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NUCLEAR
Sick Gulf Veterans 'Made to Feel Like the Enemy'
The Festering Sore of 'Gulf War Syndrome'
I AM A MUTANT
Iran tells UN watchdog to hunt for nuclear weapons elsewhere
Iran Rules Out Direct Nuclear Talks with U.S.
Iraq to conduct nuclear research for peace, economic development
Michael Moore, Richard Perle Join Forces
Déjà Vu, ElBaradei?
Two Exelon nukes clear hurdle to license renewals
Trial Begins on U.S. Nuclear Waste Costs
MILITARY
Afghan President Describes Militias as the Top Threat
Britain to boost budget for armed forces, security
CONTRACTS AWARDED
Florida anthrax cleanup under way
EU agrees to take over Bosnia peacekeeping force
Insurgents Kill 3 U.S. Troops in Northern Iraq
3 Americans Are Killed and 4 Are Injured in Attacks in Iraq
Attack Shows Need for Wall, Sharon Says
Bombing in Tel Aviv Kills a Soldier and Wounds 20 Israelis
Naming CIA chief: Puzzle for Bush
Stryker Brigade Set for Hawaii Despite Air, Water, Land Impacts
Malaysia, US to hold joint military exercise in South China Sea
Wars causing shortage of officers
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Officials discuss how to delay Election Day
U.S. Terror Warnings Lack Specifics - Congress Report
Yemen recovers 3,500 smuggled children
Hiring Freeze Starts, Layoffs Possible at Bureau of Prisons
POLITICS
Kerry proposals boost spending
DeLay's Corporate Fundraising Investigated
Report Says CIA Distorted Iraq Data
Intelligence Findings Sway Few, but Add to Anxieties
Final 9/11 Report Is Said to Dismiss Iraq-Qaeda Alliance
Senators press for release of FBI terrorist report
Antiwar Group Says Its Ad Is Rejected
Bush Insists He Has Made America Safer
Bush's Pre-emptive Strategy Meets Some Untidy Reality
Democrats Drop Antiwar Pretensions
Bush makes blocked judges a key issue
Conservative roasts Bush on war
OTHER
Judge Halts Mine Waste Dumping in West Virginia Streams
Annan Urges Greater Efforts Against AIDS
ACTIVISTS
Vet believes in peace - how very threatening
Singers of Sudan Study War No More
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- depleted uranium
Sick Gulf Veterans 'Made to Feel Like the Enemy'
By Jennifer Sym,
PA News / Scotsman
July 12, 2004
http://news.scotsman.com/latest.cfm?id=3194698
Troops in the first Gulf War were inoculated with a cocktail of drugs which they believe left them with debilitating illnesses and may have contributed to fatal birth defects, an inquiry heard today.
Veterans were even made to feel "like the enemy" when they complained of a range of conditions following the 1991 conflict, including chronic fatigue, memory loss, depression, mood swings, aching joints, sensitivity to chemicals and cancerous tumours, the hearing was told.
The Gulf War Illnesses independent inquiry started hearing evidence in London today from veterans and relatives of those who served in the war.
Flight Lieutenant John Nichol, who served as an RAF Tornado navigator, is now president of the Gulf Veterans' Branch of the Royal British Legion.
Together with pilot Flt Lt John Peters, he was shot down on the first day of the conflict, captured and held as a prisoner of war for 49 days.
He told the three-man inquiry panel: "The men and the women you will hear from over the coming days are not the enemy - but many times over the past few years that is exactly how they've been made to feel - they deserve better."
He said during the conflict troops were given up to 14 inoculations, experienced the first ever mass use of NAPS tablets - the nerve agent pre-treatment used as an antidote against chemical weapons - and were exposed to heavy use of pesticides including those purchased locally.
They were exposed to atmospheric pollution from burning oil wells and depleted uranium dust whilst decommissioning site and vehicles attacked with DU weapons and were possibly exposed to nerve agents when Iraqi chemical weapons storage facilities were destroyed, he said.
Vicky Warriner, 36, from Peterborough, told the inquiry she attributes the deformities of her late baby Catherine to injections and tablets her former husband Mark was given when he served in the Gulf.
In January 1999 a requested scan at 35 weeks revealed their baby had hydrocephalus and a body measuring 37 weeks but a head measuring 39 weeks.
Their baby was subsequently born with a range of deformities including no ears, widely spaced eyes, club foot and a set of ribs missing, and lived for just seven and a half hours.
Addenbrookes Hospital said although mutogenic effects seemed "unlikely", knowledge of what went on in the Gulf War was so limited they would hesitate to completely rule it out.
The couple subsequently divorced and Mrs Warriner said: "I think he blamed himself for Catherine from what he received in the Gulf. I said 'I don't blame you', he didn't have a choice as far as I'm aware. He had to have the injections and the tablets."
Larry Cammock, chairman of the Gulf Veterans' Association, told the inquiry he was given a series of more than 16 vaccinations, including smallpox, yellow fever (twice), cholera, polio, meningitis, hepatitis B and C, rabies, plague, anthrax, "biologicals" and issued with malaria and NAPS tablets.
He said the programme was "chaotic", while Shaun Rusling, vice chairman of the National Gulf Veterans' and Families' Association (NGVFA), told the hearing he was the only veteran receiving a pension on the basis of Gulf War Syndrome.
Without the diagnosis, pensions cannot be passed on to widows, the hearing was told.
Mr Rusling appealed for the Government to support the inquiry and accused the MoD of "dereliction of duty and gross crass negligence" for not disseminating information at the time or testing troops in the subsequent 14 years for depleted uranium.
The independent inquiry is funded by an anonymous donor, and the three-week probe aims to establish the facts about Gulf War illnesses and resolve the long-standing dispute over their causes.
Support groups claim about 6,000 veterans have suffered unexplained ill health since the 1991 conflict, and more than 600 are said to have died.
The MoD has always denied the existence of a so-called Gulf War Syndrome, insisting there was no single cause of the illnesses suffered.
Hundreds of veterans have tried to claim compensation but they were dealt a blow earlier this year when solicitors advised that there was insufficient evidence to prove their cases in court. Lord Lloyd of Berwick, a former Lord Justice of Appeal, is sitting alongside Dr Norman Jones, treasurer of the Royal College of Physicians, and Sir Michael Davies, formerly Clerk of the Parliaments.
The inquiry was adjourned until next Monday, when more veterans are expected to give evidence.
----
The Festering Sore of 'Gulf War Syndrome'
By Neville Dean,
PA News
Mon 12 Jul 2004
http://news.scotsman.com/latest.cfm?id=3191068
The row over whether several thousand veterans of the first Gulf War became ill as a result of their service has been rumbling on unresolved for more than a decade.
About 53,000 British soldiers took part in the Desert Storm campaign, the international effort to liberate Kuwait in 1991 following the invasion by Saddam Hussein's Iraq.
Support groups say that since then, more than 500 former British soldiers have died of so-called Gulf War Syndrome and a further 6,000 are suffering its effects.
The National Gulf Veterans and Families Association believes many of those who have died have committed suicide as a result of the stress of their illness and the toll it has taken on their jobs and personal relationships.
The illnesses have been attributed to the "cocktail" of inoculations given to the Gulf War soldiers to protect them against chemical attack. Exposure to Depleted Uranium (DU) munitions has also been cited as a possible cause.
The symptoms are said to be similar to those for chronic fatigue, including headaches, memory loss, muscle pain, nausea, gastrointestinal problems, loss of concentration, vision and balance problems.
Sufferers have also complained of post-traumatic stress, stomach cramps, vomiting, kidney disorders, depression, dizziness and severe weight loss.
Others have developed more serious conditions including asthma, arthritis, osteoporosis and dermatitis.
The Ministry of Defence has always maintained that the illnesses are so varied there can be no distinct syndrome or a specific cause.
Two years ago, the Gulf War veteran Shaun Rusling won a landmark ruling when a War Pensions Agency tribunal officially recognised Gulf War Syndrome as a disease.
However, the veterans' battle for recognition was dealt a severe blow earlier this year when they were advised there was insufficient evidence to pursue their claims for compensation.
The legal team, which had been investigating the strength of the case for six years, said there was not enough scientific evidence to prove exactly what had caused their illnesses.
That left the sufferers facing the prospect of having to fund their own hugely expensive compensation claims, without the millions of pounds worth of legal aid they had hoped for.
----
I AM A MUTANT
Western Daily Press (UK)
12 July 2004
http://www.westpress.co.uk/displayNode.jsp?nodeId=146049&command=displayContent&sourceNode=145779&contentPK=10576238
A Former defence worker has won legal aid to sue an aerospace firm over claims he was poisoned by depleted uranium at a West factory, it emerged yesterday. Richard "Nibby" David suffers from health problems, including breathing difficulties and a serious kidney condition as well as skin, bowel and joint disorders.
He worked for Normalair Garrett in Yeovil between 1985 and 1995, during which time his health declined to the point where he was forced to give up work.
The former Somerset county councillor believes his debilitating condition was caused by exposure to controversial depleted uranium (DU) at the factory.
Yesterday, Mr David, 49, told the Western Daily Press that his life was "a living hell", but the legal aid at last gave him a chance to argue his case.
He says medical tests have revealed mutations to his DNA and chromosome damage, and hopes to recruit world-famous barrister Michael Mansfield to fight his case.
US firm Honeywell, which now owns the factory, denies depleted uranium was ever used at Yeovil and the case is heading for a 10-day hearing at London's Royal Courts of Justice.
The landmark case is set to send shockwaves through the armaments trade and provide hope for many Gulf War veterans who claim DU has damaged their health.
Nineteen years ago, Mr David was physically fit and an aerobics instructor in his spare time.
He told the Press yesterday his health first began to decline soon after starting work at the Yeovil factory in February 1995.
"Within three weeks of working there, I had a horrifically sore throat," he said. "That soon became a permanent feature. I felt like I was going down with flu.
"I felt a complete change in my personality, my outlook and my emotions. Every doctor I saw said I was imagining it." His health continued to decline until in 1995 he says he was paralysed with pain and said: "The hospital were concerned. They were trying to work out what I had been exposed to. They thought I had caught a mysterious viral infection, which I hadn't."
A chance viewing of part of a TV programme which featured a Gulf war veteran struggling with apparently similar symptoms, led Mr David to wonder if there was a link.
"I thought she must have what I've got. You could tell the pain she was in," he added.
Urine samples revealed high levels of uranium and tests in 2001 also showed damage to his chromosomes, according to Mr David. This suggested exposure to radiation.
After leaving his job as a component fitter in 1995, Mr David moved from his home near Yeovil to Seaton, in Devon, where he had a boat.
He fell in love with and married Jane in 1998, but his condition has put huge strains on their private life.
"It is a living hell, for myself and my family," he said. "The stress on my family is phenomenal."
According to Mr David other former colleagues have also become mysteriously sick.
"A lot of my work mates were simply ill," he said.
He believes exposure to DU at work is the cause of his many ills.
A spokeswoman for Honeywell declined to comment beyond saying DU was not used at Yeovil.
Daily Press Fact File
Depleted Uranium is what is left over after ordinary uranium has been enriched for use either in nuclear weapons or in reactors. It is a dense, heavy metal used for warfare in shells and projectiles to enhance their armour-piercing capacity.
When a DU round strikes a solid object like a tank, it bursts into a burning spray of radioactive dust. This dust can remain on site for years and is claimed to have caused disease in soldiers using the munitions and in the local populations.
According to the MoD, two kinds of DU ammunition are used by UK forces: 120mm anti-tank rounds fired by the Army's Challenger tanks, and 20mm rounds used by the Royal Navy's PHALANX Close-In Weapon System, a missile defence system.
The MoD insists no satisfactory alternative material provides the level of penetration needed to defeat modern battle tanks and says many of the claims about the effects of DU are "groundless".
-------- iran
Iran tells UN watchdog to hunt for nuclear weapons elsewhere
TEHRAN (AFP)
Jul 12, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040712144937.d4tsyq3s.html
Iranian President Mohammad Khatami on Monday accused the UN nuclear watchdog of double standards and told it to pay closer attention to countries that had not signed up to global anti-proliferation safeguards.
In a meeting with visiting Singaporean Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong, Khatami reaffirmed that nuclear weapons had "no place" in the Islamic repubcic's defence doctrine and that he was campaigning for a Middle East free of such arms.
According to the IRNA news agency, Khatami "expressed regret over the double standards approach towards those countries possessing nuclear weapons", a reference to Iran's view that it is being unfairly targetted by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) while Israel has escaped major pressure.
"If atomic weapons are dangerous, then the world should be concerned about atomic programs of those countries that are not members of the International Atomic Energy Agency," Khatami was quoted as saying.
Iran has been subject to more than a year of tough IAEA inspections related to suspicions it is seeking to develop the atomic bomb under cover of its efforts to generate nuclear power, as well as the target of a string of IAEA resolutions criticising its level of cooperation.
The Islamic republic's arch-foe Israel, widely believed to possess a nuclear arsenal, is not a signatory of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and hence not subject to IAEA supervision.
During a visit to Israel last week, IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei made little progress on his hopes for a Middle East free of nuclear weapons, with Israel holding fast to its longstanding "strategic ambiguity" policy of secrecy about whether it has nuclear weapons and its refusal to sign the NPT.
Singapore's prime minister arrived in Tehran for a five-day visit Monday for a string of talks mostly focussed on trade issues. But the nuclear issue was raised as Singapore will soon be taking a seat on the IAEA's executive, the board of governors.
According to IRNA, Goh will also pay his respects to Iran's late revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini by visiting mausoleum in southern Tehran. He will also travel to the historic city of Isfahan in central Iran.
The visit is the last leg of a tour that has already taken him to Pakistan, Bangladesh and India.
--------
Iran Rules Out Direct Nuclear Talks with U.S.
July 12, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-nuclear-iran-usa.html
TEHRAN (Reuters) - Iran ruled out on Monday holding direct talks with the United States on its nuclear program.
``There is no justification for accepting suggestions to hold negotiations with a country which adopts a bullying attitude toward others,'' Hassan Rohani, secretary-general of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, told state television.
Washington accuses Iran of trying to develop nuclear weapons. Tehran says its ambitions are limited to generating electricity from nuclear reactors.
Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog the International Atomic Energy Agency, had told U.S. policymakers in March that Iran might be open to a deal and suggested direct U.S. contacts with Tehran, U.S. officials said. Washington broke ties with Tehran following its Islamic revolution in 1979.
Rohani also played down negotiations with Germany, France and Britain and said Iran held talks with them in the past year because the big three European powers initiated the dialogue.
``The other party to the negotiations for us is the International Atomic Energy Agency and we have nothing to do with any other country,'' he said.
``If we are talking with the Europeans countries, it is because we have normal relations with them and they took the initiative to do so.''
The IAEA board passed a resolution in June that rebuked Tehran for not fully cooperating with IAEA inspectors.
In retaliation, Iran said it was resuming production and testing of centrifuges, which can be used to enrich uranium, ending an agreement with the European states that it would suspend such activities.
-------- iraq
Iraq to conduct nuclear research for peace, economic development
BAGHDAD (AFP)
Jul 12, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040712142834.o7a4nn9m.html
Iraq's science minister said Monday he will focus on building an army of scientists to conduct peaceful nuclear research in contrast to the more destructive ambitions of Saddam Hussein.
But the country urgently needs 15 million dollars for a short term fix as it struggles to rebuild and restock laboratories that fell into ruin during years of war and sanctions under Saddam, interim Science and Technology Minister Rashad Mandan Omar told AFP in an interview.
Despite pledges of support from the international community, no money has yet parted hands, he said, urging organs like the International Monetary Fund to turn words into action.
"We will develop a strong scientific community," Omar said.
"The plan of my ministry is to redirect Iraqi scientists and technologists to contribute towards the country and to solve problems in industry, agriculture and environment which can build Iraq as a strong nation."
Nuclear physics remained a key area for research but Iraq's scientific talent would be steered towards fighting disease rather than developing weapons of mass destruction, he said.
"We want to treat ailments like cancer. For that we need nuclear science," Omar explained.
"But we are not going to have any false title for a project to conduct destructive research. That chapter is closed. It is finished. We are fed up of it."
Scientific research was all but snuffed out under former regime, cut off from free contact with the outside world and deprived of many of its best minds -- including Omar himself -- who fled the country during the war with Iran in the 1980s and the first Gulf war in 1991, the science minister noted.
"The former regime destroyed scientific development. As an urgent need, we have to build physical infrastructure like new laboratories, buildings and equipment," Omar said.
"For this I need immediately 15 million dollars," he declared.
The ministry is talking to the IMF for short term funding before the country could stand on its own thanks to revenue from its oil-rich resources, Omar said.
But money promised by countries in the form of technology grants, loans or donations to fund technology projects had yet to materialise.
"On the ground level we have not received any grant or donation. No single dollar has come, only promises. But we are hopeful that a few of our projects would be approved," the minister said.
The interim government, which took office two weeks ago when the US-led coalition formally handed over sovereignty, planned to set up new institution to train a fresh wave of scientists.
"Very soon we will be setting up three institutions for such research where by existing and new scientists can be absorbed for postive research."
-------- mideast
Michael Moore, Richard Perle Join Forces
by Tanya Hsu
July 12, 2004
Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/hsu.php?articleid=3010
"Hijacking planes, terrorizing innocent people and shedding blood, constitute a form of injustice that cannot be tolerated by Islam, which views them as gross crimes and sinful acts. ... Any Muslim who is aware of his teachings of his religion and who adheres to the directives of the Qur'an and the Sunn'ah will never involve himself in such acts because they will invoke the anger of God Almighty and lead to harm and corruption on earth." Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia and Chairman of the Senior Ulema, Sheikh 'Abdul-'Aziz Âlush, Sept. 15, 2001
Michael Moore's new film Fahrenheit 9/11 has done a tremendous favor for proponents of a war on the Arabian Peninsula. The film achieves what endless pages of conservative think-tank studies, panel discussions, PR and books have not: it spills gasoline on the anti-Saudi sparks in the United States. Moore's film lambastes the Saudis not only for their business relationships, but also for leaving the U.S. after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 (as did other non-Saudi officials that day). The overwhelming popularity of this documentary takes the anti-Saudi message to a whole new market. It is the latest rationale for a long-term plan to invade and occupy the Kingdom. In spite of its progressive producer and target audience, Fahrenheit 9/11 falls in lockstep with the agenda of neoconservative hawks: rid Arabia of the House of Saud, thereby granting the U.S. and allies full access to the Middle East's biggest prize.
There is a growing belief on the part of members Congress, diplomats, and the American public that the Bush administration is executing a "turnaround" in U.S. policy toward the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia because of neoconservative and interest group pressure. Those opposed to the current administration accuse the White House of maintaining ties to an enemy of America in exchange for lucrative business deals. In contrast, those who support ties with Saudi Arabia maintain that the U.S. has no intention of severing relations with a regional stabilizing force and with long term friends in the House of Saud. Who is correct?
Neither.
The U.S. has not had wholly "friendly" intentions toward the Kingdom for the past 30 years. Any appearance of such is only the visible veneer of real U.S. military policy. Declassified documents reveal that there has been a constant drumbeat behind closed doors to invade Saudi Arabia. The Pentagon has, for three decades, formulated and updated secret plans to seize Saudi oil wells and rid the Kingdom of the ruling House of Saud. This is not only a neoconservative cabal. Time and again, plans have been made for an invasion of Saudi Arabia for a larger purpose: U.S. control of Middle Eastern oil, with all the political power that would entail.
The most recent wave of charges that Saudi Arabia supports and/or condones terrorism signifies a secondary and more public attempt to gain support for a thirty-year-old plan to occupy Saudi Arabia. Other regional players' objectives (such as "securing" oil supplies, or "fighting terror") may create an unstoppable impetus for an American invasion.
Classified Plans Brought to Light
In 1973, the Nixon administration described a plan of attack against Saudi Arabia to seize its oil fields in a classified Joint Intelligence Report entitled "UK Eyes Alpha." British MI5 and MI6 were informed, and under British National Archive rules, the document was declassified in Dec. 2003. The oil embargo had been over for only three weeks but "Eyes Alpha" suggested that the "U.S. could guarantee sufficient oil supplies for themselves and their allies by taking the oil fields in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the Gulf State of Abu Dhabi." It followed that "preemptive" action would be considered, and that two brigades could seize the Saudi oilfields and one brigade each could take Kuwait and Abu Dhabi.
In Feb. 1975 the London Sunday Times revealed information from a leaked and classified U.S. Department of Defense plan. The plan was code-named "Dhahran Option Four" and provided for an invasion of the world's largest oil reserves, namely Saudi Arabia. (See exhibit #1)
Exhibit 1 The Take-Over Plan (Source: London Sunday Times, February 1975, retouched by IRMEP)
Also in 1975, Robert Tucker, U.S. intelligence and military analyst, wrote an article for Commentary magazine, owned by the Jewish American Committee, entitled "Oil: The Issue of American Intervention." Tucker stated that, "Without intervention there is a distinct possibility of an economic and political disaster bearing ... resemblance to the disaster of 1930s. ...The Arab shoreline of the Gulf is a new El Dorado waiting for its conquistadors." And this was followed in February of the same year by an article in Harper's magazine by a Pentagon analyst using a pseudonym, Miles Ignotus, emphasizing the need for the U.S. to seize Saudi oilfields, installations and airports, entitled "Seizing Arab Oil." According to James Akins, former U.S. diplomat, the author was probably Henry Kissinger, secretary of state at the time. Kissinger has neither confirmed nor denied the charge.
Further, in Aug. 1975, a report entitled, "Oil Fields as Military Objectives: A Feasibility Study," was produced for the Committee on Foreign Relations. This report stated that potential targets for the U.S. included Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Venezuela, Libya and Nigeria. "Analysis indicates ... [that military forces of OPEC countries were] quantitatively and qualitatively inferior [and] could be swiftly crushed."
The real premise of an attack against the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has been around since the Cold War. The idea was, however, revived under the aegis of a new "war against terrorism" on the charge of that the Saudi state supported strikes against the west. One nexus of this drive is Richard Perle.
Neoconservative Designs on Saudi Arabia
Richard Perle is an outspoken critic of any Americans doing business with the Kingdom, despite his own attempt to secure $100 million in Saudi investment for his private venture capital firm. His ill-fated attempt to become a power-broker with one foot in the door of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board and another foot in the door of Trireme capital investments is well documented. He has since become more hardline, telling National Review, "I think it's a disgrace. The Saudis are a major source of the problem we face with terrorism. " (Perle had to resign from the Defense Policy Board when his secret and extortive fundraising meetings with Saudi Arabian businessmen became public.)
Perle's efforts to rearrange the dynamics of the region, including Saudi Arabia, have gone on for many years. Incoming Israeli Likud Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu asked Perle to draft a regional strategy paper for Israel. The Institute for Advanced Strategic & Political Studies, a think tank based in Washington, D.C., and Jerusalem, published "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," which emphasized the need to overturn the Oslo Accords and Middle East peace process. It demanded Yasser Arafat be blamed for every act of Palestinian terror; it called for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and the Ba'athist regimes in Iraq and Syria; and it recommended that the force of democracy be foisted upon the entire Arab world plus Iran. One senior Israeli intelligence officer said the goal was to make Israel the dominant power in the region and expel the Palestinians. Perle's efforts to neutralize international funding for the Palestinian resistance have driven his policy recommendations ever since.
Another author of "A Clean Break" was David Wurmser. In Sept. 2003, Wurmser was moved to the U.S. State Department to work directly under Vice President Dick Cheney and his Chief of Staff Lewis Libby. David Wurmser's wife, Meyrav, ran MEMRI (Middle East Media Research Institute) alongside Colonel Yigal Carmon of Israeli Army Intelligence. MEMRI specializes in selective retrieval, searching and translating especially plucked Arab language documents that confirm MEMRI's bias that the Arab world despises the West. Meyrav Wurmser received her doctorate at George Washington University on the life of Vladimir Jabotinsky, founder of Revisionist Zionism, declared fascist and hero of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and the Likud Party.
Saudi Arabia was again declared an enemy of the United States on July 10, 2002, when RAND Corporation's Laurent Murawiec gave a PowerPoint presentation to the Defense Policy Board at the invitation of Perle. Like Meyrav Wurmser, Murawiec is also from George Washington University and listed as a past faculty member. He was also a follower of the Lyndon LaRouche cultist organization. This group indoctrinates its members to abandon their homes because "family values are really immoral," according to those who left the group. (Lyndon LaRouche is a convicted felon, conspiracy theorist and UFO believer.)
Entitled "Taking Saudi Out Of Arabia," the PowerPoint presentation named "Saudi Arabia the strategic pivot" and declared that the Kingdom is an enemy of the U.S. It advocated the U.S. seize the Kingdom and its oil fields, invade Mecca and Medina and confiscate Saudi Arabian financial assets unless the Kingdom stop supporting anti-Western terrorist activities.
Saudi Arabia was declared as the "kernel of evil, the prime mover, the most dangerous opponent" in the Middle East. Murawiec claimed, "Since independence, wars have been the principal output of the Arab world" and that "plot, riot, murder, coup are the only available means to bring about change. ... Violence is politics, politics is violence. This culture of violence is the prime enabler of terrorism. Terror as an accepted, legitimate means of carrying out politics has been incubated for 30 years. ..." James Akins explained the overall plans thusly: "It'll be easier once we have Iraq. Kuwait, we already have. Qatar and Bahrain too. So it's only Saudi Arabia we're talking about, and the United Arab Emirates falls into place."
The connections between individuals pressing for a U.S. invasion of Saudi Arabia run deep. Richard Perle's lifelong mentor was the RAND corporation's late Albert Wohlstetter, the grandfather of neoconservative analysts. Wohlstetter also befriended Ahmed Chalabi at the University of Chicago. Chalabi, the leader of the Iraqi National Congress who provided information to the U.S. government regarding Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, is an indicted criminal in Jordan, where he has been sentenced to more than 20 years' hard labor for currency manipulation and embezzlement through Jordanian Petra Bank.
The analytical and populist groundswell of denunciation against Saudi Arabia as a state sponsor of terrorism from progressive and conservative circles alike may culminate in an invasion sooner rather than later. Supporters within the current U.S. administration can use this unity to execute another "blueprint" for U.S. policy. Anti-Saudi Rhetoric can work just as Saddam Hussein's "imminent threat toward America" and Iraq's WMD served as the principle rationale for the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
Target Saudi Arabia: Taking the Case From Think Tank to Theater
In reality there has been no hard evidence linking Saudi Arabian leaders and officials to terrorism, little evidence of Saudi subjects playing a mindful role and far fewer financial ties to terrorism than could be found in most nations with a banking system. In fact, the U.S. State Department lists the Netherlands, Switzerland, Italy, Germany, Australia and indeed the United States itself as having al-Qaeda financial ties and connections. However, facts may not be enough to stem rising anti-Saudi sentiment among policymakers and average Americans.
The Murawiec PowerPoint indictment also claimed that Saudi Arabia is "[a]n instable group: ... Wahhabism loathes modernity, capitalism, human rights, religious freedom, democracy, republics, an open society" and that "Wahhabism is spreading world-wide" [sic] based upon Iran's Revolution led by Shi'ite Ayatollah Khomeini; that "Wahhabism moves from Islam's lunatic fringe," and that there was a "[s]hift from pragmatic oil policy to promotion of radical Islam. ... [Saudi Arabians are] treasurers of radical, fundamentalist, terrorist groups."
Saudi Arabia is then charged with being "the chief vector of the Arab crisis ... active at every level of the terror chain ... [it] supports [U.S.] enemies [and has] virulent hatred against U.S. ... There is an 'Arabia' but it need not be 'Saudi.' ... [U.S. must] stop any funding and support for any fundamentalist madrassa, mosque, ulama, predicator anywhere in the world. ... Dismantle, ban all the kingdom's 'Islamic charities,' confiscate their assets ... [and] what the House of Saud holds dear can be targeted - Oil ... the Holy Places ... Saudi Arabia [is] the strategic pivot."
Had these presentations not been heard by top-level Bush administration officials they could be dismissed as simplistic absurdity. However, the sparks of a mass movement to demonize Saudi Arabia had already begun, and on June 6, 2002, the right-wing Hudson Institute held a seminar called "Discourses on Democracy: Saudi Arabia, Friend or Foe?" with Laurent Murewiec and Richard Perle in attendance.
Of even further interest is the ironic and direct link between Richard Perle and terrorism. A recent fundraiser in support of the victims of the Iranian earthquake in Bam, sponsored by the Mujahedin-e-Khalq, asked Richard Perle to be their keynote speaker. Despite rejections by other groups to speak at the event, based upon the U.S. State Department's official designation of the MEK as a "foreign terrorist organization," Richard Perle ignored it and was happy to oblige and raise money - money that was immediately seized after the event by U.S. Treasury agents. The MEK is the same terrorist organization that attempted to assassinate Richard Nixon in 1972.
Two weeks after the PowerPoint presentation to the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board, the American Enterprise Institute held yet another seminar by Dore Gold, former UN Ambassador from Israel, to promote his new book, Hatred's Kingdom: How Saudi Arabia Supports the New Global Terrorism. Despite having never visited the country, Gold has been promoted on broadcast television networks as an "expert" on Saudi Arabia (when not introduced as "an advisor to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon").
Gold claims that the al-Haramain group has channeled massive funding to al-Qaeda, while omitting that Saudi Arabia shut down the organization and froze its assets. Gold's strongest claim is an Israeli document claiming funds to Hamas come from Saudi Arabia. Hamas has strongly denied the charge of any Saudi government involvement, and Saudi Arabia also dismissed the charges as false. Gold uses the book to promote the Netanyahu/Perle/Bush agenda to pursue Saudi Arabia "far more aggressively if Middle Eastern security is to be protected." He also argues that Israel has only a "minor role" in al-Qaeda-related acts of terrorism because Saudi Arabia is to blame for funding the "global jihad of al-Qaeda." Gold has also testified before the United States Congress about the inherent evil of Saudi Arabia. Yet, throughout the book, Gold only confirms that terrorism connections come from foreigners who infiltrate Saudi Arabia, and through foreign governments.
Hudson Institute cofounder and neoconservative Max Singer sent a paper to the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment in May 2002 urging the outside breakup of Saudi Arabia. On Oct. 7, 2003, fellow neoconservative William Kristol, editor of Weekly Standard, said he was upset that the U.S. had not gone beyond the war on Iraq to the "next regime change" of the "next horrible" Middle East dictator, Bashar Assad of Syria.
Before publication of his book Sleeping With The Devil, Robert Baer, ex-CIA officer, was ordered by the CIA to remove multiple passages claiming special CIA knowledge of Saudi royals having funneled money to al-Qaeda for terrorism, assassination plots and even Chechen rebels. He asserts that Saudi Arabia is a "powder keg waiting to explode," the royal family is "corrupt," "hanging on by a thread" and "as violent and vengeful as any Mafia family." Baer, filled with loathing toward the Saudis, relies upon a tacit, yet rejected CIA stamp of approval, but also shows little hard evidence. Baer refused to comply with the CIA's request "just [to] defy them." The CIA is considering filing a lawsuit against Baer, who, like Gold, has also never visited Saudi Arabia.
Another author who has made the best-seller list is Gerald Posner, who wrote Why America Slept, which connects Osama bin Laden and the Saudi government. In Posner's view, the rulers have been paying hush money to bin Laden for years in order to prevent terrorist attacks upon the Kingdom. One might consider it strange that there have been multiple fatal attacks upon civilians in Saudi Arabia if bin Laden receives such bribes. And how was Posner able to create a book with such a detailed indictment within a few months, when U.S. intelligence has taken years? Posner presents no clarifications.
The U.S. government itself not only unknowingly harbored and sponsored terrorists (9/11 al-Qaeda members, Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, Mujahedin-e-Khalq [MEK], IRA, etc.), it also consciously negotiated with Iranian terrorist groups to secure U.S. troops' safety from attack in Iraq in exchange for Iraqi weapons. From the mid-Nineties until 2001, the U.S. dealt directly with the Taliban for oil pipeline rights, agreeing to pay the Taliban a tax on every one of the million cubic feet of fuel that would have passed through Afghanistan daily. Vice President Dick Cheney, Halliburton CEO at the time, stated, "Occasionally we have to operate in places where, all things considered, one would not normally choose to go. But we go where the business is." During this time, Hamid Karzai was the Taliban's deputy foreign minister and a former UNOCAL consultant (UNOCAL led these negotiations, along with Paul Wolfowitz aide Zalmay Khalilzad). On Nov. 9, 2003, Israel confirmed that it had failed in secret negotiations with Hizbollah. (In January 2004 the Israeli negotiations with their designated terrorist group Hizbollah bore fruit, when a prisoner swap occurred.)
Whatever inconsistencies exist between U.S. public relations and the "war on terror," the efforts to tie the Saudi government or Saudis in general to terrorism are having an effect. Merit and evidence are not the issues; passion and mobilization are. The movie Fahrenheit 9/11, true to its title, turns up the heat through an entirely new American audience: Democrats and progressives.
The Approaching Decision
On June 25, 2004, Michael Moore's film, Fahrenheit 9/11 opened to 500 screens and insatiable crowds. The film's message to audiences is clear and simple: the U.S.-Saudi relationship must end. However, Americans should take time to go beyond the film, books and talk-show pundits to reexamine the complicated history between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia and the real motives of those pushing for war.
Americans will soon be asked to make a decision about whether invasion is the proper course. An informed decision will serve America in a way that hidden plans, rationales and one-sided movies cannot.
----
Déjà Vu, ElBaradei?
by Gordon Prather,
July 12, 2004
Antiwar.com
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/prather.php?articleid=3012
Mohamed ElBaradei - director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency - was in Israel last week pursuing a nuke-free Middle East.
Now, ElBaradei has already certified Iraq to be nuke-free. And Iran. So, isn't the Middle East already nuke-free?
Well, not according to Mordechai Vanunu. Vanunu was a technician at the Israeli nuclear facilities at Dimona for eight years. He fled to England, taking with him documents and photographs, including a photo of a plutonium "pit" for a thermo-nuke "primary" and a photo of a facility producing lithium-6 - a critical material in a thermo-nuke's "secondary."
The London Sunday Times had Vanunu's photos and documents "vetted" by British nuke scientists and published Vanunu's story on Oct. 5, 1986.
But even before publication, Vanunu had been kidnapped and taken back to Israel. He was held captive - and incommunicado - until this April, when he was semi-released. He is not allowed to leave Israel, and his movements and communications are severely restricted.
Nevertheless, Vanunu heard about ElBaradei's visit and managed to make public a suggestion that ElBaradei "should demand that the Israeli government let him go inside Dimona, to be part of the IAEA inspection of Dimona - as the IAEA demanded from Iran, Iraq - to report to all the world what every state is doing in secret."
It is extremely unlikely that Prime Minister Sharon will allow that, or that ElBaradei would even make such a "demand."
You see, Israel is a charter member of the IAEA, which was established by United Nations statute in 1957 to facilitate the spread of nuclear energy.
But Israel is not a "party" to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which entered into force in 1970.
The IAEA is not a "party" to the treaty, either, but has been made the international "safeguards" inspectorate under Article III of the NPT.
Each non-nuclear-weapon state party to the treaty undertakes to accept safeguards - as set forth in an agreement to be negotiated and concluded with the International Atomic Energy Agency in accordance with the Statute of the International Atomic Energy Agency and the Agency's safeguards system - for the exclusive purpose of verification of the fulfillment of its obligations assumed under the treaty with a view to preventing diversion of nuclear energy from peaceful uses to nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices.
But, if Israel is not an NPT signatory, why is ElBaradei in Israel?
Well, as El-Baradei put it, "I'd like to see Israel supporting the Non-Proliferation Treaty through maybe concluding an Additional Protocol with the agency."
ElBaradei would "like" Israel to agree to do what we - at the urging of the Israelis - have just forced Iran to do? Elbaradei would "like" Israel to sign an Additional Protocol to an IAEA Safeguards Agreement, authorizing IAEA inspectors unrestricted and unannounced access to all "suspicious" sites and facilities in Israel?
Get outta here!
Now, the IAEA can negotiate Safeguard Agreements and Additional Protocols with any nation-state - NPT signatory or not - when asked.
And, if the IAEA concludes that any nation-state - NPT signatory or not - is "cheating" on its Safeguards Agreement, it may report that to the UN Security Council for appropriate action.
In fact, we demanded that the Iranians sign an Additional Protocol because we were fairly certain the Iranians would refuse and that refusal might cause the IAEA to refer the matter to the Security Council.
Either way, the Israelis would have an "excuse" to launch pre-emptive attacks on Iranian "nuclear" facilities, destroying the not-yet-operational Russian-supplied Bushehr reactor, just as they destroyed, back in 1981, the not-yet-operational French-supplied Osiraq reactor in Iraq.
But the Iranians didn't refuse. They made a deal. Iran would sign an Additional Protocol if - and only if - UK-France-Germany would guarantee their "inalienable" rights under Article IV of the NPT.
All the parties to the treaty undertake to facilitate - and have the right to participate in - the fullest possible exchange of equipment, materials and scientific and technological information for the peaceful uses of nuclear energy.
However, as ElBaradei was urging an Additional Protocol on Israel, Secretary of State Colin Powell and Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom emerged from a meeting in Washington to claim that "European foreign ministers" had concluded that Iran had reneged on their Additional Protocol deal with UK-France-Germany.
It seems Israeli spies and Iranian expatriates have "intelligence" - not to be made available to the IAEA - that Iran is pursuing a "nuclear weapons program" at sites that ElBaradei can never find.
Déjà vu, ElBaradei?
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- illinois
Two Exelon nukes clear hurdle to license renewals
REUTERS USA:
July 12, 2004
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/25951/story.htm
NEW YORK - The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission found no environmental reasons to reject the proposed 20-year renewals for the operating licenses for Exelon Corp. (EXC.N: Quote, Profile, Research) s Dresden and Quad Cities nuclear power plants in Illinois.
Before granting a new 20-year operating license for a nuclear power reactor, the NRC requires energy companies to submit environmental impact statements to make sure the continued operation would not harm the environment. The original operating licenses were for a period of 40-years.
Dresden is located in Morris, Illinois, about 60 miles southeast of Chicago. The current operating licenses expire on Dec. 22, 2009, for the 800 megawatt Unit 2 and Jan. 12, 2011, for 800 MW Unit 3. One MW powers 1,000 homes.
Quad Cities is located in Cordova, Illinois, about 155 miles west of Chicago. The current operating licenses expire on Dec. 14, 2012, for both 876 MW Units 1 and 2.
Exelon Generation Co., which operates more than 24,000 MW of generating capacity, submitted an application to renew the licenses for both plants on Jan. 3, 2003.
Exelon Generation is a subsidiary of energy holding company Exelon of Chicago, which distributes electricity to 5.1 million customers in northern Illinois including Chicago and in southeastern Pennsylvania including Philadelphia.
-------- us nuc waste
Trial Begins on U.S. Nuclear Waste Costs
July 12, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Nuclear-Waste-Cost.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The government's failure to open a dump site for commercial nuclear waste could expose taxpayers to tens of billions of dollars in damages. The first in an expected string of trials to determine exactly how much began Monday in a courtroom across the street from the White House.
Owners of three reactors in New England claim they are spending hundreds of millions of dollars building storage facilities and maintaining spent nuclear fuel that the government under a contract had promised to pick up six years ago. In all, more than 60 claims have been filed seeking damages from the government.
More than two decades ago, the government signed a contract with utilities promising to take charge of the highly radioactive used reactor fuel at commercial power plants beginning in 1998. But the government has yet to come up with a central storage site.
A number of court cases have ruled that the Department of Energy is liable for the cost of keeping the waste because of a breach of contract. How much is at stake is anyone's guess, but the industry has put the number as high as $56 billion.
The first case, involving three utilities that own the Yankee group of reactors in Maine, Massachusetts and Connecticut, went to trial Monday before the U.S. Court of Federal Claims. The trial is expected to last seven weeks.
Jerry Stouck, an attorney representing the utilities, outlined a case that was expected to focus on expenses utilities had to pay because of the government's repeated failures -- dating back to 1983 -- to get approval for a central waste dump at Yucca Mountain in Nevada and its refusal in the interim to accept the waste at some other facility.
``They built these facilities for one reason only -- because of DOE's default,'' Stouck said of the utilities.
A Justice Department attorney countered that the damage claims were ``speculation'' and wrongly assumed that if the government had met the 1998 deadline, the New England reactors' waste would have been taken within a few years. In fact, the companies would have had to build storage facilities and maintain fuel for years as they awaited their turn for shipping waste to a central repository, the government argued.
``Even though there was a delay, the (utilities) cannot prove there was incremental damage,'' argued Harold Lester, the government's lead attorney, representing the Energy Department.
The courts already have ruled the government violated its contract with the nation's utilities to take charge of the waste. Now the utilities are seeking damages, with a total of 65 claims having been filed including a rush of them at the beginning of the year, just before the six-year statute of limitation for lawsuits expired.
``Damages. Damages. It's all about damages. How much money are we entitled to,'' Stouck said during a break in the proceedings.
The case before Judge James Merow of the claims court is limited to used reactor fuel that is being stored at the Maine Yankee, Connecticut Yankee and Yankee Rowe (in Massachusetts) nuclear plant sites. The issue is of special importance to the utilities because the reactors have been shut down and keeping the waste is more expensive and may affect site cleanup.
```If this litigation is successful, it will provide some financial relief to the electric customers who bear the increasing costs to store fuel at these sites as a result of the DOE's failure to met its legal obligations,'' said Bruce Kenyon, chairman of Yankee Atomic Electric Co.
The utilities together are asking for $548 million in damages for costs incurred to keep the spent reactor fuel in dry-cask storage until 2010, the year the proposed Yucca Mountain waste site is expected to be opened. The amount is nearly double the $268 million cited in 1999 when the New England utilities began litigation. Stouck said the cost of keeping the waste on site, initially underestimated, has grown because today's terror threats require increased security.
But the money sought in this trial is only a fraction of what the government may have to pay, given that these are only three of 65 claims filed by owners of the country's 102 reactors at 72 power plants.
The bill could grow if the Yucca Mountain waste site does not open in 2010 as planned. A federal appeals court raised new questions about the Energy Department's ability to keep its timetable Friday as it rejected DOE's proposed radiation protection standard for that site.
In a recent letter to Congress, Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham estimated that utilities will incur $500 million a year in costs for every year the Yucca Mountain dump is delayed past 2010. ``Some portion of (that cost) ... the department will be liable for,'' he
wrote.
On the Net:
Energy Department: www.doe.gov
Yucca Mountain project: http://www.ocrwm.doe.gov/ymp/index.shtml
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
Afghan President Describes Militias as the Top Threat
July 12, 2004
By CARLOTTA GALL and DAVID ROHDE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/12/international/asia/12AFGH.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
KABUL, Afghanistan, July 11 - President Hamid Karzai said Sunday that Afghanistan's private militias had become the country's greatest danger - greater than the Taliban insurgency - and that new action was required to disarm them.
"We tried to do it by persuasion," Mr. Karzai said in an interview with The New York Times two days after he had postponed parliamentary elections by six months because of the threat of disruption. But now, he said, "The stick has to be used, definitely."
Mr. Karzai did not specify what action he would undertake. But his assessment represented a new ranking of Afghanistan's problems, with attacks by Taliban supporters and slow voter registration suddenly receding, to be replaced by worries about election intimidation by warlords and militias.
Mr. Karzai, who has largely governed through consensus, met with Afghan and international officials later Sunday to lay out a new strategy.
The United Nations, NATO and the United States-led coalition are involved in Afghanistan, training the police, augmenting the army and providing security for the elections. Mr. Karzai is counting on that process to continue to improve his government's standing.
His leadership over two and a half years, with heavy American backing, has rested largely on accommodation with various forces, an approach he defended Sunday. But his frustration, and that of his top ministers, seemed acute.
Asked to rate his government on how well it had achieved its goals, Mr. Karzai offered the barely passing grade of D. He said that corruption remained rampant and that the failure of the disarmament program was a source of keen anxiety among the people.
Out of the 60,000 armed militiamen, only 10,000 have been disarmed and demobilized, and the program has stalled rather than accelerated in recent months. The hope now is to disarm 60 percent to 70 percent of the militias before the new parliamentary elections in April 2005, the leader of the joint election commission, Zakim Shah, said Saturday.
Mr. Karzai said the struggle with the warlords would be decisive, suggesting that his government and society were at a turning point.
Asked what lessons he could offer for Iraq, he said Washington should not let private militias flourish.
Postponing the parliamentary elections had not been his preference, he said, but he acknowledged that Afghans wanted to see militias disarmed and sent away first.
"The frustration that we have in this country is that progress has sometimes been stopped by private militias, life has been threatened by private militias, so it should not be tolerated," he said. Without disarmament, "the Afghan state will have really serious difficulties," he said.
Mr. Karzai and important foreign officials in Afghanistan said that despite the delay in elections, the country should take pride in the independence of the new joint election commission, which delayed the parliamentary elections in the face of the cabinet's opposition. The plan had been for parliamentary and presidential elections to be held simultaneously.
Presidential elections, which are considered simpler to carry out, are now scheduled for Oct. 9, already a delay of four months from the original timetable.
Mr. Karzai is widely expected to win in a field of a dozen minor challengers. An alliance of powerful northern political leaders and warlords has thrown its support behind Mr. Karzai, making it unlikely that he will face a serious challenge.
Critics have accused Mr. Karzai of striking a deal with the northern leaders. On Sunday, he denied that an agreement had been reached.
In recent months, the big concern had been to register voters at the time of an insurgency by Taliban supporters. Yet registration is progressing, especially in rural areas, and militias are now looming as the primary threat to free and fair elections, Mr. Karzai said. "We hear of intimidations even now," he said.
Yet the likelihood of disarmament in the next six months remains uncertain. Mr. Karzai has always tried to bring the warlords on board rather than confront them, and the tension between his deal making and his new declaration of toughness has not been resolved.
Despite vows to toughen his tactics, Mr. Karzai spent much of the interview explaining the need for accommodation. He would be tough on the process of disarmament, not on individuals, he said.
Jean Arnault, the leader of the United Nations mission in Afghanistan, which is helping in the disarmament and elections, said the United Nations favored disarmament through cooperation rather than sanctions. "Sanctions push people to find new ways to skirt the issue," he said Saturday in an interview.
Mr. Karzai spoke of his most recent trip to the United States, when he visited the room in Philadelphia where the Declaration of Independence was signed, and reflected on the task of building a functioning democracy.
"In Afghanistan we will have many more messy years to come, before we can claim that we have succeeded," he said. "This is a country in the making, and I am very realistic about that."
"We have succeeded in bringing new money to Afghanistan in a very strong manner. We have succeeded in stabilizing the economy," he said. "But we have failed to curb corruption" and to disarm the militias, he said.
Nevertheless, compared with two years ago, when internal government rivalries and the assassination of his vice president forced him to accept American bodyguards who still protect him today, he said he now had a government that worked.
"It has changed," he said. "We are a government. Two years ago we were not. Today I can decide things. Two years ago we could not."
Afghan security officials said that another serious concern for Afghanistan was foreign interference, notably but not only by Pakistan. Foreign states may be behind some of the violence that plagues Afghanistan, one security official warned this week.
A bomb exploded Sunday morning in Herat in western Afghanistan, killing five civilians, including a 12-year-old boy, and wounding 21 others, said the police chief of Herat, Ziauddin Mahmoudi. In a statement later on Sunday, Mr. Karzai condemned the attack, saying it was "the work of Afghanistan's enemies who are desperately trying to derail Afghanistan from the path of reconstruction, peace and democracy."
Senior officials in southern Afghanistan have warned that leaders of the former Taliban government are increasing their insurgency there and in the southeast, and that they are gaining popular support.
Mr. Karzai, who will visit Pakistan this month, said he was concerned about the training in Pakistan of militants, who then cross over and carry out attacks in Afghanistan. Afghan troops recently captured a militant who said he had been trained in Pakistan, Mr. Karzai said. The government raises the issue with Pakistan "on a daily basis," he said, adding that he would like for Pakistan to do more.
But he dismissed the Taliban threat as "exaggerated." He differentiated those attacks from bombings and other acts of "terrorism" and "warlordism," which he said were the bigger problems.
He described relations with Afghanistan's principal neighbors, Iran and Pakistan, as cooperative, and said both had benefited from Afghanistan's recovery. "We are thinking from a businessman's point of view. It is very businesslike. We want to make money - and how do you make money? - by trading with our neighbors," he said.
He said if he won a new five-year term in October, he would do things "very differently" and not trap himself in a coalition with people who did not support change.
"I will try to have as much of a professional, technocratic cabinet as possible, especially in the departments where there is the need for them," he said. But he acknowledged that he would still have to balance that with a policy of bringing factional leaders or warlords into the government. "The success will come when the balance is right," he said.
-------- britain
Britain to boost budget for armed forces, security
LONDON (AFP)
Jul 12, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040712155255.okh39syg.html
Britain has set aside an extra 3.7 billion pounds (5.6 billion euros, 6.9 billion dollars) a year for its armed forces by 2008, while also boosting spending on homeland security, finance chief Gordon Brown said Monday.
The budget for the armed forces will rise from 29.7 billion pounds this year to 33.4 billion by 2007-08, an average annual rise of 1.4 percent above inflation, the chancellor of the exchequer told parliament.
The cash would enable the Ministry of Defence to "modernise for the long term", Brown told lawmakers as he unveiled the Labour government's spending review for the next three years.
It would allow the military to "make the changes that are now necessary to continue to adapt technologically and strategically to the threats posed by international terrorism, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and the rapidly changing global environment," he added.
The budget did not include the cost of military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, for which an additional 4.4 billion pounds had already been pledged, Brown noted.
He said that spending on national security would rise from 1.5 billion pounds this year 2.1 billion by 2007-08.
"Since the tragic events of September 11, the needs of national security at home and action against terrorism abroad have rightly assumed a new importance," the chancellor said.
"Recent events demand we strengthen not just our national security, our capacity to prevent terrorist incidents, but our national resilience, our capacity to respond."
Brown said the money would fund reforms to border security, counter terrorism capabilities, radio communication systems, arrangements in respect of nuclear and chemical decontamination and provide for 1,000 staff more intelligence staff.
There have been reports that the Ministry of Defence, facing growing strains on its budget, will announce plans to slash its non-military staff, totalling 93,500, by as much as 10 percent in the wake of the review.
-------- business
CONTRACTS AWARDED
Washington Technology And States News
Monday, July 12, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A43391-2004Jul11?language=printer
Abacus Technology Corp. of Chevy Chase won a $7 million contract from the U.S. Air Force's 377th Contracting Squadron to provide command, control, communications and computer services.
Advanced Technology & Research Corp. of Burtonsville won a $15 million contract from the U.S. Navy's Naval Sea Systems Command for research and development and technical, engineering and analytical support services for the continuous-rod warhead, assault breaching systems, the thermobaric warhead and the Evolved Sea Sparrow Missile.
Bell-Boeing Joint Program Office of Patuxent River won an $8.7 million modification to a previous contract from the U.S. Navy's Naval Air Systems Command to install wing auxiliary tanks and remove aft sponson fuel tanks on the nine MV-22 aircraft in Lot 8.
Communications Technologies Inc. of Norfolk won a $7.6 million contract from the Naval Air Systems Command for academic and simulator training for the C-9B aircraft.
Kellogg Brown & Root Services Inc. of Arlington won a delivery order worth $17.3 million from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for the design and construction of an aircraft-parking ramp.
RehabPlus Staffing Group Inc. of Greenbelt won a $13 million contract from the U.S. Air Force's Headquarters 311th Human Systems Wing to provide clinical social workers, registered nurses and Family Advocacy Program personnel (46 total employees) to implement the Family Advocacy Program at 17 U.S. Air Force medical treatment facilities.
Communication Technologies Inc. of Norfolk won a $7.6 million contract from the Naval Air Systems Command for the NAVAIR Orlando, Training Systems Division to support the Navy's Command Aircraft Crew Training program for the Navy C-9B Phase I & Phase II avionics upgraded aircraft.
Delex Systems Inc. of Vienna won a $1.5 million contract from the Naval Air Systems Command to provide PMA 201 program management services.
Family Health International of Arlington won a $33.9 million contract from the Agency for International Development, Overseas Missions, for HIV Transmission Reduced and the Impact of AIDS Mitigated program in Guyana.
Global Infotek Inc. of Reston won a $1.3 million contract from the U.S. Air Force's Materiel Command for research and development.
Iktara and Associates of Bethesda won a $4.6 million contract from the Naval Sea Systems Command for the Navy Science and Technology Roadmap.
The Institute for Genomic Research of Rockville won a $21.1 million contract from the Department of Health and Human Services for research and development of bioinformatics resource centers for biodefense and emerging/re-emerging infectious diseases.
Quantell Inc. of McHenry won a $20 million contract from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for an environmental management and remediation contract.
Rannoch Corp. of Alexandria won a $29.8 million contract from the Department of Transportation's Research and Special Programs Administration for communications, navigation and surveillance services.
Versar Inc. of Springfield won a $9.9 million contract from the Environmental Protection Agency's acquisition management office for exposure assessments for toxic substances.
Virginia Tech won a $10.3 million contract from the Department of Health and Human Services's National Institutes of Health for research and development.
Marine Hydraulics International Inc. of Norfolk won a $1.3 million contract from the U.S. Navy's Military Sealift Command, MSC-Atlantic Virginia 242/2 for shipbuilding and repair.
Sweet Analysis Services Inc. of Alexandria won a $50 million contract from the Robert Morris Acquisition Center for weapons.
Women in Community Service Inc. of Alexandria won a $3.5 million contract from the Department of Labor's Employment and Training Administration, contract services division, for administrative management and general management consulting services.
Axiom Resource Management Inc. of Falls Church won a five-year, $4 million contract from the Defense Logistics Agency to improve its business and management processes.
EFJ Inc. of Washington and Lincoln, Neb., received a $1 million order from the Department of Energy for an interoperable digital communications system.
General Dynamics Corp. of Falls Church won a $21.5 million contract modification from the U.S. Navy to continue systems integration work and to develop enhanced capabilities for the submarine modernization system program.
NMS Imaging Inc. of Silver Spring won a $5 million contract to provide a records and correspondence management system to handle document tracking, imaging, reporting and workflow operations for the National Institutes of Health.
SI International Inc. of Reston won a five-year blanket purchase agreement to provide technical support and services for the U.S. Air Force's Space and Missile Systems Center space programs under a multiple-award contract with a ceiling of $500 million over five years.
SRA International Inc. of Fairfax won a $22.5 million task order to develop and maintain the U.S. Army's latest force-management system.
-------- chemical weapons
Florida anthrax cleanup under way
(UPI)
July 12, 2004
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20040712-104943-5065r.htm
Boca Raton, FL, Jul. 12 -- Officials are fumigating the old National Enquirer headquarters building in Boca Raton, Fla., to sterilize thousands of anthrax spores.
The cleanup of the nation's first anthrax attack began Sunday under the direction of former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, The Miami Herald reported Monday.
The fumigation was expected to last 24 to 48 hours.
"It will be a symbol we can deal with these new risks we live with in our world," Giuliani said.
Giuliani's company, Bio-ONE is conducting the operation. The company has already decontaminated anthrax sites in Washington and New Jersey.
When the company completes the job, it will make the three story building its headquarters.
Before that can happen, workers will scrub off the chemicals inside the building and take dozens of tests to ensure no anthrax remains.
The anthrax scare occurred in October 2001 when photo editor Bob Stevens inhaled some spores and died. No arrests have been made in the case.
-------- europe
EU agrees to take over Bosnia peacekeeping force
BRUSSELS (AFP)
Jul 12, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040712174134.uqj1wxgz.html
EU foreign ministers agreed Monday to deploy a 7,000-strong peacekeeping force to Bosnia, where it will fill in for an outgoing NATO-run force in providing security in the divided Balkan republic.
The force, which would be the biggest military operation yet undertaken by the European Union, would head to Bosnia-Hercegovina "before the end of the year", they said.
It would be headed up by a British officer, David Leaky, under the supervision of the deputy commander at NATO's European headquarters in Mons, Belgium.
The move comes after NATO leaders last month agreed to wind up the Alliance's stabilization force (SFOR) mission in the republic and welcomed the European Union's offer to take it over.
SFOR was deployed in Bosnia in December 1995 after a US-brokered peace deal ended the former Yugoslav republic's three-and-a-half-year war which claimed some 200,000 lives.
Postwar Bosnia-Hercegovina is now split into two highly autonomous entities -- the Muslim-Croat Federation and Republika Srpska (RS).
NATO has been gradually cutting back its troop numbers in Bosnia, dropping from 60,000 personnel in 1995 to around 7,000 currently. It will still keep its headquarters in Sarajevo, the capital of the Muslim-Croat Federation.
The EU, meanwhile, has been keen to undertake its first large-scale military operation following smaller peacekeeping missions in Macedonia and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The EU foreign ministers also Monday approved the creation of a common European defense agency, charged with boosting the military capabilities of the 25-member bloc.
-------- iraq
Insurgents Kill 3 U.S. Troops in Northern Iraq
Associated Press
Monday, July 12, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A43212-2004Jul11.html
BAGHDAD, July 11 -- Insurgents ambushed two U.S. military patrols north of Baghdad on Sunday in separate attacks that killed three U.S. soldiers and an Iraqi civilian.
A roadside bomb attack in the afternoon in Samarra, 70 miles north of Baghdad, killed two soldiers and wounded three others, the military said.
An attack on a U.S. convoy in Baiji, 110 miles northwest of Baghdad, began Sunday morning when a roadside bomb exploded, the military said. Occupants of a vehicle then raced toward the convoy, firing at the soldiers, who shot back and killed the driver, the military said. A soldier and a civilian traveling behind the patrol were killed. A second soldier was injured and evacuated. Thick black smoke poured over the area from an oil tanker set on fire in the attack.
The deaths came a day after four U.S. Marines were killed in a vehicle accident near Fallujah, west of Baghdad. More than 875 U.S. military personnel have died since the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
[Meanwhile, insurgents holding a Filipino truck driver hostage in Iraq gave the Philippines another 48 hours on Monday to agree to withdraw its 51 troops before they killed him, a minister said in Manila, according to the Reuters news agency.
"I think there are now new signals that the extension of the deadline has been given another 48-hour life," Labor Secretary Patricia Santo Tomas said in a television interview, Reuters reported.]
The Philippine government on Sunday rejected the ultimatum.
Militants from a group calling itself the Islamic Army of Iraq -- Khaled bin Al-Waleed Brigade had earlier given the Philippines a Sunday night deadline to agree to withdraw its troops by July 20, a month ahead of their scheduled departure.
The wife and brother of the truck driver, Angelo de la Cruz, were heading to Baghdad, Foreign Secretary Delia Albert said.
A deadline for two other hostages, Bulgarian truck drivers held by a separate group demanding the release of all Iraqi detainees, expired Saturday morning. Bulgarian Foreign Minister Solomon Pasi said Sunday he had unconfirmed information that the two were alive.
In another development, Iraq's national security adviser, Mowaffaq Rubaie, said the country would honor the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and international agreements banning the use of chemical and biological weapons.
--------
VIOLENCE
3 Americans Are Killed and 4 Are Injured in Attacks in Iraq
July 12, 2004
By IAN FISHER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/12/international/middleeast/12IRAQ.html?pagewanted=all
BAGHDAD, Iraq, July 11 - Three American soldiers were killed Sunday in attacks here, two by a roadside bomb near Samarra, a hard-line Sunni Muslim city north of Baghdad where insurgents made a major attack on American forces last week.
On Thursday, five American soldiers and one Iraqi soldier were killed in Samarra when insurgents launched at least 38 mortars against a military outpost in firefights that raged for four hours. On Sunday, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian militant blamed in many of the deadliest attacks in Iraq, claimed responsibility for that assault.
"The soldiers of God were waiting for them and rained those who came with mortar shells," read a statement on an Islamic Web site that represented itself as coming from Mr. Zarqawi's group, the Tawid and Jihad Movement.
A military statement released Sunday night said that in addition to the two soldiers killed in the attack near Samarra, three were injured. In December in Samarra, the insurgency made one of its first large-scale attacks on American forces, but the city, about 60 miles north of Baghdad, had been relatively quiet in recent months even as violence raged in other nearby Sunni cities.
Earlier on Sunday, one American soldier was killed and another was injured in northern Iraq, near Beiji, when their convoy was also hit by a roadside bomb - the biggest killer of American soldiers here. A military statement said that while the injured soldier was being treated, a car sped by and opened fire on the convoy. "The soldiers returned fire, killing the driver," the statement said.
In the Philippines, the government said it would not withdraw its contingent of 50 military personnel from Iraq, rejecting demands from insurgents who last week kidnapped a Filipino truck driver working for a Saudi company in Iraq. A group calling itself the Iraqi Islamic Army-Khaled bin al-Waleed Corps set a deadline of Sunday for the government to agree to withdraw its troops by July 20 - or, it said, it would execute the driver, Angelo de la Cruz. The troops are scheduled to leave next month. "In line with our commitment to the free people of Iraq, we reiterate our plan to return our humanitarian contingent as scheduled on Aug. 20, 2004," Foreign Secretary Delia Albert told reporters in Manila.
[Early Monday, the kidnappers of Mr. de la Cruz said they would delay executing him for another 48 hours, giving the Philippines more time to decide whether to withdraw its troops early, Reuters reported. "I think there are now new signals that the extension of the deadline has been given another 48-hour life," Labor Secretary Patricia A. Sto. Tomas of the Philippines said in a television interview.]
The Bulgarian government repeated its contention that two kidnapped Bulgarian truck drivers in Iraq were still alive, despite threats by their captors to execute them on Saturday unless all Iraqi prisoners were released. Mr. Zarqawi's group has also claimed responsibility for kidnapping the two Bulgarians, Georgi Lazov and Ivaylo Kepov - both of whom, the Bulgarian government said, were in poor health.
On Sunday, the new Iraqi national security adviser, Mowaffak al-Rubaie, said that he believed Mr. Zarqawi was trying to obtain radioactive material for an attack in Iraq, possibly with a so-called dirty bomb. "I have no shadow of doubt," he said in a news conference in Baghdad, that "with his evil mind, he will try to acquire these unconventional weapons." Mr. Rubaie called the news conference to declare that Iraq would never build unconventional weapons. Without providing evidence, he said he was worried that some radioactive material might have been moved by Saddam Hussein out of the country during the war last year, might still be hidden in Iraq or might have already fallen into the hands of insurgents.
-------- israel / palestine
Attack Shows Need for Wall, Sharon Says
Court Ruling Condemned After Fatal Blast in Tel Aviv
By John Ward Anderson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, July 12, 2004; Page A10
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A41938-2004Jul11.html
JERUSALEM, July 11 -- A bomb exploded early Sunday near a bus stop in Tel Aviv, killing an Israeli woman and injuring about 30 people. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said the attack underscored the need for a massive barrier to separate Israelis and Palestinians, rejecting a ruling against the project two days ago by the International Court of Justice in The Hague as an "immoral and dangerous opinion."
"This morning's act of murder is the first to have occurred under the auspices of the opinion," Sharon said in his first public remarks on the ruling, which found that the West Bank barrier project is illegal and that large parts of it should be dismantled. "The opinion sends a deadly message that encourages terror on the one hand and prevents countries from protecting themselves on the other. The sacred right of the war on terror received a slap in the face."
Hassan Abu Libdeh, chief of staff for Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qureia, said the government condemned the attack as "a counterproductive terrorist act." At the same time, he said, "The fence will never be a source of security for the Israeli government or the people. The only guaranteed source of security is peace between the two sides."
The blast was the first Palestinian attack in Israel since a double-suicide bombing March 14 at the seaport of Ashdod that killed 12 people, including the two attackers. It was also the first attack in Tel Aviv in more than 14 months. Police said the attack, at 7 a.m. Sunday, the start of the workweek in Israel, occurred when a bag containing a small amount of explosives hidden in weeds near a bus stop exploded just after a bus full of passengers had pulled away.
"Suddenly I heard a strong explosion, and I saw a screen of black smoke in front of me," the bus driver, Eyal Gazit, told Army Radio. "In the beginning I thought that a tire had exploded, but I saw that the windows had shattered, and I understood that it was a terror attack."
The bombing was a departure from the methods used in most attacks in Israel, in which Palestinian militant groups typically have deployed suicide bombers to restaurants, buses and other public places. Police would not say how the bomb was detonated, but in similar attacks, most notably a July 2002 bombing in a cafeteria at Jerusalem's Hebrew University that killed nine people, including five U.S. citizens, a cellular phone was used to trigger the explosion.
Israeli officials said the long period without an attack proved that the controversial barrier project -- a $1.7 billion, 450-mile complex of fences, walls, ditches and barbed wire that is about one-third complete -- was a necessary and effective shield against would-be attackers. The Israeli military's Web site asserts that from the beginning of the year through June 30, 79 Palestinian terror attacks were thwarted.
In recent months, the Israeli military also has waged an aggressive campaign against Palestinian militant groups in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The senior leadership of the Islamic Resistance Movement, or Hamas, has been wiped out in Gaza, and top militants in the group and in the Islamic Jihad, the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine have been killed in the West Bank city of Nablus, about 28 miles north of Jerusalem, in the last two weeks.
A cell of al-Aqsa, the military wing of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's Fatah political movement, asserted responsibility for Sunday's bombing, which killed Mayan Na'im, 19, an Israeli soldier who lived just south of Tel Aviv. The group said the attack was revenge for Israeli army operations in Nablus and Gaza.
"This says that we can reach every place, even when there is a fence," an al-Aqsa spokesman was quoted as telling the Associated Press. An al-Aqsa leader in Nablus contacted independently confirmed that the group was behind the attack.
--------
Bombing in Tel Aviv Kills a Soldier and Wounds 20 Israelis
July 12, 2004
By GREG MYRE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/12/international/middleeast/12mide.html?pagewanted=all
JERUSALEM, July 11 - A bomb exploded next to a Tel Aviv bus stop on Sunday, killing an Israeli soldier, and Prime Minister Ariel Sharon called for Israel to respond by pressing ahead with the West Bank barrier to separate Palestinians and Israelis, which an international court has ruled illegal.
The attack, which also wounded about 20 other Israelis, was the first deadly bombing inside Israel in nearly four months, the longest such stretch since the current round of fighting began in September 2000.
Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades, a faction linked to the Fatah movement of Yasir Arafat, claimed responsibility for the bombing, saying it was revenge for recent Israeli raids in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
But Mr. Arafat, the Palestinian leader, denounced the attack and then hinted that Israelis might 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 the police said it might have been detonated by remote control. The blast occurred shortly after 7 a.m., during the morning rush hour. Sunday is the first day of the workweek in Israel.
A 19-year-old soldier, Maayan Nayim, was killed in the blast, which wounded 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 wounded was Sammi Masrawa, an Israeli Arab who leads an Arab-Jewish friendship group in the Tel Aviv area. Mr. Masrawa told Israel radio that he had opposed the barrier, and took part in recent protests against it. But the bombing on Sunday changed his mind, he said.
"I will now be for it and from an organization in favor of it,'' said Mr. Masrawa, 29, who was wounded in the leg. He had been heading to a restaurant where he works as a chef.
Early Monday, Israeli armored vehicles pushed into the Gaza Strip to demolish what the army called militant gun posts, Reuters reported. Palestinian medics said a man was killed when his house was knocked down in the raid, near Khan Yunis.
The last bombing in Israel was on March 14, when two suicide bombers killed 10 Israelis in Ashdod, a southern port town.
Shortly after the bombing on Sunday, 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, the United Nations' highest court.
In a nonbinding decision, the court ruled that the sections of the separation barrier that Israel was building in the West Bank were 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 in the last two years, and Israel says it has already contributed to a sharp decline in the number of Palestinian attacks.
But 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.
Parts of the barrier run along Israel's 1967 border, and the Palestinian leadership says Israel is free to build along this path if it wishes.
But most of the existing barrier, and segments planned for construction, are in the West Bank on land that Israel seized in the 1967 war.
In another development on Sunday, Israel's High Court of Justice called for a temporary halt to building one segment of the fence in the West Bank, northeast of Tel Aviv.
It is the second time in the last two weeks that the court has frozen construction on parts of the barrier in response to Palestinian objections.
In addition, the court ruled last month that Israel must reroute about 20 miles of the barrier that is planned inside the West Bank, to the northwest of Jerusalem. The court said that the route caused undue hardship to the Palestinians in the area, and that the government must balance security concerns with the needs of Palestinians.
Mr. Sharon has said Israel will abide by the Israeli court's decisions, and the Defense Ministry, which is responsible for building the barrier, is working on an alternative route.
According to the United Nations, the route approved by Mr. Sharon's government would put nearly 15 percent of West Bank territory on the western, or Israeli, side.
The Palestinians say they will seek further international backing for the ruling by the International Court of Justice.
They are expected to raise the issue in the United Nations General Assembly in the near future. However, if the Palestinians take a resolution to the Security Council, it could be blocked by the United States, which has used its veto power before to block resolutions critical of Israel.
-------- spies
Naming CIA chief: Puzzle for Bush
International Herald Tribune
Brian Knowlton/IHT
July 12, 2004
http://www.iht.com/articles/528916.html
WASHINGTON President George W. Bush was urged by leading senators Sunday to move quickly to name a new director of central intelligence, someone able to address the profound failures of intelligence before the Iraq war.
But with the presidential election campaign overhanging much that happens in Washington this year, chances of substantial intelligence reform before November appear small, officials and analysts said.
"Yes, I think we ought to have the administration send somebody up" for confirmation, said Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas, chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, which issued a blistering attack Friday about CIA failures to properly assess the possible threat from Iraq. "It's going to have to be an extraordinary pick."
The outgoing director, George Tenet, stepped down Sunday after seven years in the job. He had been under heavy pressure for his agency's since-discredited assertions that Iraq was developing banned weapons. The 511-page Senate report suggested that he bore large responsibility for failing to stop an accretion of mistaken judgments and unquestioned assumptions - or to step aside what it called a blinding "groupthink" - about Iraq's weapons programs. John McLaughlin, who was Tenet's deputy, is now acting director.
There were indications that Bush might nominate a successor as soon as this week, particularly after the Senate panel's condemnation of an intelligence system plagued by "lack of information sharing, poor management and inadequate intelligence collection."
The report said that prewar intelligence on Iraq was wrong not only in exaggerating Baghdad's weapons programs or capabilities, but also in suggesting that the Iraqi military threatened U.S. interests and regional stability.
It implied that continued containment of Iraq, which had a badly deteriorated military after the first Gulf war, might have been the proper course.
Bush's choice almost inevitably will be made under complicated political pressures. If he does not announce his nomination soon and terrorists strike the United States, analysts have said, Democrats may criticize Bush for having acted indecisively. But unless he nominates someone with clear support in both parties, the Senate confirmation hearings could be divisive and distracting at a time when the threat of new terrorist attacks is said to be high.
The decision is likely to come just as the intelligence committee opens a debate on how the U.S. intelligence community should be reformed.
A key proposal is the creation of an intelligence czar, or a national intelligence director, who might assume the role now held by the CIA director as chief coordinator of all 15 U.S. intelligence agencies. He or she would also, under some proposals, oversee the $40 billion now spent on intelligence by those agencies. One Democratic committee member, Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, said that she opposed rushing a nominee into place until it was clear what reforms might materialize, and where the leading candidates stood on such changes.
But the panel's ranking Democrat, Senator John Rockefeller 4th of West Virginia, disagreed, saying: "You can't wait. You can't take that chance in this country with a terrorist threat before the election."
Even if a new director is named and a reform plan announced, some legislators and intelligence experts say, it could take years to make far-ranging changes in a vast and sometimes-fragmented intelligence system that, the panel said, is short on human spies, has grown overly dependent on foreign intelligence sources, and is too unskeptical about its own findings. The dangers and distractions of an election year mean that major change is not likely this year, analysts and officials said. "No one in Washington - not the president, not the Congress - will have the time to take this on until next year," a senior administration official, who asked not to be named, told The New York Times.
One proposed reform would be to extend the CIA chief's term to seven years from five in an attempt to isolate him from political pressures. But before such changes, the new CIA chief is likely to be named. Committee members discussed several possible nominees: Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage; Representative Porter Goss of Florida, chairman of the House intelligence committee; the former navy secretary John Lehman, a member of the national commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks; and former Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia, a security and weapons-proliferation expert. Senators Roberts and Rockefeller both said they could support Armitage. Roberts referred to him as "a tough cookie" well-versed in intelligence. Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi, the former Senate Republican leader and a member of the committee, said he had spoken to administration officials about all four, adding, "I had the impression Goss probably would have the edge." The senators said it was important that Bush name someone who would gain instant support - someone, as Rockefeller put it, "so good, pre-emptively good, who would get support from both Democrats and Republicans." Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, and other Democrats have already seized on elements of the report to say that Bush irresponsibly led the country to war without fully examining the underlying basis for war.
Roberts, however, expressed what has emerged as a common Republican response: that the administration made a reasonable judgment on war based on the flawed intelligence presented to it. He also continued to insist that the intelligence committee, which approved its report unanimously, had found no undue pressure on CIA analysts from administration officials.
Asked on Fox television if the administration had been "a victim of bad intelligence or an instigator," he replied, "I think they were a victim, and so was the Congress; so was everybody involved."
Roberts added: "I don't care what intelligence agency we're talking about from what country. They assumed that after 1998 that Saddam Hussein would reconstitute his weapons of mass destruction."
The Bush administration has also continued to assert that regardless of postwar findings about Iraqi weapons, Saddam was a dangerous and brutal dictator whose overthrow was eminently justified. "He was a dangerous man," Bush said Friday.
"The world is better off without Saddam Hussein in power. America is safer."
Rockefeller continued to reject the notion that the administration applied no inappropriate pressure to the CIA to generate data that would support a war. "I think there was pressure primarily because of the nonstop barrage of statements that were coming out of the administration saying that, you know, 'the horror, mushroom clouds, grave and growing danger,'" he said.
Not all in Washington have accepted the Senate panel's suggestion that Tenet oversaw a deterioration in CIA capabilities.
Supporters point to his success in gaining greater financial resources for the agency and hiring more intelligence agents - after years of decline - and helping pave the way, through CIA paramilitary forces, for the quick U.S. military victory in Afghanistan.
Lott was angry, however, about the CIA's redaction of nearly one-fifth the 511-page Senate report. An earlier redaction, of much more of the report, "was absolutely an insult," he said earlier, "and it would be laughable if it wasn't so insulting."
-------- us
Stryker Brigade Set for Hawaii Despite Air, Water, Land Impacts
July 12, 2004
HONOLULU, Hawaii, (ENS)
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/jul2004/2004-07-12-09.asp#anchor4
The biggest Army project in Hawai'i since World War II was approved by the Pentagon on Thursday. The Army is bringing 291 eight-wheeled Stryker armored vehicles to Oahu starting in 2006.
Because of its speed and maneuverability, the Stryker can transport Soldiers more quickly and closer to the areas where they are needed. Soldiers are able to obtain time sensitive critical information from their commanders, and they can remain in constant communication with each other, their commanders or other units via satellite links and Internet connections in the Stryker vehicle. This is a radical departure from the way soldiers fight today and the Army says it requires new ranges, training facilities, high tech communication facilities, and new training protocol.
The reconfigured 2nd Brigade of the 25th Infantry Division (Light) based at at Schofield Barracks is expected to be operational by 2007.
The Army says the Strykers will be part of a "multi-year, phased and synchronized program of transformation over a 30-year period." The future force would come out of the development and refinement of weapons, equipment, communications, and training that will occur during the interim phase over the next 30 years when the entire Army would be transformed.
The Strykers will affect the environment on Oahu and on the Big Island of Hawaii in many ways. Another firing range, battle area, and motor-pool maintenance and vehicle wash facility will be built at Schofield in central Oahu.
A combined arms training facility will be built in Kahuku at the northern tip of Oahu. The project includes 49 miles of private trails on Oahu and the Big Island for Stryker use, six new firing ranges, two airfield upgrades and support facilities including a virtual war-fighting trainer.
Acquisition of 1,400 acres of additional training lands on Oahu and 23,000 acres on the Big Island is planned.
The project was approved after release of a 3,000 page environmental review, which includes 2,000 community comments. The review states that 1,736 tons of dust would be generated from increased vehicle use, an increase of 81 percent.
The Army said there would be significant effects on cultural and biological resources, air and water quality, dust, erosion and noise but that mitigation efforts could reduce them.
"Significant impacts from wind erosion of areas disturbed by military vehicle use would occur" at Pohakuloa Training Area on the island of Hawaii, the environmental impact statement says. "Mitigation measures will substantially reduce the severity of the impact but not to less than significant levels."
The construction of a trail from Kawaihae to Pohakuloa Training Area on the Big Island, and a trail from Schofield to Dillingham Airfield, will not begin start until 2009 or later, so the Stryker vehicles will have to share public roads until then.
While the Army says it provided "a means for open communication between the Army and the public," about a half-dozen opponents of the Stryker brigade in Hawaii were prevented from entering the press conference at Fort Shafter announcing the decision. Previous public meetings were held on private property, such as country clubs, and protesters were kept out of these meetings.
There are two other Stryker Brigade Combat Teams on the Pacific coast of the continental United States in Alaska and Washington "to support deployment to the critically important Pacific Rim," the Army says, while others will be in the eastern United States to support deployment "to other geographic regions."
Read the Stryker Environmental Impact Statement online at: http://www.sbcteis.com/
--------
Malaysia, US to hold joint military exercise in South China Sea
KUALA LUMPUR (AFP)
Jul 12, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040712113333.jai1m1kt.html
Malaysia and the United States will hold a joint naval and land exercise in the South China Sea aimed at bolstering military ties, the US embassy said Monday.
"Malaysian soldiers and sailors will be joining with their US counterparts this week for the annual Cooperation Afloat Readiness and Training (Carat) exercises," it said in a statement.
This year's exercise off Malaysia's Pahang state would feature simulated landings with Malaysian troops riding US amphibious landing craft, it said.
Guided-missile destroyer the USS Russell is participating in the exercise under task group commander Captain Buzz Little. They will remain in Malaysia until the weekend.
"The Carat mission helps enhance regional cooperation, increase interoperability and builds stronger friendship between the US and Malaysia.
"It also strengthens professional skills at every level for the military personnel involved," the embassy said.
Last month Malaysia and the United States mended fences after an angry dispute over protecting international shipping against terrorist attacks in the vital Malacca Straits.
Malaysia reacted strongly to reports that Washington was considering deploying marines in the straits to counter terrorist threats in the narrow waterway, which carries a third of world trade, saying this would infringe on its sovereignty.
Malaysia, a mainly Muslim state, angrily dismissed the idea, saying US forces in the area would attract terrorism rather than repel attacks.
-----
Wars causing shortage of officers
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
By Rowan Scarborough
July 12, 2004
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20040712-121948-5153r.htm
The Army's commitments in Afghanistan and Iraq are draining infantry officers from combat-ready companies and battalions elsewhere in the world, according to an internal memo.
The memo from the Army's Human Resources Command in Northern Virginia, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Times, said there is a 30 percent shortage - or about 100 majors and lieutenant colonels and an unspecified number of other grades.
"[Units] are suffering very badly at all grades," Lt. Col. Lee Fetterman, chief of the command's infantry officer assignment branch, said in the June memo sent to infantry colonels in the United States and abroad. "Many of you are currently short officers."
But Col. Fetterman, who recently returned from a combat tour in Iraq with the 101st Airborne Division, said in an interview that no unit deployed in combat in Iraq or Afghanistan is suffering shortages of these critical officers who lead companies and battalions fighting terrorist insurgents. The shortages are being felt by nondeployed divisions and in other billets Army-wide.
In fact, he said, part of the reason for the shortage is that the Army is keeping manning levels for these officers at 105 percent in the war zones to replenish any units who lose men.
The second factor, Col. Fetterman said, is that the ongoing transformation of the Army's 10 active combat divisions requires more officers. This is because divisions are becoming "modular" in mix-and-match components.
The result is that divisions are creating more battalions on a smaller scale that can get to overseas hot spots faster. More battalions mean more officers to lead them.
"We are short infantrymen at all grades, but particularly at major and lieutenant colonel," the Fetterman memo states. "Units deployed or deploying in the very near future will be filled to authorizations. Units recently returned from combat can expect to have shortages in all grades."
To some inside and outside the Army, the memo is proof that twin wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, plus other worldwide commitments, has the 480,000-soldier Army stretched thin.
The Pentagon recently announced that it is so short on certain skills that it is invoking rarely used powers to call back to active duty more than 5,000 members of the individual ready reserve. These are persons who completed their active-duty requirement, but still are subject to recall.
"The significance of the sobering memo is that it makes a mockery of all the talk from the Defense Department that the Army's force structure is adequate as currently sized," a former Army official said.
This official, who asked not to be named, as well as some private military analysts and lawmakers, think that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld needs to increase what is called active-duty "end strength" by at least 40,000 - the rough equivalent of two Army divisions.
But Mr. Rumsfeld has resisted, saying current deployments are likely a spike rather than the rule. The Pentagon has about 140,000 troops in Iraq and more than 10,000 in Afghanistan. The Army is tapping all its divisions to rotating in and out of those two theaters on 12-month deployments.
Col. Fetterman said the Army is "stretched." "We're at war," he said.
"Nobody would argue we're not stretched, but to argue we're stretched too thin is a leap of logic I would not take," he said.
Col. Fetterman said the Army eventually will increase its roughly 3,700 infantry officers once the Rumsfeld-ordered transformation is further along.
The shortage, he said, is not because of recruiting problems.
"I've got many more officers wanting to be infantrymen than I've seen in the past," the colonel said. "We are very popular right now." "I wanted to be in combat formations," he added, explaining the allure. "I wanted to lead soldiers in time of war. It's sort of a patriotic thing."
Col. Fetterman said in his memo, "In the long term, this will be self-correcting. In the short term, we will not have enough officers to fill all authorized billets."
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- homeland security
Officials discuss how to delay Election Day
Talks stem from recent fears of terror attack timed to vote
Monday, July 12, 2004
(CNN)
http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/07/11/election.day.delay/
WASHINGTON -- U.S. officials have discussed the idea of postponing Election Day in the event of a terrorist attack on or about that day, a Homeland Security Department spokesman said Sunday.
The department has referred questions about the matter to the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel, said spokesman Brian Roehrkasse, confirming a report in this week's editions of Newsweek magazine.
Newsweek said the discussions about whether the November 2 election could be postponed started with a recent letter to Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge from DeForest Soaries Jr., chairman of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.
The commission was set up after the disputed 2000 presidential vote to help states deal with logistical problems in their elections.
Soaries, who was appointed by President Bush, is a former New Jersey secretary of state and senior pastor of the 7,000-member First Baptist Church of Lincoln Gardens in Somerset.
Newsweek reported that Soaries expressed concern that no federal agency had the authority to postpone an election and asked Ridge to ask Congress to give his commission such power.
Ridge warned Thursday that al Qaeda terrorists were planning a large-scale attack on the United States "in an effort to disrupt the democratic process." (Full story)
Ridge said he had no specific or credible information about threats to the political conventions. The four-day Democratic convention kicks off July 26 in Boston, Massachusetts, and the Republican National Convention begins August 30 in New York City.
Ridge also said the nation's color-coded terrorist threat level would remain at yellow, or elevated.
Democratic Rep. Jane Harman of California, ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, said Sunday that she believes planning for the possibility of postponing Election Day is "excessive, based on what we know."
"Six days ago, the leadership of the House and Senate intelligence committees and leadership of the House and Senate were briefed on these so-called new threats," Harman said on CNN's "Late Edition."
"They are more chatter about old threats, which were the subject of a press conference by Attorney General [John] Ashcroft and [FBI] Director [Robert] Mueller six weeks ago.
"[Ridge] sounded more like an interior decorator talking about what more we can do under the shade of yellow," she said.
The news that such discussions have taken place raised other eyebrows on Capitol Hill as well.
"I don't think there's an argument that can be made, for the first time in our history, to delay an election," said Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, a member of the Intelligence Committee.
"We hold elections in the middle of war, in the middle of earthquakes, in the middle of whatever it takes. The election is a statutory election. It should go ahead, on schedule, and we should not change it."
But the Republican chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, Rep. Christopher Cox of California, said on "Late Edition" that he sees Ridge's request as part of a prudent effort to plan for "doomsday scenarios."
"We don't have any intelligence to suggest that it is going to happen, but we're preparing for all of these contingencies now," Cox said.
Noting that New York election officials were able to postpone their September 11, 2001, primary election after terrorists slammed hijacked planes into the World Trade Center, Cox said "there isn't any body that has that authority to do that for federal elections."
"So what Secretary Ridge has asked the Justice Department to do is, 'Give me a legal memo, tell me what will be necessary. Do we need to go to Congress and get legislation?' "
What has Homeland Security officials worried is that terrorists could attempt to disrupt the election in the same way that train bombings in Madrid created unrest three days before the Spanish general election, Roehrkasse said.
Although there is no evidence that the bombings influenced the March 11 vote, socialist Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero unseated Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar, whose center-right government supported the U.S.-led war in Iraq.
The country's new government then pulled Spanish troops from Iraq.
--------
U.S. Terror Warnings Lack Specifics - Congress Report
July 12, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-security-usa.html
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. government terror warnings to local police and citizens fail to give the specific information many authorities say is needed to protect the public, a congressional report said on Monday.
The report follows a series of official warnings about possible attacks -- most recently voiced last week by Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge -- which lacked new intelligence or details on the threat and how to respond.
The report by the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, was based on survey of 28 agencies and 56 states. Those responding ``generally indicated that they did not receive specific threat information and guidance, which they believe hindered their ability to determine and implement protective measures,'' the report said.
Some critics have accused President Bush's administration of using terrorism warnings as a political tool. Bush has made the fight against global terrorism a major theme of his campaign for reelection.
The administration denies playing politics with terror threats, but a GAO official said the warning system's credibility could be undermined by vague announcements.
``When the government gives warnings without more information about why they're giving them ... that inevitably leads to people questioning whether the timing is a diversion, or politically motivated.'' Randall Yim, the head of GAO's homeland security division, told Reuters.
The report urged the Department of Homeland Security to give ``specific information about the nature, location and timing of the threat, and guidance on action to take.''
A failure to deliver specific information in terror warnings can leave agencies unable to gauge risk or develop an effective response, it said.
It recommended that the department publicize threats quickly and through multiple channels, and said many authorities reported they had first learned about threat warnings from media sources.
Government officials have said that the nature of terrorist threats and the classified information on which they are often based make it difficult to give more detailed information.
But Yim said recent warnings may be counterproductive. ``They didn't say what was new and they didn't suggest any additional measures to be taken other than please be a little bit more vigilant and please go about your shopping. I think that that really attacks the credibility of the government warning system.''
-------- human rights
Yemen recovers 3,500 smuggled children
(UPI)
July 12, 2004
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20040712-111244-3646r.htm
Sanaa, Yemen, Jul. 12 -- Yemen has recovered 3,500 children smuggled into Saudi Arabia and other neighboring states for slavery and illegal adoption, a Yemeni legislator said Monday.
Mansour al-Zanadani raised the issue of smuggling children before parliament, asking for the questioning of the interior minister, the minister of labor and human rights on the issue.
Al-Zanadani produced official documents affirming that Yemen was able to recover 3,500 children who were smuggled to neighboring countries, especially to Saudi Arabia where they are being put up for adoption or sold into slavery.
He said much more Yemeni children have been smuggled and never returned.
Only last week, he said, authorities seized six children ages ranging between 6 and 13 whom gangs were trying to smuggle into Saudi Arabia.
-------- police
Hiring Freeze Starts, Layoffs Possible at Bureau of Prisons
By Christopher Lee
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, July 12, 2004; Page A15
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A43044-2004Jul11.html
The Federal Bureau of Prisons began a 30-day hiring freeze last week and will have to lay off some of its 35,000 employees next year unless the agency finds other ways to avert a budget crunch, according to Director Harley G. Lappin.
Lappin announced the freeze Friday in a memo to employees and disclosed the prospective layoffs last month in a letter to a federal employee leader. He wrote that it was his "sincere desire" to avoid a layoff -- known as a reduction in force, or RIF -- through other cost-saving measures at the agency, which has a $4.4 billion budget and operates 104 federal prisons.
"However, the reality is that if our continuing efforts are unsuccessful, for whatever reason, the agency will have no choice but to complete a formal reduction in force," Lappin wrote in the June 17 letter to Phil Glover, president of the American Federation of Government Employees Council of Prison Locals.
Layoffs could begin as soon as March and "could affect every employee and position," Lappin wrote. He did not indicate how many workers might be let go.
Judith Garrett, a bureau spokeswoman, said Thursday that neither Lappin nor any other agency official would be available for an interview with The Washington Post. She invited a reporter to submit written questions but had not provided responses by Friday evening.
"It's just a very sensitive area for us to talk about," Garrett said Thursday. "And so we really need to make sure that we're kind of controlling the whole thing to make sure it doesn't go badly."
Glover, whose union represents 20,000 of the agency's workers, said Friday that the bureau has gotten only 91 percent of the funding it requires over the last three years, leading to chronic understaffing. Management has told employees that the agency needs to trim costs by $140 million this year and $300 million in 2005, Glover said.
"You are running short all the time," he said. "It's just not a safe situation." The prospective layoff could wipe out as many as 2,000 jobs, Glover said. In a memo last month, he urged union members to contact members of Congress to complain about the agency's money woes.
"I cannot stress enough that this is a 'political' problem," Glover wrote. "The Bush administration has chosen not to fund prisons the way they need to be funded." In recent years the bureau has struggled to keep pace with a fast-growing inmate population that has more than tripled since 1990. The agency oversees about 176,000 inmates this year, up from 58,000 in 1990 and 26,000 in 1980, Lappin told a House appropriations subcommittee March 24.
He attributed much of the increase to stricter sentencing guidelines, the abolition of parole and an increase in prosecutions. About 55 percent of inmates entering federal prisons were convicted of drug-related offenses, he said. At the same time, 500 bureau employees have been deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq as part of their military reserve duties, Lappin said.
Inmate assaults against guards and other inmates have increased 28 percent over the last few years, he testified in March.
"The rapid growth of the inmate population and significant crowding have increased the demand on services and facilities," Lappin said. "If not managed properly, this can lead to an increased potential for inmate violence. We must continue to maintain adequate staffing levels and to provide adequate programs and secure our capacity to house the additional inmates."
Lappin said the bureau will "continue to pursue the streamlining, consolidations and other measures to improve the cost efficiency within our operations." Such measures include eliminating some managerial and central office positions, combining some departments, leaving jobs vacant, cutting back food service costs and centralizing prison pharmacy services, according to agency documents obtained by union leaders.
"It looks like rather small cost-cutting efficiencies he's putting in," John Gage, national AFGE president, said in an interview last week.
Last week the Republican-controlled House approved $4.76 billion for the bureau in fiscal 2005 -- $50 million above what the Bush administration asked for. A Senate panel has not yet taken up the bill that funds the bureau.
-------- POLITICS
-------- budget
Kerry proposals boost spending
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
By Don Lambro
July 12, 2004
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20040712-121948-6467r.htm
Sen. John Kerry's campaign proposals would result in $226 billion in higher spending in the first year of his presidency, including an additional $115 billion in social welfare, foreign aid, and environmental and energy costs, according to a study of his budgetary recommendations.
The study by the National Taxpayers Union Foundation (NTUF), which will be released later this week, finds that Mr. Kerry's budget proposals, which he says would slash the deficit in half over four years, would increase spending well beyond his estimates.
"Despite Kerry's attempts to outflank Bush on the deficit issue and portray himself as the more fiscally responsible candidate, the data behind Kerry's rhetoric tell a different story," said Drew Johnson, the study's author.
"Enactment of Kerry's 'revised' spending agenda in its entirety would still mean higher taxes, a larger national debt or likely both," he said.
Using the Kerry campaign's data and budget estimates from independent sources such as the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office to assess the cost of each budget recommendation, the NTUF said the Massachusetts liberal's proposals would add $734.6 billion to the government's bills over five years.
Since he announced his presidential candidacy, Mr. Kerry has made 70 policy proposals that would affect spending, five of which would reduce spending.
"Overall, Senator Kerry proposes spending $770.6 billion over five years to fund his projects, while suggesting just $35.99 billion in budget cuts," the study says.
"This leaves $734.62 billion unaccounted for and presumably passed on to American taxpayers in the form of increased taxes or suffocating debt," the study said.
When he introduced his budget proposals at Georgetown University earlier this year, Mr. Kerry said his spending recommendations would be "paid for" through higher taxes on the wealthy, budget cuts and other increased tax revenues.
But the Bush-Cheney campaign has said that repealing the president's tax cuts for those in the top tax bracket would not yield enough money to pay for the senator's new spending and that he would be forced to raise lower tax rates to achieve his budgetary goals.
The NTUF analysis of the Kerry spending plan reaches the same conclusion.
"If John Kerry were indeed to 'pay for' every program he has proposed as a presidential candidate, as he promised in the April 7 speech at Georgetown, the average taxpayer in the U.S. would face an additional $2,206 in taxes in the first year of a Kerry presidency alone," the study says.
Mr. Kerry's spending increase over a four-year term would total $621.76 billion, study figures show.
"That translates to an average increased tax burden of $6,066 for every person paying federal taxes in America over Kerry's first term," it says.
But the NTUF study does not spare President Bush's record, pointing out that he has presided over major increases in spending, although they are well below what Mr. Kerry would spend.
"Lost among Bush's attack on Kerry's plans for costly programs is the president's own disturbing record on spending, which includes a 29 percent increase in the size of the federal budget during his first term," Mr. Johnson said.
In addition to Mr. Kerry's newest spending proposals, the study also totaled the cost of all of the bills he has supported or co-sponsored in the Senate in the past year to get an indication of his spending habits as a senator.
This tally finds that he sponsored or co-sponsored $182 billion worth of new legislation last year and voted to increase federal spending by $466.5 billion in 2002.
The study concludes that Mr. Kerry's proposed spending caps, "meant to convince Americans that he would usher in a new era of austerity, are actually so porous as to be no more effective than the restraints George W. Bush has sought."
-------- corruption
DeLay's Corporate Fundraising Investigated
Money Was Directed to Texas GOP to Help State Redistricting Effort
By R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, July 12, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A43219-2004Jul11?language=printer
In May 2001, Enron's top lobbyists in Washington advised the company chairman that then-House Majority Whip Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) was pressing for a $100,000 contribution to his political action committee, in addition to the $250,000 the company had already pledged to the Republican Party that year.
DeLay requested that the new donation come from "a combination of corporate and personal money from Enron's executives," with the understanding that it would be partly spent on "the redistricting effort in Texas," said the e-mail to Kenneth L. Lay from lobbyists Rick Shapiro and Linda Robertson.
The e-mail, which surfaced in a subsequent federal probe of Houston-based Enron, is one of at least a dozen documents obtained by The Washington Post that show DeLay and his associates directed money from corporations and Washington lobbyists to Republican campaign coffers in Texas in 2001 and 2002 as part of a plan to redraw the state's congressional districts.
DeLay's fundraising efforts helped produce a stunning political success. Republicans took control of the Texas House for the first time in 130 years, Texas congressional districts were redrawn to send more Republican lawmakers to Washington, and DeLay -- now the House majority leader -- is more likely to retain his powerful post after the November election, according to political experts.
But DeLay and his colleagues also face serious legal challenges: Texas law bars corporate financing of state legislature campaigns, and a Texas criminal prosecutor is in the 20th month of digging through records of the fundraising, looking at possible violations of at least three statutes. A parallel lawsuit, also in the midst of discovery, is seeking $1.5 million in damages from DeLay's aides and one of his political action committees -- Texans for a Republican Majority (TRMPAC) -- on behalf of four defeated Democratic lawmakers.
DeLay has not been named as a target of the investigation. The prosecutor has said he is focused on the activities of political action committees linked to DeLay and the redistricting effort. But officials in the prosecutor's office say anyone involved in raising, collecting or spending the corporate money, who also knew of its intended use in Texas elections, is vulnerable.
Documents unearthed in the probe make clear that DeLay was central to creating and overseeing the fundraising. What the prosecutors are still assessing is who knew about the day-to-day operations of TRMPAC and how its money was used to benefit Texas House candidates.
Several weeks ago, DeLay hired two criminal defense attorneys to represent him in the probe. He previously created a fund for corporate donors to help him pay legal bills related to allegations of improper fundraising, and is now considering extending its reach to include the fees for these attorneys.
DeLay declined to comment for this article. Stuart Roy, his spokesman, said: "DeLay is doing everything moral, legal and ethical to increase the Republican majority and advance conservative ideas. He raised legal campaign money for effective political activity and that makes his critics enraged. Unfortunately, some Democrats are making an attempt to criminalize politics."
Cristen D. Feldman, the Texas lawyer who filed the suit, said in response, "I guess DeLay and his team forgot they were from Texas . . . [where] the prohibition against clandestine corporate cash is 100 years old."
Many corporate donors were explicitly told in TRMPAC letters that their donations were not "disclosable" in public records. But documents from several unrelated investigations offer an exceptional glimpse of how corporate money was able to influence state politics -- and also of DeLay's bold use of his network of corporate supporters to advance his agenda.
By investing as much as $2.5 million in corporate money in the 2002 election, TRMPAC and another group, the Texas Association of Business, were able to help elect 26 new Republican candidates to the Texas House. The new Republican majority then redrew the congressional district boundaries and, as a result, five Democrats are likely to lose in the Nov. 2 election, according to political experts.
This case "is only one piece of a much larger picture," said Ronnie Earle, the Travis County district attorney running the investigation. "And the larger picture is a blueprint of what is happening in the country, namely a saturation of the political process by large corporate interests with large amounts of money."
Earle, an elected Democrat who oversees the state's Public Integrity Unit, previously prosecuted four elected Republicans and 12 Democrats for corruption or election law violations. So far, he has issued about 100 subpoenas in this case, most of them secret.
Texas is one of 18 states that bar political contributions from corporations for election purposes. But the law has an exception for expenses incurred by political action committees. At issue in Earle's probe, and the lawsuit, is whether the law permits corporations to finance only routine administrative expenses, such as rent, as an official of the Texas Ethics Commission contends, or whether the law permits corporations to finance virtually any activity besides direct contributions to candidates, as TRMPAC's lawyer contends.
The Texas statutes involved -- barring the acceptance of prohibited contributions, the donation of corporate money for improper purposes and the expenditure of money for unauthorized uses -- have been invoked in only a few previous cases. Violations are punishable by as many as 10 years in prison.
Requests to Enron
DeLay's effort to build a Republican majority in the state legislature by channeling large campaign donations to Texas from lobbyists and corporations with interests before Congress dates at least from the 2000 election.
In an e-mail dated July 24 of that year, Enron Executive Vice President Steven J. Kean advised colleagues that DeLay had sent notes to company executives "about designating portions of their contributions for use in Texas."
Three days later, Enron sent a check for $50,000 to the Republican National State Elections Committee (RNSEC) in Washington, and three top executives sent checks totaling $25,000. Around the same time, RNSEC transferred $1.2 million to the Texas Republican Party, which in turn donated $1.3 million to 20 legislative candidates that year, according to federal and state records.
Public records do not track the final destination of the Enron contribution. But Republican National Committee spokeswoman Christine Iverson said any corporate money sent to Texas by RNSEC was spent only for allowable purposes.
In 2001, DeLay assisted Enron in its efforts to secure deregulation legislation. Houston business lobbyist Anne Culver also sent executives at Enron and other energy firms an e-mail in March of that year stating that "Mr. DeLay is interested in what he and the other congressmen may be able to due [sic] legislatively to assist in addressing some of the issues we have" with new pollution-control rules.
DeLay's daughter, Dani Ferro, played a role in arranging access for corporations that gave money to DeLay's project and earned fees for planning fundraising events. On Oct. 10, 2001, Ferro called Enron's Washington-based lobbyists to remind them of an upcoming fundraising event in Florida. "As part of platinum sponsorship, we have the opportunity to have a dinner with Congressman DeLay either here or in Houston," said an e-mail from lobbyist Carolyn Cooney to colleague Linda Robertson. "Dani wants to know" when to schedule it, Cooney added.
Roy, the DeLay spokesman, said there was nothing unusual about DeLay's contacts with Enron, a major local employer that had not yet become notorious for accounting fraud.
Ferro, who has not been named as a target in the investigation but has turned over documents to the grand jury, declined to be quoted for this article.
For a Republican Majority
The efforts to collect money from Enron represented a small part of DeLay's overall campaign to build a GOP majority in the Texas House. DeLay conceived of TRMPAC as a way to counter Democratic spending and pour new money from corporations and their executives into the redistricting effort.
TRMPAC's startup expenses in 2001 were covered by $50,000 in corporate money from DeLay's principal political action committee, Americans for a Republican Majority (ARMPAC). A second payment of $25,000 was made in late 2002. TRMPAC then raised $525,000 in corporate money on its own, and spent less than $70,000 on its director's salary; the rest went mostly toward fundraising, receptions, polls, candidate evaluations, voter identification and private investigations of key Democratic candidates, according to files obtained by The Post.
TRMPAC's director was John Colyandro, a veteran of White House political adviser Karl Rove's direct-mail firm; one of its decision-makers was Jim Ellis, who runs DeLay's ARMPAC; and its chief corporate fundraiser was the same person who performed that function for ARMPAC. As it turned out, ARMPAC donated money to 15 of the same Republican candidates in Texas, sending along cover letters printed on TRMPAC stationery, lawyers said. No allegations of wrongdoing have been made about the ARMPAC donations.
DeLay chaired the TRMPAC advisory board, wrote his own cover letter for its fundraising brochure and received copies of memos that described Texas candidates being considered for TRMPAC funding. He also traveled to Texas to appear at fundraisers and meet with donors, flying at least once on a plane provided by a private company reimbursed by TRMPAC.
TRMPAC never incurred much in the way of expenses such as rent, utilities and supplies -- of the sort that the Ethics Commission says corporations are allowed to finance. "For all functional purposes," Colyandro said in his court deposition, it was run from the home office of its treasurer. Colyandro did not remember leasing any office space or paying a utility bill.
Colyandro set up a multi-tiered membership program for corporate donors: $100,000 bought a "private dinner" with board members such as DeLay, and $50,000 guaranteed a "special dinner" including two other contributors. But even smaller sums brought access: Jack Dillard, a Philip Morris official, sent $10,000 to TRMPAC in July 22, 2002, and in a letter expressed thanks "for the invitation to meet Congressman DeLay in Austin next week."
Some corporations were careful to specify that their contributions were solely meant to defray legally permissible administrative expenses. TRMPAC solicitations being investigated did not mention the restrictions. For example, DeLay was the featured "special guest" at a fundraising luncheon for TRMPAC at the Houston Petroleum Club, where donors were asked to contribute $15,000 to be considered a co-chair and $25,000 to be listed as an underwriter.
"Corporate checks are acceptable," the invitation stated, according to a copy obtained by The Post.
TRMPAC's appeals worked. More than $254,000, out of a total of $600,000, was collected from 14 corporations between the middle of May and early September in 2002. Only two were headquartered in Texas -- a beer distributor and a builder of prisons; the others were mostly firms with regulatory or policy interests in both Washington and Texas.
For example, Westar Energy, which in 2002 sought a federal tax break, gave $25,000 to win "a seat at the table" during congressional deliberations about the provision, even though it had no business in Texas, according to an internal company e-mail that surfaced in a criminal probe. Its executives joined DeLay -- and top officials from other TRMPAC contributors -- at a golf resort in Puerto Rico owned by a TRMPAC contributor that year. DeLay supported the tax break Westar wanted.
Two other internal documents point to heavy involvement by DeLay in TRMPAC's activities. State Rep. Dianne White Delisi, a TRMPAC board member, told oilman T. Boone Pickens in a letter before the 2002 election that "House Majority Whip Tom DeLay agreed to help us and has been an ardent advocate for us by raising money, making phone calls, serving as a special guest at events, and providing assistance with leading strategists," according to a copy. Pickens's company subsequently donated $5,000, and Pickens sent a personal check for $50,000.
A TRMPAC fundraiser also told members of its "finance" board around the same period that DeLay would participate in a conference call "to update everyone on TRMPAC's efforts to date and to discuss our strategy." Roy said DeLay appears to have participated in the call, adding that Delisi's letter accurately summarized DeLay's overall involvement.
RNC Involvement
Besides spending the corporate money it collected to benefit targeted candidates in 2002 -- through polls, fundraising events, voter identification efforts and investigations of Democratic opponents -- TRMPAC also sent corporate money to the Republican Party in Washington, starting a chain of events under review by prosecutors.
It worked like this: On Sept. 10, TRMPAC's director told its accountant that "a blank soft-dollar check" made out to the Republican National State Elections Committee should be sent overnight to Ellis, the ARMPAC director, at his headquarters in Washington, according to a copy of the director's e-mail. "Soft dollars" was a reference to corporate money. Ellis inscribed $190,000 on the check.
The national committee, in turn, sent the same total amount in seven checks ranging from $20,000 to $40,000 to Texas House candidates on Oct. 4, 2002, completing a transfer that Earle and others believe may have been intended to hide the corporate origins of the money and circumvent the law.
The RNSEC contributions were highly unusual. In no other instance did RNSEC spend more than $2,000 on a state legislative candidate in September, October or November; virtually all of its money went instead to Republican governors and attorneys general.
Earle is scrutinizing the Oct. 4 contributions and trying to determine who was involved in "the decision-making process," according to a copy of one of his subpoenas.
Iverson, the RNC spokeswoman, said the Oct. 4 donations were drawn from a non-corporate account, altogether different from the corporate-related account into which the TRMPAC check was deposited. The fact that the total incoming and outgoing amounts were identical was simply "coincidence," she said. She declined to make available documents she said would support the claim, citing the pending lawsuit.
Terry Scarborough, a lawyer for TRMPAC, similarly said he considers the transaction legal.
Jonathan D. Pauerstein, a lawyer for Ellis, who signed the TRMPAC check, said he also considers the transaction legal and noted that matching dollar exchanges of this kind between state organizations and federal parties are common among Democrats as well as Republicans. If they constituted improper laundering, "lots of Democrats and Republicans around the U.S. would have soap on their hands," he said.
Help From Friends
TRMPAC played a central, but not unique, role in DeLay's project, which included other political organizations and was assisted in the end by a key Texas lawmaker.
The nonprofit Texas Association of Business spent $1.9 million in corporate money in 2001 and 2002 to send 4 million letters to voters in many of the same districts where TRMPAC's efforts were concentrated. The group is now a target in the investigation, but its lawyer, Andy Taylor, said it is not subject to the same laws as TRMPAC and did nothing illegal.
The Texas lawmaker who played a critical role in the project was state Rep. Tom Craddick (R), a DeLay ally who was running for House speaker in 2002. On Oct. 21 of that year, TRMPAC sent checks for 14 Republican House candidates to Craddick's office; his office then mailed the checks. The grand jury is now looking into whether this or other actions taken in connection with the speaker's race amounted to using "money or things of value" to influence the outcome of the speaker's election, a violation of state law.
Craddick's lawyer, Roy Minton, said that "there is absolutely nothing illegal" about any actions Craddick took in connection with the race.
In all, 17 House members who received money from TRMPAC were elected. Craddick was elected speaker in a secret ballot, and in May 2003, as the redistricting plan came to the Texas House floor, he ordered state police to help track down Democratic lawmakers trying to boycott the vote. The effort was closely coordinated with DeLay, whose chief political aide Julie Ann Sullivan telephoned the Federal Aviation Administration to find a plane used by some of the Democrats.
The House approved the redistricting plan on Oct. 12, 2003. TRMPAC never reported the bulk of its corporate spending to the Texas Ethics Commission; it was reported only to the Internal Revenue Service, a discrepancy first noticed by a nonprofit advocacy group called Texans for Public Justice. Scarborough, the TRMPAC lawyer, said he believes reporting of this spending in Texas was not required by law.
But Karen Lundquist, the Ethics Commission's nonpartisan executive director, said all expenditures derived from corporate money -- whether for administrative purposes or not -- should have been reported. She also said the rules governing spending by political action committees are clear: Corporate money cannot be used for politically related expenses, such as fundraising and vote drives.
Staff researcher Lucy Shackelford contributed to this report.
-------- investigations
Report Says CIA Distorted Iraq Data
Senate Panel Cites Exaggerations in Paper Made Public in 2002
By Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, July 12, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A43220-2004Jul11?language=printer
In the only comprehensive assessment of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction released to the public before the war, the CIA exaggerated and distorted the evidence it had given Congress just days earlier, according to the Senate intelligence committee's report released last week.
The White Paper, released Oct. 4, 2002, and based on a classified assessment given to Congress, was the public's only look at the intelligence that policymakers used to decide whether Iraq posed enough of a threat to warrant immediate military action.
Yet the 28-page public document turned estimates into facts, left out or watered down the dissent within the government about key weapons programs, and exaggerated Iraq's ability to strike the United States, the investigation by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence found.
The heavily redacted White Paper section of the Senate report amounts to a pointed critique of the CIA's willingness to present an unbiased and objective account of the Iraqi threat to the American public.
It also raises questions about the CIA's selective declassification of material, a critique that was made by last year's joint Sept. 11 congressional inquiry and by the subsequent independent Sept. 11 commission.
In one case cited in the Senate report, a "key judgment" in the public document asserted that Iraq could quickly produce and weaponize "lethal and incapacitating biological weapons agents," including anthrax bacteria, "for delivery by bombs, missiles, aerial sprayers, and covert operations, including potentially against the U.S. Homeland."
The statement, the report said, "conveyed a level of threat to the United States homeland inconsistent with the classified National Intelligence Estimate."
The classified version, the Senate report noted, asserted that Iraq would try such attacks "if Baghdad feared an attack that threatened the survival of the regime were imminent or unavoidable, or possibly for revenge," and that such attacks would be carried out by special Iraqi forces or intelligence operatives.
Three days after the public document was released, President Bush said in a major speech to the nation in Cincinnati: "Iraq could decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorists. Alliance with terrorists could allow the Iraqi regime to attack America without leaving any fingerprints."
The report also notes that the White Paper dropped such qualifiers as "we judge" and "we assess," making best estimates appear as fact.
Thus the classified report's language, "We assess that Baghdad has begun renewed production of mustard, sarin, cyclosarin, and VX . . . " became "Baghdad has begun renewed production . . . "
Also, the words "we have little specific information on Iraq's CW [chemical weapons] stockpile" were removed from the unclassified paper.
"Removing caveats such as 'we judge' and 'we assess' changed many sentences in the unclassified paper to statements of fact rather than assessments," the report noted. In doing so, the White Paper "misrepresented [the intelligence community's] judgments to the public," the Senate panel concluded.
The national intelligence officer who wrote the White Paper told the committee that dropping "we judge" and "we assess" from the public version was done for stylistic reasons. At the time the White Paper was written, he told the panel, he was unsure whether it would be released by the intelligence community or by the U.S. government, in which case using "we" would not make sense.
The committee, however, noted that an unclassified White Paper issued in 1998 "contained other words which expressed the uncertainty behind the IC [intelligence community] judgments without using the word 'we.' " For example, it referred to world experts and said "they believe" or "the evidence strongly suggests" and "Iraq could."
A particularly controversial section of the NIE was the debate over Iraq's attempts to obtain high-strength aluminum tubes for centrifuge rotors as part of its nuclear program. The classified version for lawmakers noted that the Department of Energy, the government's best experts on nuclear technology, "assesses that the tubes probably are not part of the [nuclear] program."
The unclassified White Paper said only: "Most intelligence specialists assess this to be the intended use, but some believe that these tubes are probably intended for conventional weapons programs."
Eliminating the names of the dissenting agencies or excluding dissent altogether, as the paper did on the issue of whether Iraq was developing unmanned aerial vehicles to deliver lethal agents abroad, "provided readers with an incomplete picture of the nature and extent of the debate within the Intelligence Community regarding these issues," the Senate report said.
The NIE assembled the analyses of several U.S. intelligence agencies, including the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Energy Department's intelligence unit, which monitors nuclear matters. It was the most extensive intelligence assessment of Iraq's chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs to be made public in several years.
The CIA began work on a public document after the agency's deputy director at the time, John E. McLaughlin, attended a White House meeting at which National Security Council deputies requested such a paper. Work on the document began in May 2002, months before the classified NIE was requested by the Senate intelligence committee.
Then-CIA Director George J. Tenet resisted producing the NIE for Congress. Had the classified version not been produced, it would have been much more difficult to detect the distortions between what the intelligence community believed in private, and what it gave to the public.
When the public White Paper version was released in October, it sparked strong protests from Democrats on the Senate intelligence panel who had the classified version. They believed the public document slanted the case toward the administration's view of the Iraqi threat. In particular, Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.), the panel's chairman at the time, pushed the CIA to declassify more information.
Four days later, Tenet, in a letter to the committee, released more information. Among the new items: The CIA believed that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein would be unlikely to initiate a chemical or biological attack against the United States unless provoked by U.S. military actions.
"Should Saddam conclude that a U.S.-led attack could no longer be deterred," he might launch a chemical-biological counterattack, Tenet's letter said.
Hussein also might "decide that the extreme step of assisting Islamist terrorists in conducting a WMD [weapons of mass destruction] attack against the United States would be his last chance to exact vengeance by taking a large number of victims with him."
The CIA also declassified other elements of analysis that seem to back up the president's assertion that Iraq has active ties to al Qaeda -- a growing feature of the administration's case for considering military action. Among the intelligence assessments linking Iraq to al Qaeda is "credible reporting" that the group's "leaders sought contacts in Iraq who could help them acquire WMD capabilities," according to the letter. The Senate's request and Tenet's letter came when an increasing number of intelligence officials, including former and current intelligence agency employees, were concerned the agency was tailoring its public stance to fit the administration's views.
Yesterday, speaking on NBC's "Meet the Press," the Senate committee's chairman, Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), said that had Congress known before the vote to go to war what his committee has since discovered about the intelligence on Iraq, "I doubt if the votes would have been there."
Roberts characterized some of the redacted parts of the Senate report as "specific details that would make your eyebrows even raise higher."
---------
VOICES
Intelligence Findings Sway Few, but Add to Anxieties
July 12, 2004
By MONICA DAVEY
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/12/politics/12VOIC.html?pagewanted=all
CHICAGO, July 11 - As Americans learned details of a Senate committee report that found flaws in the intelligence used to justify the war in Iraq, many who had always staunchly favored an invasion said that their support remained firm, and many who had strongly opposed the war said the report merely added to their list of reasons.
But for the people in between - those whose opinions about Iraq have changed, sometimes more than once, over 16 months of conflict - the conclusion that government assessments of Iraq's weaponry were overstated stirred new uncertainty and anxiety, renewed sadness over lives lost, and a sense of helplessness about when and how the conflict would end.
This weekend, seated on a park bench not far from Lake Michigan, Max Sanjuan, 32, recalled how in March 2003 he supported going to war. As time passed and stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons were not found, doubts began to creep up. Then on Friday came the Senate Intelligence Committee's findings.
"It's getting scary to even think about," Mr. Sanjuan, a stock trader, said. "Hopefully we did the right thing, but this doesn't give me much faith."
Eating lunch nearby, Mark Hall, 49, said he remained a proud supporter of President Bush and nearly all of his administration's decisions, but was starting to wish that events could somehow be rewound.
"I never like to see our boys get hurt, but especially now that we know all this," Mr. Hall, an unemployed car salesman, said. "I guess I wish now that we hadn't gone in, in the first place."
"And of course we can't leave now," he said. "We're there. So what are we going to do about it?"
In dozens of interviews this weekend, people from San Francisco to Miami spoke of broad concerns, too, about the intelligence failings pointedly described in the committee's 511-page report. What, some asked, did it signify about the government's larger understanding of world events? What did it mean for the reliability of intelligence on Osama bin Laden's whereabouts or on the nature or seriousness of terror threats?
In Richmond, Va., Celeste German, 35, said she was now unsure of what to make of government warnings, like one issued just Thursday, advising that Mr. bin Laden could be planning a terror attack in the United States sometime this year. "I don't know if we should believe it," she said.
And at a bookstore in South Florida, Maria De Los Rios, 28, a legal assistant, said she found the intelligence failings frightening for what else they might imply.
"If it takes them over a year to realize they've made a mistake, I can't even imagine what other mistakes they could make," she said. "We're supposed to have the best intelligence in the world."
Across the country, many of those who had strongly supported the war all along seemed unfazed by the committee's findings that the government's prewar claims about unconventional weapons in Iraq were not backed up and that, despite the comments of some administration officials, intelligence agencies had found only tenuous ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda. Regardless, these people said, Saddam Hussein needed to be removed.
"I have a lot less confidence in the C.I.A. now, but I still believe the people in Iraq are better off," said Tom Oglesby, 45, a vegetable farmer and high school agriculture teacher in Hillsboro, Ohio.
And in Pensacola Beach, Fla., where thousands packed the shoreline for the Navy's Blue Angels aerobatics show, Chris Williamson, 24, said simply: "Bush is doing a great job. So what if there is no weapons of mass destruction?"
Likewise, those who had long opposed the war in Iraq viewed the Senate report as a predictable, final proof that American soldiers should never have been sent there. Some complained, too, that the Senate committee had decided to wait several months before addressing an issue they consider crucial: how the Bush administration had used the intelligence agencies' assessments as it went into war.
"It seems to me clear that the Bush people wanted to go into Iraq, and nothing was going to stop them from going into Iraq," said David Hunt, 48, a high school art teacher in Kansas City, Mo.
In San Francisco, Allen Gross, 56, said the findings were, sadly, what he had seen coming. "There were no surprises," said Mr. Gross, who works as a stagehand. "Just disappointment and disgust."
Many people had critical words for the state of the country's intelligence agencies and for George J. Tenet, who formally stepped down Sunday as director of the C.I.A.
James Bratcher, 53, a private security officer from Farmington, Ga., argued that America's intelligence operation needed more money and more highly qualified employees. "Any president can only react on any information he is given," Mr. Bratcher said.
But others said President Bush was ultimately responsible for the failings of the agencies.
"The captain of the ship is responsible whether he knew about it or not," said Gregg Schobinger, 35, of Aurora, Colo.
Although most people viewed the committee's findings through the prism of their own political leanings, a smaller group said they were still weighing the newly disclosed intelligence lapses, the war itself, and how all of that might play into their political choices.
Sonny Patrick, a 50-year-old secretary in Chicago, said she has "gone back and forth, back and forth" on the question of war during the past year. The flawed intelligence, she said, left her once more wondering what to think - both about war and about the coming presidential election. "I need to think some more," she said quietly.
For some with family and friends in the military, news of the flawed intelligence hit particularly hard. Some remembered hundreds of American soldiers who have died in Iraq, and wondered how their families must feel now. Some wondered whether service people in Iraq had read about the Senate report yet, and what they must be thinking.
Steven Hawthorne, 34, of Dallas, said he served in the military during the first war in Iraq more than a decade ago.
"I feel for the soldiers there," he said. "I hurt for them."
News of the flawed intelligence would be disheartening, he said. Soldiers need to know that the cause they are fighting for is real, he said. "It's like rushing into a house with a search warrant, and it's really for a house two doors down."
Reporting for this article was contributed by Lisa Bacon in Richmond, Va.; Anne Berryman in Athens, Ga.; Duwayne Escobedo in Pensacola, Fla.; Laura Griffin in Dallas; Carolyn Marshall in San Francisco; Yudy Pineiro in Miami; Alberto Salvato in Cincinnati; Mindy Sink in Denver; and Toni Wood in Kansas City, Mo.
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Final 9/11 Report Is Said to Dismiss Iraq-Qaeda Alliance
July 12, 2004
By PHILIP SHENON
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/12/politics/12panel.html?pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, July 11 - The commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks is nearing completion of a final, probably unanimous report that will stand by the conclusions of the panel's staff and largely dismiss White House theories both about a close working relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda and about possible Iraqi involvement in Sept. 11, commission officials said.
The report, which is expected to be made public several days before the panel's mandated deadline of July 26, will also probably be unwelcome at the White House because it will document management failures at senior levels of the Bush administration that kept the government from acting aggressively on intelligence warnings in the spring and summer of 2001 of an imminent, catastrophic terrorist attack, the officials said.
Campaign advisers to Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, the presumed Democratic presidential nominee, have said they eagerly await the commission's report, believing it will damage President Bush by showing that he and his senior aides were inattentive to dire threats before Sept. 11 and may have misled the nation about the reasons for the war in Iraq.
At the commission's request, the White House in April declassified and made public an intelligence report given to Mr. Bush on Aug. 6, 2001 - 36 days before the attacks - that was titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." Commission members said the final report would not single out government officials by name for intelligence or law enforcement blunders before Sept. 11. But they said the report would criticize several agencies for their performance in both the Bush and Clinton administrations, especially the F.B.I. and the C.I.A., and call for an overhaul of the nation's counterterrorism efforts.
The officials declined to detail the report's recommendations but said they would call for a shakeup of the F.B.I.'s domestic counterintelligence program and for equally broad changes at the C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies, possibly by adding to the authority of the director of central intelligence to oversee the work of agencies beyond the C.I.A.
The panel's expected call for change at the C.I.A. would be bolstered by the findings of a Senate intelligence committee report that was made public on Friday, which blamed the agency for systematically exaggerating the evidence that Iraq had stockpiled chemical and biological weapons and was pursuing nuclear arms, the central justification for last year's invasion.
"We don't need to point fingers in our report, because people will be able to judge the facts for themselves," said John F. Lehman, a Republican commissioner who was Navy secretary in the Reagan administration.
Mr. Lehman has said that he expects the commission's work to result in "revolutionary" changes in the government's intelligence community. "The editorializing has shrunk and shrunk and shrunk as the facts before us have expanded and expanded and expanded," he said.
Timothy J. Roemer, a Democratic commissioner who is a former House member from Indiana, said he expected the final report to be unanimous and to call for "dynamic and dramatic changes in the intelligence community - changes in tradecraft and also nuts-and-bolts changes."
The panel's staff created controversy last month with an interim report that largely discounted theories about close ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda, another major justification cited by the Bush administration for invading Iraq.
The staff report found that there was "no credible evidence that Iraq and Al Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States" and that repeated contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda "do not appear to have resulted in a collaborative relationship."
The staff also said that it did not believe a widely circulated report from Czech intelligence that a ringleader of the Sept. 11 attacks met in Prague with an Iraqi intelligence officer in April 2001, suggesting Iraqi involvement in the attacks.
The findings were in marked contrast to statements by President Bush and, more often, Vice President Dick Cheney, who has been the administration's lead spokesman in arguing that an alliance existed between Iraq and Al Qaeda.
Though Mr. Cheney insisted that he had no major differences with the commission and that the debate was being mischaracterized in news reports, the vice president responded to the staff report last month by telling a television interviewer that "there clearly was a relationship" between President Saddam Hussein of Iraq and Al Qaeda and that "the evidence is overwhelming," noting that he "probably" had access to intelligence information not reviewed by the commission. He also insisted that the Czech intelligence report might be credible.
Despite initial suggestions from the commission's leaders that they might rewrite the staff report to limit its conclusions that discounted a possible Iraq-Qaeda tie, commission members and the panel's chief spokesman said last week that the panel had decided to stand by the staff in the final report.
That reasoning was bolstered last week by the findings of the Senate intelligence committee, which cited several classified intelligence reviews prepared by the C.I.A. after Sept. 11 that suggested that evidence of a close relation between Iraq and Al Qaeda was "murky" and at times contradictory. The Senate committee said the C.I.A. had "reasonably concluded" that contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda "did not add up to an established formal relationship" between Mr. Hussein and the terror network.
''We believe we have seen everything now that the vice president has seen and we continue to stand on the staff statements," said Al Felzenberg, a commission spokesman.
He suggested that the commission's final report would go further than interim staff reports in documenting contacts over the years between Iraqi government and military officials and Al Qaeda's leadership. This may placate the White House to some extent by showing extensive communication between Iraq and Qaeda leaders.
"We expect the final report to enumerate on some of the contacts that were made between Iraq and Al Qaeda, and there were a number of points of contacts,'' Mr. Felzenberg said.
Commission members met in Washington last week to decide on the final wording of several chapters of the report. Several said afterward that they were increasingly optimistic that any differences between the five Democratic and five Republican members could be set aside and that they could agree on a unanimous report and on recommendations for overhauling the F.B.I., the C.I.A. and other counterterrorism agencies.
They noted, however, that they had not concluded their deliberations of some of the central policy recommendations, and that those issues were so contentious that they could prove to be a stumbling block to a unanimous report.
''We're still working through final iterations, but I think that on the main points, there seems to be consensus,'' said Richard Ben-Veniste, the former Watergate prosecutor who is a Democratic member of the panel. ''This commission operates on a very collegial basis, and I have found that talking through these issues has produced much more that we find in common than in opposition.'' Mr. Roemer said his "optimism is growing every day" about the possibility of a unanimous report.
The commission is trying to complete its work and publish the final report sometime during the week of July 18, to avoid being overshadowed by news from the Democratic convention, which opens on July 26.
Mr. Felzenberg said that the White House - through the office of Andrew H. Card Jr., President Bush's chief of staff - appeared ready to move quickly to declassify chapters of the report as they are completed by the commission. "I can say it's going smoothly," he said.
Under a procedure established by the commission last year, the White House has reviewed and declassified 17 interim staff reports released by the commission at a series of public hearings since January.
The commission has said that as it completes chapters of its final report, they will be given to the White House for a final security review. Commission officials said that since so much of the final report is built upon information in interim reports that have already been declassified, the final review process would be relatively straightforward.
Mr. Felzenberg said that the commission's staff investigators had essentially finished their work, though they would keep gathering information until shortly before publication of the final report.
The White House said last week that Condoleezza Rice, President Bush's national security adviser, had recently provided the panel with written answers to a final set of questions submitted by the commission. The White House and the commission would not describe the issues raised by the panel in its questions to Ms. Rice.
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Senators press for release of FBI terrorist report
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
By Jerry Seper
July 12, 2004
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20040712-121949-4162r.htm
Two senior Senate Judiciary Committee members want the Justice Department to release a newly completed classified report on the FBI's handling of information it received prior to the September 11 attacks, including an agency memo on Zacarias Moussaoui and information about two of the al Qaeda hijackers.
Sens. Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, the committee's ranking Democrat, and Charles E. Grassley, Iowa Republican, said in letters Friday to Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III that the report includes terrorist information "that was not acted upon, or not acted on in the most effective and efficient manner."
The report includes information on the FBI's handling of the so-called Phoenix memo; the handling of information about Moussaoui, the only person charged in connection with the September 11 attacks; and the FBI's investigation into two of the September 11 hijackers, Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almihdhar.
The senators also want the release of two other reports that involve accusations made by a former contract linguist, Sibel Edmonds, about problems in the FBI translation program, and an audit of the FBI's overall translation program.
The reports were conducted by the Justice Department's Office of Inspector General (OIG).
"We have been informed that all three of these reports are classified and that there are no plans at this time for the OIG to release to the public any unclassified information," the senators said.
"As a result, the information gathered in these investigations, which is of significant public interest and is critical to effective congressional oversight of the FBI and other federal agencies, will not be made available to the public," they said.
The senators said the release of the report on what pre-September 11 information the FBI possessed was critical as the committee attempts to understand "how important clues were overlooked and how we can protect Americans by preventing such failures from occurring in the future."
The Phoenix memo was written by FBI Agent Kenneth Williams, who notified senior agency officials in Washington in July 2001 that followers of Osama bin Laden were training at a flight school in Arizona. Although Mr. Williams said eight suspected terrorists were training, senior FBI officials did not follow up on the information.
Those same FBI executives never connected Mr. Williams' memo with the August 2001 arrest of Moussaoui, a French Algerian who raised suspicion when he attempted to seek training at flight schools in Oklahoma and Minnesota. Although Moussaoui, who paid cash for flight lessons, had little aptitude for flying, he asked specific questions about piloting a plane over New York, and about how to open the cabin doors on a Boeing jet.
Alarmed, the school contacted the FBI, who arrested Moussaoui on immigration charges.
After learning from French intelligence that Moussaoui had been associated with members of an Algerian terrorist group, FBI agents in Minneapolis tried to obtain a warrant to search the hard drive on Moussaoui's computer. The request was denied by FBI executives in Washington.
In June 2002, Coleen Rowley, a veteran FBI agent, told the Senate Judiciary Committee that senior bureau chiefs mishandled a pre-September 11 probe by field agents of Moussaoui because a "climate of fear" inside the FBI had inhibited aggressive investigations.
Mrs. Rowley said the agency was bogged down by an "ever-growing bureaucracy" with multiple layers of senior managers in critical decision-making positions, and FBI field agents were subjected to make-work paperwork and seldom communicated concerns about ongoing investigations to senior supervisors.
She said senior officials in Washington derailed the agents' efforts to obtain a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant to search Moussaoui's computer, even rewriting the warrant application. Lawyers at FBI headquarters said there was insufficient probable cause.
Moussaoui, 34, was indicted in December 2001 by a federal grand jury in Alexandria on six counts of conspiracy. He is awaiting trial in the case in Virginia.
"While the needs of national security must be weighed seriously, we fear the designation of information as classified in some cases serves to protect the executive branch against embarrassing revelations and full accountability. We hope that is not the case here," the senators said.
-------- propaganda wars
Antiwar Group Says Its Ad Is Rejected
July 12, 2004
By RAYMOND HERNANDEZ and ANDREA ELLIOTT
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/12/nyregion/12billboard.html?8hpib=&pagewanted=all&position=
A group of antiwar advocates is accusing Clear Channel Communications, one of the nation's largest media companies, with close ties to national Republicans, of preventing the group from displaying a Times Square billboard critical of the war in Iraq.
The billboard - an image of a red, white and blue bomb with the words "Democracy Is Best Taught by Example, Not by War" - was supposed to go up next month, the antiwar group said, and it was to be in place when Republicans from across the country gathered in New York City to nominate President Bush for a second term.
But members of the group, Project Billboard, contend that Clear Channel backed out of a leasing agreement last month that the two had reached in December for the billboard site, on the Marriott Marquis Hotel at Broadway and 45th Street.
A Project Billboard spokesman, Howard Wolfson, said the group planned to file a lawsuit today in federal court in Manhattan charging Clear Channel with breach of contract and asking it to live up to what the group said were the terms of the deal.
Last night, the president and chief executive of Clear Channel, Paul Meyer, said the company had objected to the group's use of "the bomb imagery" in the proposed billboard. Mr. Meyer said Clear Channel had accepted a billboard that would replace the bomb with a dove. However, he said, any billboard at the site required the approval of the Marriott Marquis management, which he said also objected to the bomb.
"We have no political agenda," Mr. Meyer said. "It's the bomb imagery we objected to."
A spokeswoman for the hotel, Kathleen Duffy, said that the management considered the ad with the bomb "inappropriate," but that it had not seen the version with the dove.
Told of Mr. Meyer's comments, Mr. Wolfson said that earlier, Clear Channel had rejected the ad with the dove as well as the one with the bomb, demanding that the words be changed, too. "It's news to us, and not reflected in any prior communications between Clear Channel and Project Billboard," Mr. Wolfson said last night. "This contradicts Clear Channel's demand that the copy be changed."
The dispute had led members of the antiwar group to accuse Clear Channel of censorship.
"I think the idea that political advertising is banned from some part of New York City would be repellent to New Yorkers," Mr. Wolfson said. "I guess we can have a war, but we can't talk about it."
This is not the first time that Clear Channel, one of the nation's largest owners of radio stations, has found itself in the middle of a debate over free speech and censorship.
The company has been accused of using its radio stations to rally support for the war in Iraq, while trying to silence musicians who oppose it.
The company's critics point out, for instance, that some Clear Channel country music stations stopped playing the songs of the Dixie Chicks last year after the group's lead singer, Natalie Maines, told fans during a London concert, "We're ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas."
The company's critics also point out that the Federal Communications Commission is considering regulations that would make it easier for companies like Clear Channel to own more television and radio stations.
But even some of its fiercest critics agree that some claims against Clear Channel are overstated. As it turns out, for example, its stations were only sporadically involved in a boycott against the Dixie Chicks.
Part of what may be fueling speculation about the company's motives is the close relationship that its executives have with the Republican Party and the Bush administration. In the 2000 and 2002 election cycles, for instance, the company and its officials donated slightly more than $300,000 in unregulated money, almost all of it to Republicans, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, an organization in Washington that monitors political contributions.
In addition, Tom Hicks, the Texas Rangers' owner who has longtime ties to President Bush, is a top executive at Clear Channel.
Project Billboard's representatives said the contract they signed in December with Spectacolor, a division of Clear Channel, required the antiwar group to pay $368,000 to use the billboard space from Aug. 2 through Nov. 2, Election Day.
But they said Spectacolor began balking after company officials saw the ad that included the image of the bomb. The group then sent a second ad, which replaced the bomb with a red, white and blue dove accompanied by the same words, but Mr. Wolfson said that was also rejected.
A lawyer for Project Billboard, Doug Curtis, said that at one point Clear Channel suggested that the group use a less provocative billboard ad, one with the image of a little girl waving a flag accompanied by the words, "Democracy is best taught by example."
Mr. Curtis said that earlier this month, a vice president for marketing for Spectacolor and Clear Channel, Barry Kula, sent the group an e-mail message that said, in part, "We hope you will appreciate that New York City has endured a horrific attack and businesses in this area that serve a wide array of clientele are extremely sensitive to references to war."
Project Billboard's director, Deborah Rappaport, indicated that the reaction of Clear Channel executives was not a complete surprise given what she described as its poor record on free expression. "This is not the first time," she said. "They try to suppress speech with which they don't agree."
The dispute between Clear Channel and the antiwar group drew a mixed reaction yesterday from visitors in Times Square.
When shown a printed copy of the antiwar ads that Clear Channel is said to have rejected, Nene Ofuatey-Kodjoe, 36, of Stamford, Conn., became visibly upset. "Clear Channel should not have a position one way or another about what they put up there as long as it's not obscene," he said.
He also scoffed at the alternative billboard proposed by Clear Channel, with a little girl waving the flag. "All the fence-sitting is what has gotten us to where we are today," he said. "You have got to take a stand."
Terry and Jim Baugh, two Californians strolling north on Seventh Avenue, said the image of the bomb bordered on treason. "That looks like they're trying to blow up America," said Mrs. Baugh, 59, a retired dental hygienist.
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Bush Insists He Has Made America Safer
July 12, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/politics/politics-campaign-bush.html
OAK RIDGE, Tenn. (Reuters) - Under fire for intelligence failures at home and abroad, President Bush tried on Monday to convince American voters he has made them safer since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and told them ``we were right to go into Iraq.''
Faced with polls that show many believe the terror threat against them has increased due to the Iraq war, Bush argued that wars against Iraq, Afghanistan and al Qaeda have made them safer, as has diplomacy that led Libya to surrender its weapons of mass destruction programs.
``Today because America has acted, and because America has led, the forces of terror and tyranny have suffered defeat after defeat, and America and the world are safer,'' Bush told employees at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where components of Libya's nuclear program are being stored.
Bush's war against terrorism was supposed to be an easy sell on the campaign trail, and is an important plank of his re-election effort.
But the Iraq war has spawned doubts among Americans. In a recent NBC News/Wall St. Journal poll, 51 percent of Americans said they felt the threat of terror was increased, not reduced.
His Democratic opponent, Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, responded by saying Bush's policies had made the country less safe by failing to secure nuclear material that could fall into the hands of terrorists and by allowing North Korea to become more of a threat.
``It's not enough just to give speeches. America will only be safer when we get results,'' he told reporters in Boston.
'REMOVED A DECLARED ENEMY'
A Senate intelligence committee report last week said U.S. intelligence agencies overstated the threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, one of the White House's chief justifications for the war which removed Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein from power. None was ever found.
``Although we have not found stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, we were right to go into Iraq,'' Bush said. ``We removed a declared enemy of America who had the capability of producing weapons of mass murder and could have passed that capability to terrorists bent on acquiring them.''
Democrats have used the report to accuse Bush of exaggerating evidence used to justify war against Iraq. Republicans said the Bush administration was a victim of bad intelligence.
Bush said that his policies since the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington have led to an Afghanistan headed toward elections and cooperation against al Qaeda with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.
But problems persist in Afghanistan's attempt to hold elections after years of Taliban rule. A bomb blast killed at least five people and wounded 34 in the western Afghan city of Herat on Sunday, raising new concern about security for landmark polls in October.
Bush said al Qaeda was receiving help three years ago from inside Saudi Arabia with little opposition and that the Saudi government is now going after al Qaeda in its own country. Critics say Saudi Arabia only began responding in earnest to the al Qaeda threat after repeated attacks by militants.
After taking a look at centrifuge parts intended for use in Libya's nuclear weapons program, Bush said its decision to disavow unconventional weapons was ``encouraging evidence that nations can abandon these ambitions and choose a better way.''
-------- us politics
NEWS ANALYSIS: THE INTELLIGENCE
Bush's Pre-emptive Strategy Meets Some Untidy Reality
July 12, 2004
By DAVID E. SANGER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/12/politics/12PREE.html?pagewanted=all
Even as President Bush turns his doctrine of pre-emptive action against powers threatening the United States into a campaign theme, Washington is using a far more subdued, take-it-slow approach to the dangers of unconventional weapons in Iran and North Korea.
There are many reasons for the yawning gap between Mr. Bush's campaign language and the reality. One of the most important is woven throughout the searing, 511-page critique of the intelligence that led America to war last year, released Friday by the Senate Intelligence Committee.
The report details, in one painful anecdote after another, misjudgments that the C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies made as they put together what the committee called an "assumption train" about Iraq's nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs. That same train powered Mr. Bush's own justification for a pre-emptive strike against Saddam Hussein, down to his now-discredited argument that the Iraqi leader was developing unmanned aerial vehicles capable dropping biological weapons on American troops in the Mideast, or perhaps even the United States itself.
The sweeping nature of that report is already fueling a new debate over pre-emption, on the campaign trail and among the nations the United States must convince as it builds its case against North Korea and Iran. On Sunday, Senator Pat Roberts, the Republican chairman of the intelligence committee, said on NBC's "Meet the Press" that the urgency of those problems meant there was not much time to fix the intelligence community.
"Let's do it very quickly," he said, "because in a dangerous world, if you're going to have a policy of pre-emption, whether it be North Korea or whether it be whatever threat we face," including a possible terror attack on the United States before the election, "we have to get it right."
Mr. Bush's aides say other countries are citing Iraq to make the argument that America can never again be sure it is getting it right and thus must back away from the pre-emption doctrine enshrined in Mr. Bush's 2002 "National Security Strategy of the United States."
China has been the most outspoken proponent of this view, suggesting publicly that the administration cannot be trusted when it asserts that North Korea has secretly started up a second nuclear weapons program - one based on enriching uranium. Administration officials say the Chinese are exploiting the Iraq findings for political convenience, because finding a solution to the North Korean problem will be far simpler if the evidence of a uranium program can be ignored.
"It hurts us, there is no question," a senior aide to Mr. Bush conceded on Friday, as the Senate report was published. "We already have the Chinese saying to us, `If you missed this much in Iraq, how are we supposed to believe that the North Koreans are producing nuclear weapons?' It just increases the pressure on us to prove that we are right."
Iran is making a parallel argument. It admits - even boasts about - its efforts to enrich uranium, which it hid for 17 years from international inspectors until the evidence became overwhelming last year, forcing the country into a reluctant confession. Now the Iranians argue that the United States is riding another "assumption train," this time racing to the conclusion Iran's real goal is making a weapon, rather than seeking an alternative way to produce electricity.
In the cases of North Korea and Iran, the basis for the American charges is far stronger than it was in Iraq: Inspectors have seen and measured fissile material in both nations, and visited facilities capable of making more.
Yet so far, the International Atomic Energy Agency - which in retrospect largely got it right in Iraq - has declined to back the United States. "We all think the American assessment is probably right because there is no other good explanation for the Iranian activities," one senior international diplomat involved in the search for evidence in Iran said the other day. "But we still don't have the smoking gun." He said that after the Iraq experience, "We need smoking guns more than ever."
In public, Mr. Bush's language about responding to threats is as black and white as it was before his administration's case about the threat posed by Mr. Hussein began to crumble.
"September the 11th, 2001, taught a lesson I will never forget," Mr. Bush said recently while campaigning in Cincinnati. Using a line that often turns up in his stump speech, he continued: "America must confront threats before they fully materialize. In Iraq, my administration looked at the intelligence and we saw a threat."
But, in noncampaign contexts, Mr. Bush says there are many ways to disarm a country, and on Monday he is going to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, a center of nuclear weapons technology, to speak about his counterterrorism strategy. Oak Ridge is the repository of the centrifuges, raw uranium and other nuclear equipment that the United States shipped out of Libya this year, in the most conspicuous success story yet of how to disarm a country without attacking it.
Mr. Bush is urging Iran and North Korea to follow the same path. So far, neither has indicated it would. And so far, the president's aides say, Mr. Bush has purposefully avoided making the kinds of threats that he made to Iraq. One reason is a military reality: Iran could strike back against Israel or American forces in the region, and North Korea could inflict huge damage on Seoul, the capital of South Korea.
But Mr. Bush's position on Iran and North Korea may also have something to do with election-year politics. His challenger, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, has made clear that he will make a major issue of both the intelligence failures and what he termed in a recent interview the administration's "foolhardy rush" to embrace a pre-emptive attack against Iraq.
The Democratic Party platform is expected to include a sentence declaring that the "doctrine of unilateral pre-emption has driven away our allies," and Mr. Kerry argued in the interview that while he would reserve the right to act pre-emptively, he would never make it a core doctrine of American foreign policy.
Mr. Bush and his aides argue that would be a huge mistake. In the old understanding of pre-emption, they argue, a country could see an army massing and then decide whether to strike in advance. In the age of terror, there would probably be no such obvious warning. Mr. Bush sees that as a reason for broad presidential latitude. But it is more unclear than ever before how any president can make that judgment with an intelligence system that is widely viewed as badly broken.
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Democrats Drop Antiwar Pretensions
antiwar.com
by Caleb Ewing
July 12, 2004
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/ewing.php?articleid=3009
Saturday at the Westin Diplomat hotel outside Fort Lauderdale, Fla., the Democratic Party finalized its platform for the upcoming Democratic National Convention to be held in Boston later this month. Progressives and peace lovers - mostly Kucinich and Dean supporters - didn't get much at all. Not only does the platform not call for the U.S. to leave Iraq ASAP, it is also loaded with militarism and calls for the U.S. to advance democracy abroad through force.
It was a sad outcome for progressives. This wholesale rejection of our cause and values stung deeply. We were shocked, in fact, and many of us cried when we realized that not only did our amendments lack the support necessary for passage, but we also lacked even the minimum support required to debate the amendments.
Since the primaries, the Progressive Caucus has worked tirelessly for the cause of peace and justice and for the Democratic Party to define itself in opposition to the wars of aggression in which we are currently engaged. We have been fighting for respect and inclusion. We have been fighting for the enlightened ideals of Dennis Kucinich and Howard Dean. We have been advocating a Department of Peace, and arguing for a better, more civilized America. In all this we lost. For all our efforts, amendments proposed, and quid pro quos offered, we were given only a single, very minor, language adjustment to one of our proposed amendments. In this one instance, when we asked for the following language:
"[W]e must announce our intention to set a date for the withdrawal of our military forces,"
we were instead given
"[T]he U.S. will be able to reduce its military presence in Iraq, and we intend to do this when appropriate so that the military support needed by a sovereign Iraqi government will no longer be seen as the direct continuation of an American military presence."
This new language is not exactly predicated on the notion that attacking Iraq was an illegal and immoral mistake in the first place.
And so it went, amendment after amendment, all unseen, none debated. Forgotten for now is justice in Palestine, the Department of Peace, a scaled-back military, the proscription of preemptive war, the legitimacy and primacy of international law, etc., etc.
We are diehard Democrats, and even though some of us felt stretched to the breaking point by the sustained cold shoulder of the Democratic Party power elite, our Progressive Caucus leadership quickly scrambled to put a positive spin on the process. To wit: even though we were all but marginalized and ignored in the platform, and even though we got practically nothing in the end, the fact that we took part in the process and formally accepted nothing is evidence of a working relationship with the Kerry camp that will bode well for us once Kerry is elected.
I don't know if I believe that. If the upcoming election proves to be a referendum on the war, and I think it might be, then Democrats have not sufficiently differentiated themselves from Republicans for Kerry to win.
-----
Bush makes blocked judges a key issue
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
By Bill Sammon
July 12, 2004
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20040712-121949-3939r.htm
President Bush has decided that excoriating Democrats for blocking his judicial nominees is a potent political strategy that he will exploit in both the presidential race and congressional elections.
The Bush campaign thinks the Democratic ticket of Sens. John Kerry and John Edwards is particularly vulnerable on this issue because Mr. Edwards sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee.
"It's just another example of how they stand out of the mainstream," said Mathew Dowd, the Bush campaign's chief strategist. "They stand out in blocking judges that have been highly qualified in various states."
He added: "We will talk about it more in the months ahead."
Mr. Bush first resurrected the issue last week, when visiting Mr. Edwards' home state of North Carolina. The president met with his judicial nominees in that state and then railed against the two Democratic candidates for preventing them from getting up-or-down votes in the Senate or, in some cases, even hearings by the Judiciary Committee.
"They're the ones blocking the nominees in the first place," Mr. Bush said. "Take for example here in North Carolina. Senator Edwards will not allow two of the nominees to whom I referred to even get to the committee for a hearing."
Mr. Bush then traveled to Michigan, where he met with another batch of blocked nominees and renewed his criticism of Democrats.
It is a strategy that paid dividends in the midterm elections of 2002, when aggressive campaigning by Mr. Bush led Republicans to historic victories. At almost every stump appearance, the president talked about judges.
"There's no doubt in my mind that we won races all throughout the country" on the issue, White House political strategist Karl Rove told The Washington Times earlier this year. "We won the Senate race in South Carolina - judges; won the North Carolina race - judges; won the Georgia race - judges."
Mr. Rove said voters responded enthusiastically whenever Mr. Bush invoked the issue.
"If he said judges, people cheered," he said. "They didn't know exactly what it was, but they'd know that something was fundamentally flawed with the courts, that we've got a bunch of judicial activists, that Bush could be trusted to appoint good people to the courts, and there was something stinky about how all these people were being held up."
It was no accident that Mr. Bush began railing against Democrats on the issue of judges just one day after the Senate narrowly confirmed one of the president's judicial nominees, Arkansas lawyer Leon Holmes. Mr. Holmes was the last in a batch of 25 judicial nominees who received votes in the Senate as part of a deal in which Mr. Bush agreed not to make any more recess appointments.
Mr. Holmes, a staunch opponent of abortion, was approved by a vote of 51-46 after apologizing for writing in 1980 that rape victims rarely get pregnant. Mr. Kerry and Mr. Edwards did not vote on the nomination because they were campaigning.
"I am pleased that the Senate recently voted on 25 of my judicial nominees," the president said in Michigan. "That was a welcome step. Yet, it's not enough."
Mr. Bush said some senators are still "playing politics" with judicial nominees.
"They don't appreciate the fact that I named judges who will faithfully interpret the law, not legislate from the bench," he said. "They apparently want activist judges who will rewrite the law from the bench."
Mr. Dowd suggested that the president was just getting warmed up.
"This is an issue that's important to highlight," he said. "We will talk about it again." Out of the 254 nominees sent by the Bush administration to the Senate, nearly 200 have been confirmed. Six nominees to the circuit court have been denied confirmation votes; two of those nominees were subsequently appointed by Mr. Bush during a Senate recess, but have yet to be confirmed. Dozens more have been stalled in the Judiciary Committee.
•Staff writer Charles Hurt contributed to this story.
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Conservative roasts Bush on war
ASSOCIATED PRESS
July 12, 2004
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20040712-121947-1527r.htm
An influential group of conservatives who gather in downtown Washington each week often gets a political pep talk from a senior Bush administration official or campaign aide. They don't expect a fellow Republican to deliver a blistering critique of President Bush's handling of the Iraq war.
But nearly 150 conservatives listened in silence recently as a veteran of the Nixon, Ford and Reagan administrations ticked off a litany of missteps in Iraq by the Bush White House.
"This war is not going well," said Stefan Halper, a deputy assistant secretary of state under President Reagan.
"It's costing us a lot of money, isolating us from our allies and friends," said Mr. Halper, who gave $1,000 to George W. Bush's campaign and more than $83,000 to other Republican causes in 2000. "This is not the cakewalk the neoconservatives predicted. We were not greeted with flowers in the streets."
Conservatives, the backbone of Mr. Bush's political base, are increasingly uneasy about the Iraq conflict and the steady drumbeat of violence in postwar Iraq, Mr. Halper and some of his fellow Republicans say. The conservatives' anxiety was fueled by the Abu Ghraib prisoner-abuse scandal and has not abated with the transfer of political power to the interim Iraqi government.
Some Republicans fear angry conservatives will stay home in November, undercutting Mr. Bush's re-election bid.
"I don't think there's any question that there is growing restiveness in the Republican base about this war," said Mr. Halper, the co-author of a new book, "America Alone: The Neoconservatives and the Global Order."
Some Republicans dismiss the rift as little more than an inside-the-Beltway spat among rival factions of the Republican intelligentsia. Indeed, conservatives nationwide are still firmly behind Mr. Bush. A Pew Research Center poll last month found that 97 percent of conservative Republicans favored Mr. Bush over the presumptive Democratic nominee, Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts.
But anger is simmering among some conservatives.
"I am bitterly disappointed in his actions with this war. It is a total travesty," said Tom Hutchinson, 69, a self-described conservative from Sturgeon, Mo., who posted yard signs and staffed campaign phone banks for the Republicans in 2000. Mr. Hutchinson said he did not believe the administration's stated rationales for the war, in particular the argument that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.
Mr. Hutchinson, a retired businessman and former college professor, said his unease with Iraq may lead him to do something he has not done since 1956: avoid the voting booth in a presidential election.
Jack Walters, 59, a self-described "classical conservative" from Columbia, Mo., said he hadn't decided which candidate to vote for.
"Having been through Vietnam, I thought no, never again," Mr. Walters said.
-------- OTHER
-------- environment
Judge Halts Mine Waste Dumping in West Virginia Streams
July 12, 2004
WASHINGTON, DC, (ENS)
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/jul2004/2004-07-12-09.asp#anchor3
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers can no longer allow coal companies in West Virginia to bury free flowing mountain streams with mining waste using a "streamlined" general permit, after three environmental groups won a court decision on Thursday. In U.S. District Court for the Southern District of West Virginia Judge Joseph Goodwin sided with the environmental groups, ruling that the Corps' nationwide permitting of valley fills violates the Clean Water Act.
Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition and Coal River Mountain Watch sued the Corps alleging that Nationwide Permit 21 was illegal when used to authorize the dumping of mining waste in streams after removing mountaintops to access the coal within.
"Nationwide Permit 21 does not comply with the plain language, structure, and legislative history of the Clean Water Act. Section 404(e) of the Clean Water Act authorizes the Corps to issue nationwide permits only for those activities determined before issuance to have minimal environmental impact," the court ruled.
"Go tell it on the mountain: the Bush administration's rubber stamp used for destroying West Virginia's waterways has been revoked," said Daniel Rosenberg, a senior attorney in NRDC's clean water program. "The court agrees that the Clean Water Act doesn't allow the Corps of Engineers to issue short-cut permits so that coal companies can bury Appalachian streams under mining waste."
Not only is the Corps barred from authorizing any future valley fills under Nationwide Permit 21 in West Virginia, but the judge also ordered the agency to revoke previous authorization for 11 permitted mountaintop removal mining operations that would have destroyed more than 26 miles of Appalachian streams in the state.
The largest of the 11 operations that have been halted is the Fola Coal Company's Surface Mine No. 4a project. Involving the relocation and reconstruction of the Right Fork of Leatherwood Creek and Rock Lick Creek and the construction of five sediment control structures, it would have impacted 35,590 feet of U.S. waters.
Mountaintop removal is a process in which coal companies blow up mountaintops to access thin seams of coal beneath the surface. Although the companies replace some of the debris on the mountaintop after removing the coal, they dump the rest of the rocks and dirt in nearby valleys. These "valley fills" bury streams under tens of thousands of tons of waste rock and dirt, killing all aquatic life below.
For years, the Corps of Engineers has granted coal companies permits to destroy more than 1,200 miles of Appalachian streams under the nationwide permitting program (NWP 21), which is intended only for small fills that have "minimal adverse environmental effects."
"This huge court victory blocks the valley fills already authorized by the Corps and prevents the agency from authorizing any new fills," said Joe Lovett, executive director of the Appalachian Center for the Economy and the Environment. "This decision won't stop mining in West Virginia, but it will finally force the Corps and Big Coal to comply with the law."
-------- health
Annan Urges Greater Efforts Against AIDS
By Ellen Nakashima and David Brown
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, July 12, 2004; Page A10
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A43301-2004Jul11?language=printer
BANGKOK, July 11 -- U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan urged stronger leadership from the grass-roots level to the heads of government to reverse the global AIDS epidemic as he opened the 15th international conference on the disease Sunday night.
"AIDS is far more than a health crisis," Annan told a crowd of more than 17,000 cheering delegates. "It is a threat to development itself."
Annan said it was appropriate that the conference was being held in Asia, where one in four infections in the world occurred last year. "There is no time to lose if we are to prevent the epidemic in Asia from spinning out of control," he said.
Three years ago, the United Nations, during the first General Assembly session devoted to a disease, pledged to deliver the money and action needed to beat AIDS, he recalled.
Progress has been made, he said. "Significant new resources have been pledged" through the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, he said, and most countries have adopted strategies to tackle the disease, "yet we are not doing nearly well enough."
The world is falling behind in reducing the scale and impact of the epidemic, he said, referring to the World Health Organization's goal of helping governments and organizations put 3 million people in poor countries on life-prolonging antiretroviral drugs by 2005. A U.N. report issued before the conference said 38 million people worldwide were estimated last year to have HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.
A top priority must be the training and recruitment of health care workers to support treatment and prevention programs, Annan said, including ensuring that infected health care workers have access to treatment. In many hard-hit countries, he said, "AIDS drives a cruel and vicious circle by striking at those who are most badly needed to fight the epidemic."
Annan noted that women account for about half of all adult infections; in sub-Saharan Africa they make up about 58 percent of cases. Among people younger than 24, girls and women make up nearly two-thirds of those living with HIV, he said.
Stronger leadership at every level is needed, he said, to stem the pandemic, which has killed 20 million people since 1981. "There must be no more sticking heads in the sand, no more embarrassment, no more hiding behind a veil of apathy," Annan said.
The meeting is taking place against a backdrop of tension over the role of the United States, the wealthiest and most powerful country, in the global AIDS fight. This year, the U.S. government sent one-quarter as many people to the conference as it did to the meeting two years ago in Barcelona. At that event, activists heckled Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy G. Thompson. U.S. officials said the reduced delegation this year was a cost-saving move, not a snub.
At a news conference Sunday afternoon, Joep Lange, president of the International AIDS Society, which is co-chairing the conference, called the slimming-down of the U.S. delegation "shameful" and "tragic." He lamented that "people in the field who have to do the job are directly prevented from coming here."
During a morning news conference convened to highlight research published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, JAMA editor Catherine D. DeAngelis said a scientist from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who had co-written a paper on preventing HIV transmission from mothers to newborns was not allowed to attend. The association had offered to pay the scientist's way, DeAngelis said.
Ronald O. Valdiserri, head of the CDC delegation, said he had offered to send a scientist from the agency who was not part of the research team to the news conference. JAMA officials declined, and instead had a co-author, Mardge H. Cohen, of Cook County Hospital in Chicago, present the findings, which will appear in this week's issue of the journal.
About 1,000 activists marched outside the convention hall Sunday afternoon, urging increased access to cheaper drugs, condoms and clean needles. "Medication for all nations!" they shouted. "Bush tells lies, condom saves lives," read one placard.
During the opening ceremony, Thailand's prime minister, Thaksin Shinawatra, endorsed Annan's call for strengthened leadership. Thailand, which slashed HIV infections by about 86 percent from 1991 to 2003, has been hailed as a model for the rest of the world. Thaksin said Thailand was committed to universal access to antiretroviral drugs, with a target of reaching 50,000 people this year. He also said that his government would give excess drugs to Laos, Burma and Cambodia, countries bordering Thailand that face significant challenges in fighting the disease.
During part of Thaksin's address, activists booed and unfurled a large black banner saying "Thaksin Lies." Human rights activists have charged that an aggressive drug crackdown in Thailand had driven users underground, where they are harder to reach. More than 2,500 people have been killed in the country's war on drugs. Human rights groups say many of the deaths were extrajudicial killings, but the Thai government insists that most were the result of violence among drug dealers.
In other developments, Richard Feachem, executive director of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, urged the United States to rapidly approve generic drugs for poor nations.
Brown reported from Washington.
-------- ACTIVISTS
Vet believes in peace - how very threatening
July 12, 2004
Doug Grow,
Minneapolis Star Tribune
http://www.startribune.com/stories/462/4872822.html
Now John Varone, a man of peace, has some peace again. The media, national and local, have moved on.
Varone, president of the local chapter of Veterans for Peace, was caught in the spotlight on the Fourth of July weekend when a newspaper reporter called him and asked about a promotion being sponsored by the Minnesota Twins. The Twins, as a so-called tribute to U.S. troops, were giving away a G.I. Joe doll to children attending the July 5th game.
Varone, a draftee who served in Vietnam for a year (1969-70), answered the question, but tried to add context about his organization's position. But context was stripped away from his answer.
What was left was this: "I think the Twins are way off base with this idea. For gosh sakes, the last place we need to promote war is at our national pastime."
The ink was barely dry on those few lines of type when Varone's phone started ringing. Fox, CNBC, ESPN were calling for comments. And Varone became a punching bag for conservatives who dominate American talk radio. He quickly was labeled everything from a crackpot to a threat to national security.
What is it about peace lovers that so many find so threatening?
It's a question Varone tussles with. So far, he's come up with no answers.
"What bothers most is the accusation we don't support the troops," Varone said. "It's a replay of the old 'Love it or Leave it' syndrome. The thing is, we are for the vets. We especially want to take care of the kids when they come home."
Varone said he understands how complex the scars of war can be. He came home from Vietnam and battled alcohol for 22 years, he said. There were other demons, too, which didn't reveal themselves for years after his service ended.
A lifelong hunter, Varone said he was hunting small game near Chaska seven years ago. Two helicopters flew over him. Suddenly, he said, he was sweating heavily and "stalking" the game.
"I sold the guns," he said. "Now I fish."
At so many levels he lives in the mainstream. Varone, a finance specialist in the Scott County Social Services Department, also is president of the county public employees union. He and his spouse, Becky, a social worker, are collectors of antiques.
"I like to collect old fruit jars," he said. "I guess that really makes me a dangerous radical."
But there are aspects of his life that separate him from most of us.
For example, there's a coffin in his garage. At one point, the coffin was simply used as a prop at antiwar demonstrations.
But when the administration blocked photographers from taking pictures of the coffins carrying home the remains of U.S. troops, Varone started writing the names of those killed on the surface of the coffin.
"At first, it was a task that I felt I had to do," Varone said. "We had to do something to show that these are not just numbers. I'd put down about 100 names, and then it became something more than a task. Now, it's something spiritual for me. It's very important. I put my hand on the coffin and think about each name. I say, 'We have to remember you. We can't ask anything more of you.' "
Sweet. Moving.
But it's far more than most of us do. We proclaim our appreciation for sacrifice being made by troops, then, we go to a ballgame or go shopping.
What's wrong with Varone? Why does he go so much further?
"I'm simply trying to show comradeship with these young people," he said. "I once carried a gun. I think I have a pretty good idea what they're going through. They're terrorized. They're in a place where they don't know who the enemy is. It is important we think about, and remember, each of them."
He is frustrated by the presidential campaign to date because there's no real debate about the war.
"They only talk about who's more patriotic," Varone said.
There's no campaign discussion of depleted uranium, another big issue of Vets for Peace and other organizations. (Depleted uranium is used by the military for such things as armor-piercing shells. The radiation from the depleted uranium lingers long after the fighting stops. Many believe this radiation will prove fatal, over time, to friend and foe.)
When the reporter called to ask about the G.I. Joe giveaway, Varone said he tried to talk about meaningful issues like depleted uranium and the Veterans for Peace freshwater project in Iraq.
He said he tried to talk about how his organization supports vets in ways far more meaningful than most Americans muster.
"When they do come home, our soldiers are going to need the support of all of us," he said. "And they're going to need our hugs."
Dangerous character, this Varone.
Doug Grow is atdgrow@startribune.com
----
NYALA JOURNAL
Singers of Sudan Study War No More
July 12, 2004
By MARC LACEY
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/12/international/africa/12SUDA.html?pagewanted=all
NYALA, Sudan - Before they head out to battle, the militiamen who have been rampaging through the Darfur region in Sudan sit down together on straw mats and listen to songs of war.
Until recently, Fatima Mohamed Sanusi was one of those who used her melodious voice to stir up ferocity in the Arab militiamen. She is a hakamah, a traditional Sudanese singer, and war songs are just a small part of a repertory that includes songs of love, mourning and celebration.
But there has been plenty of fighting lately in this harsh area near the border with Chad, and Ms. Sanusi, like so many other hakamah, has been belting out war song after war song.
Making up the lyrics as she goes along, she has sung of bravery and strength. She has sung of the need to stick up for the tribe. She has sung of the courageousness of past generations.
Her songs, and those of other hakamah, have had their intended effect.
The Arab militias, full of pride and fury, have driven more than one million black Africans from their homes since early 2003, causing a crisis for civilians that the United Nations says is without parallel anywhere in the world.
The fighting is partly a result of a rivalry over resources between groups of Muslims in Darfur. The Arabs are nomads who have long competed for land with black African farmers, also Muslim.
A rebel movement started last year by black Africans here brought the situation to a boil. The rebels say black residents of Darfur have been marginalized by the federal government in Khartoum, which is dominated by Arabs.
Eager to crush the rebels, government soldiers have joined forces with the Arab militias, which are known as Janjaweed. The result has been fierce fighting that has left Darfur in tatters. Most of the victims have been black African villagers caught in the cross-fire.
After so much bloodshed, Ms. Sanusi and some of the other hakamah in Darfur say they have been wishing they could take back their songs. Mostly elderly women, hakamah play an essential role in maintaining the traditions of Sudan's many Arab tribes. They are regarded as wise women who have special insight into the world.
Their change of heart was not accidental though.
In an effort to calm tensions here, the Peace Studies Center at the University of Nyala recently invited Ms. Sanusi and 29 other hakamah to a special two-day workshop for influential community leaders. There were lectures on the history of the conflict and pleas to the hakamah to use their considerable power for good.
Initially, organizers of the workshop said, the hakamah denied that they were to blame for the violence. But as the discussions progressed, one of the hakamah eventually broke down in tears and acknowledged her role in the fighting.
By the end, all the participants agreed that they could do far more than they had been doing to spread nonviolent messages in their songs.
"They are very respected," said Ashwag Elnour, director of the government-financed peace center. "People listen to their songs and follow what they say."
Ms. Sanusi, now well into her 70's, said that "when I was very small, I took care of the cows," and that the training to become a hakamah "began back then."
She learned to sing and dance, waving her hair in the air and gyrating her neck. As she grew, she polished her ability to come up with poetry on the fly, singing words to help babies enter the world, to honor those who had died and to mark community celebrations.
Eventually, after years of training, community elders tapped Ms. Sanusi as a full-fledged hakamah.
She now rewards generosity, bravery and other acts of virtue with songs of praise. Dishonorable acts are denounced through lyrics that send shame to the perpetrators and their kin.
Hakamah are more than poets and singers. They are community judges, of sorts, admired and feared by those who join them around the straw mat.
The songs of the hakamah reach every tribe member's ears, and who would not want one's name lauded in lyrics that float from the throat of the hakamah into the desert night?
"My authority in the tribe is indirect," said Ms. Sanusi, her weathered face peering out of a long yellow robe decorated with brown flowers. "I sit in the tribe and watch the people. If someone does something wrong, I say a poem about it. I change his attitude. If someone is not generous, if he keeps all his money to himself, I'll say something. If someone is not brave in war, I'll say something about him."
These days, however, Ms. Sanusi and the other hakamah who attended the peace workshop devote much of their attention to one topic.
Ms. Sanusi and four other hakamah from South Darfur gave a demonstration the other day. They sat on a straw mat outside the peace center in Nyala, all dressed in bright multicolored robes. Their fingers and toes were tattooed with elaborate designs. It was their voices, though, that were most arresting.
Singing and chanting in Arabic, one after another they showed how hakamah can sing as persuasively about peace as they can of war.
"May the children grow with no fighting in their lives," sang Shara Muhammad Farah-Aldoor.
"What happened to you, Sudan?" sang out another, Zaida Hamad Jabro. "We mourn the deaths. We long for an end to war."
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