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NUCLEAR
Nobel prize-winner's reactor offers safer, cleaner nuclear power
New nuclear power station for Scotland
Briton sues US giant over 'uranium poison'
'Uranium poisoning' man sues firm
Iraq security chief says fate of WMD materials still a concern
Kerry blasts Bush on anti-nuclear terror security
Atomic waste tanks rusted and leaked
Old SRS tanks leak atomic waste
MILITARY
Portrait of a U.S. Vigilante in Afghanistan
Russian Merchants Display Their Wares at Arms Expo
Lord Butler: the ultimate British establishment insider
Blair's key quotes on Iraq's weapons
Other '04 Race: Building Copter for Presidents
Iraq's Rebellion Develops Signs of Internal Rift
Bomb Sets Pipeline Afire; Captives Reported Alive
In Iraq, Showdown Looms Over Self-Rule for Kurds
Iraq Says Zarqawi Likely Seeking WMD Materials
Marines battle Islamists, Saddamists on Iraq's deadliest road
Report: Filipino's captors extend deadline
4 Palestinians Are Killed by Explosion in Gaza Strip
Israel Seeks U.S. Aid in Barrier Dispute
Sharon Says Attack Proves Barrier Is Essential
Sharon Rejects World Court Ruling on W.Bank Barrier
UN to rebuild homes Israel destroyed
Annan: Israel must accept ICJ ruling
Saudis Facing Return of Radicals Young Iraq Veterans Join Underground
Egypt's Government Gets an Overhaul
Despite Terror Risk, Washington Is Unlikely to Press Reform of C.I.A.
Tenet's Leadership, His Pride, Faces Attack From Senate Panel
He Wrote the Book on Intelligence
Senate Leaders Urge Bush to Name New CIA Director
Whales' Plight Revives Sonar Theory Navy Denies Role In Near-Stranding
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Pentagon seeks way around high court on Guantanamo detainees
POLITICS
Panel Describes Long Weakening of Hussein Army
Powell's 'Solid' C.I.A. Tips Were Soft, Committee Says
CIA Skewed Iraq Reporting, Senate Says
Senators Push for Swift CIA Nomination
U.S. Mulling How to Delay Nov. Vote in Case of Attack
Florida Won't Use a Flawed Felon List
Bad Iraq Intelligence Cost Lives, Democrats Say
Kerry Vows To Restore 'Truth' to Presidency
Bush Administration "Guidelines" for Postponing or Canceling
OTHER
SMALL IS HAZARDOUS WARNS HRH THE PRINCE OF WALES
W.H.O. Lags in Meeting Its AIDS Treatment Goal
ACTIVISTS
Israel nuclear whistleblower urges end of restrictions
Peace coalition seeks pithy slogans for signs
Armenian Protests Falter Under Authoritarian Rule
-------- NUCLEAR
Nobel prize-winner's reactor offers safer, cleaner nuclear power
By Robert Matthews, Science Correspondent
11/07/2004
UK Independent
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/07/11/wnuke11.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/07/11/ixhome.html
A revolutionary nuclear reactor that can recycle its own waste is being studied by the Government as a future source of energy for Britain.
The reactor, which is being developed by a Nobel prize-winning Italian scientist, is said to eliminate the risk of disasters of the type that devastated Chernobyl in 1986. It can also use radioactive waste from other reactors - as well as from its own - as a source of fuel, minimising any environmental problems and reducing the cost of generating electricity.
By offering these benefits, scientists believe that the reactor will ensure that nuclear power plays a greater role in future energy policy. Conviction is growing among governments and some environmentalists that without nuclear power the world will face an energy crisis.
Last week Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, indicated that Britain might have to build a new generation of nuclear power stations. Mr Blair said that the aim would be to reduce carbon dioxide emissions - as required by the Kyoto convention - produced by other forms of electricity generation and declared that the only obstacles to nuclear power were the issues of safety and cost. The reactor, which is being assembled near Rome by Prof Carlo Rubbia, an Italian physicist who won a Nobel Prize in 1984, addresses both concerns.
In a conventional reactor, radioactive fuel - uranium - is used to trigger a chain reaction, in which atoms of the fuel break apart, releasing energy and particles that in turn break apart further atoms, sustaining the reaction. The challenge has been to prevent the chain reaction getting out of control and producing an atomic explosion. This has led to complex and expensive safety systems, which do not always work, as the Chernobyl disaster in the former Soviet Union demonstrated.
Prof Rubbia's reactor, by contrast, can use other radioactive fuels - such as plutonium, neptunium and other high-level waste products from conventional nuclear reactors - that do not produce enough particles to sustain a chain reaction.
Instead, the reactor has to be fed with particles from an external source. If the supply of particles is cut off - through a mistake or sabotage - the reactor reverts to its natural state, and switches off.
Since the start of nuclear power generation 50 years ago, thousands of tons of hot and toxic radioactive waste have accumulated, awaiting the discovery of some long-term disposal method. In Britain, it is turned into a glassy material and kept in huge, heavily protected cooling ponds.
Dr Kadi said that the new reactor, which is known as an "energy amplifier", would be able to dispose of waste produced by five conventional reactors, as well as its own. "With this reactor you can put in any type of radioactive waste, as long as you can get it into the right form," he said.
The first live test on the reactor will be conducted soon at the Casaccia Research Centre. Once the performance of the test reactor has been assessed, the team plans to upgrade to a bigger reactor and particle accelerator and attempt the first "incineration" of radioactive waste.
Nuclear power has had a chequered history since the opening of Britain's Calderhall, the world's first nuclear power station, in 1956. Incidents such as the Windscale reactor fire of 1957, Three Mile Island in 1979 and Chernobyl led many countries to halt their nuclear power programmes. Within 20 years Britain will have just one nuclear power station.
Despite its reputation, nuclear power is seen by many scientists as offering environmental advantages because it generates no carbon dioxide. Other forms of non-fossil fuel-burning energy generation - such as wind turbines - do not produce enough power to meet Britain's requirement to cut its greenhouse gas emissions, while electricity produced by nuclear power is likely to be less than half as expensive as that from offshore windfarms.
-------- britain
New nuclear power station for Scotland
by Murdo MacLeod & Eddie Barnes,
July 11, 2004
Scotsman
http://scotlandonsunday.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=793492004
IN A major U-turn on energy policy, Scotland is in line to have a new nuclear power station built in order make sure that Britain can reduce its output of greenhouse gases without Californian-style massive power cuts.
The two front-runners for the new stations are the current nuclear power station sites of Hunterston in Ayrshire and Chapelcross, at Annan, in Dumfries and Galloway, with Torness in East Lothian as the outsider.
The move has come in the wake of Tony Blair admitting to MPs that Britain is likely to need a new generation of nuclear power stations in order to meet the challenge of climate change.
Previous energy policy had targeted renewables such as wind farms to make up the shortfall in supply caused by the need to reduce harmful carbon dioxide emissions.
The move could result in a clash between Labour ministers in the south who see no alternative to a nuclear programme, and the Scottish Executive Labour-Lib-Dem coalition whose Liberal Democrat ministers have threatened to veto planning permission for new nuclear power stations.
A senior nuclear industry source last night confirmed that Scotland was set to have a nuclear power station built, but that the location was still to be decided.
He said: "It's a toss-up between a new unit at Hunterston or one at Chapelcross, with Torness being an outsider, but still having a chance."
"Hunterston and Chapelcross both have their good points, but it is still to be decided which it will be. The final decision will be for the government, although they will take our recommendations into account."
The source said that the government could not hope to meet ambitious targets to reduce the nation's output of polluting gases such as carbon dioxide, the main gas which is linked to global warming.
The move marks a major rethink by ministers. Last year's Energy White Paper in February 2003 came down firmly in favour of energy efficiency and renewables being given priority as the best option for Britain's future. Nuclear energy was not ruled out forever but put on hold for at least five years.
Blair last week signalled to the Commons that the government believed it had no option but to commission a new generation of nuclear power stations.
Blair said the evidence was now overwhelming that climate change was the biggest long-term problem facing the country, and conceded the world was nowhere near finding a mechanism to cut carbon dioxide emissions by the government's target of 60% by 2050.
Over the next 20 years, all but one of the UK's 16 nuclear power stations will close, leaving the British energy market looking to find a substitute for the 23% of the country's electricity which is generated by nuclear power. Scotland relies even more on atomic power, with a third of power north of the Border being nuclear generated.
In Scotland the Chapelcross power station was closed last week and the Hunterston B plant will close in 2011. The Torness station will close by 2023.
The main advantage of the Hunterston site is its closeness to a deep-water port, meaning it has a readily available supply of water for cooling. Chapelcross is better situated to be able to supply power to England when needed.
Brian Wilson, the former energy minister, said: "I very much welcome Tony Blair's comments and it might well be a significant landmark in the whole debate. My view is that this issues will have to re-visited sooner rather than later.
"If we are going to keep the emphasis on carbon reduction then this is the only reliable source of carbon free energy that we have. Over the next few years, thinking environmentalists would start to recognise that fact."
Wilson, who is also an enthusiastic backer of wind energy, said: "It is very silly to think renewables can fill the gap. I am pro-renewables but the worst thing we can do is to exaggerate what they can deliver."
Bill Tynan, the chairman of the House of Commons all-party group on the nuclear industry last night welcomed the signals that a new station would be built north of the Border, and said that he believed Hunterston was the best option for the new plant.
Tynan said: "Scotland needs a new nuclear power station.
We face becoming increasingly reliant on imported energy which comes from countries which are not always very stable."
But the Labour MP warned that the biggest hurdle the power station may face may be Scotland's Labour-Lib Dem coalition executive. The anti-nuclear Liberal Democrats have threatened to use their position in the Executive to veto any planning permission for new nuclear plants.
And the Scottish Green Party reacted with fury to the suggestion that Scotland was in line for a new nuclear plant.
A spokesman said: "It is a stupid idea. The answer is renewables and a focus on saving energy. It is utterly illogical to try and substitute one kind of pollution for another. Nuclear power is hugely expensive in addition to being environmentally disastrous."
(All forms of power production produce some pollution. Renewable biomass energy emissions are estimated to kill around 2.5 million people every year. KJ)
A spokesman for the Nuclear Industry Association said: "The existing stations have been looked at (for future development). You would not want to be building a new station on a green field site. There is enough land on the existing sites to expand. There is also a degree of local support in these areas because they are employers."
A Scottish Executive spokesman said that nuclear power was a reserved matter and each planning application would be decided on its own merits.
-------- depleted uranium
Briton sues US giant over 'uranium poison'
Landmark court case could establish critical link for Gulf war veterans
Antony Barnett, public affairs editor
Sunday July 11, 2004
The Observer
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,6903,1258632,00.html
A former British defence worker has won legal aid to sue the giant US military corporation Honeywell over claims that he was poisoned by depleted uranium while working at its Somerset factory.
The case is likely to have far-reaching implications for Gulf war veterans, aerospace workers and civilians living in former war zones.
Richard 'Nibby' David, 49, suffers from serious respiratory problems, kidney defects and finds it extremely painful to move his limbs. Medical tests have revealed mutations to his DNA and damage to his chromosomes which he alleges has been caused by depleted uranium poisoning (DU), a radioactive waste product from the nuclear power industry that is used for shells because it can smash through tank armour.
Millions of tonnes of DU shells have been fired by US and British forces in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq. It has also been used as ballast in aircraft and counterweights on helicopter blades. While it is believed to be relatively harmless lying in the soil, a growing body of scientists believe that when its fine dust is inhaled it can cause a range of cancers, kidney damage and birth defects.
It has been alleged that DU used in the 1991 Gulf war was responsible for abnormally high levels of childhood leukaemia and birth defects in Iraq. France, Spain and Italy claim soldiers who served in Bosnia and Kosovo, where Nato used DU shells, have contracted cancers. It is also believed to be a possible cause of Gulf war syndrome, which has left thousand of veterans with mysterious health problems.
While the defence and nuclear industries have played down the danger of DU, David's case is the first time that the arguments will be heard before a court. Should he win, the verdict will send shockwaves through the military establishment as it could pave the way for huge compensation claims against the armed forces. He also believes that dozens of his fellow workers at the Honeywell site in Yeovil have also suffered. A number of his closest colleagues have died or contracted liver cancers.
Although the Legal Aid Board does not back personal injury claims, it decided that David's case was in the 'wider public interest'. The decision was a major victory after an eight-year struggle for justice after ill health forced him to give up his job in 1995 as a component fitter for Normalair Garrett, the Yeovil firm now owned by Honeywell, which makes parts for most of the world's fighter planes and bombers.
After being struck down by a disorder that left him paralysed with pain and unable to breathe properly, David began looking for clues as to the cause. The breakthrough came in September 1995 while watching a news bulletin on Gulf war syndrome on which he saw how a UK army major struggled to get out of her car.
'I was in unbearable pain and unable to move. I thought I was going to die,' he said. 'But when I saw this woman major trying to move and saw the intense pain in her eyes I immediately knew she was suffering like me.'
David had never been in the armed forces or the Middle East, but was convinced there was a link between his illness and those suffered by former Gulf troops. But it was not until February 1999 that the possibility that DU was the cause came when he heard a talk by US scientist Dr Asaf Durakovic, a former military doctor and nuclear medicine expert. Durakovic suggested that the debilitating, in some cases fatal, illnesses suffered by Gulf veterans were not necessarily caused by a cocktail of vaccines, as some claimed, but by DU poisoning.
Durakovic decided to test the urine samples of 15 UK Gulf veterans and agreed to include David's. Six months later, the results showed that he had one of the highest levels of uranium contamination out of all the samples.
'It was unbelievable,' said David. 'I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. On one hand it gave an answer to why I was suffering, but also the knowledge I would never recover. Above all I was confused. How could I have been contaminated in England?'
The answer was not long in coming. DU is a man-made material and experts told him that the most likely route of his contamination was his workplace. David decided to sue Honeywell Aerospace, but without being able to pay for lawyers it was impossible to collect evidence. But now he has been awarded legal aid he hopes to be represented by barrister Michael Mansfield QC and intends to call a stream of world experts to back his claim.
One is Malcolm Hooper, emeritus professor of medicinal chemistry and chief scientific adviser to the Gulf Veterans' Association.
'This case will be highly significant not only for soldiers but for many others. We know of cases where firemen have had to deal with fires caused by burning DU at factories and prison officers have also been contaminated by inhaling fumes. I am in no doubt that inhaling DU has the potential to cause a great deal of damage.'
Honeywell has declined to comment on details of the case, but will claim it never used DU at Yeovil. However, it is known that another aerospace group, Westland, which shared the Somerset site, has admitted using DU from 1966 until 1982 as counterweights for helicopter blades. David also claims Honeywell used special heavy metal alloys for making components which he believes may have contained DU.
----
'Uranium poisoning' man sues firm
Sunday, 11 July, 2004
BBC
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/devon/3884687.stm
A former worker at US aerospace firm Honeywell is to sue over claims he was contaminated by depleted uranium (DU) at its Somerset factory.
Richard David, 49, from Seaton, Devon, says he suffers breathing problems, kidney defects and pain in his limbs.
The case, thought to be the first of its kind, could help other aerospace workers and Gulf war veterans.
Mr David has won legal aid for his fight, but the firm says DU was never used at the Yeovil plant.
Mr David worked fitting components for fighter planes and bombers at the Yeovil factory, formerly Normalair-Garrett, between 1985 and 1995.
He said medical tests had revealed mutations to his DNA and damage to his chromosomes.
DU is believed to be a possible cause of Gulf war syndrome, which has allegedly left many veterans with health problems. The radioactive waste product was used in coalition anti-tank weapons in both Gulf wars.
Many scientists now believe that when DU is inhaled as a fine dust it can cause a range of illnesses including cancer, birth defects and kidney damage.
Mr David, who gave up his job due to ill health in 1995, said the decision to grant him legal aid was a victory.
He said: "It is brilliant to get this funding as I can barely afford to live, let alone take my case to court."
Mr David said he would be represented by barrister Michael Mansfield QC at a High Court hearing in October.
A spokeswoman for Honeywell said the company never used DU at Yeovil.
She declined to make any further comment.
DEPLETED URANIUM
DU is nuclear fuel that has been "depleted" of most of its radiation High-density material is used as the tip of armour-piercing shells The residue has a half-life of 4.5 billion years
-------- iraq
Iraq security chief says fate of WMD materials still a concern
BAGHDAD (AFP)
Jul 11, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040711124933.w1pn0lkw.html
Iraq's national security advisor warned Sunday that "dangerous materials" that could be used by terrorists in the manufacture of so-called dirty bombs might remain in the country despite the US-led coalition's failure to find any banned weapons.
Muwaffaq al-Rubaie said his interim government had evidence some might already have been smuggled out during the anarchy that followed last year's US-led invasion.
"This is a huge country ... I cannot put my hand on my heart and say that cross my heart, wish to die, that Iraq is free of weapons of mass destruction," Rubaie told reporters.
"We have intelligence information and proof that during the height of the crisis last year and afterwards vehicles carrying suspicious materials crossed the country's borders."
Rubaie declined to detail the nature of the materials or their destination but said the smuggling was made possible by the "security vacuum" in the country following the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime in April last year.
"There have been so many mistakes committed then ... we did not secure these sites immediately, so there is a possibility that it may be in the hands of (enemies of Iraq)."
Rubaie said his government was heartened by the recent removal of 1.7 tonnes of enriched uranium and other radioactive materials and their shipment to an undisclosed location in the United States.
"Could you imagine what catastrophe it would be if Zarqawi gangsters, global terrorists and Saddam loyalists possessed any of these materials?" Rubaie asked.
He was referring to fugitive Jordanian-born Islamist Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi whom the interim government and its coalition backers accuse of masterminding some of the deadliest attacks here in recent months.
-------- terrorism
Kerry blasts Bush on anti-nuclear terror security
BOSTON, Massachusetts (AFP)
Jul 12, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040712195330.4neqe2v6.html
Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry blasted Monday the Bush administration's efforts to thwart nuclear terrorism as "too little, often too late" and urged appointment of a national intelligence czar.
In a written statement and comments to reporters, Kerry took issue with President George W. Bush's assertion in a speech Monday that "Americans are safer" because of his policies after the September 11, 2001 terror attacks.
"It's not enough just to give speeches. America will only be safer when we get results," Kerry said. "The facts speak for themselves: in the two years since 9/11, less nuclear materials have been secured than in the two years prior to 9/11.
"The facts speak for themselves. North Korea is more dangerous today than it was when this administration came into power."
Kerry said the possibility of terrorists or hostile states getting nuclear weapons was "the gravest threat" facing the country, but since September 11, "we have done too little, often too late, and even cut back our efforts."
"North Korea has reportedly quadrupled its nuclear weapons capability in the past year," he said. "Iran is developing a nuclear weapons capability. Afghanistan has become a forgotten front in the war on terror."
Kerry said that, as president, he would pursue an "aggressive plan" to reduce the threat of nuclear terrorism, stepping up efforts to keep nuclear materials out of undesirable hands and working to defuse the threat from North Korea and Iran.
"I will appoint a national director of intelligence so that there is one individual with responsibility and accountability for intelligence operations," the Democrat said.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- south carolina
Atomic waste tanks rusted and leaked
By Associated Press
Sunday, July 11, 2004
http://www.trivalleyherald.com/Stories/0,1413,86~10669~2266137,00.html
COLUMBIA, S.C. -- Fifteen tanks holding deadly atomic waste at a nuclear weapons complex along the Savannah River have cracked, rusted or leaked, according to federal inspection reports.
Some of the cracks date to the 1950s, when the steel tanks first went into use at the Savannah River site. But inspection reports say some leaks have been found in the past three years. In 2001, 92 gallons of radioactive waste leaked through a 40-year-old tank into a containment area. Six leak sites were found on the 750,000-gallon, 24-foot high steel tank. Secondary containment systems have kept radioactive poisons from getting into groundwater. But a containment system failed in 1960, and the waste leaked into the ground, the reports said.
The 300-square-mile federal weapons complex has 51 steel tanks holding 37 million gallons of waste, including uranium, cesium and plutonium. Westinghouse Savannah River Co., which runs the site for the U.S. Department of Energy, says some tanks are within 8 to 10 feet of the water table, raising concerns. But Dean Campbell, a spokesman for Westinghouse, says the government does not know of any tanks that currently are leaking.
The Energy Department wants Congress to allow it to empty most of the waste from tanks and fill them with a grout intended to reduce the threat remaining material can pose to groundwater. But critics of the DOE plan say the tanks' poor condition shows the need to empty the containers.
----
Old SRS tanks leak atomic waste
Lowcountrynow Staff and wire reports
Sunday, July 11, 2004
http://www.lowcountrynow.com/stories/071104/LOCsrs.shtml
Federal inspection reports show that 15 of 51 tanks holding deadly atomic waste at the Savannah River Site are cracked, rusty or have leaked.
Recent federal inspection reports note hundreds of "leak sites," or cracks in the steel tanks that have been used since the 1950s and 1960s as the site helped make nuclear weapons.
The SRS borders the Savannah River, and Beaufort and Jasper counties are located downstream from the plant. The river supplies most of the drinking water to customers of the Beaufort-Jasper Water & Sewer Authority, with an intake about 100 miles from the SRS.
Dean Moss, the authority's general manager, said Saturday evening that routine testing assures that the drinking water is safe, but "of course I'm concerned" to hear of the report about atomic waste leakage at the SRS.
In a cooperative program with the water authority, the city of Savannah draws daily water samples at the river and U.S. 301 for safety testing. The sample site is "about 90 hours to 100 hours ahead of our intakes, so we have a couple days warning if there's going to be any kind of problem," Moss said.
The SRS was built in rural South Carolina southeast of Augusta during the Cold War to produce tritium, a radioactive form of hydrogen used to boost the power of atomic weapons.
On the drinking water front, a scare occurred in 1991, when the radioactive isotope at the SRS leaked into the river at high amounts considered potentially dangerous. Pumping from the river was halted for 10 days until it was deemed safe again. Moss said that was the first and only time for a shutdown due to SRS contamination concerns.
In recent years, "We've seen, essentially, levels of tritium in the river coming down over time, not up," Moss said Saturday,
"But, having said that, this is not good news and we have been and we continue to be concerned about the management of waste on the Savannah River Site," he said.
"Customers should feel confident in our commitment to protect them from any potential problem in the river," he said, "and we will begin inquiries about this on Monday"
SRS tanks contain about 37 million gallons of liquids, salts and highly contaminated sludge. The tanks contain radioactive waste, including uranium, cesium and plutonium.
Environmentalists say the remaining radioactivity is among the highest at federal nuclear weapons facilities.
While some cracks date to the 1950s, the most recent inspection report says some leak sites have been found in the past three years at the 300-square-mile federal weapons complex on the Savannah River.
In 2001, one of the most recent problems involved 92 gallons of radioactive waste leaking through a 40-year-old tank into a containment area, the government's latest tank inspection report says. Inspectors found six leak sites on the 750,000-gallon, 24-foot high steel tank. Secondary containment systems for most tanks kept the radioactive poisons from getting into groundwater beneath the sprawling site.
But a containment system failed in one case, when radioactive waste leaked into the ground. Westinghouse Savannah River Co., which runs SRS for the U.S. Department of Energy, says some tanks are within 8 to 10 feet of the water table, raising concerns.
Dean Campbell, a spokesman for Westinghouse, says the government also does not know of any tanks that currently are leaking.
"They obviously are getting older and will not last forever," said Charles Hansen, an assistant waste disposition manager with the U.S. Department of Energy. "This is highly radioactive, and there is a concern to get that waste out as soon as possible. There's always some potential for inadvertent leakage into the environment."
"These tanks are not designed for long-term storage, as you can obviously tell," said Geoff Fettus, a Natural Resources Defense Council lawyer.
The council sued to stop the Energy Department's cleanup plan in favor of its own.
The Energy Department wants Congress to allow it to empty most of the waste from tanks and fill them with a grout intended to reduce the threat remaining material can pose to groundwater.
Agency officials say that will speed the tank cleanup before a serious accident occurs.
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
Portrait of a U.S. Vigilante in Afghanistan
July 11, 2004
By DAVID ROHDE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/11/international/asia/11afgh.html
KABUL, Afghanistan, July 10 - Journalists remember him as Jack, an eccentric, heavily armed and at times, it seemed, dangerously unbalanced, middle-aged former American Special Forces soldier, who appeared in Afghanistan in the fall of 2001.
Surrounded by armed Afghan guards and rumors that he worked for the Central Intelligence Agency, he quickly rose to prominence. In the next two years, he was interviewed by Fox and CBS News, helped write a book called "The Hunt for bin Laden" and said he had discovered evidence in Afghanistan that linked Iraq to Al Qaeda.
This week, Jack, a convicted felon whose real name is Jonathan Keith Idema, was arrested with two other Americans and accused of running his own vigilante antiterrorism campaign in Kabul. Afghan and American officials said that Mr. Idema, 48, and the two other Americans posed as government officials and illegally imprisoned at least eight innocent Afghan men for 10 days or more.
A senior Western diplomat said Saturday that Mr. Idema's campaign appeared to have been an attempt to get American intelligence agencies to take him seriously. American officials have said that Mr. Idema had no ties to the American government. "Perhaps if he did something successful," the diplomat said, "the government would pay attention to him."
In an article about the exploits of Mr. Idema's group sent by e-mail to news organizations in Kabul just before his arrest, a journalist identified as Mohammed Ashimey wrote that a "supersecret group" of "renegade Green Berets" had decided to break up a major terrorist plot in Kabul "without United States support and without government funds."
But local Afghan journalists said they had never heard of Mr. Ashimey, and there was no response to a message sent to the e-mail account from which the article originated.
In breathless prose, the article said the former commandos, frustrated by American government inaction, had dubbed themselves Task Force Saber and had arrested 13 people suspected of terrorism since arriving in Afghanistan three months ago. The article, which sounded like it could have been written by an American, included an accurate description of the illegal arrests that led to Mr. Idema's detention and a fawning description of his work.
"Driving beat up old S.U.V.'s, wearing low-slung holsters like Clint Eastwood, long hair, beards and Afghan scarfs, the Green Berets operated they way they did during the 2001-2002 war, with no rules, no oversight and no plan," the article said. "Changing cities, houses and bases every few days, they seem to appear and disappear at will."
American and Afghan officials are still investigating how many Afghans Mr. Idema detained during his spree, how long it lasted and whether he harmed anyone.
The Western diplomat said bloody clothes had been found at a house in Kabul where the Afghan authorities freed five of the Afghans whom Mr. Idema had been holding prisoner.
Black curtains still hang over two back rooms where prisoners were held in his house in Kabul. Prisoners also appeared to have been tied to chairs in the kitchen and bathroom, Afghan officials said. In an office, there were two clocks on the wall, one showing the time in Kabul and one showing the time at Fort Bragg, the military base used by Special Operations forces in North Carolina. A piece of paper on the wall was titled "Missions to Complete" and listed various tasks. Item No. 2 was "Karzai." Item No. 4 was "pick up laundry."
One of the prisoners, Muhammad Hanif, a 19-year-old mechanic, said in an interview on Saturday that when Mr. Idema's group arrested him, they burst into the house where he was working and fired shots into the ceiling. Local police who arrived at the scene said the armed Americans said they were with the United States military.
When he and seven other prisoners were taken to Mr. Idema's house, they found an Afghan named Sher Ali, who said he had been imprisoned there for six days. The next day, Mr. Ali was gone.
Mr. Hanif said he had been denied food and water for the first three days of his imprisonment and at one point had become so weak that he had lost consciousness. Through 10 days of imprisonment, he said, his hands were tied and a bag was placed over his head. He said that when the prisoners had asked their captors if they could pray, one American had answered: "You are terrorists. Why do you pray and what do you pray for?"
Afghan officials said all the men Mr. Idema arrested appeared to be innocent.
Mr. Idema grew up in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., joined the Army in 1975, and was on active duty for three years before joining a Reserve Special Forces unit in New York, according to The Fayetteville Observer.
In December 2000, he was featured in an article in The New York Times about pet owners who believed animal cloning may eventually be possible.
Mr. Idema, who lived in Fayetteville, N.C., at the time, said he had saved some genetic material from Sarge, a dog he had used while serving as a soldier. Mr. Idema said the dog had parachuted out of planes with him and sniffed bombs.
In 1994, a federal jury in Fayetteville found Mr. Idema guilty of wire fraud, according to court documents. Prosecutors said he faked credit reports and established a false company to obtain roughly $270,000 in merchandise for his troubled military equipment business, Idema Combat Systems. He was sentenced to four years in prison.
Ali Ahmed Jalali, the Afghan interior minister, questioned how Mr. Idema was able to operate without being noticed by foreign intelligence agencies. He said that in the wake of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, Mr. Idema's spree would fuel Afghan suspicions of American forces.
"There are people who are trying to find excuses to blame everything on the Americans," he said. "He was running a prison in Kabul."
-------- arms
Russian Merchants Display Their Wares at Arms Expo
July 11, 2004
By C. J. CHIVERS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/11/international/europe/11russ.html?pagewanted=all&position=
NIZHNY TAGIL, Russia, July 9 - Eight Russian infantrymen sprinted for cover behind a wooden wall. The soldiers began firing, first with assault rifles, then with grenade launchers and antitank rockets.
Tracers skipped off the ground; the crunch of exploding rockets reverberated in the air. Minutes later a jet fighter screamed overhead and performed multiple rolls, corkscrewing between Russian forest and low-hanging clouds.
Cheers rose from reviewing stands, where the spectators included delegations from Jordan, Egypt, North Korea, Libya, China and the United States. On this former Soviet target range, the once shadowy Russian arms industry is today's sales show, performed for a global audience with the money to buy.
Russia has surged back into the international arms market, moving from laggard to a leader. Prodded and promoted by a state-controlled export agency, Moscow has been closing deals on submarines, tanks, frigates, helicopters and jet fighters, along with the add-ons and maintenance contracts that keep these expensive items running. Even a Soviet-era aircraft carrier has been transferred to India as part of a deal for its refit and the purchase of new weapons and aircraft.
Last year was the fourth consecutive year of growth. Rosoboronexport, the state exporter, said sales exceeded $5.07 billion in 2003, a position that would rank it second on the list of arms-exporting nations, behind the United States. Talk among exporters is optimistic, laced with residual cold war bravado.
"We are pleased to have such a strong rival - the United States," said Igor Sevastyanov, who leads Rosoboronexport's ground equipment division. "We hope that one day soon we will become first."
For now that seems unlikely. From 1999 through 2002, the last year for which international data is available, the United States made 41.9 percent of international arms agreements. Russia made 25.5 percent, according to the Congressional Research Service.
Given the United States' continued investment in research and development, and the soaring wartime purchases by the Pentagon, analysts say Russia has little immediate prospect of knocking Washington from its perch as the world's premier arms merchant.
Still, no one disputes Russia's revival. Since the Sept. 11 attacks, global defense expenditure has increased markedly. But this is a result of domestic purchases in the United States. Global defense exports have actually decreased. Yet Russia has closed more deals, mainly through its leading clients, China and India.
"The Russians have been capturing more of a percentage," said Mark Stoker, a defense economist for the Institute of Strategic Studies in London. "There has been a successful marketing drive."
The swing in fortunes is tied to a decision in President Vladimir V. Putin's first term that merged two foundering arms export agencies, creating Rosoboronexport.
At the time the Russian military did not have the budget to buy its own equipment, and traditional clients of the former Soviet Union - including Iraq, Syria, Egypt and other African nations - were seeking fewer weapons, especially armor and planes.
Through marketing and high-profile management - Rosoboronexport is led by Mr. Putin's former colleagues in Soviet intelligence services - Russia has managed to protect much of its military industrial base in a period of lean domestic purchases.
Its endurance draws from a reputation forged in the cold war. For decades Moscow's arsenal had outfitted the world with Soviet-designed military equipment, which went to battle under flags as varied as those of Uganda, North Korea, Egypt, Iraq, Iran and even the Taliban.
Soviet tanks became the standard armor formations. Soviet planes filled fleets. Two infantry weapons - the Kalashnikov assault rifle and the rocket-propelled grenade - became weapons of choice for guerrillas and Soviet-aligned armies alike.
Today's markets are narrower. The nations of the Middle East no longer purchase arms as they once did, and, during the cold war, Communist countries dumped tens of millions of assault rifles into conflict zones, swamping markets that remain flooded today.
"Russia is not doing well at all right now with these weapons, because in the past they've done too well," said Charlie Cutshaw, co-editor of Jane's Infantry Weapons.
The main sales are now in aircraft, followed by naval vessels. Principal clients are China, which has bought fighter jets, frigates and submarines, and India, with purchases of tanks, jets and the aircraft carrier.
As more companies strive for market share, the results were on display here this week at the Russian Arms Expo 2004, where more than 200 companies presented their wares.
Products ranged from tanks and infantry weapons to artillery guns, helicopters, radars, radios, body armor, life rafts and more. One booth offered equipment to detect eavesdropping bugs; another showed torpedoes designed to destroy American submarines.
Mr. Sevastyanov and his staff handed out brochures suggesting novel financing arrangements, including barter and forgiving state debt. "Total Solutions for Defense," the brochure read.
A firing display was held each day. Tanks drove by the reviewing stand and demonstrated their capabilities: fording a pond, shooting on targets at a distant tree line, climbing urban obstacles, a sort of fashion runway for the militarily inclined.
A woman's voice sounded over the loudspeakers as a T-90 tank roared by - "Maximum speed up to 65 kilometers an hour," she said. After the tank leapt over a ramp, she practically purred, "Only Russian tanks are able to negotiate such obstacles."
Maj. Neddir Hussein, an Egyptian officer, said he was impressed. He had been sent by the Egyptian Army to look for products of potential interest, and to meet manufacturers who might provide them.
"We will go back to Egypt and we'll make a report," he said. "And if we need anything later we have all of the e-mail addresses and names and numbers for the factories."
One Russian product of international interest - but not displayed here - is a device to jam global positioning satellites. Many precision munitions used by the United States rely on such satellites to find their targets. In theory, the jammers could cause the Pentagon's most sophisticated bombs and missiles to go astray.
The devices became the focus of a brief political row at the beginning of the war in Iraq in 2003, when the United States accused Russia of supplying them to Baghdad. Mr. Sevastyanov, who recalled the diplomatic tension, said he was not sure why the jammers were not displayed, but he said Russia did not violate import sanctions against Iraq.
He also confirmed that Russia has been developing jammers and hopes to find markets for them. "We have many companies that are working in this field," he said.
For all of the energy surrounding sales efforts here, precisely how much business Russia is doing remains unknown.
Russia's military exports are not public, and analysts say the accounting methods for figuring their sales are unknown. It is unclear, for example, whether Russia's sales figures separate sales agreements from actual deliveries, which can be considerably different. Terms of sale are also not disclosed.
"For certain countries - Russia, China, Vietnam or Indonesia - it is always hard to know how much of the deals are in cash, barter, debt repayment or some other means," said Mr. Stoker, the Institute for Strategic Studies economist.
How long such sales can climb is also subject to debate. Russia is officially bullish on the arms market. But analysts say they expect sales to plateau, and perhaps to drop in a few years. Much of the Russian equipment is dated. Its best markets - for fighter aircraft, for example - may be approaching saturation.
Moreover, Russia has not heavily invested in research that could lead to new products and contracts.
"This places it at great disadvantage in arms markets traditionally dominated by Western suppliers, who continue to expend significant financial and human resources on developing new generations of military combat equipment," Richard F. Grimmett, a specialist in national defense at the Congressional Research Service, wrote in a report last fall.
At the pavilions, however, Western skepticism met Russian pride. One Russian official asked why, if Washington was so confident, it did not send its armor here for a contest.
"Why didn't the Americans bring their tanks?" the official, Aleksandr Karasyov, asked. "I think it would be interesting to see whose tanks shoot better."
-------- britain
Lord Butler: the ultimate British establishment insider
LONDON (AFP)
Jul 11, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040711015440.kt7iqb6q.html
Lord Robin Butler, who will this week present a potentially devastating report into British pre-war intelligence on Iraq's weapons, is a man who spent his entire career attempting to smooth the business of government, not disrupt it.
During 37 years in public administration, Butler rose to become perhaps the ultimate establishment insider, eventually serving as head of the civil service under three different prime ministers.
The last of these was current premier Tony Blair, whose government could be dealt a severe blow should Butler report on Wednesday that it relied upon -- or worse, encouraged -- misleading information about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.
When he was appointed to lead the inquiry in February, Butler, now 66, was dismissed by some critics as being far too much of an unctuous mandarin to criticise ministers with any independence.
His background undoubtedly offers evidence for such a view.
Educated at Harrow School, a favourite of the rich and well-connected, and then Oxford University, Butler joined the Treasury as a junior civil servant in 1961.
Rising steadily through the ranks, he became Cabinet Secretary -- head of the entire domestic-based civil service -- in 1988, a post he kept until retirement a decade later.
Butler's judgement was called into question during the 1990s when he investigated a pair of Conservative lawmakers accused of corrupt practices, Neil Hamilton and Jonathan Aitken.
Butler found little wrong in their conduct -- only to be publicly proved very wrong when Hamilton resigned from the government for accepting money to ask parliamentary questions while Aitken was jailed for perjury.
Butler also found himself quite literally in the firing line on a couple of occasions.
In 1984 he narrowly escaped being killed when a bomb planted by Northern Ireland paramilitary group the IRA destroyed part of a hotel in the coastal resort of Brighton where then-prime minister Margaret Thatcher and her ministers were staying.
Seven years later Butler flung himself to the floor alongside Thatcher's successor, John Major, as IRA-fired mortar rounds landed in the garden of Downing Street.
The incident is occasionally remembered as the only time contemporaries saw Butler behave with anything other than complete dignity.
After his retirement, the grey-haired Butler, married for 42 years and with three children, was made a peer and became head of one of Oxford University's colleges.
Despite his pedigree, Butler might surprise people who expect such a figure to side with the government, said Paul Kelly, a lecturer in politics at the London School of Economics.
"He's definitely an establishment figure but he's a very sensible and cautious, small "c" conservative figure, who will be aware of the longer-term reputation of government," Kelly told AFP when Butler was appointed.
"His concern, I think, in his position in the establishment is to look at the lasting trust in institutions.
"He's going to be very concerned about the standing of the intelligence services, the civil service, the reputation of government itself -- not just this particular government."
-----
Blair's key quotes on Iraq's weapons
LONDON (AFP)
Jul 11, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040711020133.z2sqfq0n.html
On Wednesday, a British government-appointed inquiry will report into intelligence about Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) ahead of the war to remove Saddam Hussein.
Before last year's conflict, led by the United States and staunchly supported by Britain, British Prime Minister Tony Blair insisted Iraq posed a serious threat to the West through its stocks of chemical and biological weaponry. Since the ousting of Saddam in April no such stocks have been found.
Here are the British prime minister's key quotes on the issue:
April 10, 2002, to parliament:
"There is no doubt at all that the development of weapons of mass destruction by Saddam Hussein poses a severe threat, not just to the region but to the wider world."
September 25, 2002, in the House of Commons:
"His weapons of mass destruction programme is active, detailed and growing. The policy of containment is not working. The WMD programme is not shut down, it is up and running now."
March 25, 2003, addressing a press conference on why no WMDs had yet been found:
"The idea that we can suddenly discover (such weapons) is a lot more difficult in a country the size of Iraq...
"There is absolutely no doubt at all that these weapons of mass destruction exist."
July 9, 2003, evidence to a lawmakers' committee:
"I have absolutely no doubt at all that we will find evidence of weapons of mass destruction programmes."
December 16, 2003, interview with the BBC:
"I don't think it's surprising we will have to look for them. I'm confident that when the Iraq Survey Group has done its work we will find what's happened to those weapons because he had them."
January 25, 2004, interview with The Observer newspaper:
"I can only tell you I believed the intelligence we had at the time. It is absurd to say in respect of any intelligence that it is infallible, but if you ask me what I believe, I believe the intelligence was correct, and I think in the end we will have an explanation.
"I have absolutely no doubt at all in my mind that the intelligence was genuine."
February 3, 2004, evidence to House of Commons Liaison Committee:
"I think it is right as a result of what (ex-Iraq Survey Group head) David Kay has said, and the fact that the Iraq Survey Group now probably won't report in the very near term... that we have a look at the intelligence that we received and whether it was accurate or not."
July 6, 2004, also to House of Commons Liaison Committee:
"I have to accept that we haven't found them, that we may not find them ... We don't know what has happened to them. They could have been removed. They could have been hidden. They could have been destroyed."
-------- business
Other '04 Race: Building Copter for Presidents
July 11, 2004
By LESLIE WAYNE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/11/business/11HELICOPTER.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
No helicopter symbolizes executive power more than Marine One as it lifts off the White House lawn. Now, the competition to build the next fleet of presidential helicopters has become a bare-knuckles brawl that pits a flag-waving domestic maker against an international team hoping to be rewarded for supporting the United States in Iraq.
One bidding team is led by the Lockheed Martin Corporation, the nation's largest military contractor, which has lined up European partners and a lobbying juggernaut that includes Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain and his Italian counterpart, Silvio Berlusconi - two of Washington's staunchest allies in Iraq.
Their Italian-designed craft, named US 101, would be the first of its kind to ferry the president.
On the other side is the United Technologies Corporation, parent to Sikorsky Aircraft, whose founder, Igor I. Sikorsky, invented the modern helicopter.
It is selling itself as the all-American entrant, and ads for Sikorsky's S-92 say that only "skilled, trustworthy American hands" can "ensure mission safety and the security" of the president.
"There is a visceral and gut feeling that you don't want the president in a Mercedes or flying around in an Italian helicopter," said Jeffrey P. Pino, a Sikorsky senior vice president. "You want the president in an American chopper."
To which Stephen C. Moss, president of the United States subsidiary of AgustaWestland, Lockheed's European partner, counters: "The real issue is whether you want competition on a level playing field or a win based on jingoist antiforeign sentiment in an election year.
Charged with sorting this out is the U.S. Navy, which found selecting of one of these two teams to be such a political hot potato that it kicked the decision up to the defense secretary, Donald H. Rumsfeld. He agreed with the Navy to delay the final decision until after the November election. The current presidential helicopter fleet is now 30 years old.
At the moment, both sides are revving up the rhetoric and lining up powerful politicians behind their cause. Lockheed, which will build much of the US 101 in upstate New York, has the support of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, who logged many hours on Marine One as first lady, and Gov. George E. Pataki. Sikorsky, whose helicopters, built in Stratford, Conn., currently carry the president, has the Connecticut Congressional delegation knocking on the Pentagon door.
For all the struggle over politics and jobs, the decision is also affected by some hard practical considerations. Since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the presidential fleet - 11 Sikorsky Sea King and 8 Sea Hawk helicopters - has become so weighed down with new security equipment that the helicopters are less safe and less maneuverable when taking off than they once were, both companies say. This has accelerated the Pentagon's timetable for replacing the fleet.
While many people may think the president flies in only one of the helicopters, in reality all 19 are used to ferry not only the president, but also foreign dignitaries. When the president is on board, the copter gets the Marine One designation.
The competition has both symbolic and financial importance. Most obviously, the winner will gain the prestige of making the helicopter that flies the most powerful person in global politics, at least for short distances.
In addition, the winner of the relatively modest $1.6 billion deal is set up to receive potentially another $40 billion or so from contracts for military search-and-rescue missions from the United States and foreign governments as well as from corporations seeking to transport executives and oil-rig workers.
"This contract will have a huge impact,'' said Richard Aboulafia, a military analyst at the Teal Group, a northern Virginia consulting group. "This is the last big undecided military competition on the horizon, and the issues are both psychological and financial."
Given its high profile and "these politically charged times," Mr. Aboulafia added, the competition can easily turn into an issue of "do we want to be hurting a U.S. contractor and helping a foreign one?"
The Marine One competition raises the question of how far the Pentagon will go to aid countries that supported the United States in Iraq. AgustaWestland, an Anglo-Italian venture, designed the helicopter and has lined up Lockheed and Bell Helicopter, along with dozens of other United States subcontractors, to do much of the work and give it an American veneer.
And Lockheed is not above flag-waving itself. Its red-white-and-blue US 101 promotional literature is headlined "American Jobs. American Pride." It features a model who vaguely looks like President Bush striding toward the craft.
But it also is not shy about using its international connections. Already Mr. Blair, the British prime minister, has written a "Dear George" letter to President Bush praising the US 101 design, which is already in use by the British, Italian and Canadian armed forces. An AgustaWestland helicopter also ferries the pope.
Last March, a delegation of high-level Italian business executives and government officials trooped through Washington, telling any lawmaker and Pentagon official who would listen that the US 101 would create 3,000 American jobs.
They also said that, after spending billions on American military hardware and sending their soldiers to support the United States in Kosovo and Iraq, Italy would like some Pentagon business, too. Among those meeting the Italians were Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the deputy defense secretary, Paul D. Wolfowitz.
On the other side is the question of domestic politics and how far the government wants to go to support a company, Sikorsky, whose future is heavily dependent on landing this contract.
Just recently, Sikorsky lost a military contract worth as much as $38 billion when the Pentagon decided to cancel the Comanche helicopter program. The company's bread-and-butter helicopter line - Black Hawks, Sea Hawks, Sea Stallions and a variety of other medium- and heavy-lift helicopters - have been in production for decades and the S-92 would be part of the company's next-generation product line.
Sikorsky's S-92 would essentially be an updated version of the Black Hawk helicopter, and the company has already spent $500 million developing it.
Even though President Dwight D. Eisenhower kicked off the White House helicopter era in a Bell helicopter on July 12, 1957, when he flew back and forth to Camp David, nearly every Marine One since has been a Sikorsky helicopter. A loss to Sikorsky would be both a financial and a psychological blow.
"Having the president chose anything other than a Sikorsky product is absolutely unacceptable to us," said Stephen N. Finger, Sikorsky's president. "Sikorsky has invested its own money and developed state-of-the-art helicopter capacity and that should be rewarded."
Of course, times were much simpler in the Eisenhower era. In contrast to the top-secret equipment in the current Marine One fleet, President Eisenhower flew in an off-the-shelf chopper, which was guided to his Gettysburg farm by a strobe light placed on top of a barn.
With many aviation experts saying that either the Sikorsky or the AgustaWestland helicopter could do the job equally well, both companies are trying to gain the edge. On the technical side, Lockheed claims its three-engine helicopter makes it safer while Sikorsky claims to have a superior fuel tank design.
Sikorsky also has made sure that it can promote its helicopter as the all-American offering. Originally, parts were to have been made in Brazil, Japan and China. But Sikorsky dumped its foreign suppliers to better position itself to win the Marine One contract, even though it will continue with foreign content on the rest of the S-92 helicopter line.
Meanwhile, Lockheed and AgustaWestland have noted that, in dollar terms, a full 90 percent of the value of the US 101 contract will go to suppliers in the United States. By law, all military products purchased by the Pentagon must have at least 50 percent domestic content.
AgustaWestland picked a powerful partner in Lockheed, which, as the nation's largest military contractor, has the biggest budget for lobbying and political contributions. AgustaWestland and Lockheed have also been playing smart politics with their choice of suppliers and factory locations.
Lockheed has already broken ground on a new helicopter facility in Owego, N.Y. In January, Governor Pataki attended the ribbon-cutting ceremony; so did the state's Democratic senators, Charles E. Schumer and Mrs. Clinton, who emerged from her spin in a US 101 remarking that "it landed like a feather."
To line up even more political support, Lockheed and AgustaWestland have spread out subcontracting work to locations in Connecticut, Texas, Maryland and Kansas.
Sikorsky, of course, is not about to be beaten at the domestic politics game. Its ads bluntly ask: "Shouldn't the president's helicopter be American?"
It, too, has lined up an impressive array of subcontractors across the country, including Northrop Grumman, which is based in Los Angeles and has facilities in dozens of congressional districts, and General Electric, which, like Sikorsky, is headquartered in Connecticut but has many operations across the country. Both companies bring with them teams of skilled lobbyists.
Meanwhile, Senator Christopher J. Dodd, the Connecticut Democrat, has been particularly active on Sikorsky's behalf, calling last April on Navy Secretary Gordon England to press his case in a private meeting.
Sikorsky proudly notes that its helicopters have safely carried the president for decades and that more than 500 of its employees have "Yankee White" clearance, the maximum White House security clearance.
Moreover, Sikorsky executives sniff that Lockheed has not been in the helicopter business historically, while their decades of making Black Hawks and other craft have given them a strong track record.
Besides, Sikorsky's executives point out that today's allies could become tomorrow's foes during the helicopter's 40-year life span.
"You just cannot bring in a spare part from anywhere overseas," Mr. Pino of Sikorsky said. "How do you modify a part that's been built with an Italian design? What if Italy is not so friendly to us?"
-------- iraq
Iraq's Rebellion Develops Signs of Internal Rift
July 11, 2004
By IAN FISHER and EDWARD WONG
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/11/international/middleeast/11INSU.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
BAGHDAD, Iraq, July 10 - Tension appears to be rising between the homegrown Iraqi resistance and the foreign Islamist fighters who have entered the country to destroy the American military here. This is one reason, experts speculate, that Iraq has not had the kind of spectacular attack meant to spread terror and defy the American agenda for a long two weeks, even during the transfer of formal sovereignty back to the Iraqis.
Evidence has emerged in sniping between groups on Arabic television and Web sites, and in interviews with Iraqi and American officials, as well as from members of the resistance and people with close ties to it. All speak of rising friction between nationalistic fighters and foreign-led Islamists over goals and tactics, with some Iraqi insurgents indicating a revulsion over the car bombs and suicide attacks in cities that have caused hundreds of civilian deaths.
But such friction does not mean there is a "submission by the resistance," said Dhary Rasheed, a professor at the University of Baghdad who lives in Samarra, a center for the resistance. "It is a phase of reconstruction and re-evaluation in order to push the operations out of the cities," so as "not to have innocent people killed."
Large car-bombings - thought to be carried out more often by foreigners, who make up a tiny percentage of the rebels - have "disgraced the reputation of the resistance," Professor Rasheed said. "And the resistance has worked just as the government has been trying to, to curtail the influence of the foreigners."
Routine violence continues at high levels across much of Iraq, and many civilians and American soldiers continue to die. The big attacks have not necessarily ended, experts are quick to acknowledge.
But this week, the split took a cinematic turn when masked men calling themselves the Salvation Movement released a videotape containing threats to kill Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian militant suspected in the deadliest attacks here. American military officials say the group, based in Falluja, is made up of secular former members of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party. Then on Friday, a second group of guerrillas released a similar message threatening Mr. Zarqawi.
The same day, a statement posted on an Islamist Web site, claiming to be signed by Mr. Zarqawi, lashed out against the Muslim Clerics Association, an influential Sunni group with strong ties to Iraqi insurgents. The statement accused the group of weakness for offering a ransom to prevent the beheading of Nicholas E. Berg, the American businessman killed in May.
"Some mediators tried to save this infidel and offered us as much money as we want," the statement said. "But we refused, although we need this money to keep the wheel of holy war rolling."
Opinions among resistance fighters vary, but it is not uncommon these days to hear comments disdainful of the foreign fighters, like those from a young fighter in Falluja, whose relatives hold high positions in the resistance.
"Iraqis do not need Zarqawi or Al Qaeda members to help them," he told an Iraqi reporter working for The New York Times.
Dividing the Rebels
The split would seem to be welcome news to the new government of Prime Minister Iyad Allawi. His strategy for combating violence is to divide the insurgency by appealing to the patriotism of Iraqi fighters to reject the presence of foreigners who he claims do not care about Iraq itself. He is promising amnesty for some Iraqis, but threatening to crack down on those who do not accept it.
To that end, Mr. Allawi and other government officials say, he has been meeting with former Baath Party members in the resistance and tribal leaders to convince them that their interests and those of foreign fighters are not the same.
"We're negotiating with what I call the noncriminals, those who never really were the hard core like Zarqawi and his aides and the Al Qaeda-style people," Mr. Allawi said in an interview. "And on the other hand, be very firm with the criminals and the assassins and the killers and the terrorists."
But many with ties to the insurgency caution against drawing clear lessons from this split or expecting Mr. Allawi's strategy to succeed.
There is little evidence that the various parts of the resistance regard Mr. Allawi's government as the legitimate sovereign leadership of Iraq. There are still 160,000 foreign troops on Iraqi soil, and American officials continue to hold sway. Until the last American soldier is gone, there will be no end to the resistance, say many Iraqis sympathetic to the insurgency.
"We don't approve of Iyad Allawi's government because he is an American agent," said one 25-year-old Sunni insurgent in Baghdad.
American and Iraqi officials say they hope the Sunni resistance will eventually channel its disenfranchisement into political action and contest the general elections scheduled for January 2005 rather than continuing to take up arms. A move in this direction could further widen the rift with foreign fighters.
But the reality is that the Sunni Arabs are a minority in the country and will probably be a small or nonexistent presence in the highest offices after general elections, even though they have governed the area known as Iraq since the days of the Ottoman Empire. The insurgency could then continue its struggle, this time against a popularly elected government dominated by Shiites, who make up at least 60 percent of the population.
"We must prevent it from taking root," a senior American military official said, referring to the possibility that the Sunni insurgents will totally turn their backs on the political order created by United States and the United Nations.
Intelligence Gaps
American officials admit they lack reliable intelligence about the resistance, even about its size.
For months, American officials have said in public that the resistance has attracted no more than 5,000 people. But officials say privately that the numbers are far higher, and a detailed report by The Associated Press this week quoted an anonymous military official as saying that the resistance can call on upward of 20,000 people.
But even without detailed intelligence, the outlines of the resistance have been clear since it began gaining strength last fall. At the most basic level, the insurgency has been divided into the three parts that sometimes overlap: Sunni Arabs, in many cases led by former Baath Party members and former soldiers; Shiite Arabs led by Moktada al-Sadr; and foreigners from other Arab and Muslim countries.
The Shiites operate largely separately from the Sunnis and most foreign fighters, experts conclude. Sunni insurgents do not act under a central command, but rather are made up of independent groups that coordinate loosely and that have attracted many volunteers, these sources say.
The heavy fighting in April and May appears to have changed the groups' relations and relative strength.
Mr. Sadr's poorly trained militia appears to have been weakened greatly as it has taken on American troops in Baghdad and cities across the southern Shiite heartland, even as Mr. Sadr's popularity has soared.
Meanwhile, the military position of the Sunnis and foreign fighters appears to have improved after American officials declined to mount a final military assault on Falluja, essentially allowing the creation of a haven for militants.
Some experts argue that the formation of the new government, even if it has not been accepted as legitimate, has still accentuated the difference in goals between the groups.
The Iraqi resistance seems to be fighting against the Americans largely in the names of Mr. Hussein and Iraqi patriotism or for the cause of getting Sunnis into positions of greater power.
The foreign fighters embrace a broader anti-American agenda, less specific to Iraq and concerned more with sowing destruction in the name of militant Islam.
But religious fervor does seem to bind some Iraqis and foreigners.
A Shift in Perceptions
he establishment of the sovereign government may have set in motion a subtle but real shift in perceptions among some Iraqi rebels. Some argue that Mr. Allawi's Baathist past - he was a hard-liner before he ran afoul of Mr. Hussein - is swaying some former Baathists toward loyalty to the new government.
Perhaps even more persuasive, American military officials say, is the new president, Sheik Ghazi Ajil al-Yawar, a Sunni who has spoken against the occupation. And even if Americans hold ultimate power, Iraqis head a government with broad authority, and the resistance is taking notice, several experts say.
"All these things taken together will pull in some Baathists, though not all of them," said Hamid al-Bayati, the deputy foreign minister. "We have to see how many of them will join in."
Though the Iraqi guerrillas have proved to be skilled warriors, it is the foreign fighters who are most often accused of plotting the larger attacks, which have hit Shiite mosques, crowded streets, political parties and foreign aid groups. In a single day of bombings, as many as 200 people have been killed.
Over time the deaths of those innocent Iraqis, American and Iraqi officials say, have angered many Iraqi resisters, and that is evident in several statements by groups involved with the resistance or close to it. There even seems to be specific opposition to the attacks on police stations, oil pipelines and electrical stations - all basic structures of a functioning state.
Asked recently if he advocated continued struggle against the Americans, Sheik Abdul-Satar Sattar al-Samarrai, a leader of the Muslim Clerics Association, said: "Yes. Honest and true resistance - that is away from chaos, killing innocents and policemen and sabotaging the infrastructure - should go on to kick the occupation out of the country."
The mystery remains whether the transfer of sovereignty itself has truly deepened the divide between Iraqis and foreigners and has led to the lull in audacious terror attacks since June 24. On that day, four days before the transfer of formal sovereignty, coordinated bombings in several cities killed more than 100 people. After that, American officials braced for an increase in attacks to protest the new interim government, but that never materialized.
Since then, insurgents have struck on a much smaller scale and have mainly confined their targets to American soldiers, Iraqi police officers and government officials and infrastructure.
Professor Rasheed said such changes were deliberate, with the resistance essentially giving Mr. Allawi the chance to prove that he is working in Iraqis' interests and will try to decrease the visibility of American soldiers.
Other officials do not go that far. The senior American military official would not rule out the possibility that Iraqi insurgents were reining in the foreigners. But it is also possible, he said, that altogether the insurgents are adapting to circumstances and are focusing less on the immediate and more on the longer term.
"Maybe this is just a tactical pause," he said. "What is the next big event? The elections."
--------
ATTACKS AND ABDUCTIONS
Bomb Sets Pipeline Afire; Captives Reported Alive
July 11, 2004
By JAMES GLANZ
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/11/international/middleeast/11IRAQ.html
BAGHDAD, Iraq, July 10 - Striking with apparent impunity, saboteurs detonated an improvised bomb next to a gas pipeline north of Baghdad early Saturday in an area that has seen more than a dozen major pipeline attacks over the past year.
The attack shut down the gas pipeline, which feeds the enormous Bayji power plant, and set it on fire.
Only five days ago, another attack cut off a pipeline feeding several northern power plants, as well as a factory that makes gas canisters for use in Iraqi homes. Over the past year there have been more than 70 attacks on Iraqi oil and gas pipelines, oil plants and industry officials, according to a compendium maintained by the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security in Washington.
"You're going to see this kind of attack against feeder pipelines just continue," said Anne Korin, director of policy and strategic planning at the institute, who added that militants were using well-planned attacks to discredit the new Iraqi government.
"When it's really hot outside and the electricity is out, that's a really good way to make you unhappy," she said.
With sporadic violence across Iraq on Saturday, reports suggested that three kidnapped foreigners remained alive after their abductors had threatened to kill them.
A kidnapped Filipino truck driver who had appeared in a video on the television network Al Jazeera with his captors, who said they were from a previously unknown group called Khalid bin Waleed Corps of the Islamic Army, was close to being released late Saturday, Philippine officials said. But after expressions of optimism by the officials, Al Jazeera reported that the man's captors denied that the release was imminent.
"There is no actual turnover," Ignacio Bunye, a Philippine government spokesman conceded, according to Reuters. "Indications point to that direction. We are waiting for this positive development in a few hours."
There was no word on yet another captive, an Egyptian whose kidnappers had demanded a $1 million ransom.
But the Bulgarian foreign minister said he had received unconfirmed information that two kidnapped Bulgarian drivers were still alive after a group led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian militant thought to be at large in Iraq, issued an ultimatum to American-led forces on Thursday. The group said then that it would kill the hostages, Ivailo Kepov and Georgi Lazov, in 24 hours unless Americans released imprisoned Iraqis.
The Zarqawi group, which calls itself Jamaat al-Tawhid and Jihad, has already claimed responsibility for beheading an American, Nicholas Berg, and a South Korean, Kim Sun Il. Al Jazeera broadcast a video of the Bulgarian hostages with masked kidnappers.
Violence in Iraq claimed at least four lives on Saturday. In Baquba, north of Baghdad, attackers blew up several liquor stores almost at the same time, killing one person, and American marines said they had killed two members of a gang who were trying to attack them in Ramadi, west of Baghdad. A guard at a farming cooperative was killed when assailants opened fire on the building in the northern city of Kirkuk.
Ms. Korin, of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security, said the latest pipeline attack was part of an extremely sophisticated, two-pronged effort.
Attacks on oil pipelines disrupt Iraq's ability to attract foreign investment, while the attacks on gas pipelines, many of which feed power plants, disrupt electricity service and tend to make people upset with the government.
"This is a strategic issue," Ms. Korin said. "This is not a bunch of people saying, `Oh, let's blow up a pipeline because we want to.' "
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In Iraq, Showdown Looms Over Self-Rule for Kurds
Regional Leaders Say They Will Not Give up Quasi-Independence
By Edward Cody
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, July 11, 2004; Page A18
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A41461-2004Jul10?language=printer
IRBIL, Iraq -- Karzan Kanabi, whose clothing shop attracts young men with its cheap bell-bottom pants, never went to Baghdad, never learned Arabic and never felt the desire to go anywhere he would have to mix with Iraq's Arab population.
"We want Kurdistan to be an independent country," said Kanabi, 18, who had his Washington-brand jeans trucked in from Turkey, just to the north. He does no business with the rest of Iraq. "We only need Kurdistan."
The nationalist sentiments voiced by Kanabi and many others in this prosperous Kurdish city 200 miles north of Baghdad have become the leading edge of a storm looming over Iraq. After 13 years of quasi-independence -- the only regime Kanabi and his peers have known -- the 4 million Kurds living under their own government here in the grassy plains and jagged mountains of historical Kurdistan have resolved never to relinquish the self-rule bestowed on them by the United States after the Persian Gulf War in 1991.
"Iraq is made up of two nationalities, Kurds and Arabs," Massoud Barzani, one of the region's two legendary leaders, said in an interview Thursday in nearby Salahuddin. "Kurds have no less a place than Arabs in Iraq."
Kurdish determination, however, has run up against a resolve widely shared by Iraq's new leadership and its backers, including the United States, to preserve a unified country even without the iron fist of former president Saddam Hussein's Baath Party. Iraq, they have pledged, is to be organized as a majority-rule democracy, which would redistribute power among its 25 million inhabitants -- roughly 60 percent Shiite Arabs, 20 percent Sunni Arabs and 20 percent Kurds.
So far, with a bloody anti-U.S. insurgency their primary concern, the new leaders in Baghdad and their sponsors in the Bush administration have postponed the showdown over the Kurdish issue, hoping a crisis can be avoided. But with elections scheduled for January, Kurds here said, the time has drawn near to deal with some of the most explosive issues, particularly the status of the city of Kirkuk. In addition, plans to write a permanent new constitution after the January elections, Kurdish leaders warned, are likely to bring the country face to face with the question of Kurdistan's long-term legal relationship with the central government in Baghdad.
"We have been patient for over a year," said Falah Mustafa Bakir, Barzani's foreign relations adviser. "Now is the time to address it."
Kirkuk, about 150 miles north of Baghdad, lies just outside the Kurdish region as defined over the last decade. The Kurdish leadership, citing historical ties, has demanded that the city and its surrounding oil fields be incorporated into the autonomous Kurdish zone and its special rule. The demand is opposed by leaders of the Arab majority and has been under discussion ever since U.S. troops overthrew Hussein and occupied Iraq 15 months ago.
With the organization of elections about to begin, the Kurdish demand has gained new urgency. Who lives and votes in Kirkuk, Kurdish leaders point out, is a question that will help determine the outcome of the vote -- and who is at the controls -- in a region they regard as theirs.
"This issue is a time bomb," Barzani said, speaking softly and wearing a brown uniform with the Kurds' traditional baggy pants and red-and-white headdress.
Kirkuk has been part of Kurdish folklore from time immemorial, with songs and poems heralding its place in the Kurds' tortured history. But others have long lived there too, including Arabs and Turkmens. More Arabs were brought in by Hussein's government to help smother Kurdish separatism, which had led to three secessionist uprisings in 20 years.
The Kurdish leadership has insisted that Iraqis who were brought in to Arabize the area must be returned to their homes, many of them in southern Iraq. Those leaving should be treated humanely and compensation should be paid, they said in interviews, but the newcomers must leave. At that point, they added, a referendum could be held allowing the city, its Kurdish majority restored, to vote whether to stay in the Arab part of Iraq or join the Kurdish autonomous region.
"We can't make any concessions on Kirkuk," Bakir said. "For us, it's very important."
But the new leaders in Baghdad have made it clear they too regard Kirkuk as very important. Its oil fields have contributed to Iraq's national prosperity for 80 years. Moreover, they have said, readjusting the ethnic composition of cities or regions is not the way Iraq should begin its new political life.
Vice President Ibrahim Jafari, a Shiite Muslim of the Dawa party, said in a recent interview that the rights of Kurds must be respected in the new Iraq. The history of their oppression must be taken into account in whatever arrangement is worked out, he added. But he also emphasized that Iraq must remain a unitary nation, true to its history and traditions, and said the rules of democracy must be followed.
Behind his comment lay a tension that has run throughout the debate over what to do about the Kurds and the north. For Iraq's Shiites, long overshadowed by the Sunnis who dominated the Baath Party, representative democracy is a way to gain a measure of power proportionate to their majority share of the population. There is no reason, in their view, for the country's Kurdish minority to oppose majority rule now that Hussein's tyranny has been eliminated.
Quasi-Independence
For more than a decade, U.S. warplanes flew regular patrols to prevent Hussein's forces from venturing north of the 36th parallel and into the 17,000-square-mile Kurdish-controlled zone of northeastern Iraq. Left alone for the first time in generations, Kurds constructed a flourishing quasi-state, with democratic elections and institutions to underpin the traditional leadership of Barzani and his Kurdistan Democratic Party, and his rival to the east, Jalal Talabani of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan.
Along the road north from Baghdad, what they built is readily apparent. Northward from Kirkuk, the Iraqi flag has disappeared, replaced by the green, white and red colors of Kurdistan, with a blazing yellow sun in the center. The Arabic language has withered away, replaced by the Kurds' own tongue.
Security checkpoints to control traffic have been erected by Kurdish fighters, called pesh merga, only a few of whom wear uniforms of the U.S.-trained Iraqi National Guard. Barzani's headquarters, atop a steep bluff just outside Salahuddin, is guarded by his party's militia.
"We will not agree to having the Iraqi army here," said Mohammed Sharif Ahmad, dean of the law and political science department at Salahuddin University. "We have our pesh merga. They are organized like an army."
Together, Barzani and Talabani field more than 70,000 armed men, twice the planned strength of the Iraqi national army and several times its current roster, according to a U.S. tally. Each of the two Kurdish leaders has built his own military academy to turn out officers in two-year courses.
A decree issued by Iraq's interim government in Baghdad banning militias has had no noticeable effect here. For Kurds, making the pesh merga illegal would be like trying to reverse generations of history and undo the emergence of a new national entity over the last dozen years.
"This is my land," said Goran Nuri, who runs a bookstore in the shadow of a fortress built by Salahuddin, a Kurd, after his conquest of Jerusalem.
Nuri has laid in stocks of dictionaries, English language courses and science texts, scattered haphazardly around his narrow little shop. But what his customers really want and buy, Nuri said, are Kurdish-language modern novels, literature of their own.
The only Arabic-language tome that attracts buyers, he said, is the Koran, the Muslim holy book.
Fearing the Future
The word that has come to dominate the debate over Kurdistan is federalism. Kurds and Arabs alike have suggested that reorganizing Iraq in an association of states could give Kurdistan room to retain self-rule while staying within a unified Iraq. The Kurdish parliament has voted to forgo total independence in return for loose federalism.
But there is little agreement on how Kurdistan should be defined in the new constitution. Ahmad, the jurist, said putting off the debate is the best idea, to give the new Iraq time to jell. Meanwhile, he suggested, Kurdistan would retain its semi-independence.
But Barzani said the Kurds can wait only so long and that writing the new constitution will force a decision. "My approach is to put all these issues on the table and solve them as much as possible," he said.
Much will depend on how the United States comes down when the crunch arrives, probably next year, he said. Two recent decisions by the Bush administration have inspired doubts.
The first was rejection of a Kurdish demand for the post of either president or prime minister in the interim government, reflecting the Kurdish contention that Iraqi society is divided into Arabs and Kurds. The second was refusal to put into the Security Council resolution underpinning the new Iraqi government a condition that any important decision must be agreed on by consensus among Iraq's political and ethnic factions.
At the Kurds' insistence, U.S. occupation authorities included such a proviso in the Temporary Administrative Law governing Iraq pending its new constitution. But Shiite leaders, including Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, objected that this amounted to a Kurdish veto, frustrating majority rule. Eager for votes at the United Nations, the Bush administration dropped the language from the resolution.
Kurdish leaders repeatedly said they would never forget U.S. help in setting up the quasi-independent Kurdistan they have had since 1991. But they also have not forgotten what happened in 1975, when the United States, along with Iran and Israel, withdrew support for an earlier secessionist revolt and stood by while Iraqi troops crushed the pesh merga, who were then commanded by Barzani's late father, Mustafa Barzani.
"We have every right to have fears about the future," Barzani said.
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Iraq Says Zarqawi Likely Seeking WMD Materials
July 11, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-iraq-weapons.html
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraq's national security adviser said Sunday unconventional weapons material might have gone to neighboring states in the war and Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is probably trying to get some.
Mowaffaq al-Rubaie also said the Iraqi interim government had approved the transfer of all radioactive material in its possession to the United States, but said he could not be sure more material was not hidden inside Iraq by Saddam Hussein.
Rubaie did not provide any evidence that unconventional weapons materials had crossed the border, or of attempts by militants to acquire them in Iraq.
U.S. and U.N. officials said Wednesday Washington had transported about 1.8 tonnes of enriched uranium out of Iraq for safekeeping more than a year after looters stole it from a U.N.-sealed facility left unguarded by U.S. troops.
Artillery shells found by Polish troops in Iraq in June contained the deadly nerve agent cyclosarin, the Polish army said last week.
``Just imagine if these weapons of mass destruction or any of these capabilities of making a dirty bomb or a chemical weapon or anything like this, if it falls in the hands of Zarqawi's gangsters and Zarqawi's people and these global terrorists or Saddam's former regime, what will happen?'' he said.
``I have no shadow of doubt that..., with his evil mind, he (Zarqawi) will try to acquire these unconventional weapons,'' he told a news conference.
Zarqawi is Washington's top militant target in Iraq and has offered a $25 million reward for his capture. Zarqawi's group has claimed responsibility for bombings in Iraq and the beheadings of an American and South Korean.
MISTAKES
Asked if unconventional weapons material may already be in the hands of Zarqawi or others like him, Rubaie said: ``We don't know. We have no intelligence information on that.''
But he said ``many mistakes'' were made in failing to secure sensitive sites after the U.S.-led war that toppled Saddam.
Rubaie said the transfer of about 1.8 tonnes of low enriched uranium and almost 1,000 radioactive sources to the United States involved everything collected in Iraq. But he said he could not be certain Iraq was free of weapons of mass destruction.
``Whether he (Saddam Hussein) has smuggled these through the borders during the conflict of last year, whether he has hidden these weapons of mass destruction... we don't know,'' he said.
The United States and Britain have failed to uncover any stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, even though the possession of such weapons was one of the reasons cited for launching the March 2003 invasion.
Rubaie said there were indications that some unconventional materials had crossed borders into neighboring states, and said Iraq would seek to have it returned if so.
``There are some indications that these (unconventional materials) have gone that way during the conflict and immediately after the conflict,'' he said but gave no details.
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Marines battle Islamists, Saddamists on Iraq's deadliest road
MAHMUDIYAH, Iraq (AFP)
Jul 11, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040711074501.wwvftet3.html
The platoon speeds up and down the deceptively calm stretch of highway from Mahmuidyah to Lutifiyah. Despite the palm trees and acres of farmland, the area is one of the killing fields of a 14-month insurgency against US-led forces -- perhaps the deadliest roadway in Iraq.
The 10 humvees speed by a burnt-out tanker hit a week ago, and the charred chassis of a car bomb exploded one day before.
In the past, teenagers have zealously ripped apart the frames of burnt out sports utility vehicles and cursed US troops.
The narrow roadway, lined with farms and densely packed communities that count about 450,000 people, has been the stage for numerous drive-by shootings.
Seven Spanish intelligence agents were gunned down here in November. Two CNN employees were killed in January and a Polish journalist shot dead in May.
Just east of the insurgency hotbed of Al-Anbar province, the Mahmudiyah region functions as a crossroads for resistance heading down into the Shiite Muslim hearltand or traveling up north to Baghdad.
"Mahmudiyah is one of those in between places. It's one of the stops where you can blend in," said Major Brian Neil, of the Second-Battalion, Second Marines.
The town itself, lined with loitering unemployed, military- aged men is a snapshot of the insurgency's different strains.
"Many different groups ... choose to fight us," says Neil.
"I think you have the former regime elements who want to go back to the time of Saddam. You have religious extremists who can't be comfortable with the fact we're here ... (and) disenfranchised youth who need to latch on to something."
The hatred against the US-led forces can spread like wildfire as it did in April when the US military assaulted the insurgency hotbed of Fallujah and faced down Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr's revolt across central and southern Iraq.
"It's culturally hip to fight the coalition," Neil said.
"We feel or came here believing we are here to do the right thing.... (but) there are significant influences in their culture that feel otherwise."
Marines have to combat clerics that label them untrustworthy in their weekly sermons, as well as some tribal leaders, deadset against them, and perhaps fanning the insurgency, said Lieutenant Colonel Giles Kyser.
The troops try to win by treading softly, planning reconstruction projects and step-by-step building up an Iraqi security force -- no easy task in an area where the police and national guard are regularly attacked.
In their minds, they can see a slow measure of progress.
The marines take heart in the fact that the Mahmudiyah police and the Iraqi national guard beat back an attack on the local police station last week.
Recruiting the unemployed military-aged males on the street to join the Iraqi security forces is one method to drain the pool of potential anti-US fighters, Kyser said.
"If we can provide for them a positive ... something that reinforces their honor and desire to contribute to the country, have them involved in the police and national guard, we should do that," Kyser said.
The tactic has brought the marines together with a man, named General Mudir, a former officer in Saddam's Republican Guard, who is serving as the advisor to the area's new national guard battalion.
But for every success, there is a step back. The police station in Yusifiyah was looted and burnt to the ground in mid-June.
Six national guard were killed in an ambush last week. In April, a female translator who marines had nicknamed the "Dragon Lady" because of a tattoo on her arm, was shot dead by unknown assailants. They suspect the insurgents listen in on Iraqi security force radio lines and some police are probably double agents.
Guarding a rotting Iraqi tank, abandoned in the spring 2003, Lieutenant Karl Noradeen drips sweat and speaks enthusiastically about how one defeats an insurgency.
"It's caring for people," he says.
If a bomb goes off, "We ask people if they're OK," he says, explaining the minutiae of winning a psychological war.
The marines hold their fire if shooting at the enemy means there might be civilian casualties, he says.
It's proving the insurgency's rhetoric is hollow and false, he says.
Asked how long it might take, he grinned and says half-joking: "A place like this, maybe a decade."
-----
Report: Filipino's captors extend deadline
(CNN)
July 11, 2004
http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/meast/07/10/iraq.main/index.html
-- Militants who took a Filipino man hostage in Iraq have extended their death-threat deadline by 24 hours, hours after relatives were told he had been freed.
Philippines foreign affairs spokesman Gilberto Asuque confirmed a report broadcast by the Arabic-language TV network Al-Jazeera that the captors had given the Philippines until Sunday evening to meet their demands.
Word on the fate of Angelo de la Cruz came hours after a top Philippines official had said the 46-year-old truck driver was being released.
Labor and Employment Secretary Patricia Santo Tomas said on television that President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo told de la Cruz's wife that he was on his way to a hotel in Baghdad. De la Cruz's wife, Zeny, then spoke on Philippines national television, recounting her conversation with Arroyo.
Government officials said de la Cruz was in the custody of mediators and was expected to be turned over to the Philippines government.
A presidential spokesman told CNN "we're very optimistic something positive will happen."
But a Philippines diplomat in Iraq said there was no concrete information that de la Cruz was about to be released.
And Al-Jazeera reported receiving a new statement from the kidnappers Saturday in which they extended the deadline and added a new demand: that the Philippines pull its small contingent of troops out of Iraq by July 20.
The captors, who have identified themselves as members of the Khaled Bin Al-Walid Squadrons, part of the Islamic Army of Iraq, originally had called for Philippines troops to leave the country.
The Philippines said it would be sticking to the schedule under which its 50-strong humanitarian force will leave Iraq next month.
Philippines Foreign Secretary Delia Albert said the government's decision not to extend the mandate of the forces past an August 20 deadline was not directly related to the hostage negotiations.
"The decision has really been taken since the day we went to Iraq a year ago," Albert said. She also said the Philippines is prepared to repatriate all Filipino workers who want to return home.
The Philippines had previously said it would consider extending the mandate for troops in Iraq, as it did last year.
Albert also stressed that the Filipino forces are a "humanitarian contingent" and are not involved in fighting.
Al-Jazeera broadcast an apparent new plea from de la Cruz early Saturday, asking his country to withdraw its troops. CNN cannot independently confirm the authenticity of the videotape.
The Al-Jazeera reporter said the kidnappers allowed de la Cruz "to give a final message to the president of his country, Gloria Macapagal [Arroyo], and to his wife."
"To my colleagues in the Philippines company and all the Filipinos heading to Iraq, I advise you not to come to Iraq. And to President Arroyo, I beg you to withdraw the troops from Iraq," de la Cruz said on the tape.
De la Cruz and his wife have eight children, and his wife pleaded for his release in a news conference Friday in Manila with Arroyo.
"I am appealing to the whole world, to our Muslim brothers to please help us," said Zeny de la Cruz, according to a translation from Associated Press Television Network.
"Please do not hurt my husband. Please have mercy on my children, for he is their only hope."
Two Bulgarian truckers also have been kidnapped recently in Iraq. Militants have abducted drivers because they have been transporting goods to U.S.-led forces.
The Bulgarian Foreign Ministry said Saturday that it believes the two hostages are still alive. Marine being debriefed
U.S. Marine Cpl. Wassef Hassoun, the 24-year-old translator who disappeared June 19 and resurfaced this week in Lebanon, was being debriefed Saturday at a U.S. military base in Germany and may be back in the United States early next week. (Full story)
Hassoun had been listed as "captured" in Iraq after being seen on video blindfolded with a sword being held over his head.
A narrator on the tape said the captive would be killed if the United States did not free jailed Iraqis. There were conflicting reports on Hassoun's fate, including claims on Islamist Web sites that he had been beheaded.
It's unknown how Hassoun got to his family's home in Tripoli, some 500 miles (805 kilometers) away from where he was last seen at his unit's base in Iraq. Other developments
# Marines killed two insurgents in a gunfight in Ramadi, attackers gunned down a guard at a Kirkuk farmers' cooperative headquarters, and assailants thought to be Muslim fundamentalists killed a cabbie in attacks on Baqubah stores targeted because they sell liquor. A movie theater owned by a Turkmen businessman was burned down in Kirkuk. # Saboteurs attacked a natural gas pipeline Saturday in northern Iraq, Kirkuk's deputy mayor said. Marwan Al-Anni said a bomb was planted at a pipeline that feeds into a northern power station between Kirkuk oil fields and Beiji refineries, more than 40 miles (64.4 kilometers) west of Kirkuk. A fire erupted after the attack, but it died out when the gas flow was stopped. Crews were trying to fix the break Saturday afternoon.
# A planned trip by Iraqi interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi to Europe next week has been canceled. A government official said Saturday that the trip was scrapped because of pressing security concerns, while another said it was delayed because Allawi wanted to visit Middle East countries first.
# The number of deaths in the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq surpassed 1,000 this week. The deaths bring multinational fatalities -- both in combat and in "nonhostile" situations -- to 1,002 since the start of the war in March 2003. U.S. military deaths now total 881.
-------- israel / palestine
4 Palestinians Are Killed by Explosion in Gaza Strip
July 11, 2004
By GREG MYRE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/11/international/middleeast/11MIDE.html?hp
JERUSALEM, July 10 - A powerful explosion destroyed a black Mercedes and killed three Palestinian militants traveling in the vehicle on the edge of Gaza City on Saturday, but the cause of the blast was unclear. A fourth Palestinian on a motorcycle was also killed, Palestinians said.
Palestinian security officials initially said the attack was carried out by an Israeli helicopter, but later said the car was hit by an Israeli tank shell.
However, the Israeli military, which usually acknowledges such strikes, said it was not responsible. A military official said a helicopter had fired warning shots in the area earlier in the day, but had not fired any missiles. The official speculated that the blast might have been caused by a bomb in the car that went off inadvertently.
The three men killed in the car belonged to the Popular Resistance Committees, a militant organization, the Palestinian security officials said.
The Israeli foreign minister said in remarks broadcast Saturday that Israel was looking to the United States to block any United Nations Security Council resolutions that would condemn Israel's barrier in the West Bank. The comments by the foreign minister, Silvan Shalom, came a day after the United Nations' highest court, the International Court of Justice, delivered an advisory ruling that the sections of the barrier being built in the West Bank violated international law and should be torn down.
Armed with the decision, Palestinian leaders said they would take the matter to the General Assembly, and possibly the Security Council, seeking a resolution that would put pressure on Israel to comply.
"The issue will go to the Security Council because they have an automatic majority in the U.N. General Assembly," Mr. Shalom told Israel Radio. The foreign minister, who had just returned from the United States, said he had asked Washington to prevent any resolution from being passed.
Another Israeli official said Israeli diplomats would lobby other members of the Security Council to try to block a resolution.
In the past, President Bush has referred to the fence's route inside the West Bank as a "problem." But his administration has said the issue should be settled in political negotiations, not by the international court, a position Mr. Bush's spokesman, Scott McClellan, reiterated Friday.
The United States has used its veto power on many occasions to block Council resolutions critical of Israel.
But the Palestinian prime minister, Ahmed Qurei, said, "It is the responsibility of the U.N. to put a mechanism to commit Israel to this decision." Mr. Qurei spoke after a meeting on Saturday with a European Union envoy, Marc Otte.
The Associated Press, citing sources present at the meeting, reported that Mr. Qurei said during the discussion that he hoped the Americans would not "sabotage" the Palestinian efforts at the United Nations.
Israel has refused to recognize the international court's authority to rule in the case, and says it will continue building the barrier, which it hopes to complete by the end of next year.
Israel says the partly built barrier is already serving its purpose and has contributed to a significant drop in Palestinian suicide bombings. The Palestinians say the barrier has resulted in the confiscation of large tracts of Palestinian-owned land and undermines efforts to establish a viable Palestinian state.
In other violence on Saturday, a 16-year-old girl, Haneen Abu Samhadana, was killed by Israeli gunfire in Rafah, at the southern end of the Gaza Strip. Dr. Ali Musa, the director of Al Najar Hospital in Rafah, said she suffered a bullet wound to the chest.
An Israeli military official said the army was checking the report, but had no information on any shooting in the area on Saturday.
In northern Gaza, in Beit Hanun, a Palestinian woman who is six months pregnant suffered a leg wound, either from a bullet or shrapnel, the two sides said.
Israeli troops entered Beit Hanun at the end of June after rocket fire from the town killed two Israelis just outside Gaza's perimeter fence. The Israeli incursion has reduced the rocket attacks but not completely halted them.
The Palestinian Health Ministry said that since Israeli troops entered the town 12 days ago, 14 Palestinians had been killed, including militants and civilians, and 137 wounded.
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Israel Seeks U.S. Aid in Barrier Dispute
July 11, 2004
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/11/international/middleeast/11mide.html
JERUSALEM, July 10 - Israel is looking to the United States to block any United Nations Security Council resolutions that would condemn Israel's barrier in the West Bank, the foreign minister said in remarks broadcast Saturday.
The comments by Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom came a day after the United Nations' International Court of Justice ruled that the parts of the barrier being built in the West Bank should be torn down.
Palestinian leaders said they would take the matter to the General Assembly, and possibly the Security Council. The Bush administration has said the issue should be settled in political negotiations.
But on Saturday, the Palestinian prime minister, Ahmed Qurei, said, "It is the responsibility of the U.N. to put a mechanism to commit Israel to this decision."
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Sharon Says Attack Proves Barrier Is Essential
July 11, 2004
By GREG MYRE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/11/international/middleeast/11CND-MIDE.html?hp
JERUSALEM, July 11 - A bomb exploded next to a Tel Aviv bus stop, killing a female soldier and wounding about 20 Israelis today. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon called for Israel to respond by pressing ahead with the ``terrorism-prevention fence'' that an international court ruled illegal just two days earlier.
The attack marked the first deadly bombing inside Israel in nearly four months, the longest such stretch since the current round of Middle East fighting began in September 2000.
The Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades, a faction linked to Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat's Fatah movement, claimed responsibility for the bombing, saying it was revenge for recent Israeli military raids in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
However, Mr. Arafat denounced the attack, and then hinted that Israelis may have been behind the bombing.
``We condemn this act as we always condemn these acts,'' Mr. Arafat said at his West Bank compound in Ramallah, where he has been confined for more than two years.
``You know who is behind these acts,'' he said. ``Europe knows it, the Americans know it, the Israelis know it.''
The bomb was concealed in bushes next to the bus stop, and police said it may have been detonated by remote control. The blast occurred shortly after 7 a.m., during the morning rush hour today, the first day of the work week in Israel.
A 19-year-old soldier, Ma'ayan Nayim, was killed in the blast, which injured people on the street as well as passengers on a bus that was passing by on a busy thoroughfare, near the city's main bus station.
Among those injured was Sammi Masrawa, an Arab citizen of Israel who heads an Arab-Jewish friendship group in the Tel Aviv area. Mr. Masrawa told Israel radio that he had opposed the barrier, and had taken part in recent protests against it. But today's blast changed his mind, he said.
``I will now be for it and from an organization in favor of it,'' said Mr. Masrawa, 29, who suffered leg wounds while heading to a restaurant where he works as a chef.
The last bombing inside Israel was on March 14 when two suicide bombers killed 10 Israelis in the southern port town of Ashdod.
Shortly after the bombing, Mr. Sharon gathered his cabinet in Jerusalem and reiterated that his government would ignore the decision handed down Friday by the International Court of Justice at The Hague.
In a non-binding decision, the United Nations' highest court ruled that the sections of the separation barrier that Israel is building in the West Bank are a violation of international law and should be torn down, with compensation paid to Palestinians who have lost land.
``I want to make it clear: the state of Israel completely rejects the I.C.J.'s opinion,'' Mr. Sharon told his cabinet. ``The opinion completely ignores the reason for the construction of the security fence - murderous Palestinian terrorism.''
About 120 miles of the planned 437-mile barrier has been built over the past two years, and Israel says it already has contributed to a dramatic decline in the number of Palestinian attacks.
However, Palestinians say the barrier has separated West Bank residents from their farmland, schools and jobs, and is undermining efforts to create a viable Palestinian state.
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Sharon Rejects World Court Ruling on W.Bank Barrier
July 11, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-mideast-barrier-sharon.html
JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon rejected Sunday the World Court's ruling on Israel's West Bank barrier as one-sided and politically motivated.
In his first public comments on Friday's non-binding opinion declaring the barrier illegal, Sharon said a Palestinian bombing in Tel Aviv that killed a woman Sunday was the first attack carried out ``under the auspices of the ruling.''
``I want to make clear, the state of Israel absolutely rejects the ruling of the International Court of Justice in The Hague,'' Sharon said. ``It is a one-sided and politically motivated ruling.''
Sharon said the decision by the U.N.'s top legal body ``completely ignores the reason for building the security fence -- that is the murderous Palestinian terrorism.''
Continued construction of the barrier, he said, ``is the most reasonable measure to take against this criminal terrorism.''
The court said the network of razor wire-tipped fences and towering cement slabs -- condemned by the Palestinians as an ``apartheid wall'' built on occupied land they want for a state of their own -- should be taken down.
Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, part of Palestinian President Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement, claimed responsibility for the bomb blast at a Tel Aviv bus stop, saying it came in response to Israel's killing of Palestinian militants and civilians.
Hospital officials said one woman was killed in the explosion, the first bombing in Israel since March when two suicide bombers slipped out of the Gaza Strip and killed 10 Israelis in the strategic port of Ashdod.
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UN to rebuild homes Israel destroyed
Some say Israeli home demolitions are a war crime
Sunday 11 July 2004
Aljazeera
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/F7F01F8D-FCF8-4A22-B20A-B189C6B39794.htm
The UN agency for Palestinian refugees is to rebuild homes for some of the 15,000 people made homeless by an Israeli policy of home demolitions, officials said on Sunday.
The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) reached an agreement with the Palestinian Authority (PA) and another UN agency to build 700 homes for Palestinians left homeless because of direct Israeli action in Rafah, Southern Gaza.
Rafah has been the hardest hit by Israel's policy of home demolitions.
The PA is to set aside land for the new homes and the UN Development Programme (UNDP) will help pay for them with donations from the Saudi Committee for the Relief of Palestinians and the United Arab Emirates Red Crescent.
"This agreement now allows UNWRA to move quickly to the most important task at hand, that of transferring the concern of the international community for the people of Rafah into bricks and mortar," UNWRA Commissioner-General Peter Hansen said.
Donations needed
UNRWA officials said they would seek additional donations from other countries to cover the rest of the houses they would need to build to house all the homeless.
The agency said in June it needed nearly $45m to build homes for 9000 Palestinian refugees made homeless since 2000 by Israeli army raids in Rafah.
Israel says the number of Palestinian homes destroyed by its army and the number of people made homeless is far lower than the figures reported by UNWRA.
It says its forces only destroy buildings used by resistance fighters to hide weapons-smuggling tunnels or as "gunmen's nests" to launch attacks against Israeli forces.
But UNWRA statistics dispute Israeli claims and point to more than 22,000 homeless Palestinians due to Israeli occupation army operations in Gaza since the start of the Palestinian intifada almost four years ago.
Palestinians say home demolitions are a form of collective punishment.
Three-day spree
Last May, a three-day Israeli military operation along the Gaza-Egypt border resulted in the demolition of 100 homes, leaving some 1000 Palestinian civilians homeless.
The Israeli occupation army said that it has been searching for, and destroying, tunnels which they alleged where used by weapons smugglers.
Home demolitions have become a contentious issue in Israeli public life.
In late May, Israeli Justice Minister Yosef Lapid, a Holocaust survivor, compared the demolition of Palestinian homes to Nazi atrocities against the Jews during the second world war's Final Solution.
"I saw on television an old woman picking through the rubble of her house in Rafah, looking for her medicine, and she reminded me of my grandmother who was expelled from her home during the Holocaust," he was quoted as saying.
His remarks set off a furor in Israel as several politicians rejected the comparison between Palestinians left homeless and the effects of the Holocaust.
Earlier in the year, Rabbi Arik Ascherman also protested against home demolitions and called them a crime against humanity.
Ascherman, a US-born rabbi who heads the Rabbis for Human Rights movement, was prosecuted and charged in court for his activism to prevent demolitions of Palestinian homes, and is currently awaiting a verdict.
He faces up to three years imprisonment.
Aljazeera + Agencies
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Annan: Israel must accept ICJ ruling
Annan believes the world court's decision is clear
Sunday 11 July 2004,
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/1C53CA1B-AB40-45E7-86FD-3F303951496D.htm
"We decided that it was not wise now to go to the Security Council because we don't want to incite the Americans, especially during the election campaign and it's better to wait until after the elections." - Anonymous minister, Palestinian Authority
UN Secretary General Kofi Annan says Israel should abide by international law after the world court ruled that the controversial West Bank separation barrier is illegal.
Speaking to reporters in Bangkok on Friday, Annan said Israel is responsible for complying with the decision.
"I think the decision of the court is clear," he told reporters in Bangkok, where he is due to attend a world AIDS conference.
The International Court of Justice (ICJ), the UN's highest legal body, ruled on Friday that the 700 km barrier violated international law.
"Whilst we all accept the government of Israel has a responsibility, and indeed the duty to protect its citizens, any action it takes has to be in conformity with international law and has to respect the interest of the Palestinians," Annan said.
Israeli responsibility
"And Israel, as an occupying power, is responsible for the welfare of the Palestinian people."
Israeli Prime Minister Sharon has refused the finding of the ICJ
"The report has been given to the general assembly and we'll see where they go from there," he said.
"I don't want to prejudge what they may decide, so we'll leave it to the general assembly."
The ruling said that those sections that cut into Palestinian areas should be torn down and ordered Israel to pay compensation for damages caused.
While the Palestinians hailed the ruling as a great victory, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said on Sunday that Israel totally rejected the world court's ruling that the barrier breached international law.
Total rejection
"I want to make clear, the state of Israel absolutely rejects the ruling of the International Court of Justice in The Hague," Sharon said. "It is a one-sided and politically motivated ruling."
"The state of Israel totally rejects the opinion of the world court," Sharon said in his first public reaction to the advisory judgement.
And the White House, Israel's chief supporter, said it was "inappropriate" for the ICJ to issue the ruling, a sentiment echoed by Democrat John Kerry, who is challenging President George Bush in the US presidential election in November.
However, the Palestinian Authority has confirmed it would fight Israel all the way through the United Nations after the court gave its decision by 14 to one.
But on Sunday the PA decided to hold off pushing for a UN resolution against the West Bank barrier until after November's US presidential elections as Israel looked to Washington to veto any eventual vote at the Security Council.
"We decided that it was not wise now to go to the Security Council because we don't want to incite the Americans, especially during the election campaign and it's better to wait until after the elections," one minister said after a meeting chaired by Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.
"In the meantime we will take the issue to the (UN) General Assembly," he told AFP on condition of anonymity.
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Saudis Facing Return of Radicals Young Iraq Veterans Join Underground
By Craig Whitlock
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, July 11, 2004; Page A01
RIYADH, Saudi Arabia -- An increasing number of Saudis who crossed the border into Iraq to fight the U.S.-led military occupation are returning home to plot attacks against the Saudi government and Western targets in the desert kingdom, according to Western counterterrorism officials and Saudis with ties to militant groups.
The Iraq veterans are serving as fresh recruits for an underground network in Saudi Arabia that, until recently, was led by an older generation of fighters that had trained in Afghanistan and was closely connected to al Qaeda and its founder, Saudi native Osama bin Laden. Many of those leaders have been killed or captured in recent months by Saudi security forces.
Today, the proclaimed new chief of the primary militant group in the kingdom is Saleh Awfi, 33, a Saudi who journeyed north last year to join Ansar al-Islam, an Islamic radical group in Iraq that the U.S. government has branded as a terrorist organization. Awfi stayed for a few months, barely surviving U.S. aerial bombardment, before deciding to return and take up arms in his home country, according to a former Saudi radical who met with Awfi last year.
Other Saudis are returning after spending time in newly established training camps across the Red Sea in remote parts of Sudan where central government influence is weak, said a European intelligence official whose government is advising Saudi officials on their domestic terrorist threat.
For years, the religiously conservative Saudi royal family considered itself immune to attacks from Islamic extremists, but since May 2003, armed insurgents have shaken the government with a series of bombings and shootings resulting in more than 80 deaths.
The violence has helped drive oil prices to record highs, due to concern that the radicals will target pipelines or refineries.
The Saudi government sealed its border with Iraq last year and has played down evidence that Saudi radicals have contributed to the insurgency there. But Western counterterrorism officials and diplomats here said a small but significant number of Saudi veterans of the fight in Iraq have already made their way back and are helping carry out attacks in the kingdom.
Some Western officials express fear that the homecoming will grow if Iraq stabilizes. They also say they worry that the trend could become an echo of the 1990s, when thousands of Saudis traveled to Afghanistan to enlist in training camps sponsored by al Qaeda and other Islamic groups. Many of those radicals were dispatched around the world to launch attacks, including the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackings in the United States.
After the Iraq insurgency is over, "there will be people who are freshly trained in the art of guerrilla warfare," said a Western diplomat who spoke on condition of anonymity. "It's a real concern. How big a concern? I don't know. It clearly doesn't take too many to do a lot of damage."
Young Leaders Fill Ranks
Recent statements from Saudi militants underscore the Iraq connection. A cell that asserted responsibility last month for the beheading of Paul M. Johnson Jr., a Lockheed Martin Corp. employee kidnapped in Riyadh, called itself the Fallujah Brigade of a broader group known as al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Fallujah is a city west of Baghdad where insurgents have repeatedly clashed with U.S. forces.
The leader of that cell, Abdulaziz Muqrin, who was killed three weeks ago in a shootout with security forces, suggested in a statement that appeared on the Internet last fall that there was substantial crossover between the group in Saudi Arabia and foreign fighters in Iraq. "We are exerting our efforts there," Muqrin wrote, according to Janes Intelligence Review, a London-based publication.
Another example of Saudi fighters coming home from Iraq emerged in late June, when Othman Amri surrendered to Saudi officials under a recently declared amnesty program. Amri had been No. 19 on a list of the kingdom's 26 most wanted terrorism suspects. His family told Saudi reporters that he spent much of last year in Iraq as part of the insurgency there.
Like their compatriots in Iraq, cells operating in Saudi Arabia have repeatedly stated that their primary aim is to drive out all "infidels," including more than 100,000 Western expatriates who help run the country's oil industry and whose military and technical support is crucial to the Saudi government.
Although the border with Iraq is officially closed, many Saudi fighters are still finding their way back into the kingdom. Saudi officials said the nation's 900-mile border with Yemen has become an even more favored reentry point. Officials have reported that border guards have confiscated tons of explosives and ammunition from smugglers. In response, the Saudi government has begun construction of a concrete barrier along the Yemeni border, which runs through an especially desolate stretch of desert and mountains.
The frequency of attacks within Saudi Arabia has picked up in the past two months, as attackers have conducted deadly raids on Western compounds in Khobar and blown up a police building in Riyadh. In May, they began to target individual Westerners in Riyadh, killing a German man at a bank machine and stalking two Americans before fatally shooting them at their homes.
Saudi security forces have arrested hundreds of alleged radicals and sympathizers but largely have been unable to stop the violence since it ignited 14 months ago. Saudi leaders said they are optimistic, however, that their efforts reached a turning point when security forces killed Muqrin and three of his lieutenants in a shootout in Riyadh. Since then, security forces have gone on the offensive and have rounded up numerous other suspects by identifying several hideouts they used in the Riyadh area.
Saudi security officials said they have disrupted each of the five cells known to exist in the kingdom. Although 12 of the government's 26 most wanted terrorist suspects remain at large, Western and Saudi counterterrorism officials said the movement has been dealt a heavy blow.
"The terrorist networks created over the past few years have been almost entirely compromised and will have to be rebuilt largely from scratch," said Nawaf Obaid, a Riyadh-based security consultant. "There are no longer any known senior, battle-hardened bin Laden associates left to run the organization or create new cells."
Most of the original architects of that network were veterans of al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan, including several who were personal acquaintances of bin Laden, according to Saudi officials.
The Saudi government has long drawn criticism for allowing Islamic extremism to flourish within the kingdom and encouraging it abroad. Many Saudi leaders have minimized their responsibility, arguing that the insurgents became radicalized only after leaving the country.
Prince Saud Faisal, the Saudi foreign minister, told reporters in Jiddah last month that "the university of Afghanistan" had brainwashed many Saudis. "They were being mentally reformed and turned into killing machines," he said.
But other officials said most of the leaders trained in Afghanistan have been killed or captured, creating a void that is being filled by younger people whose primary fighting experience comes from Iraq or North Africa, or who have never been out of Saudi Arabia.
"The Afghanistan group is starting to get aged," the Western diplomat said. "A lot of them are now out of the system. I don't know how many of those guys are really left."
Other analysts said the Afghan veterans presented a more serious threat and questioned the ability of their replacements.
"You have two distinct generations," said Ramzi Khoury, a journalist who tracks violent extremists in the kingdom. "You have those guys who came from Afghanistan, who are very well trained, very effective, very well brainwashed. And you have the kids. The kids are angry and depressed, angry over what's going on in Palestine and Iraq."
Weakness on Both Sides
Awfi, the apparent new leader of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, traveled to Afghanistan before Sept. 11, 2001, and met with bin Laden, according to interviews his family has given to Saudi reporters. More recently, he spent time in northern Iraq, but returned to Saudi Arabia after he was nearly killed during the U.S. invasion, according to Mohsen Awajy, a lawyer and former Saudi radical who said he was contacted by Awfi last year.
Although Awfi's militant resume looks impressive on paper, his ascension is a sign that the group has become severely weakened, Awajy said. "If he's going to be the next leader of al Qaeda in Saudi Arabia," he said, "then they are in big trouble, because he has no capability as a leader."
The Saudi security forces, however, have been confronted by weaknesses of their own. Counterterrorism experts and government officials said the kingdom was ill-prepared to respond to terrorism, in part because the government mistakenly assumed it would never become a target.
That began to change in May 2003, as radicals launched attacks not just against Westerners, but also against Saudi citizens and the government.
"The Saudi government was jolted out of its denial," said Jonathan Stevenson, senior fellow for counterterrorism at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London.
Although the government now says it takes terrorism much more seriously, its military and security forces were not trained or equipped to handle the threat and have had a hard time adjusting.
More than a dozen Saudi police officers and National Guardsmen have died in shootouts, in many cases because they were outgunned. In May, three of four gunmen who killed 22 people and took hostages in a Western office and residential compound in Khobar escaped, even though they were surrounded by hundreds of security forces, including a special anti-terrorist Saudi SWAT team.
"Our security apparatus is not well trained in combating terrorism, but they are learning," Ibrahim Alebaji, a former deputy interior minister, told Saudi television last month.
Saudi Arabia's rulers have requested assistance from Western governments to help with training and intelligence gathering. Western counterterrorism officials said the Saudi capability to fight terrorism was improving, but that the kingdom still needed to reorganize its many overlapping military, law-enforcement and security agencies.
"Saudi Arabia did not believe -- or did not want to believe -- that it had a problem for a long time," said a German intelligence official who spoke on condition of anonymity. "They are not underestimating the problem any longer . . . But they first need to create the structures to fight the problem."
Saudi officials used to bristle at such critiques, but have begun to acknowledge the need to revamp their anti-terrorism bureaucracy. Two weeks ago, Prince Saud of the Foreign Ministry met with Western diplomats and businessmen in Jiddah to reassure them that the government recognized the challenge.
"He was quite explicit," said another Western diplomat who attended the meeting and also spoke on condition of anonymity. "He said, 'Yes, we have made mistakes. And we are learning from those mistakes.'"
Technical assistance from the West has already produced results. A newly trained Saudi forensics unit was recently able to confirm, based on physical evidence, that a single al Qaeda cell was responsible for carrying out at least five separate attacks, according to a Western official.
Researchers Robert Thomason and Margot Williams in Washington contributed to this report.
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Egypt's Government Gets an Overhaul
July 11, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/11/international/middleeast/11egyp.html?pagewanted=all
CAIRO, July 10 (Reuters) - The prime minister and cabinet in Egypt resigned Friday, and the president, Hosni Mubarak, chose a computer expert to lead a new cabinet, a change that was aimed partly at reviving a sluggish economy.
Mr. Mubarak asked Ahmed Nazif, communications minister in the departing government, to replace the departing prime minister, Atef Obeid, 72. Mr. Obeid's government had been frequently attacked over its record, especially on the economy.
On Saturday, Egypt's ambassador to the United Nations, Ahmed Aboul Ghaith, was appointed foreign minister, replacing Ahmed Maher, the state news agency MENA reported.
Egypt's leading newspaper, Al Ahram, said about 14 of the 27 cabinet ministers were expected to leave office to pump "youthful and fresh blood" into the administration.
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Despite Terror Risk, Washington Is Unlikely to Press Reform of C.I.A. This Year
July 11, 2004
By DAVID E. SANGER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/11/international/middleeast/11INTE.html?pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, July 10 - Despite a scorching Senate report that describes a profound breakdown of the American intelligence system at a time of increasing terror threats, both White House officials and Congressional leaders say the political calendar will prevent any serious action until after the November elections.
President Bush's staff is already sorting through a series of proposals that he is likely to endorse but not spell out in detail when he appoints a new director of central intelligence, probably in the next two weeks. Mr. Bush, senior officials said, will probably wait until after the release of a second report, expected to be equally searing in its criticism, about the intelligence failures surrounding the Sept. 11 attacks.
One senior administration official characterized the two reports as almost mirror-image descriptions of a deeply dysfunctional intelligence apparatus, with Friday's report describing, in this official's words, "a system that assumed the presence of threats that didn't exist," and the second report detailing "a system that failed to see threats that were coming at us."
Yet any major changes would require far-reaching legislation, and some of the proposals now being considered inside the White House do not directly address what the Senate Intelligence Committee described Friday as a system marked by the "lack of information sharing, poor management and inadequate intelligence collection."
One such proposal is the designation of an intelligence czar who could have control over the $40 billion intelligence budget now dominated by the Pentagon. Senate leaders like John D. Rockefeller IV, the ranking Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, and intelligence experts said the need for action was urgent given the list of imminent threats facing the country - from reports that Al Qaeda may be planning attacks on the nation before the election to a race by North Korea and Iran to speed their nuclear programs.
But even if the reform proposals now being debated at the White House and in Congress were enacted immediately, the senators and experts said, it would take years to change a culture that the Senate committee report said had failed to put much emphasis in penetrating Iraq with human spies, had relied too much on foreign intelligence systems and had made claims about Iraq's weapons capability that were "not supported by the intelligence."
Mr. Bush said Friday that his goals included improving human and technical intelligence collection abilities. He discussed no specifics, however, and several officials who advise the White House on intelligence policy said they doubted that the president would risk beginning a prolonged debate about reforming the system now.
"The president hasn't decided how deeply he wants to take this on now," said one senior official involved in the internal debate. "Everyone knows that serious reform is going to be strongly opposed by the Pentagon and the armed services committees," which could lose some of their budgetary control.
"And the fact is that no one in Washington - not the president, not the Congress - will have the time to take this on until next year," the official said.
Given the unpredictability of politics in an election year, however, the Democrats will probably force the issue to the forefront of the political agenda.
If it becomes a significant issue, Mr. Bush could be forced to act, just as political forces pressed him to action in creating both the Department of Homeland Security and the Sept. 11 commission.
Arguing over such reforms during a campaign against Senator John Kerry, Mr. Bush's political advisers said, might remind Americans about the specific charges that both Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney made almost weekly about Iraq's alleged nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs.
The Senate committee report on Friday confirmed what has been known for months - that many of those charges were "not supported by the intelligence." The report went further, however, saying that the assumptions that Saddam Hussein must have revived those programs were fueled by a "group think" dynamic.
Though Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said the information was based on current, reliable intelligence, the committee concluded that "the intelligence community appears to have decided that the difficulty and risks inherent in developing sources or inserting operations officers into Iraq outweighed the potential benefits."
Congress has been urged by several commissions in the past decade to act on the intelligence structure, but it has quickly become mired in committee politics and rivalries between the intelligence agencies.
But several Congressional leaders said the debate would not even begin until Mr. Bush declares his own views on several critical issues, including separating the job of running the C.I.A. from the job of overseeing the nation's intelligence operations.
The Senate committee charged that George J. Tenet, the departing director of central intelligence who was to leave his post on Sunday, had confused the two roles, tailoring his advice to Mr. Bush about Iraq to fit the C.I.A.'s views and giving far too little credence to doubts raised by other intelligence agencies.
"We cannot get an answer about what ideas they like and what they can't stand," said Representative Jane Harman of California, the senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee and co-author of one of several bills calling for a reorganization of the intelligence system that would include a new director of national intelligence.
Her proposal, however, would not be as radical as one recommended to Mr. Bush by the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, which would give far greater authority to the new intelligence czar.
That is one of several proposals, submitted by the board and developed inside the National Security Council that have been on Mr. Bush's desk for nearly two years.
Most of the proposals that Mr. Bush is expected to discuss with his senior aides, according to officials involved in the debate, have met with little enthusiasm within the White House. Mr. Bush has not decided on even least controversial ones, like giving a new director of central intelligence a term of five to seven years, similar to the decade-long term for the F.B.I. director.
Such a fixed term, the theory goes, would insulate the intelligence director from political pressures, though the Senate panel concluded there was no evidence that politics had led to the intelligence community's over-estimation of Iraq's weapons programs.
In conversations among one another, several of Mr. Bush's top national security officials have expressed concern that a prolonged reorganization could disrupt intelligence operations inside the Pentagon, which controls nearly all of the nation's intelligence agencies except for the C.I.A., and smaller units at the State and Energy Departments.
And there is still disagreement within the intelligence community about whether the Senate committee put together the right diagnosis.
On Friday, John E. McLaughlin, the soft-spoken and scholarly career analyst who takes over on Sunday as the acting director of central intelligence, argued that the agency's errors were largely in how it presented intelligence, not in a fundamental failure to gather it.
Mr. McLaughlin said "one significant error" was in publishing an executive summary of the intelligence estimate about Iraq "without sufficient caveats and disclaimers where our knowledge was incomplete."
Yet referring to Senator Pat Roberts, the Republican chairman of the Intelligence Committee, he said: "I think Senator Roberts called this an `assumption train.' If it was an assumption train, we were not the engine. I'm not even sure we were the coal car. I don't know where we were on it, but people all around the world made the assumption that this country had weapons."
Others say the Iraq experience is already engendering more caution, perhaps too much caution.
They cite as an example a recently produced, highly classified assessment of North Korea's nuclear weapons program.
When international inspectors were ordered out of the country 18 months ago, it said North Korea possessed enough plutonium to produce six or eight weapons. Yet the new report hedges on the question of how many nuclear weapons the country produced, giving a range for the number of weapons that one official said was "so big as to be almost entirely useless."
Within hours of the release of the Senate committee's report on Friday, White House officials were sending e-mail messages to one another citing specific conclusions that they read as exonerating Mr. Bush's top aides for the president's claim that Saddam Hussein had sought uranium in Africa.
For weeks last summer, C.I.A. officials argued that the White House had ignored warnings that the intelligence was suspect.
In private conversations, White House officials paging through the report expressed anger at what one official called "remarkably sloppy work" by the C.I.A., insisting that Mr. Bush never uttered claims about Iraq's weapons that had not first been vetted by the agency.
"You could argue it's the same kind of group think that led them to miss the fall of the Soviet Union and the India-Pakistan nuclear tests," the official said.
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INTELLIGENCE
Tenet's Leadership, His Pride, Faces Attack From Senate Panel as He Leaves C.I.A
July 11, 2004
By DOUGLAS JEHL
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/11/international/middleeast/11TENE.html?pagewanted=all
WASHINGTON, July 10 - George J. Tenet always prided himself on being a strong, inspirational leader of American intelligence agencies. But as he leaves office on Sunday, Mr. Tenet must contend with a judgment that what went wrong with prewar intelligence in Iraq reflected in large part a failure of leadership.
That was the conclusion of the Senate Intelligence Committee, whose 511-page report rarely criticizes Mr. Tenet by name but does so often by his title, as "the D.C.I.," or director of central intelligence. In that role, the report suggests, Mr. Tenet more than anyone else bears responsibility for not halting the train of misjudgments, exaggerations and unquestioned assumptions that ultimately led to the flat declaration that Iraq possessed illicit weapons.
Because he stood at the pinnacle of the intelligence agencies' chain of command, the report said, the director of central intelligence was among those who should be held to account "for not encouraging analysts to challenge their assumptions, fully consider alternative arguments or accurately characterize the intelligence reporting."
The report added the harshest indictment yet to assessments of Mr. Tenet's tenure, which has divided many in Washington. His allies point to successes, including the restoration of pride and financial support to an agency left dispirited by cuts after the cold war, and the central role played by the agency's paramilitary forces in the swift victory in Afghanistan.
But his tenure has also been marked by major failures, including the failure of American intelligence agencies to predict an Indian nuclear test in 1998 and the intelligence agencies' inability to avert the Sept. 11 terror attacks. For these and other perceived sins, some members of Congress began long before this year to call for Mr. Tenet's resignation.
An agency spokesman, Bill Harlow, declined on Friday to address the Senate criticism. But in his own farewell address on Thursday, in an emotional ceremony at the agency's headquarters, Mr. Tenet clearly anticipated it. He borrowed from Theodore Roosevelt to question the fairness of those who offered their judgments in hindsight.
"It is not the critic who counts, nor the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better," Mr. Tenet said, quoting the former president. "The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood."
"More than anything," Mr. Tenet said, American intelligence agencies constitute "a community of action, with high stakes and high risks. Where others criticize, we learn; what others discuss, we do."
At a news conference on Capitol Hill, Senator Pat Roberts, a Kansas Republican and the chairman of the panel, declined to assess Mr. Tenet's role directly. "I think it's very important that we quit looking in the rear-view mirror and affixing blame, and, you know, pointing fingers," he said.
But throughout the 511-page report are criticisms of what Mr. Roberts described as "management practices up and down the entire intelligence community," which Mr. Tenet has led since 1997, longer than anyone since Allen Dulles in the 1950's and 1960's.
"While the D.C.I. was supposed to function as both the head of the C.I.A. and the head of the Intelligence Community," the committee report said, "in many instances he acted only as head of the C.I.A."
Even in the arena that Mr. Tenet had ranked as his top concern, the panel found fault with his approach. While Mr. Tenet declared from the time he took office that rebuilding the country's human intelligence capability was his priority, the Senate committee reported that in the case of Iraq, such intelligence turned out to have been all but absent.
American intelligence agencies had no sources at all in Iraq after 1998 to collect information about either illicit weapons or ties to terrorism, the committee said. As the primary reason, it identified not the lack of money or personnel on which Mr. Tenet had focused his attention, but what it called "a broken corporate culture and poor management," in the form of an unwillingness to take the risks required to develop sources and insert operations officers.
"Such operations are difficult and dangerous," the committee said, "but they should be the norm of the C.I.A.'s activities."
That criticism prompted a particularly angry response on Friday from John McLaughlin, the deputy intelligence chief, who is due to take over as the acting director on Sunday. Any suggestion of timidity, Mr. McLaughlin told reporters, does a disservice to intelligence officers who routinely take enormous risks, including those whose recent deaths have been commemorated in stars chiseled into the marble of the C.I.A.'s main lobby.
One criticism of Mr. Tenet, within the C.I.A. and outside it, has always been that he spent more time tending his close, personal relationship with President Bush than in undertaking the hard work of managing the agency or the broader intelligence spectrum. As a former staff member on Capitol Hill, this criticism goes, Mr. Tenet was better suited to pleasing his boss than to overseeing his own agency, not to mention the broader range of intelligence agencies whose overall budget is estimated at $40 billion a year.
While Mr. Tenet met nearly every morning with Mr. Bush to listen in on his daily intelligence briefing, he rarely assembled other intelligence chiefs for a similar face-to-face, communitywide meeting. Associates say he exerted his leadership instead in sessions like a daily 5 p.m. meeting on terrorism in which, one official said, he would regularly "bark orders" and exert hands-on control.
But in other areas, Mr. Tenet was slower to assert authority, when he did so at all. Some of what the C.I.A. under Mr. Tenet assured Congress about its full sharing of intelligence on suspected weapons sites in Iraq with United Nations inspectors there in 2002 and 2003 turned out to be "factually incorrect," the committee said.
Perhaps most striking, it was not until recently, intelligence officials acknowledged on Friday, that the C.I.A. adopted changes designed to avert a repeat of the mistakes of the Iraq experience.
The most significant among these is a mandatory requirement that National Intelligence Estimates, unlike the one on Iraq in October 2002 that was never subjected to an internal or external challenge, be subjected to concerted second-guessing before they are published.
Such a "Red Team" approach is hardly novel; it has long been common in the military and even the intelligence agencies, as Senator John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, the committee's top Democrat, pointed out on Friday.
That Mr. Tenet did not include it as part of his standard practice might have been inexplicable, one Congressional official said, except that it would have clashed so directly with the kind of blunt certainty that Mr. Tenet often made a habit to express.
According to a written statement issued by Senator Rockefeller and other Democrats on the panel, Mr. Tenet also chose not to intervene directly when subordinates told him that they felt under pressure as they were preparing assessments on Iraq.
Their complaint was focused on administration officials who they said were bombarding them with repeated requests to explore possible links between Iraq and Al Qaeda, an approach that Republicans on the committee defended as prudent and justified.
"In his interview with the committee, Director Tenet confirmed that some agency officials raised with him personally the matter of the repetitive tasking and the pressure it created during this time period," the Democratic statement said.
Mr. Tenet gave no indication that he had asked administration officials to back off from an agency whose mission is to remain independent. Instead, "the director's counsel to those who raised the issue was to `relieve the pressure' by refusing to respond to repeated questions where no additional information existed."
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VIOLATING KENT'S RULES
He Wrote the Book on Intelligence
July 11, 2004
By ROBERT PEAR
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/11/weekinreview/11pear.html?pagewanted=all
WASHINGTON - Sherman Kent was a colorful character, his colleagues say, a master of barnyard language and bawdy jokes who wore bright red suspenders, chewed tobacco and was known as "Buffalo Bill, the Cultured Cowboy."
But his earthiness aside, Mr. Kent, a onetime history professor at Yale, did more than anyone else to establish intelligence analysis as an important discipline. In three decades as an intelligence analyst, including 17 years at the C.I.A., he set standards that guide the profession to this day.
Mr. Kent's legacy looms large in the scathing new Senate assessment of intelligence failures leading up to the war against Iraq. In its report last week, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence singled out Mr. Kent as a professional paragon and said that intelligence analysts had violated his admonitions in recent years.
Mr. Kent repeatedly advised analysts to challenge assumptions, to acknowledge uncertainty and ambiguity, to watch for their own biases and to meet the needs of policy makers without being seduced by them.
Iraq analysts evidently forgot those precepts. For example, the Senate committee said, intelligence officials did not explain the uncertainties behind their judgment that Iraq was pursuing biological, chemical and nuclear weapons. Intelligence analysts fell into ''group think,'' the committee said.
Mr. Kent urged history students to test the authenticity of sources and to curb their own ''predilections and prejudices,'' and he followed that advice in preparing intelligence estimates at the C.I.A.
A keen observer of bureaucratic culture, Mr. Kent studied the cultural divide between producers and consumers of intelligence - the analysts and the people who use their data to make policy and decisions.
The worst case, he said, is when the intelligence estimate is a ''Siamese twin'' of the policy, when it coincides with the assessment of policy makers.
To preserve their independence and integrity, he said, analysts must not get too close to the powerful policy makers. Mr. Kent defined ''best practices'' for intelligence analysts and established a professional journal. C.I.A. employees now study the theory and practice of intelligence analysis at the agency school, which is named for Mr. Kent.
In a paper published by the school, Jack Davis, a former agency employee, said Mr. Kent ''believed that precise language was needed to avoid confusing policy clients about the meaning of intelligence judgments.'' Mr. Kent recommended that analysts give the odds for their assessments in numbers - 3 to 1 or 50-50, for example - rather than using vague phrases like ''good chance'' or ''strong likelihood.''
Mr. Kent would probably have welcomed the Senate report because he was always trying to learn from misjudgments and mistakes. Why, he asked, did analysts not foresee the Chinese-Soviet split in 1960 and 1961? Why did analysts misread Soviet intentions before the 1962 Cuban missile crisis?
"Our estimate of Soviet policy became less flexible than Soviet policy per se,'' Mr. Kent said in lecture notes. The judgment of intelligence analysts "hardened, so that barring incontrovertible evidence, which is rare, it becomes more and more difficult to modify.''
His father, William Kent, was a three-term congressman from California. Shortly before the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, Sherman Kent joined the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the C.I.A. After the war, he wrote a classic book on intelligence analysis, which attracted the attention of government officials. He went to work in the Office of National Estimates, which wrote reports for policy makers, pooling the resources of the intelligence community. In 1952, he became director of the office.
Flooded with data from spies, researchers and new technology, Mr. Kent insisted on the importance of the individual analyst.
"Whatever the complexities of the puzzles we strive to solve,'' he wrote, "and whatever the sophisticated techniques we may use to collect the pieces and store them, there can never be a time when the thoughtful man can be supplanted as the intelligence device supreme.''
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Senate Leaders Urge Bush to Name New CIA Director
July 11, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/politics/politics-security-cia.html
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Senate Intelligence Committee leaders called on President Bush on Sunday to name a new CIA director quickly amid heightened terror fears and widespread concerns about U.S. intelligence flaws.
Days after the panel issued a blistering report about CIA failures in Iraq, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts said he was prepared to oversee intensive hearings to ensure Senate confirmation for a new director of intelligence.
The choice of a new CIA director has gained urgency because of fresh warnings by the administration of possible attacks on the United States as the Democratic and Republican parties prepare for their presidential nomination conventions.
``There are a number of people who have an extraordinary background that the president could send up and we could get confirmed,'' Roberts, a Kansas Republican, said on NBC's ``Meet the Press'' program.
``I hope the administration will send somebody up,'' he added. ``It will have to be an extraordinary nominee. If that's the case, we will go full-time with the hearings to get him or her confirmed.''
Democratic Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, vice chairman of the Senate intelligence panel, agreed.
``There are four or five people out there in this country who are so good, who know intelligence so well, who are so respected by both sides of the aisle, that the president should put forward one of those names and do it now,'' Rockefeller said on the same program.
``You cannot leave in an acting director for six or seven months while you wait for the next inauguration, regardless of who is elected. We cannot take that chance,'' he added.
Lawmakers said possible candidates include Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage; Sept. 11 commission member and former Navy Secretary John Lehman; U.S. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Porter Goss of Florida; and former Democratic Sen. Sam Nunn of Georgia.
SPECULATION RIFE
The senators' remarks came on the day that CIA Director George Tenet formally left his job. The CIA is currently being overseen by acting director John McLaughlin.
Asked about the comments, White House spokeswoman Erin Healy described McLaughlin as ``a strong and capable leader'' and said, ``The president will make a decision on a new CIA director in due course.''
Speculation has been rife about when Bush would name a replacement for Tenet, who resigned early last month after presiding over spectacular intelligence lapses involving Iraq and the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Some sources said Bush could announce a new nominee as early as this week.
On the question of appointing a director, Bush said last week, ``I haven't made up my mind on the nomination process.''
Democratic Sen. Diane Feinstein of California, an intelligence panel member, said the nomination should not come until after new intelligence reforms have been debated.
``This is going to be a very hot nomination confirmation process and I would urge the administration -- not that they're going to listen -- but I'd urge them anyway to go slow on this,'' she said on ABC's ``This Week.''
``We want to do the reform. And I think it's a huge mistake to confirm someone that might not be a major reform figure.''
Critics of the intelligence community are pushing for sweeping reforms of the 15 U.S. security agencies that could include establishment of a new spy czar.
``We're going to be having hearings,'' Rockefeller said on Fox. ``We're going to be looking deeply into exactly how do you do that.''
-------- us
Whales' Plight Revives Sonar Theory Navy Denies Role In Near-Stranding
By Marc Kaufman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, July 11, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A41385-2004Jul10?language=printer
Residents of Hanalei Bay on the Hawaiian island of Kauai woke up last weekend to a distressing sight: As many as 200 melon-headed whales, a small and sociable species that usually stays in deep waters, were swimming in a tight circle as close as 100 feet from the beach, showing clear signs of stress.
To keep the animals from beaching, the locals kept a vigil all day and through the night, until a flotilla of kayaks and outrigger canoes could be assembled to herd the animals back out to sea. So far, only one young whale has been found dead.
But among increasingly worried whale advocates and researchers, the event set off immediate alarm bells: Melon-headed whales are not known to beach themselves, and nothing like this mass stranding close call has occurred in Hawaii for 150 years.
Attention quickly focused on the Navy and its use of active sonar -- a wall of sound sent out to find underwater objects that can reach the decibel levels of a jet engine. Sonar has been implicated in several recent mass whale strandings around the world, and the latest research has strengthened the association and suggested that the number of incidents may be far greater than anyone realized. The most recent study found that over the past 40 years, mass strandings of the most noise-sensitive whales off Japan occurred repeatedly in the waters near a U.S.-run naval base, but were unknown in comparable areas elsewhere.
Several hours after the Hanalei Bay episode began, locals learned that a six-ship Navy fleet 20 miles out to sea had begun a sonar exercise the morning that the melon-headed whales headed toward shore.
Officials at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said it is too early to conclusively link sonar to the near-stranding, but they said their top priority is to learn more about the Navy exercise.
Unless a different and convincing explanation can be found, the Hawaii incident is destined to become the newest case in a high-stakes battle between environmentalists and the military over a technology that has been a staple of Navy operations for decades. Marine mammal advocates say it has become increasingly apparent that sonar can lead to death for whales, porpoises and other sea creatures, and something must be done to limit its toll. But the military says that to protect the nation, it needs to use more sonar, not less.
Navy spokesman Jon Yoshishige in Hawaii said that the fleet does not believe that its sonar had anything to do with the unusual drive to shore of the melon-headed whales. He said Navy records initially showed that sonar was not turned on until about 8.30 a.m. on July 3 -- an hour after the first reports of whales in Hanalei Bay -- but that a full investigation is underway. He also said the fact that only melon-headed whales were affected suggests that sonar was not the cause, as sonar-induced strandings typically involve a number of species.
Joel Reynolds, a lawyer with the Natural Resources Defense Council, which sued the Navy over its plans for a new global sonar system, called the Navy response "consistent with what we've seen in previous instances of strandings close to naval sonar activity -- they say, 'We had nothing to do with it.' Hopefully, a real investigation will determine if that's true or not."
The latest incident could hardly have come at a worse time for the military. A series of congressionally mandated conferences has been underway for months, under the auspices of the Marine Mammal Commission, to assess the effects of sonar and other underwater noise on whales, porpoises and dolphins. The group is expected to make recommendations to NOAA and Congress next year.
This fall, the Navy intends to unveil plans for its first underwater sonar testing range. The so-far-unpublicized proposal would establish a 10-to-20-square-mile range in the shallow waters off the Carolinas for sophisticated and intensive sonar training. The Navy says it needs the range to train sailors in detecting a new generation of inexpensive and "quiet" diesel submarines that several nations have acquired and that could be deployed to threaten the coastline.
The Navy, working with information and advice from NOAA, is just finishing an environmental impact assessment for the testing range. Details of the plan and its possible implications for sea creatures remain sketchy, but the waters off the Carolinas are known to be on the migratory routes of several species of whales.
The military has already been forced by a federal judge to limit deployment of a different sonar project -- a $350 million cutting-edge, low-frequency sonar system it wants to deploy worldwide. The judge concluded last year that the government had not properly considered environmental effects before allowing the Navy to use the new sonar. That led to an agreement between the Navy and environmental groups to restrict the sonar to a limited section of the Pacific Ocean off east Asia, but the Navy has appealed several aspects of the decision.
With these major new projects underway, the Navy suddenly has to deal with a problem involving old but still evolving technology that, until recently, was not seen as an environmental threat. Only after the stranding of 17 whales in the Bahamas during a sonar exercise in 2000 did the Navy acknowledge -- a year later -- that its traditional, mid-frequency sonar could be lethal to marine mammals. In 2002, a Spanish-American naval exercise off the Canary Islands had to be stopped after it, too, touched off the stranding and deaths of beaked whales, a deep-diving and generally reclusive animal.
With interest and research growing, new reports strongly suggest that traditional sonar has caused many more mass strandings than previously believed. A database of known beaked whale strandings and naval maneuvers put together by James Mead of the Smithsonian Institution marine mammal program has found an overlap of "between 100 and 200 cases" in the past four decades. He said the overlap does not prove sonar caused the strandings, but "the association certainly is quite impressive."
Just this month, Robert L. Brownell Jr. of NOAA in California presented a paper at the International Whaling Commission that examined beaked whale strandings since 1960 near a U.S. naval base in Japan. He found evidence of at least 10 mass strandings -- involving between two and 13 animals -- in the waters near the naval base at Yokosuka. For comparison, Brownell examined records for the coast of New Zealand and other areas off Japan and found no indication of mass strandings in either locale.
"The co-occurrence of the mass strandings and the U.S. Navy activity in this region strongly suggests" a relationship, Brownell concluded.
Although the Navy has used "active" sonar -- whereby ships send out sound to bounce off underwater objects -- since World War II, the power of that mid-frequency sonar has increased over the years. The apparent link between this type of sonar and major whale strandings is a relatively new discovery, and it has put the Navy on the defensive. Several hours into the recent Hawaii incident, NOAA officials asked the Navy to stop its sonar exercise -- which included two U.S. and four Japanese ships -- and the commanders complied.
Navy officials say the service is the primary environmental steward of the world's oceans, funding 70 percent of marine mammal research in the United States and almost 50 percent worldwide. Officials also say that the number of sonar-related incidents is small, though worrisome.
Rear Adm. Steven Tomaszeski, the Navy's chief oceanographer and for 30 years a Navy combat officer, said the seamen involved in the Bahamas stranding in 2000, for instance, "told us they felt really terrible about what happened to the whales. But, the truth is, we just didn't properly consider that they might be there."
"We actually know more about the surface of the moon than we know about our oceans," he continued. "We don't really know where many of the whales are, and we don't know too much about how a whale's ear works. Some would say that if you don't know, then don't take chances and let's keep our acoustic energy out of the water. It's the precautionary principle. But in good conscience, I couldn't send a fleet out to sea without sonar. It's the best anti-submarine defense by far."
To be effective, however, the sonar systems need trained sonar operators, and Tomaszeski said that requires on-the-water experience. Training maneuvers occur regularly around the world, he said, and a sonar training exercise brought the Navy into contact with whales in the Bahamas in 2000, the Canary Islands in 2002 and, apparently, off Hawaii this month.
Whale advocates and environmentalists say they fully understand that sonar has to be used without restraint in times of war. The training exercises, they say, are needlessly harmful.
Environmentalists familiar with the plan for a shallow-water sonar testing range say the Navy should expect opposition to the proposal. According to Donald Schregardus, deputy assistant secretary of the Navy for the environment, planning began about four years ago. He said the Navy wants to install underwater microphones and sensors to create a facility where sailors can better train to use sonar.
He said the Navy is working with federal environmental officials to study which animals inhabit or migrate through the area and at what times and densities, and to assess the likelihood of disturbing marine mammals.
"We want to improve underwater training and detection," Schregardus said. "And we want to take that knowledge and information and establish a range on the West Coast, too."
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- courts
Pentagon seeks way around high court on Guantanamo detainees
WASHINGTON (AFP)
Jul 11, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040711072526.2uz6ls53.html
The Pentagon wants to circumvent a US Supreme Court ruling allowing inmates at a US base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to challenge their detention in US courts by creating military tribunals, analysts said.
The Pentagon on Wednesday responded to the June 28 Supreme Court ruling by ordering the creation of Combatant Review Tribunals to determine whether each of the 594 detainees at Guantanamo is being lawfully held as an "enemy combatant."
Under the process, the detainees will be assisted by US military officers but not represented by their own lawyers.
The US government of President George W. Bush is "anxious clearly to get the process in place before things started to heat up in the federal court litigation," said Eugene Fidell, president of the National Institute for Military Justice, a Washington-based group.
"It comes very late," he said.
Most of the detainees were picked up during military operations in Afghanistan in the fall of 2001, and are said to be linked to the Taliban militia or al-Qaeda's terrorist network.
However US officials have not released names, nor have they charged the detainees with any crimes, nor allowed them access to lawyers. Because the detainees are considered enemy combatants and not prisoners of war, US officials said, they are not protected by the Geneva Convention.
"The Pentagon clearly does not want to give up control," said Jonathan Turley, a professor at the George Washington University Law School.
"They are clearly unwilling to allow federal judges to decide these cases. The only reason they would not want federal judges to make these decisions is that they believe the federal judges would rule against them," he said.
Turley said that lawyers for the detainees "will challenge the use of these military commissions in a federal court and demand that these detainees be brought before a federal judge."
The special military tribunals will be made up of three officers. Detainees will be able to count on a "personal representative" -- an officer who will have access to the detainee's information.
Fidell describes it as "an odd arrangement," and worries that it the "personal representative" is merely "a charade."
"In what sense these people are 'personal representatives'? To show them the rules, to explain the rules or to advise them and provide the kind of assistance that ordinary a lawyer would provide?" he wonders.
Wendy Patten, an official with Human Rights Watch, sees the move as "another attempt by the Bush administration to create an ad-hoc procedure that does not comply with international human rights and humanitarian law."
"Here they have said all the detainees have already been determined to be enemy combatants," she said. "So a detainee who goes before this tribunal must somehow disprove that."
But after nearly three years of repeated statements by Bush and senior Pentagon officials to that effect, "it raises some questions about whether a panel of members of the military will have the ability to contradict their superiors," she said.
Part of the problem is that the Supreme Court's ruling "was incredibly vague," said Turley.
"There will be a fight over what the Supreme Court meant when it called for due process," he said. "The most obvious meaning of the opinion would be hearings in a federal court, not a rigged military court."
-------- POLITICS
-------- investigations
Panel Describes Long Weakening of Hussein Army
July 11, 2004
By JOHN H. CUSHMAN Jr.
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/11/international/middleeast/11MILI.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, July 10 - The Senate's report on prewar intelligence about Iraq, which asserts that warnings about its illicit weapons were largely unfounded and that its ties to Al Qaeda were tenuous, also undermines another justification for the war: that Saddam Hussein's military posed a threat to regional stability and American interests.
In a detailed discussion of Iraq's prewar military posture, the report cites a long series of intelligence reports in the decade before the war that described a formerly potent army's spiral of decay under the weight of economic sanctions and American military pressure.
The main risk of an attack by Mr. Hussein against the United States and nations in the region was his unpredictability, these reports indicated. The reports found it especially hard to predict what he would do if threatened by the likelihood of American military action. But the Senate Intelligence Committee called this analysis relatively weak.
The committee's report implies that war opponents were essentially correct when they argued that Iraq posed little immediate threat to the United States. Before the war, those who held this view, both in Congress and at the United Nations, argued that continued containment was preferable to an invasion.
Although the report described a profound breakdown in the American intelligence system, both White House and Congressional officials say the political calendar will prevent any serious action until after the November elections. [Page 10.]
In discussing the committee's report, the Bush administration has emphasized that the war was worthwhile because it removed a threatening dictator from power.
"He was a dangerous man," President Bush said Friday. "The world is better off without Saddam Hussein in power. America is safer."
In the debate before the war, administration officials sometimes made the same argument, but with not nearly the emphasis that they gave to threats from chemical weapons or terrorism. They sometimes mentioned risks that Iraq would use Scuds or other shorter-range conventional missiles, or they brought up its antiaircraft attacks on American patrols over the no-flight zones in the north and south of the country. They also spoke of continuing military dangers to Kuwait, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Israel.
In a speech in January 2003, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld interspersed claims about chemical and biological weapons and terrorism with conventional military threats to argue that "Iraq poses a threat to the security of our people and to the stability of the world."
"Iraq has invaded two of its neighbors and has launched ballistic missiles at four of its neighbors," he said, adding that it "is the only country in the world that fires missiles and artillery at U.S. and coalition aircraft on an almost daily basis."
The intelligence agencies should have offered Congress and other policymakers a comprehensive, unified view of these risks before the war, the Senate Intelligence Committee said, but they never did.
After reviewing about 400 analytical documents written by the intelligence agencies from 1991, after the first gulf war, to 2003, when Mr. Hussein was toppled, the committee unanimously concluded that "the body of assessments showed that Iraqi military capabilities had steadily degraded following defeat in the first gulf war in 1991. Analysts also believed those capabilities would continue to erode as long as economic sanctions remained in place."
The intelligence agencies, though, were much less certain about Mr. Hussein's intentions, the committee said. "The assessments came to the same general conclusions that Saddam Hussein: was unpredictable and aggressive; retained the capability to strike militarily in the region; and, would probably not choose to use force against neighbors as long as U.S. and coalition forces were in the region."
"Clearly, the issue of Saddam's intentions to use force against his neighbors and U.S. and coalition forces was a high-interest matter," the report said, "and, unfortunately, the main area where the intelligence community was least confident in its analysis."
It criticized the agencies for failing "to clearly characterize changes in Iraq's threat to regional stability and security, taking account of the fact that its conventional military forces steadily degraded after 1990."
In September 1991, a report on Mr. Hussein's "prospects for survival over the next year" found that Iraq would have "only limited capabilities to endanger U.S. interests."
By 1993, an assessment said Mr. Hussein's basic goals were to maintain power "by any means," to regain internal control, to rebuild the military, including illicit weapons, and to make Iraq "the dominant regional power." But the agencies warned that they were "hindered by the dearth of solid information."
An assessment in early 1995 called Iraq "an immediate source of concern and a long-term threat to U.S. strategic interests in the Persian Gulf," but the State Department's view in the document called it "impossible to predict with confidence whether Saddam will choose confrontation or opt for a period of quiescence and cooperation." The military's view in the document was that Iraq had "at least some chance" of striking quickly into Saudi oil fields.
Other reports that year warned of Mr. Hussein's "unpredictability and proclivity for dramatic and rash behavior" but said only "marginal" rebuilding of the military had occurred. Without a "large, standing coalition military presence" in the region, one said, there could be no guarantee of deterring him.
From about 1999 on, though, assessments "noted that the condition of all Iraqi military branches was poor," the Senate committee found.
In 2002, a report judged "that Iraqi military morale and battlefield cohesion are more fragile today than in 1991."
By January 2003, an assessment found that "Saddam probably will not initiate hostilities for fear of providing Washington with justification to invade Iraq. Nevertheless, he might deal the first blow, especially if he perceives that an attack intended to end his regime is imminent."
By March 17, 2003, Mr. Bush promised that the time of such risks was about to end.
"In a free Iraq there will be no more wars of aggression against your neighbors," he said. "The tyrant will soon be gone."
--------
CONCLUSIONS
Powell's 'Solid' C.I.A. Tips Were Soft, Committee Says
July 11, 2004
By DAVID JOHNSTON
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/11/international/middleeast/11REPO.html?pagewanted=all
WASHINGTON, July 10 - The images of dysfunction were stark. The C.I.A. stubbornly refused to accept contradictory evidence, relied on dubious, sometimes discredited sources, clung protectively to its own conclusions and reigned over the country's intelligence operations with an almost haughty sense of infallibility - all this, even as it repeatedly failed to assess accurately crucial evidence on Iraq's unconventional weapons, the Senate Intelligence Committee reported Friday.
On the most significant issues the C.I.A. investigated, like whether Saddam Hussein had mobile biologicial-weapons laboratories, tried to buy special aluminum tubes for nuclear weapons or planned to develop drone aircraft to attack the United States, the agency's analysis proved wrong. Its flaws were exposed sometimes after what the report indicated was a cursory examination of the information or sources on which the conclusions were based.
Among the most vivid examples was the issue of whether Iraq had mobile bioweapons labs, an issue that set off a debate in February 2003 when Secretary of State Colin L. Powell addressed the United Nations Security Council. One day before Mr. Powell's speech laying out the reasons to invade Iraq, a Defense Department analyst warned the agency against relying on some of the most significant informants, like an Iraqi defector code named Curveball, whom Mr. Powell planned to cite.
"I went through the speech," an unidentified military intelligence officer, an expert in biological warfare, later told the Senate Intelligence Committee, which quoted him in its report, "and I thought, my gosh, we have got - I have got to go on record and make my concerns known."
But the deputy chief of the agency's Iraqi Task Force, who said "we can hash this out in a quick meeting," rejected the worries as irrelevant. "Let's keep in mind the fact that this war's going to happen regardless of what Curveball said or didn't say, and that the Powers That Be probably aren't terribly interested in whether Curveball knows what he's talking about," the deputy chief wrote in an e-mail message obtained by the committee.
The episode goes to the heart of flawed procedures that the committee concluded had seriously undermined the agency's broad prewar analysis of Iraq's unconventional weapons. The panel found that the agency was unwilling to consider information that contradicted its expectations, dismissed information from other agencies, and shielded its sources from anyone who might challenge their credibility.
But the expert who read Mr. Powell's speech had reason to be concerned. He was the only American intelligence official before the war who had met Curveball, a crucial source of reports about a suspected Iraqi program to house mobile weapons labs in trailers. Information from Curveball and three other informants had given Mr. Powell one of the most provocative pieces of evidence in his far-reaching presentation at the United Nations.
The biowar expert said he doubted Curveball's credibility. The one time they met, the informant had turned up with "a terrible hangover," enough to raise suspicions. Intelligence officials were not even sure of Curveball's true identity, he added.
Mr. Powell heard none of these doubts during the several evenings he spent reviewing the evidence for his speech. In an interview last summer, Mr. Powell said he had demanded to see the backup material for each piece of evidence, and said he insisted on multiple sources for every assertion. He threw out some evidence, he said, that he found unconvincing.
"There were a lot of cigars lit," Mr. Powell said last summer. "I didn't want any going off in my face or the president's face."
Yet now all four of the sources on whom Mr. Powell relied concerning the supposed mobile biolabs seem at best unreliable, and at worst fictional. Curveball has been discredited. Another source was deemed a "fabricator," which in intelligence circles is tantamount to a designation as untrustworthy. The third source said the information needed further checking. The fourth source could not corroborate Curveball's claims.
The intelligence committee concluded that the C.I.A.'s belief that Iraq would probably develop mobile biological weapons, in effect, blinded its analysts. In its report, the panel found: "The intelligence community's expectation that Iraq would move to mobile biological weapons production focused their attention on reporting that supported that contention and led them to disregard information that contradicted it."
"Every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources," Mr. Powell told the United Nations. "These are not assertions. What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence."
George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, when asked about the episode, told the committee the worries probably should have been brought before Mr. Powell.
The events surrounding the speech reflected broader problems involving the agency's protectiveness about its intelligence, the Senate committee concluded. "Not only does the C.I.A. not accept information readily from other agencies; it also does not always share its most prized intelligence with those who might contradict it," the report said.
The same problems undercut the agency's assessment of another intelligence finding: that Iraq was trying to buy aluminum tubes for use in centrifuges to enrich uranium for possible nuclear weapons. That finding was initially challenged by Energy Department experts, but the C.I.A. clung to its belief even after specialists from the Defense Department and the International Atomic Energy Agency also disagreed.
Similar issues arose in assessing whether Iraq was developing drone aircraft as weapons. The agency warned that Iraq was obtaining mapping software that could only be used inside the United States, a finding that led some analysts to conclude the aircraft might be used to attack American targets with chemical or biological agents.
But the agency withheld further information that led to an alternative conclusion: that the software was innocently acquired as part of a package intended for generic guidance of drones.
Over all, the committee concluded, the C.I.A. was too secretive for its own good. The report said, "Contentious debate about significant national security issues can go on at the analytic level for months, or years, without the director of central intelligence or senior policy makers being informed of any options other than those of C.I.A. analysts."
--------
CIA Skewed Iraq Reporting, Senate Says
By Dafna Linzer and Barton Gellman
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, July 11, 2004; Page A19
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A41454-2004Jul10?language=printer
Last August, a small team of Senate investigators trying to determine how U.S. intelligence assessments of Iraq had failed went looking for answers in a place where the Bush administration believed there were not any: the offices of U.N. nuclear inspectors in Vienna. The inspectors had determined, before the war, that Iraq did not have a nuclear weapons program.
During the secret, day-long meeting at the headquarters of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the congressional sleuths focused on aluminum tubes the CIA had said Iraq was seeking to develop a nuclear weapon. It was that claim that led the CIA to conclude that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear program.
The U.N. teams had investigated and rejected that claim, much to the anger of the White House. But others, it turned out, had rejected it, too. When the Senate investigators left Vienna that day, they took back to Washington the names of U.S. intelligence community analysts who never agreed with the CIA's claims and, in many cases, refuted them.
The information, some of which is included in the extraordinary critique of U.S. prewar intelligence efforts released Friday by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, reveals the extent of the CIA's determination to keep alive the Iraqi nuclear issue long after it had been thoroughly rebutted both inside and outside the agency. The report also exposed the true nature of the CIA's relationship with U.N. inspectors whose determinations about Iraq's nuclear programs ultimately prevailed.
Contrary to public statements from outgoing CIA Director George J. Tenet and other senior officials, the CIA had not provided U.N. weapons inspectors with all of the best information it had on possible weapons locations in the run-up to war, according to the report.
National security adviser Condoleezza Rice told Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.), a member of the intelligence committee, two weeks before the U.S. attacked Iraq in March 2003, that "United Nations inspectors have been briefed on every high- or medium-priority weapons of mass destruction, missile, and UAV-related site the U.S. Intelligence Community has identified."
The committee report characterized that statement and others as "factually incorrect." Of the 148 suspect sites identified by the CIA before the war, 67 were shared with the United Nations.
Not only was the CIA keeping information from the inspectors -- whose reports on Iraq's weapons would greatly influence international support for the war -- its rationale for deciding what information to share with them was "subjective, inconsistently applied and not well-documented," according to the Senate report .
The teams led by Hans Blix, director of the U.N. effort to find chemical, biological and missile programs, were stunned by how little the CIA seemed to know about suspected sites, according to a Senate source familiar with the investigation. Senate investigators interviewed Blix and the head of intelligence analysis for the U.N. inspection teams whose headquarters were in New York.
Among the details that have not surfaced in the report but were shared with Senate investigators, was that requests by the U.N. teams to interview Iraqi defectors who were providing public accounts of Iraq's weapons programs were flatly denied, according to foreign diplomats associated with the investigation. Also, nuclear inspectors were not given information on any new sites at all -- mostly because the aluminum tubes made up the extent of the CIA's nuclear case.
The CIA was convinced the tubes were to be used in centrifuges that could enrich uranium for use in a nuclear weapon. But other U.S. intelligence analysts and the IAEA produced substantial evidence that the tubes were for conventional rockets that Iraq was allowed to possess under U.N. Security Council resolutions.
The Senate report shows that when the CIA put together its intelligence on the tubes, it withheld some evidence that did not accord with its conclusions, circulated other data in ways the Senate said was "at minimum, misleading," and tried to tilt ostensibly independent consulting reports toward the conclusion that the tubes were evidence of a nascent Iraqi nuclear program.
Speaking Friday, John E. McLaughlin, the acting CIA director, said the agency's error was to write reports "without sufficient caveats and disclaimers where our knowledge was incomplete."
The bipartisan Senate report, however, depicted something more troubling: an agency that knowingly skewed its reports to fit its convictions about an Iraqi nuclear threat.
"Who could have believed that about our intelligence community, that the system could be so dishonest?" said David Albright, an expert on Iraq's nuclear establishment who has close working contacts inside the U.S. government. "People were not only not told the truth, they were given half-truths. . . . The evidence was stacked deliberately."
Much of the Senate's narrative centers on an official identified in the unclassified report only as a "centrifuge analyst" in the CIA's Center for Weapons Intelligence, Nonproliferation and Arms Control, or WINPAC, which was established to provide U.N. inspectors with information about Iraq's programs.
WINPAC analysts gave briefings to U.N. inspectors about potential weapons sites and were enormously influential because they provided their assessments to inspectors and policymakers. Among them was the centrifuge analyst, on whom the Washington Post reported last August and identified only as "Joe."
The Senate report said he was the principal author of a CIA analysis from April 10, 2001, excerpted in Friday's report, which said that the tubes "have little use other than for a uranium enrichment program" to build the core of a nuclear warhead.
That was flatly incorrect, and an Energy Department intelligence unit explained why in detail the following day in a report titled, "Iraq: High-Strength Aluminum Tube Procurement," according to the Senate report. It said the tubes were "only marginally large enough" for use in uranium enrichment and had other specifications "not consistent with a gas centrifuge end use." The rotor casing would be only one of many parts required for a centrifuge, yet "we have not seen related procurement efforts."
The Energy Department report did not identify any such rocket program specifically. But on May 9, 2001 -- much earlier than previously known -- the Energy analysts did exactly that. "Further investigation reveals," the Energy analysts said, that Iraq had bought tens of thousands of identical tubes in the 1980s and 1990s -- 900mm long, 81mm in diameter, with walls 3.3mm thick -- to build a rocket called the Nasser 81. U.N. inspectors had counted 66,737 of the tubes on the ground in 1996.
The Post reported last August that U.S. intelligence officials serving with U.N. inspectors in Iraq documented the Nasser rocket program in early 2003.
The Senate report reveals that Joe and other CIA officials knew about the Nasser rocket program nearly two years earlier.
Yet throughout 2002 and 2003, long after learning that Iraq built tens of thousands of rockets using essentially identical tubes, the agency told policymakers the tubes were not suitable for rockets and could not be intended for a rocket program.
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, after a two-day marathon of CIA briefings, used precisely that argument before the U.N. Security Council in February 2003.
One CIA argument was that the high-strength aluminum alloy in the tubes, known as 7075-T6, was needlessly strong and expensive. Its officials did not reveal, even when asked specifically by analysts at other departments and the IAEA, that at least two NATO munitions -- the U.S. Mark 66 rocket, or Hydra, and the Italian-built Medusa -- used the same alloy. CIA officials reported numerous times that the Iraqi tubes had specifications far more precise than any U.S. rocket, another argument Powell repeated.
In fact, the Senate committee found, the Pentagon has 25 pages of specifications for its Mark 66 rocket tubes, with considerably finer tolerances.
Defense Department rocket engineers told the Senate committee that CIA analysts rebuffed them when they said the tubes resembled an Italian rocket casing. One engineer said the CIA analyst "had an agenda" and was "trying to bias us."
The tube debate continued for 18 months.
On Sept. 16, 2002, Joe sought expert support in preparation for the CIA's most extensive analysis, titled "Iraq's Hunt for Aluminum Tubes: Evidence of a Renewed Uranium Enrichment Program." He hired consultants to conduct "spin tests" on the tubes to determine whether they could withstand the extraordinary rotational speeds required for enrichment of uranium in its gaseous form.
In interviews for this story, present and former U.S. government officials with direct knowledge described details not cited in the Senate report. Joe gave the job to two engineers with ties to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Andrew Szady and Joseph Dooley. He instructed them to conceal their work from the Oak Ridge Field Intelligence Element, a major repository of expertise on Iraq's nuclear infrastructure.
"It was meant to be done independently," said one source involved in the events. In a single day, Joe reported, Dooley and Szady succeeded in spinning a tube to 60,000 rpm and concluded the tubes were well-suited as centrifuge rotors.
What Joe did not report was that the great majority of spin tests led to failures of the tubes. An Energy Department analysis, conducted after the CIA was twice forced to disgorge more test data, concluded that none of the tubes demonstrated sufficient strength for long-term operation in a centrifuge.
Szady and Dooley, reached at their homes, declined to be interviewed.
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Senators Push for Swift CIA Nomination
July 11, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-CIA-Director.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- A Senate report detailing serious flaws in U.S. intelligence-gathering highlights the urgent need for a permanent CIA director given the current terrorist threat, leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee said Sunday.
George Tenet, who announced in early June that he was resigning for personal reasons, left the agency on Sunday after seven years as director. His deputy, John McLaughlin, took over as acting director.
Tenet's departure came two days after the committee concluded the CIA provided unfounded assessments of the threat posed by Iraq that the Bush administration relied on to justify going to war.
``An acting director for the next six or seven months, during such a dangerous period for the United States, with all of these talks about attacks on the United States, is not acceptable,'' said West Virginia Sen. Jay Rockefeller, the committee's top Democrat.
The chairman, Sen. Pat Roberts, said McLaughlin's ability to lead is limited as acting director even though he is ``very skilled'' and brings a lot of experience to the job.
``I hope the administration will send somebody up,'' said Roberts, R-Kan. ``It will have to be an extraordinary nominee. If that's the case, we will go full time into the hearings to get him or her confirmed.''
Committee members discussed several possible nominees: Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage; former Sen. Sam Nunn, D-Ga.; House Intelligence Committee Chairman Porter Goss, R-Fla.; and former Navy Secretary John Lehman, a member of the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks.
The White House gave no indication Sunday about when Bush would name a permanent director.
``Acting director McLaughlin is a strong and capable leader,'' said Erin Healy, a White House spokeswoman. ``The president will make a decision on a new CIA director in due course.''
A senior administration official said in early July that White House aides expect the announcement of the next director could happen soon. Officials close to Bush have said more than one person is under consideration to take over direction of the CIA and the 14 other agencies that make up the nation's intelligence apparatus.
Federal officials said last week that intelligence from militant-linked Web sites and elsewhere indicated al-Qaida wants to attack the United States to disrupt the upcoming elections. The government is putting in place elaborate security plans for the political conventions this summer in Boston and New York. Also, officials are considering how to secure polling places come November. Such security measures require a strengthened CIA to help execute, Rockefeller said.
``I think that John McLaughlin is trying to make some changes, but making changes in the CIA after a 50-year history of Cold War operations and mentality is a very tough thing to bring about,'' he said. ``We have to do a better job.''
Without mentioning names, Rockefeller said there were four or five candidates who could get quick bipartisan support if Bush were to nominate them now. When pressed, however, Rockefeller said he did not believe Goss was one of them.
``I don't think that anybody who should be up for consideration should have a political background,'' Rockefeller said.
But Roberts quickly followed: ``I don't know of anybody in Washington that doesn't have a political background of some sort.''
One committee member said the president should take time to make the choice -- someone who will go in with a mandate to oversee major changes.
``This is going to be a very hot nomination confirmation process,'' said Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif. ``And I would urge the administration -- not that they're going to listen, but I would urge them anyway -- to go slow on this, because we want to do the reform. And I think it's a huge mistake to confirm someone that might not be a major reform figure.''
Roberts and Rockefeller also clashed over whether administration officials had pressured intelligence analysts to reach predetermined conclusions on the Iraq threat.
The White House's role will be examined in a second phase of the committee's investigation, which probably will not be finished until after the election.
Rockefeller said the administration should be held partly accountable for what he considered to be an undue interest in invading Iraq after the Sept. 11 attacks.
``In the meantime, we have created, therefore, the lowest standing of the United States in our history around the world; more people trained and being trained for probably a generation or so to come to hate us and to try and hurt us abroad and here in the homeland,'' Rockefeller said.
Roberts said the White House should not be blamed for asking tough questions of analysts and making public statements such as those referring to a ``mushroom cloud'' -- which is produced after a nuclear explosion -- in describing the Iraqi threat.
``The information that was provided to the president and to the Congress -- that led to the same kind of assertive comments that the same critics are now blaming the president for -- was flawed,'' he said.
The lawmakers appeared on NBC's ``Meet the Press,'' ``Fox News Sunday,'' ABC's ``This Week'' and CBS' ``Face the Nation.''
-------- us politics
U.S. Mulling How to Delay Nov. Vote in Case of Attack
July 11, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-politics-election-terror.html
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A senior House Democratic lawmaker was skeptical on Sunday of a Bush administration idea to obtain the authority to delay the November presidential election in case of an attack by al Qaeda,
U.S. counterterrorism officials are looking at an emergency proposal on the legal steps needed to postpone the presidential election in case of such an attack, Newsweek reported on Sunday.
``I think it's excessive based on what we know,'' said Rep. Jane Harman of California, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, in a interview on CNN's ``Late Edition.''
Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge warned last week that Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network want to attack within the United States to try to disrupt the election.
Harman said Ridge's threat warning ``was a bust'' because it was based on old information.
Newsweek cited unnamed sources who told it that the Department of Homeland Security asked the Justice Department last week to review what legal steps would be needed to delay the vote if an attack occurred on the day before or on election day.
The department was asked to review a letter from DeForest Soaries, chairman of the new U.S. Election Assistance Commission, in which he asked Ridge to ask Congress for the power to put off the election in the event of an attack, Newsweek reported in its issue out on Monday.
The commission was created in 2002 to provide funds to states to replace punch card voting systems and provide other assistance in conducting federal elections.
In his letter, Soaries wrote that while New York's Board of Elections suspended primary elections in New York on the day of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, ``the federal government has no agency that has the statutory authority to cancel and reschedule a federal election.''
Homeland Security Department spokesman Brian Rochrkasse told the magazine the agency is reviewing the matter ``to determine what steps need to be taken to secure the election.''
Republican Rep. Christopher Cox of California, who chairs the House Homeland Security Committee, told CNN that the idea of legislation allowing the election to be postponed was similar to what had already been looked at in terms of how to respond to an attack on Congress.
``These are doomsday scenarios. Nobody expects that they're going to happen,'' he said. ``But we're preparing for all these contingencies now.''
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Florida Won't Use a Flawed Felon List
July 11, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/11/national/11felons.html
MIAMI, July 10 (AP) - Florida elections officials said Saturday that they would not use a disputed list that was intended to keep felons from voting, acknowledging a flaw that could have allowed Hispanic felons to cast ballots in November.
The problem could have been significant in Florida, which President Bush won by just 537 votes in 2000. The state has a sizable Cuban population, and Hispanics in Florida have tended to vote Republican more than Hispanics nationally. The list had about 28,000 Democrats and around 9,500 Republicans, with most of the rest unaffiliated.
Gov. Jeb Bush said that not including Hispanic felons on the list "was an oversight and a mistake." He added, "We accept responsibility, and that's why we're pulling it back."
Governor Bush said the mistake occurred because two databases that were merged to form the disputed list were incompatible.
When voters register in Florida, they can identify themselves as Hispanic. But the felons database has no Hispanic category, which excluded many people from the list.
Secretary of State Glenda Hood said elections supervisors would find other ways to ensure that felons were removed from the rolls.
The decision to scrap the list was made after it was reported that of the nearly 48,000 people on the list, created by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, only 61 were classified as Hispanics.
The purge of felons from voter rolls has been a thorny issue since the 2000 presidential election. A private company hired to identify ineligible voters before the election produced a list with scores of errors, and elections supervisors used it to remove voters without verifying its accuracy. A federal lawsuit led to an agreement to restore rights to thousands of voters.
Florida is one of only a few states that do not automatically restore voting rights to felons once they have completed their sentence.
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Bad Iraq Intelligence Cost Lives, Democrats Say
July 11, 2004
By ADAM NAGOURNEY and JODI WILGOREN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/11/politics/campaign/11TICKET.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
ALBUQUERQUE, July 10 - Senator John Kerry and Senator John Edwards declared on Friday that slipshod intelligence invoked by President Bush to invade Iraq had cost the nation lives, billions of dollars and international prestige, signaling that the Iraq war would be a central issue in their White House campaign.
The presumptive Democratic candidates for president and vice president, in a 30-minute joint interview given after the release of a Senate Intelligence Committee report challenging the prewar Iraq intelligence, said Mr. Bush's policies abroad had probably increased, rather than decreased, the prospects of domestic terrorist attacks.
And they said the discrediting of much of Mr. Bush's case for going to war had fed cynicism toward government by young Americans, reminiscent of the mistrust of authority that swept the country when Mr. Edwards and Mr. Kerry came of age during the Vietnam War.
"They were wrong and soldiers lost their lives because they were wrong," Mr. Kerry said as Mr. Edwards, in an adjacent seat in the front of their chartered Boeing 757 jet, nodded in agreement. "And America's paying billions of dollars because they were wrong. And allies are not with us because they were wrong."
Mr. Edwards said, "My view is that what George Bush has done in Iraq, both in the lead-up to the war and more importantly his planning for winning the peace, has cost America dearly, and cost the possibility of success dearly."
The interview was one of several the two candidates granted on Friday, under strict time limitations.
While the two men said they had discussed the crisis in Iraq in their frequent talks leading to Mr. Kerry's decision this week to choose Mr. Edwards, they did not offer any ideas about what the United States should do to end the war beyond what they had previously called for: enlisting the help of allies and the United Nations.
Both Mr. Edwards and Mr. Kerry voted for the resolution authorizing Mr. Bush to go to war. In the interview, they declined to say whether they agreed with other pro-war Democratic senators who said on Friday that they would have voted against the resolution had they known then what was contained in the Senate Intelligence Committee report.
"I'm not going to go back and answer hypothetical questions about what I would have done had I known this," Mr. Edwards said.
Mr. Kerry said: "The vote is not today and that's it. I completely agree with John Edwards."
Mr. Bush's campaign spokesman, Steve Schmidt, dismissed the criticism, noting that Mr. Kerry and Mr. Edwards had both been early supporters of the war.
"Senator Kerry's position on the war has changed on an almost weekly basis," Mr. Schmidt said. "He voted for the war citing connections between Saddam Hussein and terrorists. Less than a year later he was an antiwar candidate.
"Senator Kerry has displayed a stunning lack of conviction and a stunning lack of decisiveness at turn regarding the war on terror," Mr. Schmidt continued. "It says a lot about John Kerry's priorities that he doesn't have time to receive his intelligence briefing about threats facing America but does have time to attend a Hollywood fund-raiser."
Mr. Kerry's aides said that he was returning to Boston on Sunday a day ahead of schedule to receive the national security briefing.
The interview was part of a meticulously orchestrated news media rollout of the Democratic ticket. It was one of at least nine joint interviews Mr. Kerry and Mr. Edwards have conducted in the past few days with newspapers, news services and magazines, all embargoed for a Sunday release that would coincide with the pair's appearance on the CBS News program "60 Minutes."
Most of the interviews were capped at 20 minutes ("We have one minute left," Mr. Kerry's communications director announced, as Mr. Kerry and Mr. Edwards bantered away). Photographers were not allowed to take make pictures of the men as they talked. Both had their ties loosened; Mr. Kerry had shed his shoes.
After a primary in which all evidence suggested that Mr. Kerry and Mr. Edwards enjoyed a proper though not particularly warm relationship, the two men went to great lengths to display camaraderie. They finished each other's sentences, touched each other's arms, laughed at each other's jokes and seemed intent on erasing any perception that they disagreed on much.
At one point, after Mr. Kerry answered a question about Iraq and terrorism, Mr. Edwards jumped in to volunteer that his signature domestic policy speech during the primary season - which some Democrats say almost allowed him to overtake Mr. Kerry - was in fact not much different from what Mr. Kerry was saying at the time.
"People have talked a lot about my 'two Americas, building one America' speech," Mr. Edwards said. "But he was talking about exactly the same thing, in different words. I mean, he talked at length during the campaign about middle-class squeeze, about the effect on working people of the cost of health care and the loss of health care coverage, what we should do about college tuition, how do we make our school system one public school system that works for everybody. It really is very much the same thing."
Although Mr. Kerry and Mr. Edwards said that they had discussed the crisis in Iraq at length over the past few months, Mr. Kerry shook his head vigorously when asked if anything he had heard in their discussion had changed his views on the war or how to end it.
"They haven't changed or modified," Mr. Kerry said. "Senator Edwards and I have been an echo chamber over the course of the last months. With respect to Iraq, we have the same position. We both voted the same way with respect to the $87 billion, we've both been talking about international cooperation, we've both been articulating the need for diplomacy and statesmanship, and that's one of the reasons why I'm so comfortable" with him.
Mr. Kerry declined to say if he agreed with some Democrats that the White House was using leaks about possible terror alerts to manipulate public opinion. "I can't speculate and I'm not going to," he said. "What I'm going to do is guarantee that we, like John just said - what's important is what we can do to make Americans safer. I don't think people want political talk about this."
Mr. Kerry said that one of the legacies of the war in Iraq was a loss of trust in government among young Americans. "I think there is a new level of cynicism and lack of credibility towards government in our country," he said. "I think you're seeing it on campuses."
At that point, Mr. Edwards leaned in and, in a revealing moment of interplay between these two former rivals, softly picked up Mr. Kerry's thought, while casting it in a sunnier tone.
"I think equally important, we can change that, we can change that," he said. "The damage is not irreparable with a new administration. "
The last major Democratic candidate to drop out before Mr. Kerry effectively won his party's nomination, Mr. Edwards has been auditioning for his new role throughout the spring at fund-raisers for Mr. Kerry. He declined to answer a question about whether he believes Dick Cheney is too powerful a vice president, and, when asked about his role models for the job, mentioned only Al Gore.
At the beginning of the interview, as Mr. Edwards answered the first question, leaning forward in his chair, Mr. Kerry looked down, fiddling with a water bottle. After a few minutes, when Mr. Kerry was talking, Mr. Edwards leaned back, crossed a foot on his knee and glanced over at his new boss.
At one point, Mr. Edwards reached across the armrest and rapped his fist against Mr. Kerry's forearm to punctuate a point. When both men jumped at the same question, Mr. Edwards politely retreated, saying, "Go ahead, I'm sorry." Then, when a reporter tried to follow up, Mr. Edwards warned, "Let him finish."
But during a particularly long answer, as Mr. Kerry was listing the ways he planned to improve domestic security and said "third" twice, Mr. Edwards broke into a wide grin before correcting him.
"Fourth," Mr. Edwards said. "You already did third."
"That's why he's good," Mr. Kerry said.
As the interview drew to an end, Mr. Edwards acknowledged that for all their playful banter for the cameras these past few days, the men still did not know each other very well.
"Our relationship is evolving," he said. "You know it will continue to evolve. I mean, he picked me Tuesday."
Accordingly, Mr. Edwards was the deferential No. 2 for most of the interview. But he strayed a bit when asked whether Mr. Kerry, who takes an acoustic guitar with him on the campaign trail, had played for Mr. Edwards in one of the first-class cabins at the front of the plane.
"He played some guitar for me," Mr. Edwards said. "I'm not sure I want him to play again."
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Kerry Vows To Restore 'Truth' to Presidency
Democratic Ticket Assails GOP Values as 'Distorted'
By Jim VandeHei and Dan Balz
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, July 11, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A41190-2004Jul10?language=printer
ALBUQUERQUE, July 10 -- President Bush has governed in a dishonest fashion, trampling values on every issue except fighting terrorism and leaving voters "clamoring for restoration of credibility and trust in the White House again," John F. Kerry and John Edwards said in an interview.
"The value of truth is one of the most central values in America, and this administration has violated" it, Kerry said in an interview with The Washington Post aboard the Democrats' campaign plane Friday. "Their values system is distorted and not based on truth."
The Democratic nominee and his running mate said it was that kind of anger toward the president that prompted entertainers at Thursday's Democratic fundraising concert in New York to attack Bush as a "cheap thug" and a killer. "Obviously some performers, in my judgment and John's, stepped over a line neither of us believes appropriate, but we can't control that," Kerry said. "On the other hand, we understand the anger, we understand the frustration."
Edwards said scathing anti-Bush attacks such as the concert and Michael Moore's new film "Fahrenheit 9/11" reflect an "expression by folks with genuine feelings," adding, "Thank goodness in our country they have a right to express those feelings."
In one of a series of interviews since teaming up on Tuesday, Kerry and Edwards predicted they would win the political fight over which party best exemplifies the values and ethics of most Americans, but Kerry said they would wage that battle on their terms and not what he called the Republican Party's "little political, hot-button, cultural, wedge-driven, poll-driven values."
With their ties loosened and shoes kicked off, the Democratic duo also vowed to forgo negative advertising in this presidential campaign -- an assertion that draws scoffs from Republicans who note that independent Democratic groups have pounded the president with millions of dollars in negative ads.
"We have not stood up and attacked our opponents in personal ways," Kerry said.
This week alone, Kerry has criticized Bush personally in speeches for lying, professional laziness, waiting until right before the election to indict Enron Corp.'s former chief executive, Kenneth L. Lay, lacking values and even having worse hair than the two Democrats. Some advisers are privately counseling Kerry to tone down his attacks on Bush.
Steve Schmidt, a spokesman for the Bush campaign, said Kerry is firing "baseless political attacks" and "not offering a positive vision for the country."
Kerry was forceful and freewheeling during the interview, while Edwards, who appeared more drained from the intensity of their maiden voyage, was generally deferential toward the Massachusetts senator, sometimes holding back until Kerry had answered a question. When not speaking, Kerry sometimes gazed out of the window at the mountainous West Virginia landscape below.
Kerry and Edwards said they would return to the Senate to oppose a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, but only for a final vote. With debate set to begin next week on the amendment proposed by the president, Kerry emphatically reaffirmed the ticket's position that marriage is between a man and a woman.
"Let's be very firm about it. Both John and I believe firmly and absolutely that marriage is between a man and a woman," Kerry said. "But we also believe that you don't play with the Constitution of the United States for political purposes and amend the Bill of Rights when you don't need to when states are adequately addressing this issue."
Kerry, who recently said he agrees with the Roman Catholic Church that life begins at conception, said he disagrees with his church's teaching that homosexuality is a sin. Edwards twice did not respond when asked if he, too, believes life begins at conception.
With Republicans questioning Edwards's fitness to serve as a wartime president, given the fact that he has less than six years of government experience, Kerry defended his vice presidential pick as more qualified for the job than Bush.
"Don't get suckered into the how many years you've been in one job or this job" debate, Kerry said. "You've got people in [Washington] who have been in one job [for] 30 years of what you call experience, and they have done nothing, they don't stand for anything and they don't know how to fight."
The measure of a leader, he said, is a "person's character, a person's values, a person's abilities and political skills and ability to work with other people and bring people to a cause." Kerry called this the "character of toughness."
Yet it was Kerry himself who challenged Edwards's readiness during the Democratic primary elections, saying it's not a time for "on-the-job training." He mocked Edwards's youthfulness -- the vice presidential candidate is 51 -- and later asked aides what made Edwards think he was ready for the presidency.
"I challenged my level of experience against his, as I will challenge my level of experience against George Bush's and Dick Cheney's," Kerry said. "That was a fair challenge . . . in the context of the primaries. But that doesn't mean [Edwards] isn't qualified against George Bush."
Kerry added, "Does [Edwards] have as much experience as me? No. But I am running for president; he's running for vice president."
Edwards, a first-term senator from North Carolina, who has served on the intelligence committee for more than five years but who has rarely been in Washington since launching his presidential bid in 2003, said his work on national security matters and terrorism qualifies him for the role of commander in chief.
"I'm ready today," he said.
During the Democratic primaries, Edwards did not make national security a central focus of his campaign. "I believe I had during that time very creative ideas about what needs to be done to protect America's role in the world," including championing efforts to fight terrorism and thwart weapons proliferation, he said.
Edwards noted, however, that he will do everything he can to reassure people of his capacity to handle the job. "I have an obligation to the American people to work 18 hours a day . . . to make sure that every day I know more than I did the day before," he said. "I feel that responsibility [and] take it very, very seriously."
Edwards's chief focus will be the messages of values and economic disparity. Kerry's advisers said Edwards will be dispatched to towns and rural communities in the Midwest and South, probably starting in Iowa, to target voters Democrats often overlook in presidential campaigns.
Asked whether he will play the traditional role of a vice presidential nominee and lead the Democratic attack on Bush and Cheney, Edwards said, "I will fulfill my responsibility to make sure people know what we will do, how we will govern, and what the differences are between us and this administration."
The two plan to frame the debates over issues from war to welfare as a choice of American values. In their words, it is a stark choice between Bush, who they say favors unilateralism abroad and the rich back home, against a Democratic ticket that believes in working closely with allies overseas and taking tax cuts away from the wealthy to help everyone else.
The new twist in this populist approach is the heavy focus on values for a Democratic ticket. "It's the heart of our campaign," Kerry said. "It's the center of what matters in America, it's why we are running."
Kerry added, "The battles of this administration do not represent the values of America -- with the sole exception, which we all share, of our determination to defeat terrorism and to stand up after 9/11 to that attack."
Edwards suggested Bush's career is not reflective of American values, either.
"George Bush and others can say whatever they want now about what their values are, but what have they spent their life doing? Have they shown in their life experience, not just in the time they've been in politics, but in their life experience, that they have the values that Americans looked up to and respected?" Edwards asked. "It's just difficult for me to imagine anybody in my little home town in rural North Carolina looking up to and respecting someone more than John Kerry."
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Bush Administration "Guidelines" for Postponing or Canceling the November Presidential Elections
www.globalresearch.ca
by Michel Chossudovsky
July 2004
http://globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO407C.html
"... Credible reporting indicates that Al Qaeda is moving forward with its plans to carry out a large-scale attack in the United States in an effort to disrupt our democratic process...
"This is sobering information about those who wish to do us harm... But every day we strengthen the security of our nation." (DHS Secretary Tom Ridge, 8 July 2004)
Does this last announcement by Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge entail a code red emergency scenario of "closing down the country" (prior to the November elections) as conveyed by Secretary Ridge in a previous statement:
"If we go to [code] Red ... it basically shuts down the country," (22 December 2003, emphasis added)
Homeland Security and the White House no doubt have several "scenarios" in mind to "win" the presidential elections in November. (See Steven Moore, http://globalresearch.ca/articles/MOO407A.html ). Recent developments suggest that Homeland Security is indeed contemplating a code red alert. (See http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO402A.html ).
At the same time, the Bush Administration is also maneuvering cautiously behind the scenes, with a view to embedding formal "guidelines" into federal election procedures, which would allow for the cancellation or postponement of an election in the event of a terror attack.
To reach their objective, the Bush Administration is using the jurisdiction of one of its bogus federal agencies, the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) , established in 2003 under the Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA) .
Concurrent with Homeland Security's statement regarding the possibility of a large scale "9/11 type attack", EAC director DeForest B. Soaries , a Bush appointee, has hinted to the need for:
"establishing guidelines for canceling or rescheduling elections if terrorists strike the United States again".
"Look at the possibilities. If the federal government were to cancel an election or suspend an election, it has tremendous political implications. If the federal government chose not to suspend an election it has political implications... Who makes the call, under what circumstances is the call made, what are the constitutional implications?... I think we have to err on the side of transparency to protect the voting rights of the country... I'm hopeful that there are some proposals already being floated. If there are,! we're not aware of them. If there are not, we will probably try to put one on the table ... The states control elections, but on the national scale where every state has its own election laws and its own election chief, who's in charge?". (quoted in AP, 8 July 2004, emphasis added)
What is important in this new initiative, is that if these so-called guidelines were to be adopted, the Administration would technically be able to postpone or cancel an election, "with the stroke of a pen", and without resorting to far-reaching emergency procedures and/or martial law.
A temporary postponement might be considered by Republican strategists as a (desperate) propaganda ploy, for swinging votes away from the Kerry-Edwards ticket. Whether these guidelines will be accepted prior to November by the Democrats is, at this stage doubtful.
The Election Assistance Commission (EAC) is described as a "clearinghouse of voting information and procedures". The statements and news coverage seem to suggest that if guidelines on the postponement or cancellation of elections are to be formulated, they should emanate from the EAC, which has a (bipartisan) mandate under the US Congress to oversee federal voting systems, rather than the DHS.
But the EAC is an "informal arm" of the Department of Homeland Security. Both the DHS and the White House are indelibly behind the proposed "guidelines" initiative, calling the shots from behind the scenes.
EAC Director Reverand DeForest "Buster" Soaries, a former Baptist minister, is a handpicked appointee. He was New Jersey Secretary of State under Gov. Christine Todd Whitman, who is a political crony of Sec. Tom Ridge, going back to their days as GOP governors of the neighboring states of Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Todd Whitman was appointed by the Bush Admistration to head the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and has since then worked very closely with Tom Ridge in the domestic war on terror.
The press reports suggest that DeForest "Buster" Soaries took the initiative on his own accord, acting on behalf of a federal governmental body. He has even complained: "that he was rebuffed when he wrote to Ridge seeking to discuss election security, including how to handle rescheduling the election if it were to be disrupted by an attack." (Associated Press, 9 July 2004).
Secretary Tom Ridge has said that he is "against the guidelines." What he does not say is that various procedures have already been carefully worked out by Homeland Security analysts, who have simulated precise red code alert scenarios including situations, implying the cancellation or postponement of elections. (See http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO402A.html ).
Ridge says that "he doesn't agree with all of the conclusions in Soaries' letter, but the department is working on constitutional and security questions, and Soaries will be involved in the process." (AP, 9 July 2004 )
Homeland Security is intent on establishing entrenched procedures under the EAC. The "guidelines" to postpone or suspend the elections could then be presented as a means to "protecting democracy" in the case of a terror attack.
The setting of so-called "guidelines" at the level of an official body, the Election Assistance Commission (EAC), would establish a "trigger mechanism" under the jurisdiction of a federal commission.
A code red alert would contribute to activating the guidelines, although the latter could indeed be activated without resort to "the highest" terror alert level.
E-Democracy or Electoral Fraud?
The same Bush sponsored body, the Election Assistance Commission (EAC), which has hinted to the need for "guidelines" in the case of a terror attack, has also been pushing for the establishment in several states of the Diebold electronic voting system .
Diebold is a black box system which very conveniently does not leave a paper trail. In other words, it does not leave a paper record of the vote. In fact: "all three black box computer manufacturers are Republican-led corporations actively involved in Bush's re-election campaign." (Steve Moore, July 2004, http://globalresearch.ca/articles/MOO407A.html ).
In June 2004, Diebold Inc, which is backing the Bush campaign, congratulated EAC Chairman DeForest Soaries for assisting Diebold in marketing is E-election system:
We welcome the opportunity to provide input on these important issues and pledge our strong support to the EAC," said Mark G. Radke, director of marketing for Diebold Election Systems, Inc. 'This initiative by Chairman Soaries and the EAC will further increase voter confidence in the election process as election practices and procedures transition to more efficient, accurate technology," said Walden W. O'Dell, chairman and CEO of Diebold, Incorporated, the parent company of Diebold Election Systems." (Diebold News Release, http://www.diebold.com/news/newsdisp.asp?id=3083 ).
Diebold's CEO Walden O'Dell confirmed in a subsequent interview that: "he has been a top fund-raiser for the Republican president, but said he intends to lower his political profile and "try to be more sensitive" in light of the national criticism he has faced. ... Because the fund-raising revelations fell closely on the heels of security questions raised about Diebold's machines in a later-questioned Johns Hopkins University study, O'Dell's critics began to suggest that Diebold should not be allowed to be involved in elections. (The Plain Dealer, 16 September 2003),
Michel Chossudovsky is the author of War and Globalization, the Truth behind September 11, Global Outlook, 2004
-------- OTHER
-------- environment
SMALL IS HAZARDOUS WARNS HRH THE PRINCE OF WALES
Independent
Sunday July 11, 2004
http://www.smalltimes.com/document_display.cfm?section_id=21&document_id=8157
I am well aware that promoting public debate about nanotechnology is an uncertain business. My first gentle attempt to draw the subject to wider attention resulted in "Prince fears grey goo nightmare" headlines. So, for the record, I have never used that expression and I do not believe that self-replicating robots, smaller than viruses, will one day multiply uncontrollably and devour our planet. Such beliefs should be left where they belong, in the realms of science fiction. The important thing is to get on with the sensible debate that should accompany the introduction of such technologies which work at the level of the basic building blocks of life itself.
Nanotechnologies involve particles of an unimaginably small size. The thickness of a human hair is 80,000 nanometers, and a pinhead is generally agreed to be one million nanometres wide. The ability to work at this scale, at the level of individual molecules, is a triumph of human ingenuity. It is also a subject of huge scientific interest and commercial potential simply because matter behaves in fundamentally different ways at the nano- scale. These new properties will enable new applications, many of which will undoubtedly have perceived benefits to our society. If they don't, they won't be commercialised. But how are we going to ensure that proper attention is given to the risks that may also ensue? Discovering the secrets of the Universe is one thing; ensuring that those secrets are used wisely and appropriately is quite another.
So I am delighted that the Royal Society and the Royal Academy of Engineering are conducting a joint study on nanotechnology. This will help to separate the scientific facts from the science fiction, and the hope from the hype, providing the starting point for a much wider debate. Their report will be published in the next few weeks, but the evidence they have taken from a wide range of interested parties is already available on the internet (www.nanotec.org.uk/ evidence). The evidence covers a wide spectrum of opinion, much of it naturally concerned to ensure that the potential benefits from nanotechnology are not understated in the report.
I was particularly struck by the evidence provided by a recently retired professor of engineering at Cambridge University, John Carroll. He hopes that the investigation will "consider seriously those features that concern non-specialists and not just dismiss those concerns as ill-informed or Luddite". Referring to the thalidomide disaster, he says it "would be surprising if nanotechnology did not offer similar upsets unless appropriate care and humility is observed". He ends by pointing out that "it may not be easy to steer between a Luddite reaction and a capitulation to the brave new technological world, especially when money, jobs and business are at risk." Those are my sentiments too, and I wish the Royal Society and Academy every success in steering that difficult course.
It is important, though, to ask, at this early stage, how we will ensure that risk assessment keeps pace with commercial development. This is clearly a very fast-moving area of science, involving many disciplines, yet if we look at the EU's research programme for nanotechnology, only an estimated 5 per cent of total funding is being spent on examining the environmental, social and ethical dimensions of these technologies. That certainly doesn't inspire confidence.
There are also important questions relating to the control and ownership of these technologies. Some of the work may have fundamental benefits to society, such as enabling the construction of much cheaper fuel-cells, or new ways of combatting ill-health, yet the techniques operate at the same scale as the "self-assembly" of natural processes. Is there a danger of awarding patents on Nature?
My final point concerns the apportionment of benefits and risks. The benefits will largely accrue to those who invest successfully in these technologies and to those who can utilise them. But these new applications will inevitably displace existing technologies. Who will lose from that process, and will it widen the existing disparities between rich and poor nations? What exactly are the risks attached to each of the techniques under discussion, who will bear them, and who will be liable if and when real life fails to follow the rose-tinted script?
This debate is still at an early stage. The Royal Society's research shows that only 29 per cent of the population currently even recognises the term "nanotechnology"; those who do are generally positive about its potential. I suspect that broader public acceptance will only be achieved and maintained if public attitudes and regulatory processes are encouraged to develop at the same rate as the technology itself, and if a precautionary approach is seen to be applied.
There will also, I believe, have to be significantly greater social awareness, humility and openness on the part of the proponents of emerging nanotechnologies than we have seen with other so-called "technological advances" of recent years. Those are the things which, above all, I hope the Royal Society and Academy's report will encourage.
Brave new world or nightmare vision of the future?
Excerpts from the evidence of Professor John Carroll, of Cambridge University, to the Royal Society and Royal Academy of Engineering investigation, cited by Prince Charles above
I hope that the investigation on nanotechnology will consider seriously those features that concern non-specialists and not just dismiss these concerns as ill-informed or Luddite.
First, it is known that chemical reaction rates often increase with increase in surface area so that ... chemical reactions that were previously considered unlikely suddenly can become likely. Finely divided powders, for example, are known to explode when the normal substance is considered inert.
Second, it is believed that small particles can behave as carcinogens when larger particles of the same substance are benign. I understand that the fumes of combusted diesel are considered "unsafe" because of the small particulate size of the components of combustion. There has been concern over depleted uranium vapours when there would be much less concern over depleted uranium chunks.
Third, I do not believe that we know how nanoparticles diffuse through the skin and through the body. I would not knowingly advise positively on the use of nano-particles in cosmetics unless I was sure that long- term studies were secure and showed no hint of long- term difficulties. How often do we hear, many years later, of difficulties when the experts have all declared a product to be safe? As someone whose wife luckily escaped from being prescribed thalidomide when pregnant, I remember such difficulties vividly. It would be surprising if nanotechnology did not offer similar upsets unless care and humility is observed.
It may not be easy to steer between a Luddite reaction and a capitulation to the brave new technological world, especially when money, jobs and business are at risk. However, a major disaster in an industry can cause catastrophic long-term damage - De Havilland never recovered from the Comet metal fatigue disasters. I submit that we probably know less about the nano-scale than we did about metal fatigue at that time.
-------- health
W.H.O. Lags in Meeting Its AIDS Treatment Goal
July 11, 2004
By LAWRENCE K. ALTMAN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/11/health/11aids.html
BANGKOK, July 10 - The World Health Organization asserted here on Saturday that its goal of delivering antiretroviral therapy to three million people infected with H.I.V. in poor countries by the end of 2005 could still be met despite obstacles that had severely limited the number now under treatment.
The program, known as 3 by 5, has been a subject of debate since the agency's director general, Dr. Lee Jong Wook, announced it last fall. In its first progress report, issued a day before the 15th International AIDS Conference here on Sunday, the World Health Organization estimated that 440,000 people were being treated. That is about twice as many as in 2002, said Dr. Jim Kim, director of the agency's AIDS program. But the agency's goal had been to treat 60,000 more people by now.
Dr. Lee said that the United Nations agency could not let it fail because "the collective response to the H.I.V./AIDS pandemic is the benchmark by which our generation will be judged."
Critics have said the effort was too ambitious. But Dr. Lee said he wanted to set "a difficult, time-limited undertaking that would force us to change the way we work at W.H.O."
Critics also said that affected countries did not have enough workers to deliver the drugs and that the agency did not have enough money. The report was intended "to measure ourselves against specific targets to assess the progress we are making," Dr. Lee wrote. "Progress is not rapid enough," because each day 8,000 people are dying from AIDS, the report said, while asserting that the slow start still would generate enough pressure to speed the effort later.
The agency attributed slow progress to a lack of money, but that has improved through contributions from Canada, Britain and Sweden.
At a news conference here on Saturday, agency officials were long on promises but less specific about the effort that the agency, which is based in Geneva, is conducting with government and private groups.
The agency published the estimated number of people receiving antiretroviral treatment by country for 49 countries. The total was 327,000. The agency did not provide the list of countries with the remaining 113,000 people being treated.
Stephen Lewis, the special United Nations envoy for AIDS in Africa, said he felt certain from visits to a number of countries that the 3 by 5 plan would succeed in Africa.
Since December, 56 countries have asked the agency for help in developing national antiretroviral programs, more than expected. The agency said it had sent workers to more than 20 of the countries.Twelve countries have established official treatment goals that meet the 3 by 5 objective of providing treatment for 50 percent of those in need.
Only Botswana, Indonesia and Uganda have published such plans. Botswana is treating 18,000 people, with a goal of 30,000; Indonesia is treating 1,500, with a goal of 3,500; and Uganda is treating 20,000, with a goal of 55,000, said Melanie Zipperer, an agency spokeswoman.
The agency said progress has been slowed by the time it takes to develop clear, standard and simplified technical guidelines and training materials, and by the time needed to develop standards and processes to certify workers. Dr. Peter Piot, the director of the United Nations AIDS program, a partner in the 3 by 5 effort, said, "We have to be frank and admit that we have a long way to go."
-------- ACTIVISTS
Israel nuclear whistleblower urges end of restrictions
JERUSALEM (AFP)
Jul 11, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040711141856.z7mzu5f7.html
Israel's nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu insisted Sunday that he had no more secrets to tell as he urged the supreme court to lift restrictions on his movements imposed after his release in April.
Former technician Vanunu, who served an 18-year prison sentence for lifting the lid on the inner workings at the Dimona nuclear plant in the southern Negev desert, has since been refused permission to travel abroad or associate with foreigners.
But he told a closed-door session at the high court that he "did not have additional information" about Israel's nuclear potential in addition to the revelations he gave to Britain's Sunday Times newspaper in 1986, said a judicial source.
He said that the restrictions were preventing him from leading a normal life and were motivated by a desire for vengeance by the authorities who still regard him as a traitor.
The government has argued that Vanunu, 50, still possesses information that poses a danger to state security.
The court hearing was adjourned and the decision will be announced at a later date.
----
Peace coalition seeks pithy slogans for signs
Billboards will go up a month before election
Sunday, 11, 2004
BY ART AISNER
Ann Arbor News Staff Reporter
http://www.mlive.com/news/aanews/index.ssf?/base/news-9/108954094280670.xml
The Ann Arbor Area Committee for Peace (AAACP) plans to rent a couple of billboards along area freeways in October as part of its effort to help derail President Bush's re-election bid.
Leaders of the grass-roots organization say all they need now are some creative slogans from the public to put on the signs.
For an entire month leading up to the Nov. 2 election, the AAACP will sponsor two billboards along I-94 and US-23 to promote the "Jobs Not War in 2004" campaign. The initiative, which kicked off in Ann Arbor on the one-year anniversary of the start of the Iraq war in March, promotes a change in national priorities from focusing on military and national defense spending to human and environmental needs.
The AAACP, a coalition of local activist groups formed after the Sept. 11 attacks to promote peaceful resolutions to international problems, raised the $7,750 for the signs at a recent dinner fund-raiser and with proceeds from last weekend's viewing of Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11" featuring Lila Lipscomb. Lipscomb is the Flint mother of a U.S. soldier killed in Iraq who is highlighted in the film.
The anti-Bush messages will be displayed on billboards along westbound I-94 and southbound US-23 to catch motorists heading into Washtenaw County, said Phillis Engelbert, AAACP spokeswoman. Together they have the potential to reach more than 137,000 motorists in a 24-hour period, said Doug English, general manager of Adams Outdoor Advertising of Ann Arbor, which owns the billboards.
Designs have not been finalized, and organizers are hoping to add creative slogans from the public to the existing 30 submissions under review, Engelbert said.
Submissions can be made to info@justpeaceinfo.org or by calling (734) 332-9047. There's one catch, however: Slogans cannot include any mention of or endorsements of a specific candidate or make partisan attacks because that could jeopardize the AAACP's 503c tax-exempt status.
The Michigan Republican Party is planning a response to anti-administration or antiwar initiatives across the state, and particularly Ann Arbor, GOP officials said Friday without elaborating.
"Ann Arbor has historically been challenging to Republican candidates but we don't plan to forsake any area," said Republican Party Executive Director Gene McNeilly. "We don't want momentum to develop against the president anywhere and we'll be very active to make Washtenaw County competitive."
Breaking campaign law?
Congressional candidate Joe Schwarz has struck back after absorbing months of negative attacks from his conservative opponents labeling him too liberal in the crowded field of Republicans vying to replace U.S. Rep. Nick Smith, R-Addison.
Last week the Battle Creek surgeon's campaign filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission claiming that Ann Arbor attorney Brad Smith, the retiring congressman's son, is violating campaign-finance laws by accepting three times the allowed limit for personal and organization contributions.
The Schwarz camp alleges that Smith is accepting up to $6,000 in personal contributions and $15,000 from political action committees because of a little known loophole in the new campaign-finance laws.
Federal campaign-finance rules limit personal contributions to one candidate at $2,000, and limit PAC funding to $5,000. However, if the disparity between funds loaned by a candidate to his own campaign and the money leader in the race is greater than $350,000, candidates trailing in funds can accept up to three times the standard limits under a "Millionaires Amendment."
Smith, making his first bid for public office, invoked the amendment last month since candidate and state Rep. Gene DeRossett, R-Manchester, indicated he loaned his own congressional campaign $451,000, according to FEC records. Smith loaned his campaign $140,000, reports indicate, which is $39,000 less than the required amount to trigger the amendment.
"It's a simple question of math, and in their case it's bad math, bad strategy, bad everything," said Schwarz spokesman John Truscott.
Making matters worse, Truscott charged, is that the Club for Growth, a national organization that supports Republican candidates committed to limited government and lower taxes, began soliciting contributions on Smith's behalf under the "Millionaires Amendment" on June 1.
Smith emphatically denies any FEC violations but declined to comment on whether he has already accepted personal or PAC contributions beyond the standard limits. He also declined to discuss Club for Growth's solicitation and said he is not paying attention to attacks from his opponents.
Truscott said he hopes either the FEC will investigate the matter or Smith's campaign will correct the problem on its own. A veteran of several contentious campaigns while working for former Gov. John Engler, Truscott had little sympathy for Smith if the problem was a simple oversight by a first-time candidate.
"This is the big leagues and you've got to do it right and have to do it clean," Truscott said.
"While a lack of legislative experience should not disqualify him from serving in Congress, Smith needs to at least learn the basics of budgeting before he can tell the voters that he has the competence to tackle the federal budget."
The FEC has yet to respond to the complaint.
State Rep. Clark Bisbee of Jackson, Dr. Paul DeWeese of Eaton Rapids and Tim Walberg of Tipton are the other Republicans running for the seat, which includes 14 townships in northern and western Washtenaw County. Three Democrats - Sharon Renier of Munith, Drew Walker of Battle Creek and Douglas Wilson of Oxford - are vying for their party's nomination in the Aug. 3 primary.
Art Aisner can be reached at aaisner@annarbornews.com or (734) 994-6823.
----
Armenian Protests Falter Under Authoritarian Rule
President's Hold on Power Contrasts Sharply With 'Rose Revolution' in Neighboring Georgia
By Susan B. Glasser
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, July 11, 2004; Page A16
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A41457-2004Jul10?language=printer
YEREVAN, Armenia -- Inspired by the peaceful street revolution in next-door Georgia last year that toppled the country's longtime president, Armenia's newly united political opposition set out to duplicate it here. They took to the streets this spring by the thousands, denouncing Armenian President Robert Kocharian and vote fraud in elections last year.
But as spring has given way to the sweltering Yerevan summer, it has become increasingly apparent that there will be no Armenian revolution -- at least not this time. The opposition in recent weeks has called its forces off the streets and retreated to closed-door strategy sessions. Kocharian taunted them in a speech in France for failing to realize that his police, unlike those in Georgia, were ready and able to "maintain public order."
Instead of creating a peaceful uprising, according to several independent observers, Western diplomats and Yerevan residents interviewed here last week, the protest proved to be an object lesson in the powerful inertia of post-Soviet politics. Georgia, it turns out, was more likely the exception than the model.
In the case of Armenia, Kocharian held onto power despite many signs of widespread dissatisfaction with the course of this small and struggling mountain country in the volatile South Caucasus region. And he did so using the authoritarian tactics increasingly favored across the states of the former Soviet Union, including willingness to use force against protesters, elimination of independent television news broadcasts and mass detentions of opposition activists.
"Of course, they tried to imitate" the Georgian revolution, Kocharian said in an interview at his presidential palace last week. His rivals failed, he said, because the Armenian opposition had "nothing in common" with the pro-Western protesters who triggered the ouster of President Eduard Shevardnadze in Georgia and instead is "trying to sing an aria from one opera in a completely different one."
Kocharian called his opponents poor losers interested only in competing for power among themselves and said he had no choice but to use police force to break up a demonstration they staged on April 12 and 13 because it constituted a "threat" to the state. "The government has to protect the society from political extremism," he said.
Kocharian's crackdown drew immediate condemnation from international organizations and foreign governments. Human Rights Watch, in a report titled "Cycle of Repression," found that 300 or more protesters had been temporarily detained, several journalists attacked, and dozens of protesters injured by security forces that used "excessive force," including stun grenades and water cannons, to break up the crowd.
Shortly afterward, authorities ransacked the headquarters of the three largest opposition parties and several protesters have since received harsh sentences. Edgar Arakelian, for instance, was given an 18-month jail term for throwing an empty plastic water bottle at a police officer.
"Kocharian is moving the country toward a police state," said Mikael Danielyan, a human rights activist who was assaulted March 30 by four men and hospitalized for days. Danielyan said it was the first such attack on a human rights activist in Armenia since the Soviet collapse. "When they beat me, the government tries to show they can do whatever they want; they have all the power."
In the interview, Kocharian denied any systematic violations of the sort that international election observers and human rights groups complained about. While acknowledging that Armenia has "an imperfect election system," he argued that even if election monitors were correct about violations, there would have been no change in the outcome of the 2003 race, in which he was reelected in a second-round runoff with 67 percent of the vote. "You would need a sick imagination to have doubts about my election," said Kocharian, who was first elected in 1998.
He also claimed that just 17 opposition protesters were arrested, not hundreds, and that of those, only a few appealed their convictions. "If they treated them unfairly, hundreds could have appealed," he said.
The effort to duplicate what Georgians call the "rose revolution" began in earnest in February, when two leading opposition factions -- the Justice alliance of nine smaller parties and the National Unity Party -- teamed up and walked out of the Armenian parliament.
Armenia's Constitutional Court in a ruling last year had appeared to sanction concerns about violations in the presidential race. In a passage whose meaning is still hotly disputed by Armenia's political factions, the court either ordered or recommended a national referendum of confidence in Kocharian by this April to assuage those concerns. When Kocharian's allies refused to act on a referendum, the opposition opted for the parliamentary boycott and a campaign of street rallies.
Almost from the start, opposition leaders said they believed that the Georgian revolution had convinced Kocharian that it was necessary to take tough steps against them -- unlike Shevardnadze, who wavered on ordering troops to break up the protests that triggered his resignation last November.
"They were really terrorizing people here -- they didn't have this in Georgia," said Stepan Demirchian, a leader of the Justice coalition and son of a Kocharian rival killed in 1999 when gunmen invaded parliament and shot several prominent politicians. "Here, the authorities are prepared to do everything to keep their power."
But their critics said the opposition had just as much to do with why their revolution failed as did Kocharian. Several analysts said opposition leaders are skilled at using the language of Western-oriented democracy but are in fact better characterized as Russian-leaning professional politicians interested in seizing power themselves. Ordinary Armenians, these critics added, simply never believed that the opposition could topple Kocharian and improve the situation.
"It's a very weak opposition unable to come up with any sort of vision or positive program and unable to unite about anything other than opposition to Kocharian," said a senior foreign diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity in keeping with diplomatic practice.
"They are not really opposition -- they are people who didn't get power," said Danielyan.
Another key difference between Armenia and Georgia has been the lesser role played here by foreign-funded nongovernmental groups, such as investor George Soros's Open Society Institute. Independent television -- which helped draw thousands into the streets supporting Georgian leader Mikheil Saakashvili -- hasn't existed in Armenia since the government yanked the broadcast license of the network called A1+ two years ago.
In Georgia, "civil society is very strong, grass-roots groups are very strong there, the media are quite strong there," and they participated in mobilizing activists who helped move along events during the revolution, said Larisa Minasyan, executive director of the Open Society Institute here. "In Armenia, genuine civil society has quite distanced itself from the two political forces in this standoff."
For now, the anti-presidential forces are on a break, unsure of how to proceed besides promising "new elements," as Demirchian put it, in their campaign against Kocharian. "The only place we have left is the street," said Aram Sarkisian, another Justice leader. "There's no other way to continue our struggle, but they don't like to let us out on the streets, either."
Hrayr Tovmasyan, an independent political analyst, said that "the two sides are deadlocked and now the government and the opposition are repeating the same moves over and over, like a long-running soap opera. The opposition has no new moves left; they can't arrange protests anymore. This could be their death.
"The authorities don't have any new moves, either, and won't even think about compromise, which could lead to their death," he said. "It's just a dead end."
He and other experts here say they worry that the Armenian political unrest might turn into not only a case study in the difficulty of challenging power in the former Soviet Union but a longer-term threat to the country's development.
Closed borders have cut off Armenia economically from its neighbors Turkey and Azerbaijan; Armenia fought a war in the 1990s with Azerbaijan over the disputed enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh. It does not have a wealth of natural resources available. And now, Georgia has seized what international attention there was on the South Caucasus region with its experiment in democracy.
"This standoff could last for years," Tovmasyan said. "At the same time, Georgia has grabbed the flag of democracy in the region and will get investments there as a result, and Azerbaijan can count on billions of dollars for its budget from oil. What future is there for Armenia? It's hard to say."
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