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NUCLEAR
The cancer risk from plutonium exposure
Frantic search for lost data at Los Alamos
Kyrgyz-German uranium processing project gets experts' approval
Gulf War Veterans More Likely to Report Ill Health
Israeli Scientific Research:
Nevada Waste Site Plan to Proceed Despite Ruling
UC appoints security aide
U.S. Nuclear Lab Temporarily Halts Secret Work
Two Missing Nuclear Fuel Rods Found at Vermont Yankee
Ruling on Nuclear Site Leaves Next Move to Congress
MILITARY
Afghan Leader Cracks Down on Militia to Disarm
Kabul Vigilantes Said to Dupe Peace Force
Guns Worn In Open Legal, But Alarm Va.
Israel helped set up Singapore army, say former officers
House Passes Bill to Finance Development of Bioterrorism Antidotes
Probe clears Blair of deliberate distortions on Iraq
Britain's Iraq Data Deemed 'Flawed'
British Report Faults Prewar Intelligence but Clears Blair
Make a Killing From Antiterrorism
Sailing Toward a Storm in China
Czech roops to remain in Iraq until 2005
Car Bomb Kills 11 in Baghdad
Bombing Kills at Least 10 and Iraqi Leader Vows to Hit Back
Iraq Blast Kills 10; Headless Body Found
Israeli missiles rain down on Gaza
In Chaos, Palestinians Struggle for a Way Out
New Group Helps U.S. Jews Move to Israel
No requests for US troops to provide Olympic security
Lawyers sue U.S. government for 15 Guantanamo detainees from Yemen
New Zealand jails alleged Israeli spies
Acting Chief Insists Agencies Aren't at Fault in War Debate
Iraq Forms New Spy Agency, Car Bomb Kills 10
Mossad Risks Slip - Ups in Race Against Qaeda, Iran
Miltary Recruitment in the US. - Jo Wilding
National Guard Allows Army Vets Who Feel Deceived to De-enlist
Missing Marine Returns to the U.S.
City Has 5-Year Expansion Plan for Navy Yard Industrial Park
Pentagon War Game Based on China Threat to Taiwan
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Convention's Security Praised
Report: U.S. Cancels Air Passenger Screening Upgrade
Immigrant Smuggling Targeted
Mysteriously Purchased 3 Years Ago, Security Doors Elude Police
British Intelligence Warned Of Attacks in Baghdad
POLITICS
House Panel Reviews Iraq Prison Reports
PATRIOT Act Foes Lose Book Battle
Marriage amendment stopped
Cheney Insists He Will Be on GOP Ticket
U.S. Works to Sustain Iraq Coalition
Election Troubles Already Descending on Florida
ENERGY
Environmentalists Want Probe of Texas Power Plants
Chavez, Uribe discuss energy, border security
OTHER
Animal welfare groups threaten to sue US navy on harm to whales
'Superbug' Kin Infects Athletes, Kids
Mandela Lends Weight to Fighting Tuberculosis and AIDS
ACTIVISTS
Protesters? Where?
Police Offer Convention Demonstrators a Rally Site Far From the Garden
-------- NUCLEAR
The cancer risk from plutonium exposure
Thursday, 15-Jul-2004
News-Medical.Net
By Rob Edwards of http://www.newscientist.com
http://www.news-medical.net/?id=3348
Plutonium may be many times more dangerous than previously thought. The cancer risk from exposure inside the body could be 10 times higher than is allowed for in calculating international safety limits.
The danger is highlighted in a report written by radiation experts for the UK government, which has been leaked to New Scientist. The experts are unanimous in saying that low-level radiation emitted by plutonium may cause more damage to human cells than previously believed. Their opinion could provoke a rethink of the guidelines on exposure to radiation.
Several tonnes of plutonium have been released into the environment over the last 60 years by nuclear weapons tests and nuclear plants.
Concern over the harmfulness of plutonium is growing because of discoveries about the subtle effects of low-level radiation. Researchers in Europe and North America have shown that the descendants of cells that seem to survive radiation unharmed can suffer delayed damage, a phenomenon called "genomic instability" (New Scientist, 20 January 2001, p 4). Cells adjacent to those that are irradiated can also sustain damage, known as "the bystander effect". And an increase was found in the number of mutations in small pieces of DNA called mini-satellites that are passed from one generation to the next. The fear is that these effects could trigger cancers and other ill effects.
The report, which is due to be published in the next few months, has been drawn up by the Committee Examining Radiation Risks from Internal Emitters (CERRIE). The committee includes 12 specialists from the UK government's National Radiological Protection Board, the nuclear industry, universities and environmental groups.
All members of the committee agree that the margin of uncertainty over the risks of plutonium and similar radionuclides inside the body "could extend over at least an order of magnitude". This "should be borne in mind by those making judgements and policy decisions on low-level internal radiation", says CERRIE's chairman, Dudley Goodhead, the former director of the UK Medical Research Council's Radiation and Genome Stability Unit at Harwell in Oxfordshire.
-------- accidents and safety
Frantic search for lost data at Los Alamos
Director of UC-run lab called to S.F. for meeting with regents
Thursday, July 15, 2004
Keay Davidson,
San Francisco Chronicle Science Writer
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/07/15/MNGKE7LMNK1.DTL
The loss of two storage devices containing classified data at a University of California-run nuclear weapons laboratory is another blow to a university system trying to hang onto its half-century management of the lab.
The devices have been missing for at least a week at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, and investigators say they are almost literally turning the lab upside-down in an effort to find them. They're even receiving help from a special team of investigators from Washington that U.S. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham sent to New Mexico shortly after learning of the loss.
Los Alamos officials declined to say Wednesday whether the loss of the devices could threaten U.S. national security. Many such devices at the lab contain information on weapons ranging from chemical explosives to thermonuclear bombs capable of vaporizing cities.
"I can't be specific what the data consists of, I'm sorry. All I can say is this is a very serious issue," Los Alamos spokesman Kevin Roark told The Chronicle. He added: "The search does continue. It is possible that they may never be found."
Among the immediate repercussions:
-- The UC Regents and UC officials have summoned Los Alamos lab Director George "Pete" Nanos to San Francisco to explain what's gone wrong at the lab. Nanos is to testify in a public session after 10 a.m. today at a UC facility at 3333 California St.
-- UC's contract for managing the lab should "immediately" be terminated by the Energy Department "before they further put our national security at greater risk," Executive Director Danielle Brian of the Project on Government Oversight, a Washington-based nonprofit group that exposes what it calls abuses and mismanagement by federal agencies, said in a statement Wednesday. The current Los Alamos contract runs out in September 2005, and UC officials have not announced formally whether they'll compete for the next contract.
-- UC's dwindling political support within the U.S. Energy Department apparently has eroded further. Abraham is "extremely displeased" by the loss of the devices, his spokesman Joe Davis said Wednesday.
Over the past two years, Abraham has grown increasingly angered by security problems at the lab, including revelations of missing documents at Los Alamos and issues around the safety of storing plutonium at Livermore. Last year, the scandals helped inspire Abraham's decision to call for opening future contracts to run Los Alamos to bidders other than UC. Yet he recently pleased UC by extending its contract to run the Bay Area's Lawrence Livermore nuclear weapons lab for another two years.
A team from the U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration, ordered to the New Mexico lab by Abraham, already is helping with the investigation, Davis said.
The missing devices are identified as Classified Removable Electronic Media or CREMs, lab officials said. Officials refuse to describe their exact nature or contents.
The story began brewing late Friday afternoon when the lab issued a press release acknowledging that "two items of Classified Removable Electronic Media (CREM) were discovered missing from the Weapons Physics (WP) Directorate. An immediate search did not locate the items. A subsequent and extensive search is currently continuing."
The umbrella term "CREMs" refers to a wide range of electronic devices that can store computer data -- ranging from floppy disks to large, hard disk drives -- and that can be removed from one computer and installed in another.
Roark also acknowledged that, in a related recent incident, lab officials failed to find two computer hard-disk drives in their accustomed places. After a search that lasted "a couple of hours," investigators found the disk drives in a safe place.
Roark said an investigation of the latter incident is under way. If anyone is found to be responsible, he or she might be fired, he added. However, there is no reason to believe the hard drives were misplaced for suspicious or nefarious reasons, he added.
Officials with the Project on Government Oversight accused Los Alamos Wednesday of covering up the brief loss of the hard disk drives. Roark denied this, stating that Energy Department regulations don't require such missing materials to be reported as missing for 24 hours.
Since they were found sooner than that, "those items were, in fact, not considered 'missing,' " Roark said.
The group's statement blasted Los Alamos management and UC: "Los Alamos and the University of California had assured the government that this type of security failure could never happen because of a fail-safe system which was put in place after the Wen Ho Lee debacle in 1999 and the missing hard drives incident (which were later discovered mysteriously behind a copy machine) in 2000."
The Lee case involved a Los Alamos scientist who came under suspicion as a possible spy. He was eventually freed.
Pete Stockton, an official with the nonprofit organization and former special assistant to Clinton administration Energy Secretary Bill Richardson, said: "We would fire the contractor (UC). This has gone on too long, they should be terminated immediately -- like Thursday, Friday! -- and have somebody else run it." Reaction From the Energy Department:
A spokesman said Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham is "extremely displeased."
From a watchdog group:
UC's contract at Los Alamos should be terminated immediately "before they further put our national security at greater risk."
From Los Alamos:
A spokesman said, "I can't be specific what the data consists of, I'm sorry. All I can say is this is a very serious issue. ... The search does continue.''
E-mail the Keay Davidson at kdavidson@sfchronicle.com.
-------- asia
Kyrgyz-German uranium processing project gets experts' approval
Thursday, July 15, 2004
By Associated Press
http://www.enn.com/news/2004-07-15/s_25868.asp
BISHKEK, Kyrgyzstan - A government-backed commission on Wednesday approved a project to process German uranium at a plant in northern Kyrgyzstan, saying it would not damage the environment.
The Kara-Balta Ore Processing Factory agreed in October 2002 to process graphite containing uranium from Germany-based RWE NUKEM GmbH in a US$1 million deal. But the project was put on hold while the Kyrgyz government considered its environmental impact.
The environmental commission concluded that the graphite was environmentally safe and that the project should go ahead, said Valeri Dil, the commission's head.
The commission, comprising government and independent experts, recommended that the government grant the company a license to start operations, Dil said.
Kyrgyzstan is home to huge uranium waste sites leftover from Soviet times when the country was a key supplier of uranium. Some waste sites in landslide-prone areas in the south are decaying, potentially threatening water supplies in Central Asia's Ferghana Valley, the region's most densely populated area and agricultural heartland.
In June the World Bank approved a US$8.9 million grant to rehabilitate radioactive waste sites in Kyrgyzstan.
-------- depleted uranium
Gulf War Veterans More Likely to Report Ill Health
REUTERS USA:
July 15, 2004
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/26036/newsDate/15-Jul-2004/story.htm
NEW YORK - Findings from the largest study ever of UK Gulf war veterans confirm that Gulf war veterans are more likely than other veterans to report ill health.
The findings are in agreement with numerous studies that have looked at ill health among Gulf war veterans. However, the authors note that the present study is the first to use "a questionnaire which did not focus specifically on the veteran's symptoms themselves."
The study, which is published in the journal BMC Public Health, involved more than 40,000 Gulf and non-Gulf veterans who responded to the validated questionnaire.
Dr. Rebecca Simmons and colleagues, from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, found that Gulf veterans were nearly three times more likely to report a new medical symptom or disease since 1990 than their non-Gulf peers. In addition, Gulf veterans typically reported more symptoms.
Gulf veterans were at particularly increased risk for mood swings and memory and concentration problems. Compared with non-Gulf veterans, Gulf veterans were about 20 times more likely to report each of these problems. In addition, reports of night sweats and general fatigue were increased by about 10-fold in the Gulf group and sexual dysfunction by about 5-fold.
Overall, 6 percent of Gulf veterans thought they had Gulf War syndrome and this was linked to the highest symptom reporting, the researchers note.
"Further research on the mechanisms underlying the reporting of ill health is required," they conclude, "and this will entail a more qualitative approach to the problem of Gulf War illness."
-------- israel
Israeli Scientific Research:
Negev and Arava Aquifer Radiation Caused by "Dimona" Waste
July 15, 2004
GAZA, (IPC + WAFA)
http://www.aljazeerah.info/News%20archives/2004%20News%20archives/July/15%20n/Israeli%20Scientific%20Research%20Negev%20and%20Arava%20Aquifer%20Radiation%20Caused%20by%20Dimona%20Waste.htm
An official Israeli scientific research asserted that a significant amount of radioactive material has leaked to the aquifer reservoirs in the areas of Negev and Arava, south of historical Palestine, due to the activity and increased nuclear waste production of the "Dimona" reactor, in the Negev Desert.
The research, which was jointly conducted by the Israeli Ben Gurion University, the Water Authority and the Center for Atomic Researches in Wadi Sureek, published its findings yesterday, in which it was revealed that there was a significant level of radiation in the aquifer reservoirs located in the Negev and Arava areas.
The researched noted that the radioactive water were not used for drinking, but used mainly in the fields of agriculture and fish-raising pools, which would mean there were fears of having contaminated fish or agricultural products.
The "Dimona" reactor, which operates under the name of "the Center for Nuclear Researches" at the heart of the Negev Desert, is surrounded by thick tall trees and bushes to keep it out of scene, not to mention the electrified barbed wire around it, the military patrols and anti-aircraft batteries.
Scientific reports and satellite images of the "Dimona" reactor indicated that this 40-year-old facility has entered the phase of strategic danger, as its assumed age has already expired ten years ago, and this has clearly resulted in the cracking of the reactor's core, and increased nuclear waste leakage.
Scientists have warned that if the Israeli government continued to operate this reactor, it might eventually become a second "Chernobyl", claiming the lives of hundreds of thousands or even millions, if any malfunction in its systems resulted in a meltdown.
Experts have mentioned that the infestation of carcinogenic tumors among the nearby inhabitants and personnel of this reactor has mainly resulted from the leaking of its nuclear waste to the surrounding environment, mainly the aquifer reservoirs.
While a report prepared by the Israeli Channel 2 TV revealed that dozens of "Dimona" personnel have actually died of different cancers due to the radioactivity leakage, the Israeli government and the reactor's administration refused to connect the deaths of those employees and their work at the reactor, as well as between their causes of death and the leaking radioactive materials from "Dimona".
Dimona Reactor... a Mystery Threatening the Middle East
International Press Center (IPC) September 18, 2003
Preface
"The Israeli nuclear reactor of Dimona is vulnerable to meltdown, like the Russian reactor of Chernobyl two decades ago, which caused a humanitarian and ecological catastrophe. If Dimona melts down, it would affect an area 500 aerial kilometers in radius, reaching Cyprus and the entire neighboring region", warned Dr. Yousef Abu Safiya, Head of the Palestinian Environment Quality Authority.
A recent study conducted by the Jordanian authorities after a request from the Palestinian Environment Quality Authority revealed that the Israelis are aware of the possibility of a meltdown in Dimona reactor, which in turn would affect the whole region, mainly the Jordanian southern city of Tafila.
The study also showed that radioactive substances are leaking from the Dimona reactor in a way that has increased rates of cancer diseases among nearby populations, particularly those of Tafila City.
What make these assumptions largely based on solid ground are the latest satellite images of the Dimona reactor, which showed that its walls have cracks, which cut its assumed age into half.
With thorough investigation into Dimona Israel's nuclear plant, one can observe the following facts: Location:
The location of Dimona's reactor in the Negev desert is a delicate one, situated between Egypt, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority's territories. The reactor was built in1963 , as part of a deal with France, who pledged to build the reactor in exchange for helping it and the United Kingdom in attacking Egypt in what was known as the 1956 -tripartite. As for funding the reactor's driving material, the United States took care of that, in addition to giving assistance with moving quantities of enriched Uranium to Israel.
The area on which the Dimona reactor is built on includes nine buildings, including the reactor building itself. Each building is tasked with producing a certain type of materials used to produce weapons of mass destruction, such as Plutonium, Lithium and Beryllium, used to manufacture nuclear bombs, in addition to producing radioactive Uranium and Triennium.
The Dimona reactor is considered to be the most mysterious secrets of the "nuclear world", as Israel categorically refused, since its establishment in 1948 and after building the reactor, any routine inspection that other reactors around the world goes through, which "forcibly" open their reactors' doors in fear of the American waving of the "club" of international resolutions.
No Inspection Beyond this Point!
Israel might be considered the only state that opposes to the inspection visits conducted by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) all over the world, added to its rejection, until this very day, to sign the treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, which was signed by all Arab states.
In spite of the complete American support for the Israeli policy, the Americans have expressed their concern over the reactor, as news revealed an American attempt to send some of its nuclear-program officials to inspect Dimona reactor apart from those working in the IAEA, but Israel refused to allow them in, continuing the reactor's legacy of being "visitation-proof", as only Israelis are allowed in.
The Fifth Nuclear Power
Israel is considered the fifth nuclear power in the world. In addition to owning nuclear bombs that can be dropped from the air, its nuclear arsenal includes also nuclear warheads that can reach a distance of1 , 500kilometers, using the Israeli-made "Jericho" missiles.
Estimations show that Israel is in possession of 200 nuclear bombs, but Arab sources indicate that Israel own massive quantities of Uranium and Plutonium that enables it of producing an additional 100 bombs. Israel, in the meantime, seeks to increase the production efficiency of its reactor to about three times its current efficiency -from 28 to 100 megawatts.
According to recent reports, the Israeli nuclear reactor consumed1 , 400tons of Uranium last year, which indicates that its efficiency might have reached 150 megawatts.
Dimona's Hazards
In a study requested by the Palestinian Ministry of Environment Quality from the Jordanian authorities, it was revealed that the average manifestation of cancer in the Al Tafila governorate, south of Jordan, is higher than the other Jordanian governorates and surrounding Arab countries.
According to Dr. Abu Safiya, high cancer rates were recorded in all the southern Jordanian governorates, which confirmed the possible direction of nuclear dust that might be leaking from Dimona.
It was recently revealed that five Israeli families lost their sons who worked in Dimona reactor, and they filed charges in the Central Court in Tel Aviv against the Israeli government and the reactor's administration, demanding compensations for the cancer that killed those workers due to radiation exposure.
According to the lawsuit, the prosecutors are relatives to five Israelis who worked for a long time in the nuclear "village": Ze'eiv Schforn, born in 1931 and started working in Dimona in 1962 as the head of the supply crew. He was diagnosed with abdominal caner in 1966 and died in1967 . The second employee was Simon Dray, born in 1942 and worked in Dimona from 1966 until 1992 in the cleaning and decontamination unit. In 1996 he was diagnosed with pharyngeal cancer, and died in1998 . The third was Moshe Zegori, born in1947 , and worked in the reactor from 1965 until1985 , also in cleaning and decontamination. Before he left his job he found out that he had a malignant tumor in his head, and died in1987 . The fourth employee was Yousif Cohen, born in1938 , and worked in the reactor from 1970 until1995 , in maintenance. In 1997 he was diagnosed with several malignant tumors, and died in1998 .
The fifth employee is still suffering from cancer in his body, and is constantly under treatment. He worked in the reactor from 1969 until1996 , in maintenance and mechanical engineering.
The prosecutors of those victims are demanding the Israeli government to take responsibility for their deaths, due to the radiation exposure they suffered inside the reactor, which caused fatal malignant tumors. At the same time, they claim that the reactor's administration didn't take enough precaution measures and never warned the employees about the radiation hazard.
Worn-out Reactor
As reports indicate, the reactor has become old now, as its isolation walls have worn-out, which might cause the leakage of some radiation from the reactor, a thing that will lead to devastating health and ecological damages to the surrounding area.
According to the reports also, the reactor suffers from a dangerous crack caused by "neutron" radiation, which caused structural damage, as neutrons cause small gas bubbles inside the concrete support, making it fragile and susceptible to cracking.
The United Arab Emirates-based "Al Bayan" newspaper revealed recently that a serious debate was going on now about whether to stop working in the reactor before the catastrophe occurs or not. Additionally, a report made the by Israeli second TV channel mentioned that dozens of the reactor's employees died of cancer, and that the reactor's administration refuses to reveal the true number of casualties and fatalities.
The Dimona reactor wasn't also immune to many working accidents that happened inside it, including the burning of hazardous and poisonous materials without providing the employees with suitable protective equipment, as many of them died because of that. As well, quantities of radioactive heavy water and nuclear waste leaked into a natural geographical hill extending along the reactor.
Expired!
By continuing to maintain and operate Dimona reactor, Israel is committing a crime against humanity that will be added to the atrocities it perpetrated along its history. Since1971 , the reactor has never been provided with new cooling towers, even though the reactor's efficiency has increased since then.
Dr. Abu Safiya pointed out that the most dangerous hazards of Dimona reactor is in the element producing Plutonium, which is used to make nuclear bombs. It's one of the resultant elements of Uranium DK dissipation, and it can be used to synthesize enriched Uranium. It contains 20 % out of the0 .05% Uranium, which is the highly radioactive substance that can be used in nuclear fission to manufacture either nuclear bombs or atomic fuel.
Abu Safiya warned that there's a regional and long-term threat in Dimona reactor, represented in the presence of these nuclear bombs in the possession of a country such as Israel, a thing that raises questions about the inspection visits in Iraq and demanding Iran to be inspected too, as well as surprise inspections by the IAEA officials, while Israel publicly admit to possessing nuclear weapons.
In response to that, Shimon Peres, temporary chairman of the Israeli Labor party, claimed that there's no comparison between Iraq and Israel, because, according to his claims, Iraq is ruled by a "dictator", while Israel is a "democratic" state!
Right after this statement, Israel used poisonous gases in the city of Khan Younis, which caused dozens of Palestinian citizens to suffer from unconsciousness and severe illnesses, added to the spasms and hysterical conditions some of them suffered from after inhaling such internationally-banned gases.
Commenting on this incident, Dr. Abu Safiya said that "we ascertained that these are nerve gases, by analyzing a specimen of the Israeli bombs that didn't burn completely. Through analysis, we revealed that it is composed of a group of nerve gases, due to which affected citizens suffered from spasms... this is an evidence against the state that Peres say it's "democratic", which used internationally-banned weapons against the Palestinian people."
Noteworthy that exposure to small amounts of radiation on the long run might pose a serious threat to embryos and children, as well as causing cancer.
Israel Least Damaged
Dr. Abu Safiya demanded the IAEA "if they truly seek integrity" to run checks in order to discover the level of radiation in the region around the Dimona reactor.
"If we conduct, for example, a Contour Survey for all directions to see the level of radiation and who's affected the most, we would find that Israel is the safest, having its population localities in the north far from the reactor. In addition,95 % of the wind direction in Palestine is northwestern, which is opposite to the Israeli population localities," Dr. Abu Safiya said.
The simplest radiation leak resulting from Dimona reactor is that of the depleted Uranium, which is of catastrophic implications, as it is considered one of the heavy elements that ruin kidney, liver and respiratory system functions, leading to death. Only one atom of radioactive Uranium is enough to cause fatal cancer.
What About the Reactor's Waste?
As for the waste products resulting from nuclear enrichment operations in Dimona reactor, Dr. Abu Safiya said that it's buried in areas near the Palestinian Authority controlled territories, as well as Jordanian and Egyptian ones, especially in those areas where the flow of aquifer water and direction of the wind is not in Israel's favor. A report by Israel's second TV channel revealed that Dimona reactor's waste products are buried in the areas east of the Al Bureij refugee camp and the town of Deir El Balah. Currently, the Palestinian Authority for Environment Quality is trying to get a permission to get water analysis equipment inside Gaza Strip to check these areas, but Israel is refusing.
"During the current Intifada, Israelis have buried nearly50 , 000tons of industrial chemical waste in Gaza Strip, only 30 meters deep, on an area of5 , 000square meters, as they stole the arable soil and moved it inside Israel and buried industrial waste in its place. This means that there's150 , 000cubic meters of poisonous waste buried in Gaza, which is a catastrophe. Moreover, Israel isn't affected by this waste because it was buried opposite to the flow of aquifer water," Abu Safiya narrated.
In the West Bank, most of what's buried is in the direction of the eastern hills, because it's not included in the Israeli-controlled lands, unlike the western hills. Now, the eastern hills are polluted with chemical waster and pesticides.
Covering Up for Their Crimes In Ramallah and Hebron, the Palestinian Authority had some basic equipment to measure radiation and environmental pollution. These equipment didn't only check radiation, but pollution in general, such as soil, water, air and chemical pollution.
In this subject, Dr. Abu Safiya said that small devices were discovered inside helicopters, which is used to regulate the fan's rotation, as well as providing the pilot with some technical data. These devices, if exposed to a person or played with by children, might lead to death or blood and gene mutations, as it contains radioactive materials. The Minister added that "after these devices wore out, the Israelis dump them in the Palestinian controlled lands, and we found three of these devices in Ramallah, one of which was in President Yasser Arafat's office 'Al Moqata'a'." Such devices were also found during the Israeli invasion of Ramallah City on March29 ,2002 , after the Authority received warnings of suspicious radioactive materials. When specialists from the Authority of Environment Quality reached the area and checked these parts, they found out that it contained glowing radioactive materials. The instruments those specialists had indicated that radiation levels exceeded the maximum limit. When the manufacturing company was contacted concerning that, the company replied that these parts were sold to the Israeli Air Force, and that it's used in helicopters of the type CH53.
As soon as the Israeli occupying forces invaded Ramallah, the radiation checking equipment were destroyed, including those equipment used to check the radioactive parts. Additionally, IOF blew up the environment laboratory in Hebron and Ramallah, and destroyed all the equipment by throwing them from the fifth floor.
Lately, a cargo of Israeli waste was uncovered in the city of Hebron, which was composed of 80 barrels, in addition to 120 others in the town of Al Ezareya, Jerusalem district. Furthermore, IOF moved in a cargo of2 , 500tons of radioactive base coarse, and the radiation was further confirmed when it was checked. The shipment was coming from Italy, and when the Israeli Ministry of Environment discovered that the radiation level of the base coarse was four times higher than that internationally allowed, the shipment was illegitimately diverted to Gaza City.
Unveiling the Hidden
The Israeli government has recently decided to boycott the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) after the latter made a documentary film about the Israeli nuclear weapons. Sources in the Israeli Foreign Ministry explained that the film is Anti-Semitic -an accusation used by Israel to anyone or anything that they don't like.
The BBC had broadcasted previews of the documentary film, in which the narrator's voice is heard on the background of the Israeli reactor core in Dimona and the photo of Mordechai Vanunu, who revealed the Israeli nuclear secrets, and the narrator asks: Which country in the Middle East possesses nuclear weapons without declaring that? Which country in the Middle East possesses the chemical and biological ability without declaring that? Which country in the world throws away the revealer of its nuclear secrets in jail for 18 years?
As for the producer of the documentary, he interviewed several senior Israeli officials, including that chairman of the Israeli Labor party, Shimon Peres, who is also considered the godfather of the Israeli nuclear program, and the man who created the nuclear reactor in Dimona. The producer asked Peres why Iraq aren't allowed to possess nuclear weapons while Israeli can, and the answer was clearly not satisfactory, and Peres found a claim to justify this question.
As for Mordechai Vanunu, who is staying in Israeli jails since1986 , as the Israeli court indicted him of espionage, treason and selling Israeli nuclear secrets to the "Sunday Times" British newspaper, and was sentenced to 18 years in prison. Now, he spent 16 years of it. Vanunu said that the Israeli authorities prevented him from meeting his British lawyers. "Now, Peres won't be able to lie to [Ronald] Reagan about not owning nuclear weapons. Now everybody knows that," Vanunu said.
Israel Protecting Itself
Israel surrounds itself with all means of protection. For example, every Israeli citizen has a pill of "stable Iodine", and can be taken anytime, as it gives radiation protection.
It was revealed that Israeli provided all its citizens with such a pill, under the pretext of fearing an Iraqi nuclear strike, but the truth confirmed that they dispensed it because of fearing the meltdown of their own reactor, not only Dimona, but the other research facilities around Israel.
On the Palestinian level, the Authority of Environment Quality has tried to take some kind of protection, and sent a letter to the IAEA and Arab Ministers of Health, considering that the Palestinians are the weakest point and closest to the reactor, as Palestinian controlled lands are only 50 aerial kilometers away from Dimona reactor, but all these letters were rejected!
Among the examples that might be shown to indicate the amount of damage caused to the Palestinians due to any nuclear meltdown, the explosion that occurred in the pesticide factory in the city of Al Majdal (Ashkelon), where the stench of the pesticides reached Palestinian cities and towns due to thermal turnover and wind. Here, Dr. Abu Safiya pointed out to the danger that might happen in case an amount of radiation leaks from Dimona reactor, which will jeopardize the entire surrounding region and on a large geographical scale.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- nevada
Nevada Waste Site Plan to Proceed Despite Ruling
July 15, 2004
Story by Chris Baltimore
REUTERS USA:
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/26032/newsDate/15-Jul-2004/story.htm
WASHINGTON - The Bush administration will proceed with a plan to build a nuclear waste site in Nevada this year despite a court decision ordering it to prevent radiation leaks for more than 10,000 years, a senior Energy Department official said.
Critics of the project, including Senate Minority Whip Harry Reid of Nevada, say this recent federal court ruling could permanently derail a plan to build a massive underground storage depot beneath Yucca Mountain about 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
The administration said, however, that it does not intend to slow down.
"We are still on track toward submitting a license application in December of this year, and opening the repository and beginning waste acceptance in 2010," Deputy Energy Secretary Kyle McSlarrow told a Senate Energy Committee hearing on nuclear energy.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia last week rejected Nevada's attempt to block the plan to store 77,000 tons of waste on constitutional grounds.
However, the court also said the administration wrongly ignored a recommendation from the National Academy of Sciences to ensure safety from leaks for well beyond 10,000 years.
Radioactive releases could peak in 300,000 years and the administration must assure safeguards on that scale, the court found.
Republican Sen. Pete Domenici of New Mexico, a long-time nuclear industry proponent, said assuring safety over that timeframe is "impossible," and that the industry will "stand or fall" on how the court's objection is addressed.
Spent fuel from the nation's nuclear plants is piling up - there are over 50,000 tons of it stored at over 100 interim locations in 39 states within 75 miles of 161 million people.
-------- new mexico
UC appoints security aide
Wackenhut manager to examine lab woes
July 15, 2004
By Keay Davidson
San Francisco Chronicle
http://www.abqtrib.com/archives/news04/071504_news_uc.shtml
An Albuquerque senior manager for Wackenhut Services Inc., a private security company, has been appointed to sort out chronic security troubles at Los Alamos National Laboratory, the University of California Board of Regents announced today.
The university planned today to outline several actions Los Alamos will take in response to the latest incident of missing classified material in a public meeting.
As part of the strategy, it has appointed Jack Killeen to the new position of University of California Office of the President special assistant for Los Alamos security, said Chris Harrington, a UC spokesman.
Killeen was general manager of protection technology at Los Alamos but left in 2003 to become general manager of the Nonproliferation and National Security Institute and the Department of Energy's Central Training Academy in Albuquerque.
The academy is operated by Wackenhut.
"He has a tremendous record of 27 years of service with the Air Force, he is well-respected throughout DOE and Wackenhut, and we're happy to have him on board," Harrington said.
The loss of two storage devices containing classified data at the lab is another blow to the UC system trying to hang on to its half-century management of the lab.
The devices have been missing at least since last week, and investigators say they are conducting a thorough search to find them. The lab also is receiving help from a team of investigators U.S. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham sent to New Mexico shortly after learning of the loss.
Lab director Pete Nanos was summoned by university regents to testify in public today about what has gone wrong with lab security.
The university was talking tough.
"A culture that permits willful disregard of security requirements must be ended," S. Robert Foley Jr., the university's vice president for lab management, said in a letter to the UC president, Robert Dynes. "There will be no exceptions."
Los Alamos officials declined to say Wednesday whether the loss of the devices could threaten U.S. national security. Many such devices at the lab contain information on weapons ranging from chemical explosives to thermonuclear bombs capable of vaporizing cities.
"I can't be specific what the data consists of; I'm sorry. All I can say is this is a very serious issue," Los Alamos spokesman Kevin Roark said. "The search does continue. It is possible that they may never be found."
Among the repercussions:
The Project on Government Oversight has called for the Energy Department to terminate UC's contract for managing the lab "before they further put our national security at greater risk," said Danielle Brian, executive director of the group. The Washington, D.C., watchdog group has been critical of the lab's security problems in the past. The current Los Alamos contract runs out in September 2005, and UC officials have not announced whether they will compete for the next contract.
UC's dwindling political support within the Energy Department apparently has eroded further. Abraham is "extremely displeased" by the loss of the devices, spokesman Joe Davis said Wednesday.
In the past two years, Abraham has grown increasingly angered by security problems at the national weapons labs run by UC, including revelations of missing documents at Los Alamos and issues surrounding the safety of storing plutonium at the Bay Area's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
Last year, the scandals helped inspire Abraham's decision to call for opening future contracts to run Los Alamos to bidders other than UC. Yet he recently extended UC's contract to run Livermore for two more years.
The Los Alamos story began brewing Friday afternoon when the lab issued a press release acknowledging that "two items of Classified Removable Electronic Media (CREM) were discovered missing from the Weapons Physics (WP) Directorate. An immediate search did not locate the items. A subsequent and extensive search is currently continuing."
CREM refer to a wide range of electronic devices that can store computer data - ranging from floppy disks to large, hard-disk drives - and that can be removed from one computer and installed in another.
In a related incident, Roark, the Los Alamos spokesman, acknowledged that lab officials failed to find two computer hard-disk drives in their accustomed places. After a search that lasted a couple of hours, Roark said, investigators found the disk drives in a safe place.
Roark said an investigation is under way. If anyone is found to be responsible, he or she might be fired, he said. However, there is no reason to believe the hard drives were misplaced for suspicious or nefarious reasons, he said.
Officials with the Project on Government Oversight accused Los Alamos on Wednesday of covering up the brief loss of the hard-disk drives.
Roark said Energy Department regulations don't require such materials to be reported as missing for 24 hours. Since they were found sooner than that, "those items were, in fact, not considered missing," Roark said.
Still, a statement by the watchdog group blasted the Los Alamos management:
"Los Alamos and the University of California had assured the government that this type of security failure could never happen because of a fail-safe system which was put in place after the Wen Ho Lee debacle in 1999 and the missing hard drives incident" in 2000.
The Lee case involved a Los Alamos scientist who came under suspicion as a possible spy. He was eventually freed.
Pete Stockton, an official with the watchdog group and former special assistant to Clinton administration Energy Secretary Bill Richardson, said of his group's solution to problems at the lab: "We would fire the contractor (UC). This has gone on too long; they should be terminated immediately . . . and have somebody else run it."
Tribune reporter Sue Vorenberg contributed to this story.
----
U.S. Nuclear Lab Temporarily Halts Secret Work
July 15, 2004
REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-security-losalamos.html
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - The Los Alamos National Laboratory, a key U.S. center for nuclear weapons research, has temporarily ceased all classified work after vital data was reported missing last week from a research area, lab officials said on Thursday.
Such a precaution at Los Alamos, the New Mexico birthplace of the first atomic bomb during World War II, has not occurred in recent memory, lab officials said, highlighting the seriousness of the breach.
The lab said it learned of two missing data storage disks on July 7 during an inventory check. At a news conference, the lab director and other officials declined to detail the nature of the data, citing national security concerns.
``Until such time as we are confident that we are addressing this issue, then all activities with respect to classified materials have been put on hold,'' said Gerald Parsky, chairman of the Regents of the University of California which manages Los Alamos. ``These breaches of national security will not be tolerated.''
The case of the missing disks is the latest in a series of security shortcomings at U.S. nuclear weapons labs in recent years. Just last month a set of keys to a sensitive nuclear area at Los Alamos went missing for most of a day.
``This is a big deal, but it is certainly a necessary step,'' Danielle Brian, director of the Project on Government Oversight, a watchdog group in Washington D.C., said of the Los Alamos halt of classified work.
The missing data was on two zip disk drives, she said, adding: ``They need to change the way they handle classified media and move to what's called a media-less system so that there isn't the capacity for a scientist to just walk off with a disk or a zip drive.''
Los Alamos spokesman Kevin Roark said ``fewer than 20'' staffers have had their lab access suspended pending the results of the inquiry.
BREAKING THE RULES
Lab director Gerald Nanos met some of Los Alamos's 12,000 employees -- most of whom have government security clearances -- on Wednesday. On Thursday, he met with University of California officials in San Francisco to address the latest scandal.
``Where in the past, most of the issues were associated with inventory errors and that sort of thing, I have a clear indication here that people did not follow the rules as to the chain of custody and keeping track and doing the proper documented transfer of material,'' Nanos said.
Officials said, however, that they had no indication that the sensitive data had been taken outside of the well-secured Los Alamos facility, which is spread over nearly 40 square miles.
Four years ago Taiwanese-American scientist Wen Ho Lee, was accused of stealing secrets at Los Alamos. He later pleaded guilty to one count of downloading nuclear weapons design secrets to a non-secure computer after the government's case against him collapsed.
Robert Dynes, University of California president, said any findings about the incident would likely be kept secret.
``If you were to suddenly tell everyone in the world that this information might be out there, you would start a treasure hunt, and that's not what we are interested in doing here,'' he said. ``We have to protect the security of the nation.''
Robert Foley, a retired admiral who serves as the Los Alamos vice president for laboratory management, said an isolated culture among scientists there may have contributed to sloppy security standards.
-------- vermont
Two Missing Nuclear Fuel Rods Found at Vermont Yankee
July 15, 2004
VERNON, Vermont, (ENS)
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/jul2004/2004-07-15-09.asp#anchor6
Entergy workers at the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant have located two missing spent fuel rod segments in the plant's spent fuel pool, the company said late Wednesday.
The two pieces were stored in a unique 40 inch aluminum cylinder, which is unlike a typical storage container but is similar to several other aluminum structures and tools in the pool, Entergy said.
On April 21, after an inspection by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), Entergy determined that two short spent fuel rod segments were not in their documented location in the spent fuel pool.
Entergy Vermont Yankee Site Vice President Jay Thayer credited interviews with former employees and contractors, intense research of records and documents dating back more than 25 years, and video tapes of the pool that were recently taken. The search team explored every possibility from three different angles. "They looked visually with the cameras, they searched the documents, and they talked to people who were on the scene 25 years ago," said Thayer.
"The team deserves a tremendous amount of credit. We earlier had checked all the containers in the pool," Thayer explained, "but when we learned that General Electric had designed and sent a pipe-like cylinder for the fuel-rod pieces, we rechecked the videotapes. That's when we noticed that what was previously thought to be part of an existing in-pool structure could very well be the canister that GE sent here."
Workers used remotely operated tools to open the canister and insert a small high-resolution video camera that confirmed the presence of the fuel segments, which are nine inches and seventeen inches long and about the diameter of a pencil.
Thayer also credits the resident NRC inspectors at Vermont Yankee and William Sherman, the Vermont Public Service Department's nuclear engineer, for their contributions to the investigation. "'These folks had full and open access to the process every step of the way and they provided valuable insights and guidance.'"
The Vermont Yankee spent fuel pool is 40 feet in depth and contains 2,789 spent uranium fuel assemblies that were used in energy production since 1972.
Vermont Yankee is presently shut down for its twenty fourth refueling and maintenance outage.
Thayer said the policies and procedures for record keeping and documentation of activities in Vermont Yankee's spent fuel pool have been revised to ensure accurate record keeping. "We want to make sure this doesn't happen again," he said.
-------- us nuc waste
NEWS ANALYSIS
Ruling on Nuclear Site Leaves Next Move to Congress
July 15, 2004
By MATTHEW L. WALD
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/15/politics/15yucca.html
WASHINGTON, July 14 - Can the United States ever bury its nuclear waste? And does it still want to, or need to?
Even though an appeals court has found that the government's plan for a repository in the remote Nevada desert is inadequate because it provides protection for only 10,000 years, experts say the answer to the first question is yes, it can. But this will happen only if Congress feels strongly enough to change the rules, and say that it does not matter what happens to public safety more than 10,000 years down the road.
It is not clear that Congress wants to do that. At the moment, Congress cannot even muster the votes to keep financing the development of the repository, at Yucca Mountain, leading to the prospect that in October the Energy Department will have to lay off 70 percent of the 2,400 government and contract workers there.
"I cannot envision this Congress legislating on the disposal standard," said a Senate aide, who asked not to be named because he was involved in the discussions to end the budget impasse. Changing the standard, he predicted, would take years.
The court implied that an acceptable standard would have to last for several hundred thousand years, but even the 10,000-year standard is mind-boggling.
"In thinking about those issues, these times are so far out that they don't have any real meaning to anybody," said Paul Craig, a former member of the Nuclear Waste Technical Advisory Board, which was established by Congress to give advice about the repository.
"Even 10,000 years is like two Abrahams ago," Mr. Craig said, referring to the era of the biblical patriarch.
The problem for the Energy Department is that it has predicted that the waste will produce doses of radiation, in the case of the highest possible exposure, that will be 10 to 80 times higher than the rules allow. And even at 10,000 years, leak rates become unpredictable because rainwater, the main mechanism for spreading the contamination, is also unpredictable.
The ruling last week, by the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, accepted Nevada's argument that the criteria by which Yucca should be licensed should be consistent with a 1995 report by the National Academy of Sciences, which said the period covered by the rules should include the period of peak risk.
But even the National Academy was ambivalent on this point. Perhaps, it said, the generation that got the benefit of nuclear power and weapons should provide the same protection to future generations that it would want provided for itself. Or perhaps not. "The principle of intergenerational equity is a matter for social judgment," the academy said.
"Social judgment" means that the scientists and engineers do not want to answer the question. Congress, however, may.
It has already spoken several times on this subject. In 1982, it decided that waste should be buried, and in 1987, it said waste should be buried at Yucca, one of three sites the Energy Department was then considering. There was no presumption that Yucca was best, only that it was a site on which everybody outside Nevada could agree, and was better than leaving the waste at reactor sites around the country.
Congress has made other decisions that substitute policy for science. It alone decides what high-level waste is. It is considering a bill that would redefine some waste as not being high level, so the waste could stay where it is, in old steel tanks in South Carolina, rather than being solidified for burial at Yucca.
Congress has shown no immediate enthusiasm for passing a law that would reverse the court ruling. "Has Congress ever taken up a major nuclear waste issue during an election year?" said Allison Macfarlane, a nuclear waste expert at M.I.T. "They're not even touching the energy bill."
Meanwhile, the waste is being moved into "dry casks," concrete and steel silos designed to last for decades. Earlier this year the owners of the Maine Yankee plant, in Wiscasset, Me., finished moving the fuel that had run the plant for its 28-year life into 60 such casks that are designed to last "indefinitely," said a spokesman, Eric T. Howes. "We're set up for the long haul," he said.
The casks cost about $90 million to build, and about $7 million a year to maintain, including security costs. This week, a court here began a trial that is supposed to last seven weeks to determine how much the Energy Department owes the owner of Maine Yankee and other defunct reactors, for breaking its contract to begin taking the fuel in 1998.
And in Utah, a private company hopes to win a license soon to build similar casks and store 40,000 tons of spent fuel (more than half the spent fuel that Yucca would hold) on an Indian reservation where it has leased 820 acres. Its casks are designed to last indefinitely, too, and will be needed whether or not Yucca opens, since many reactors are running out of space, say its sponsors.
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
Afghan Leader Cracks Down on Militia to Disarm
July 15, 2004
By CARLOTTA GALL
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/15/international/asia/15afgh.html?pagewanted=all
KABUL, Afghanistan, July 14 - President Hamid Karzai issued a decree on Wednesday ordering the "severest of punishments" for anyone who refuses to relinquish weapons under a United Nations disarmament program.
The decree, which becomes law immediately, follows Mr. Karzai's pledge last week to crack down on warlords and militia commanders who have resisted disarmament. In an interview on Sunday with The New York Times, Mr. Karzai said that persuasion had failed to bring compliance from the warlords and that harsher measures would be used.
Intimidation of citizens by rival warlords and their militias caused the government to announce last week a six-month delay of parliamentary elections. Those elections - for the upper and lower houses of Parliament and for local councils - have been rescheduled for April 2005. Presidential elections, scheduled for Oct. 9, had been delayed for three months.
The disarmament decree, announced on Kabul Television, said collecting weapons and integrating armed groups into the Ministry of National Defense are fundamental conditions for peace and economic recovery.
Anyone who refuses to disarm or who remains allied with a private militia "will be considered disloyal and rebellious and, in accordance with the law of the country, will face the severest of punishments," the decree said. It also warned that any armed group that remained outside the defense ministry, continued to recruit and arm people, or attempted to reinstate those already disbanded, would be punished. Any demobilized soldiers who try to rejoin their old units, or any units or individuals who try to retain heavy weapons would also be punished, it said.
The United Nations-sponsored disarmament program has stalled in recent weeks as regional commanders have refused to give up their weapons, partly because they want to influence the parliamentary elections, foreign and Afghan officials said. Last week, United Nations and Afghan election officials warned the cabinet that intimidation by armed militias would prevent a free and fair election and advised delaying the election for six months.
Only 10,000 of the country's estimated 60,000 militiamen have been disarmed under the United Nations program, which began last October.
--------
Kabul Vigilantes Said to Dupe Peace Force
July 15, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/15/international/asia/15kabu.html?pagewanted=all
KABUL, Afghanistan, July 14 - Three Americans who were arrested on suspicion of running a freelance counterterrorism operation and a private jail in Afghanistan duped international peacekeepers three times into assisting their illegal raids, the NATO-led force said Wednesday.
The three men have been charged with hostage-taking and assault, officials said. If found guilty, they could be jailed for up to 20 years, Attorney General Abdul Fatah said.
Afghan security forces arrested the three men last week after finding eight Afghans in a makeshift jail in the capital, Kabul.
Cmdr. Chris Henderson, a spokesman for the International Security Assistance Force, said the group's leader, Jonathan K. Idema, called in bomb-disposal teams, complete with a sniffer dog, from the international force to check buildings three times in June.
He said the international troops were deceived by the men's "American-style" uniforms and their apparently professional approach.
The peacekeeping troops "believed they were providing legitimate support to a legitimate security agency," Commander Henderson said.
-------- arms
Guns Worn In Open Legal, But Alarm Va.
'Exercising Right' Called 'Unreasonable' by Some
By Tom Jackman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, July 15, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A50416-2004Jul14?language=printer
On July 2, Fairfax County police received a 911 call from a Champps restaurant in Reston. Six men are seated at a table, the caller said. They're all armed.
Dispatchers quickly sent four officers to the scene. The officers were "extremely polite" and were hoping that some of the men were in law enforcement, said Sgt. Richard Perez, a spokesman for the police department. None was.
The men told the officers "they were just exercising their rights as citizens of the commonwealth," Perez said.
Turns out, packing a pistol in public is perfectly legal in Virginia. And three times in the last month, including at Champps on Sunset Hills Road, residents have been spotted out and about in the county, with guns strapped to their hips, exercising that right.
In the first episode, at a Starbucks, Fairfax police wrongly confiscated weapons from two college students and charged them with a misdemeanor. Police realized their mistake, returned the guns and tore up the charges the next day. Police commanders have since issued a reminder to officers that "open carry" is the law of the land in the Old Dominion.
Philip Van Cleave, president of the Virginia Citizens Defense League, an organization of thousands of Virginia gun owners, said members were involved in all three police encounters. But he said there was no coordinated campaign to start packing heat publicly.
"It was probably more of a coincidence, but not completely," Van Cleave said, noting that word of the improper confiscation spread quickly among members through e-mail. "This is a good opportunity to educate people. We have this inherent right, and not many people exercised it."
In Virginia, as in many states, carrying a concealed weapon requires a permit, issued by a local court. But no permit is required to simply wield a gun in the open, a right reinforced by a state law that took effect July 1. Not so in the District and Maryland, unless you're a police or federal officer.
Fairfax police are baffled by the sudden display of weaponry but assume it was done to make some sort of statement.
"Crime is at 20-year lows in the county," Lt. Col. Charles K. Peters pointed out, even though the population is soaring. The county's homicide rate was the lowest in the nation last year among the 30 largest jurisdictions. "Hopefully no one feels the need to carry a gun, lawfully or unlawfully," Peters said. "But there's no question it is lawful to carry a gun on the street. So we've had to ensure that all of our officers are updated on the nuances of Virginia law that allow citizens to carry firearms in public places."
Although legal, it is disconcerting to some people.
"This just shows you the extreme nature of what they're trying to do," said Bob Ricker, head of Virginians for Public Safety. "You don't want to go to Starbucks or Reston Town Center and see somebody with a firearm strapped on," he added, referring to two locations where armed patrons were found. "It's just something that I think is completely unreasonable. We all understand the concept of self-defense. . . . But when you're talking about Fairfax County, you have to look at what is reasonable."
The first incident, at a Starbucks on Leesburg Pike near Tysons Corner, might have inspired other gun owners to carry openly. It began shortly before 10 p.m. June 14, Perez said, with a complaint from a citizen. Police arrived to find a 19-year-old man carrying a .22-caliber pistol and a 21-year-old man with a 9mm pistol.
Perez said an officer spoke with the men, then took their guns and charged them with possession of a firearm in a public place. Virginia law 18.2-287.4 expressly prohibits "carrying loaded firearms in public areas."
But the second paragraph of the law defines firearms only as any semiautomatic weapon that holds more than 20 rounds or a shotgun that holds more than seven rounds -- assault rifles, mostly, Van Cleave said. Regular six-shooters or pistols with nine- or 10-shot magazines are not "firearms" under this Virginia law.
The day after the arrest, the officer consulted with a county prosecutor and determined that "he had erred," Perez said. He summoned the two men to the McLean District station, returned their weapons and dropped the charges.
Van Cleave said word of the incident, along with news of a similar incident in Richmond, spread through the defense league's e-mail alert system. "I think people were saying, 'I think I do want to open carry,' " Van Cleave said, though he added the league neither encourages nor discourages the practice.
Carrying weapons openly was not unprecedented locally, Van Cleave said. He said that the defense league has a monthly meeting in Northern Virginia with 25 to 30 members and that most go out to dinner afterward with their sidearms openly visible. "We've had 40 people open carry, in a restaurant, with no problem," he said.
Three days after the incident at Champps, a married couple were walking their dogs down Market Street, the busy thoroughfare in the heart of Reston Town Center, about 3 p.m. In addition to pistols on their hips, Perez said, both the man and woman were carrying an extra magazine of ammunition. An officer spoke with them and was informed that they were members of the defense league and were aware of the Starbucks incident. Perez said the officer took no further action, although Van Cleave said a lieutenant arrived and urged Town Center security to eject them.
Managers at the Starbucks, Champps and Town Center all declined to comment.
Van Cleave said the gun owners might have been out celebrating a law that took effect July 1. Virginia statute 15.2-915 now completely prohibits any locality from enacting any regulations on gun ownership, carrying, storage or purchase, except for rules related to the workforce. Alexandria, for example, had an ordinance prohibiting openly carrying guns. It is now invalid, Van Cleave said.
"It's like the Fourth of July," Van Cleave said. "A whole new set of freedoms came in. . . . All local gun control is completely and totally gone."
Legislators said they passed the bill to eliminate duplicative regulations, particularly in counties such as Fairfax, which imposed its own gun permit process in addition to the federally mandated background check.
Openly carrying weapons is "not a good idea," said Kristen Rand of the Violence Policy Center in Washington. "This is the gun lobby's vision of how America should be. Everybody's packing heat and ready to engage in a shootout at the slightest provocation."
Ricker said the gun owners "are probably doing their cause more harm than good by raising this issue. It raises an awareness and gives people who are more rational thinkers the opportunity to go to their legislators and make their views known."
Van Cleave said most gun owners, particularly defense league members or concealed weapon permit owners, are law-abiding. Anti-gun forces "have come to think guns themselves are evil. You've got to worry about the person, not the gun."
-------- asia
Israel helped set up Singapore army, say former officers
JERUSALEM (AFP)
Jul 15, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040715155246.bfhkw2ma.html
Israel played a discreet but sizeable role in helping set up Singapore's military, former Israeli senior officers said in interviews published in the daily Haaretz Thursday.
The two countries' cooperation began in December 1965 when an Israeli military delegation headed by Major General Yaakov Elazari visited Singapore.
The city state's prime minister and founding father Lee Kuan Yew had asked for Israel's military assistance after the country's independence from Malaysia in August 1965.
Lee had allegedly been turned down by India and Egypt.
The Israeli military delegation, consisting of six high-ranking officers, was charged with advising the government on establishing its security and defense ministries as well as setting up its army after Israel's own.
They also trained Singapore's first batch of officers.
Bilateral relations have since flourished and arms trade between Israel and Singapore reached more than a million dollars in 2000, according to Israeli military sources quoted in the British intelligence weekly Jane's.
-------- biological weapons
House Passes Bill to Finance Development of Bioterrorism Antidotes
July 15, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/15/politics/15shield.html
WASHINGTON, July 14 (AP) - Lawmakers who experienced the dangers of anthrax firsthand sent President Bush legislation on Wednesday to give private companies $5.6 billion in incentives to develop antidotes to biological and chemical weapons.
"This is the largest first-responder program ever enacted in American history," said Representative Christopher Cox, a California Republican who is chairman of the House domestic security committee before the House voted 414 to 2 to pass the Project Bioshield Act.
Over the next 10 years, the act gives the pharmaceutical industry the financial guarantees it says it needs to research and produce vaccines and antidotes for bioterror agents. Otherwise, the industry has said, such products would have little marketable value.
"What's the incentive today to develop a vaccine for Ebola or for the plague when there is no real market for such a vaccine in this country?" asked Representative Billy Tauzin, Republican of Louisiana, a chief sponsor of the legislation.
Mr. Bush said in a statement that he looked forward to signing the bill, which he said would help protect the country and "break new ground in the search for treatments and cures while strengthening our overall biotechnology infrastructure."
With the House vote, Congress completed work on legislation Mr. Bush requested in a State of the Union address 18 months ago. Agreement between the House and Senate was delayed by a dispute over how to guarantee a steady stream of money to drug makers without taking away Congress's authority to make annual decisions on spending levels.
Lawmakers have seen their offices closed and their lives disrupted twice by biological threats since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
The legislation guarantees that any company that develops countermeasures to treat diseases and conditions caused by bioterrorism will have a buyer in the federal government.
The bill also accelerates the approval process for vaccines and, in an emergency, let the government distribute certain treatments before the Food and Drug Administration approves them.
-------- britain
Probe clears Blair of deliberate distortions on Iraq
ASSOCIATED PRESS
By Jill Lawless
July 15, 2004
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20040715-121128-2974r.htm
LONDON - Prime Minister Tony Blair escaped harsh criticism in an official inquiry into prewar intelligence on Iraq, which faulted him yesterday for informal decision-making and pushing available intelligence to the limit, but found no deliberate distortions.
Mr. Blair said he took full, personal responsibility. But after the much-awaited report was released, he told Parliament, "No one lied, no one made up the intelligence."
The commission - headed by Robin Butler, a retired civil service chief - found prewar Iraq had no usable stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and that British intelligence was flawed, unreliable and incomplete. The five-member commission interviewed Mr. Blair, senior Cabinet figures and key intelligence officials.
Although the report criticized Mr. Blair's "informal" governing style, it absolved him of misleading the public over Iraq, a charge that has dogged the prime minister since he took Britain into the U.S.-led war.
Protesters - including some who wore masks depicting Mr. Blair with a Pinocchio-like long nose - greeted the announcement by gathering outside the press conference where the report was released and carrying signs that featured Mr. Blair's face and read: B.liar.
Mr. Butler's judgment vindicates the British government of some of the harshest charges against it, a week after a Republican-led U.S. Senate committee excoriated a "broken corporate culture" at the CIA and said there had been a "global intelligence failure" on Iraq.
The verdict takes some pressure off Mr. Blair, whose popularity and credibility have been battered by the war and continuing violence in Iraq, and by the failure to find any weapons of mass destruction.
His Labor Party did poorly in recent elections, and there have been rumblings within the party calling for his ouster.
Mr. Blair's future has wider symbolic and political ramifications months after a pro-war government was voted out in Spain, and with President Bush - Mr. Blair's chief ally - facing a re-election campaign.
"We have no reason, found no evidence, to question the prime minister's good faith," Mr. Butler told reporters.
He concluded "no single individual" was responsible for intelligence failures that led Mr. Blair's government to overstate the threat posed by Saddam Hussein.
Before the war, Mr. Blair said Saddam "has chemical and biological weapons ... [and] existing and active military plans for the use of chemical and biological weapons."
Addressing the House of Commons yesterday, however, he acknowledged it was likely Saddam "did not have stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons ready to deploy."
But Mr. Blair defended his decision to go to war.
"I cannot honestly say I believe getting rid of Saddam was a mistake at all," he said. "Iraq, the region, the wider world is a better and safer place without Saddam."
Former Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, an opponent of the war, said the report showed "we committed British troops to action on the basis of false intelligence, overheated analysis and unreliable sources."
The report was the latest to exonerate the Blair government. Three previous inquiries also cleared officials of misusing intelligence or lying.
The government was accused in a May 2003 British Broadcasting Corp. report of falsely claiming that Iraq could deploy some chemical and biological weapons on 45 minutes' notice.
Mr. Butler said the 45-minute claim was the weakest piece of intelligence published about Iraq, and should not have been made without explaining that it referred to battlefield munitions rather than missiles.
--------
Britain's Iraq Data Deemed 'Flawed'
Blair Didn't Distort Facts, Inquiry Finds
By Glenn Frankel
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, July 15, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A48727-2004Jul14?language=printer
LONDON, July 14 -- An official inquiry reported Wednesday that key portions of British intelligence claiming that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction were "seriously flawed" and "open to doubt," but it found no evidence that Prime Minister Tony Blair's government had deliberately distorted the evidence or misled the public in making the case for war.
The inquiry's report was particularly critical of an intelligence dossier the government published in September 2002, saying it omitted important caveats and gave the impression that the information it was based on was "fuller and firmer" than it actually was.
Wednesday's report singled out the dramatic claim -- repeated four times in the dossier -- that Iraq could launch chemical or biological weapons within 45 minutes of an order, saying the dossier had failed to make clear that the claim was "vague and ambiguous." MI6, Britain's secret intelligence service, now has doubts about the validity of the claim, the report noted.
Overall, the 196-page document painted a portrait of intelligence services under pressure to come up with data supporting the case for war from sources that were sparse, limited and, in the end, often unreliable.
But the report, issued by a special five-person panel chaired by former cabinet secretary Robin Butler, stopped well short of the strong criticism leveled by the Senate intelligence committee against U.S. spy agencies last week. It specifically stated that John Scarlett, who chaired the committee that issued the 2002 dossier, should be allowed to take up his new post as the head of MI6 next month.
Asked to specify who was to blame for mistakes in the dossier, Butler said at a news conference: "It was a weakness on the part of all those who were involved in putting together the dossier. I think that they collectively have to take the responsibility for that."
A visibly relieved and buoyant Blair told the House of Commons that he fully accepted the report's findings and recommendations and took responsibility for any errors the government had made. But Blair, saying that "I have searched my conscience," said he still believed that the Iraqi people and the world were better off without Saddam Hussein, despite the fact that weapons of mass destruction had not been found.
Opposition lawmakers said the House of Commons would not have approved the decision to go to war in March 2003 had members known how thin the intelligence was. "It's not a question of responsibility, it's a question of credibility," said Michael Howard, leader of the opposition Conservative Party, which had withdrawn its participation in the Butler inquiry because it considered the panel's mandate too restrictive.
The report said the government's decision in the spring and summer of 2002 to move toward confronting Iraq was based not on new intelligence about a potential threat, but rather grew out of Blair's belief that Iraq was a danger that needed to be dealt with and a desire to stay in alignment with the Bush administration.
"There was no recent intelligence that would itself have given rise to a conclusion that Iraq was of more immediate concern than the activities of some other countries," the inquiry said.
It cited a secret government paper in March 2002 that advised that "regime change" had no basis in international law and that there was no recent evidence of Iraqi complicity in terrorism. Officials were left with the argument that Iraq had failed to comply with U.N. resolutions on ending its weapons programs. But the 2002 paper had warned that proof of noncompliance "would need to be incontrovertible and of large-scale activity. Current intelligence is insufficiently robust to meet this criterion."
Nonetheless, the inquiry said, Blair pressed the case for confrontation and ordered the Joint Intelligence Committee, a cabinet-level group that includes the heads of Britain's three main intelligence services, to produce a dossier to support his position.
The inquiry said new intelligence arrived in four reports from three confidential sources in August and September 2002, but each of the reports assumed that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons rather than providing evidence of it. Two-thirds of the committee's human intelligence on Iraq came from one source, according to the report. "We were struck by the relative thinness of the intelligence base," the inquiry said.
Accounts by agents in Iraq were particularly unreliable because Hussein's government was extremely secretive and because MI6's evaluation procedures were weak, the inquiry said. Agents were asked to report on issues well beyond their usual expertise, and because of the scarcity of sources, "more credence was given to untried agents than would normally be the case," it stated.
After the war ended and MI6 sent analysts to Iraq to track down and confirm the material it had relied upon, the report said, doubts -- "and in some cases serious doubts" -- emerged about the reliability of at least three sources whose intelligence had helped to underpin British assessments.
Although the Joint Intelligence Committee's confidential assessments to Blair before the war emphasized that sources were thin and questionable, the dossier prepared for the public omitted those caveats. "Warnings were lost about the limited intelligence base on which some aspects of these assessments were being made," the panel concluded. This was "a serious weakness."
When new intelligence from an untested source arrived in September, two weeks before the dossier was published, MI6 used it in the dossier but refused to share it with weapons experts at the Defense Ministry's intelligence service who might have cast doubts on its validity, the inquiry said. That intelligence was withdrawn in July 2003 because it was found to be unreliable.
With publication of the dossier in the name of the Joint Intelligence Committee, the inquiry concluded, "more weight was placed on the intelligence than it could bear."
But the report defended as "well founded" the dossier's claim that Iraq had sought to obtain enriched uranium from African countries. The CIA has questioned the claim, saying it was based on forged papers, but the Butler panel said there were other sources for the assertion.
The inquiry expressed surprise that British policymakers and analysts did not reevaluate their findings in early 2003 after U.N. inspectors failed to find weapons in Iraq.
The inquiry also criticized Blair's leadership style. Although there were 24 separate discussions of the war in Blair's cabinet, the inquiry said, ministers were given no warning of most of the sessions or given copies of the detailed papers that some departments had prepared. Instead, most of the discussions were held on the basis of oral presentations, "reducing the scope for informed collective political judgment."
Blair has been President Bush's strongest international ally on Iraq, a stance that has seriously damaged his popularity with voters here. He said Wednesday that he hoped the new report -- the fourth inquiry to have focused on the war and cleared the government of falsifying or exaggerating intelligence -- would finally convince critics that he had acted in good faith.
"No one lied, no one made up intelligence, no one inserted things into the dossier against the advice of the intelligence services," he told lawmakers.
But Robin Cook, a former cabinet minister who resigned to protest the war, said that "the unavoidable conclusion" of the report's content is "that we committed British troops to action on the basis of false intelligence, overheated analysis and unreliable sources."
--------
LONDON
British Report Faults Prewar Intelligence but Clears Blair
July 15, 2004
By ALAN COWELL
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/15/international/europe/15brit.html?pagewanted=all&position=
LONDON, July 14 - A major British report released Wednesday found extensive failures both in intelligence gathering on illicit weapons and the government's use of that intelligence to justify the Iraq war. But it cleared Prime Minister Tony Blair of accusations that he or his government distorted the evidence to build a case for the war.
"We have no reason, found no evidence to question the prime minister's good faith," the report's author, Lord Butler, said at a news conference, "no deliberate attempt on the part of the government to mislead."
Echoing findings by a United States Senate committee last week, the report also found no evidence that Saddam Hussein had significant, if any, stocks of chemical or biological weapons before the war or that Iraq had cooperated with Al Qaeda.
Unlike the Senate Intelligence Committee report, which passed a withering verdict on the Central Intelligence Agency, the report specifically exonerated one of Britain's top spymasters, John Scarlett, sparing him the same destiny as the director of central intelligence, George J. Tenet, who resigned just before the Senate report was published.
The British findings departed from Senate report in several other crucial areas.
First, Lord Butler, formerly Britain's top civil servant, said Britain had received information from "several different sources" to substantiate reports that Iraq sought to purchase uranium from Niger. The Senate report found that similar claims by American intelligence, which found their way into President Bush's State of the Union address last year, were based on a single set of forged documents.
Unlike American intelligence gatherers, Lord Butler said, British intelligence agencies routinely avoided relying on Iraqi exiles as a source for information. The report showed that British intelligence had relied more than the C.I.A. did on high-level agents in prewar Baghdad, even though those agents had no direct access to information on unlawful weapons.
The Butler report was far less scathing about British failures than the Senate report was about American mistakes. But like its American counterpart, it made clear that the British government had relied heavily on "seriously flawed" intelligence gathering that was "open to doubt," and had since been proved wrong.
The report was disdainful of the evidence used to support Mr. Blair's claim that Mr. Hussein had the ability to deploy unlawful weapons within 45 minutes. That claim was contained in a British government dossier published in September 2002 that went to the "outer limits" of British intelligence available at the time.
A crucial piece of information missing from that claim, the report noted, was that it appeared to refer to Iraq's ability to move battlefield munitions, not ballistic missiles, into position. The report said the claim should not have been made in the dossier and "led to suspicions that it had been included because of its eye-catching character.''
In a speech to Parliament almost immediately after the report was published, Mr. Blair said he had to accept that "it seems increasingly clear that at the time of the invasion, Saddam did not have stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons ready to deploy."
That represented a sharp turnaround from Mr. Blair's assertions about Iraq in the months leading up to the invasion. But in an ebullient and energetic performance before Parliament on Wednesday, Mr. Blair seemed to carry off the about-face with some aplomb.
"I accept full personal responsibility for the way the issue was presented and therefore for any errors made," he said.
At the same time, though, Mr. Blair and his aides suggested that the specific intelligence about Iraq's supposed illicit weapons was not the prime rationale for war, apparently revising their earlier arguments. Rather, Mr. Hussein's refusal to comply with United Nations resolutions was the prime justification, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said.
That assertion met with some skepticism from the government's critics. "He has changed the grounds of the argument," said Alan Beith, a legislator from the opposition Liberal Democrats.
Like an earlier inquiry led by Lord Hutton, the report exonerated the government of the charge that it deliberately exaggerated the threat posed by Mr. Hussein in an effort to deceive the public and Parliament. "No single individual is to blame," Lord Butler said. "This was a collective operation."
That offered Mr. Blair, whose political standing has suffered badly from his alliance with Mr. Bush on Iraq, some relief from the longstanding accusation that he took the country to war under false pretenses.
"No one lied. No one made up the intelligence," Mr. Blair said. "Everyone genuinely tried to do their best in good faith for the country in circumstances of acute difficulty. The issue of good faith should now be at an end."
The publication of the 160-page report had been seen as a crucial hurdle for Mr. Blair, but both its content and his self-confidence in Parliament seemed to suggest that he felt he had survived the challenge without the kind of damage that could have forced his resignation.
Indeed, the report seemed to reinforce his conviction that the war was justified.
Moreover, Mr. Blair said, if the United States and Britain had backed down on their threat to invade Iraq, Mr. Hussein would have resumed programs to build illicit weapons, emboldening other dictators to follow suit.
But neither the report nor Mr. Blair's defense of his actions could quiet the lingering questions here about whether the Iraq invasion had permanently damaged his standing.
"The issue is the prime minister's credibility," said Michael Howard, the leader of the Conservative opposition, which supported the war. "The question he must ask himself is: Does he have any credibility left?"
At the news conference, Lord Butler said the so-called 45-minute claim should not have been included "in this form" by the Joint Intelligence Committee, an advisory body headed last year by Mr. Scarlett before his appointment to head the MI6 spy agency.
Moreover, the report said, Mr. Blair's government ignored some of the intelligence agencies' concerns about the flimsiness and limitations of the information concerning Iraq's unconventional weapons when it published its dossier in September 2002.
The report also said postwar checks on human intelligence sources in Iraq had "thrown doubt on a high proportion of those sources and of their reports and hence on the quality of the intelligence assessments."
-------- business
Make a Killing From Antiterrorism
Wired News
By Randy Dotinga
Jul. 15, 2004
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,64215,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_1
SAN DIEGO -- Not too long ago, cops used to wander around trade shows and linger at the booth of a company selling bodysuits to protect against NBC -- nuclear, biological or chemical hazards. "Hope I never need that," they'd say, and move on, leaving the military to actually buy the protection.
Not anymore. "Now they say, 'I need that,'" said Bob Weaver, president of bodysuit company Lanx Fabric Systems, who's watched law enforcement's share of his business quadruple over the last three years. "People who used to avoid things like this are very much engaged."
This week, Weaver hopes to attract even more clients.
With their eyes on a potential prize of another $33 billion in federal funding, Weaver and manufacturers of everything from video cameras to radiation detectors are busy pitching their products to the nation's antiterrorism infrastructure, a market that barely existed during the Clinton era. In many cases, technology developed by the military is making its way to local police and fire departments.
Getting a piece of the pie may not be simple, however. At the first-ever Homeland Security Conference, salesmen are facing both competition and the challenge of convincing government agencies to spend money that's plentiful but hard to get at the same time.
"All the easy money has been spent," said Edward McWilliams, who sells BioSeal, a material used to wrap bodies that may be contaminated with dangerous germs, even the so-called Level 4 biohazards, such as the Ebola virus.
While government agencies spent money freely after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, they're being more circumspect now, said McWilliams, whose booth was emblazoned with the words, "What Is Your Plan for 6,000 Dead?"
The federal government has sent an estimated $13.1 billion in antiterrorism funds to local and state agencies since 2001, although controversy has arisen over the fact that some money is given equally to all states, making Wyoming residents the recipients of twice as many dollars per capita as New Yorkers, according to Time magazine.
Meanwhile, Congress -- once it gets its act together -- is expected to earmark $33 billion to keep the Department of Homeland Security afloat for another year. But the funds come with plenty of strings attached, including acres of paperwork. Some agencies have had to hire people simply to write grant requests, and an entire afternoon of the San Diego terrorism-tech conference will be devoted to the challenges of extracting money from the government.
Randall Lofland, sales manager of Lanx Fabric Systems, has a different view from McWilliams. Contrary to the views of critics, he said, government agencies were always careful about shopping around for antiterrorism products. But he acknowledged that the influx of federal money may make things more complicated. "There are more checks and balances," he said.
Regardless of future obstacles on the financial front, plenty of the businesses hawking their wares at the San Diego conference aren't exactly scraping by. In many cases, federal and local funding has goosed both research and profits.
For example, sales have grown by 16 times over the past three years at Safety Tech International, which manufactures devices that make air-filtering respirators -- such as gas masks -- easier to use.
While they protect rescue workers against hazardous chemicals in the air, respirators are hardly easy to wear. Breathing through the filters can be an exhausting task requiring plenty of lung power, especially if the user is already tired from physical activity. Even a simple dust mask can be a pain to wear in an emergency.
Using a blower, Safety Tech's products suck air into the filtration system and then send it into the respirator, making it easier for the user to breathe normally. Formerly a product used mainly by the military, the devices have now become popular among FBI agents and local SWAT teams, said Jeff Paden, director of sales and marketing for Safety Tech.
Throwing around buzzwords like "situational awareness" and "war fighters," other manufacturers are hawking night-vision goggles, tiny video cameras (including one the size of a lapel microphone), virtual reality systems and bioagent detectors.
At one booth, a nearly 6-foot-tall mannequin of an injured soldier, complete with a bloody, blown-off lower leg, lies on a table. His eyes blink, his chest rises and falls, and a machine keeps track of all his vital signs. "Stan" -- short for "standard man" -- is designed to simulate the challenges of treating injuries in the field.
Stan can be programmed to suffer the symptoms of virtually any disease or injury -- say, SARS or a sarin gas attack. Among other things, his respiration, pulse and oxygen level change automatically in response to treatment or stress. When his blood pressure drops, his radial and femoral -- wrist and groin -- pulses diminish, just like in people. He can even ooze pus and hemorrhage cinematic blood, mixed with soap to mimic the realistic slippery feel of real blood.
-------- china
Sailing Toward a Storm in China
U.S. maneuvers could spark a war
By Chalmers Johnson
July 15, 2004
Los Angeles Times
http://fairuse.1accesshost.com/news2/latimes224.htm
Quietly and with minimal coverage in the U.S. press, the Navy announced that from mid-July through August it would hold exercises dubbed Operation Summer Pulse '04 in waters off the China coast near Taiwan.
This will be the first time in U.S. naval history that seven of our 12 carrier strike groups deploy in one place at the same time. It will look like the peacetime equivalent of the Normandy landings and may well end in a disaster.
At a minimum, a single carrier strike group includes the aircraft carrier itself (usually with nine or 10 squadrons and a total of about 85 aircraft), a guided missile cruiser, two guided missile destroyers, an attack submarine and a combination ammunition, oiler and supply ship.
Normally, the United States uses only one or at the most two carrier strike groups to show the flag in a trouble spot. In a combat situation it might deploy three or four, as it did for both wars with Iraq. Seven in one place is unheard of.
Operation Summer Pulse '04 was almost surely dreamed up at the Pearl Harbor headquarters of the U.S. Pacific Command and its commander, Adm. Thomas B. Fargo, and endorsed by neocons in the Pentagon. It is doubtful that Congress was consulted. This only goes to show that our foreign policy is increasingly made by the Pentagon.
According to Chinese reports, Taiwanese ships will join the seven carriers being assembled in this modern rerun of 19th century gunboat diplomacy. The ostensible reason given by the Navy for this exercise is to demonstrate the ability to concentrate massive forces in an emergency, but the focus on China in a U.S. election year sounds like a last hurrah of the neocons.
Needless to say, the Chinese are not amused. They say that their naval and air forces, plus their land-based rockets, are capable of taking on one or two carrier strike groups but that combat with seven would overwhelm them. So even before a carrier reaches the Taiwan Strait, Beijing has announced it will embark on a crash project that will enable it to meet and defeat seven U.S. carrier strike groups within a decade. There's every chance the Chinese will succeed if they are not overtaken by war first.
China is easily the fastest-growing big economy in the world, with a growth rate of 9.1% last year. On June 28, the BBC reported that China had passed the U.S. as the world's biggest recipient of foreign direct investment. China attracted $53 billion worth of new factories in 2003, whereas the U.S. took in only $40 billion; India, $4 billion; and Russia, a measly $1 billion.
If left alone by U.S. militarists, China will almost surely, over time, become a democracy on the same pattern as that of South Korea and Taiwan (both of which had U.S.-sponsored military dictatorships until the late 1980s). But a strong mainland makes the anti-China lobby in the United States very nervous. It won't give up its decades-old animosity toward Beijing and jumps at any opportunity to stir up trouble - "defending Taiwan" is just a convenient cover story.
These ideologues appear to be trying to precipitate a confrontation with China while they still have the chance. Today, they happen to have rabidly anti-Chinese governments in Taipei and Tokyo as allies, but these governments don't have the popular support of their own citizens.
If American militarists are successful in sparking a war, the results are all too predictable: We will halt China's march away from communism and militarize its leadership, bankrupt ourselves, split Japan over whether to renew aggression against China and lose the war. We also will earn the lasting enmity of the most populous nation on Earth.
Chalmers Johnson's latest book is "The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic" (Metropolitan, 2004).
-------- europe
Czech roops to remain in Iraq until 2005
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
By David R. Sands
July 15, 2004
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20040714-101153-8951r.htm
The Czech Republic will keep its troops in Iraq at least through the end of the year and stands ready to offer long-term economic and technical support to the new Iraqi government, Czech Foreign Minister Cyril Svoboda said yesterday in an interview.
Mr. Svoboda said his government is committed to supporting the U.S.-led security force in Iraq and to maintaining strong U.S.-European ties, despite political troubles at home that have shaken the ruling coalition in Prague.
"Our troops will see out their mission to the end of the designated term, which is the end of this year," Mr. Svoboda said.
The Czech Republic, which has 92 troops in southern Iraq helping train Iraqi military police, would also be willing to continue with the training - either inside the country or in another country - after Dec. 31.
Continuing violence and a rash of kidnappings in Iraq have focused new attention on the commitment of America's military allies there. The Philippines said this week it is beginning an immediate pullout of its troops to save the life of a Filipino held hostage in Iraq.
Mr. Svoboda met this week with Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and with lawmakers on Capitol Hill before leaving yesterday.
The Czech role in the global war on terror was highlighted with the release of a Senate Intelligence Committee report this week that cast strong doubt on a report that chief September 11 plotter Mohamed Atta met with a senior Iraqi diplomat in Prague in April 2001.
Mr. Svoboda said accounts of the meeting were "raw intelligence" that Czech security forces shared with the CIA and that the Czech government has never taken an official position on their accuracy.
He said the European parliamentary elections reflected continuing, deep popular skepticism in the Czech Republic about the future of the European Union just two months after the country formally joined the bloc.
He said his pro-EU government was working to convince the public as the 25 EU nations face a lengthy debate on whether to endorse a new constitution.
"It is up to the political elites to be more active in explaining what the European Union means to all of us, economically and politically," he said. "There is hardly anybody brave enough now to say that the EU is an excellent project, that there is a need for everyone to compromise."
Mr. Svoboda sounded a cautious note on eventual EU membership for Turkey, which has been strongly backed by President Bush. He said he supported the recent EU decision to begin negotiations with Turkey, but said Turkish membership would present major new challenges.
-------- iraq
Car Bomb Kills 11 in Baghdad
Suicide Attack Occurs at Entrance to Former Green Zone
By Scott Wilson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, July 15, 2004; Page A12
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A48620-2004Jul14?language=printer
BAGHDAD, July 14 -- A sport-utility vehicle filled with explosives detonated Wednesday at the main entrance to the fortified compound in central Baghdad that houses the interim Iraqi government and the U.S. Embassy, killing 11 people, most of them Iraqi civilians, and injuring more than 40 others.
Iraqi officials said the blast, triggered by a suicide bomber, occurred at 9:15 a.m. as many Iraqi civilians waited to pass through a crowded checkpoint leading to the convention center, the site of a number of government offices and booths where American contractors advertise job openings. The force of the explosion rattled hotel windows more than a mile away, collapsed plaster roofs of nearby shops and gouged huge chunks out of the cement blast walls that rim the compound once known as the Green Zone.
Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, who visited the site an hour after the blast, said the dead included four members of the Iraqi National Guard, a U.S.-trained paramilitary force that has assumed a larger role in security operations since the June 28 handover of political power to the interim Iraqi government. Seven Iraqi civilians were also killed, and Iraqi officials at the scene said most of them likely worked inside the compound or were seeking employment through the jobs fair at the convention center.
"These people were here to find work," Allawi said as the wreckage smoldered. "This is naked aggression against the Iraqi people. We will bring them to justice."
The bombing shattered a calm that had settled over the capital in the two weeks since the interim government assumed political authority after 15 months of U.S.-led occupation. It also appeared to be the first time since the handover that a suicide bomber deliberately targeted Iraqi civilians working for the United States.
Insurgents on Wednesday also assassinated the popular governor of Nineveh province, as his convoy traveled from the town of Baiji, 110 miles northwest of Baghdad. Witnesses said attackers fired on the northbound convoy, killing the governor, Osama Youssef Kashmoula, and his deputy. In an ensuing firefight, witnesses said, Kashmoula's security detail killed four insurgents. Kashmoula is believed to be the most senior Iraqi official killed since the May 17 assassination of Izzedin Salim, the acting president of the now-dissolved Iraqi Governing Council. Salim was killed in a suicide car bombing as he waited to enter the Green Zone.
Wednesday's explosion in Baghdad sent plumes of mud-brown smoke over the convention center complex and demonstrated the insurgency's continuing intent and capacity to strike at the political heart of the country. The checkpoint attacked this morning is the primary entrance for pedestrians entering the convention center and is used occasionally by members of the interim government.
The city center was largely empty Wednesday morning, as Iraqis celebrated the anniversary of the 1958 revolution that overturned the country's monarchy. Iraqi police officials at the scene of the blast said there would have been more casualties if the explosion had occurred on a normal business day. Iraqi police Brig. Majid Abdul-Hammed Obeidi estimated that about 1,000 pounds of explosives were packed in the vehicle, which a traffic patrol officer identified as a Toyota Land Cruiser.
U.S. military officials said, however, they had yet to identify the kind of vehicle used in the attack, although Col. John Murray, commander of the 1st Cavalry Division's 3rd Brigade, said it was certainly an SUV of some kind. The driver had been waved into the line to enter the parking lot, Murray said, and the process of searching the vehicle had just begun when he detonated the bomb.
"I wouldn't call it a surprise," Murray said. "These people are getting desperate. I would be surprised if this were the last one."
Judging by the charred, windowless frames of at least five cars, the bomb exploded about 30 feet from the entrance to the parking lot, along a set of 15-foot-high blast walls. The explosion was followed almost immediately by bursts of automatic rifle fire, which Iraqi police said came from confused Iraqi National Guardsmen trying to gain control over the scene.
Given the symbolic importance of the anniversary, U.S. forces had been placed on heightened alert at checkpoints and at other potential targets, including oil production facilities and police stations. But U.S. officials acknowledged that even the increased vigilance, which entailed additional troops and more-stringent search procedures at the checkpoints, could not thwart a determined suicide bomber.
"There is no place in this country where it would be possible to prevent someone willing to give up their life to detonate a bomb," said Lt. Col. Robert Campbell, commander of the 1st Cavalry Division battalion responsible for the six checkpoints into the International Zone, as the Green Zone is now officially known.
Allawi, who visited the site with Deputy Prime Minister Barham Salih, said the attack may have been a reprisal for the aggressive steps he has taken against the insurgency since taking office. In recent days, Iraqi security forces have rounded up more than 500 suspected criminals and insurgents.
"We think this is a response to the recent arrests," Allawi said. "We are going to defeat the evil forces. We are going to build a democratic Iraq."
Allawi described three of those arrested as leaders of the insurgency, including one who he said was not an Iraqi citizen. Speaking to reporters later in the day, the interim president, Ghazi Yawar, suggested the bomber might not have been Iraqi, a common assertion among Iraqi officials bewildered by the insurgents' targeting of civilians. U.S. military officials have acknowledged that, while bringing money and skill to the insurgency, foreign militants likely make up a small fraction of the overall resistance.
Yawar contended that in Iraq's history "there have not been problems between the Iraqis, be they ethnic or religious."
"These people are like a cancer . . . that plagues the Iraqi body," Yawar said of the insurgents. "We will treat it the proper way, God willing. We ask our people . . . for patience and, God willing, they will see results soon."
"All of the people waiting there in line were 100 percent Iraqis. There were no foreigners," said Sgt. Hussein Jassim, 23, of the Iraqi police, who helped carry 11 victims to the hospital in his police pickup truck. The truck's flat bed, as well as Jassim's pale-blue uniform shirt, were smeared with blood. He pointed to the stained Iraqi police patch on his shirt and noted plaintively that it was "filled with Iraqi blood."
"They said in the beginning these operations were against the occupiers because there is occupation, and they said let the Iraqis take over. So why are they doing this now?" Jassim said. "If they keep doing this, the occupiers will say the Iraqis can't keep the country safe and they will stay more. I don't understand. Do they want them to stay more?"
Two hours after the blast, Salem Baqir, 59, was being treated at Yarmouk Hospital for wounds to his back, neck and side. He and his wife, Zahra Kadhim Abbas, had planned to enter the compound to seek an exemption from U.S.-imposed rules that bar members of the once-ruling Baath Party from holding government jobs. As they crossed the intersection, the blast knocked them down.
"I don't know what happened to her," said Baqir, a retired teacher. "The last thing I saw, she was on the ground bleeding. I pray to God for her safety."
Special correspondents Naseer Nouri, Bassam Sabti and Khalid Saffar contributed to this report.
--------
Bombing Kills at Least 10 and Iraqi Leader Vows to Hit Back
July 15, 2004
By SOMINI SENGUPTA
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/15/international/middleeast/15CND-IRAQ.html?hp
BAGHDAD, Iraq, July 15 - Prime Minister Ayad Allawi announced today the establishment of a new Iraqi security service designed to "annihilate" terrorist groups in his country and urged that no one negotiate with hostage-takers.
His remarks came as a Filipino contractor, in a videotaped message broadcast on Al Jazeera, thanked his country for pulling its troops out of the country. The Filipino driver who was taken hostage last week declared that his captors were prepared to release him and send him home. The group holding him said they would let him go once the last of the 51 Filipino troops that are part of the United States-led forces had left the country.
Speaking to reporters this afternoon, Prime Minister Allawi said he had spoken to President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo of the Philippines and had urged her to reconsider the withdrawal of her forces.
"We don't negotiate with terrorists," he said. "The international community needs to close ranks against the terrorists."
The White House echoed his message, rebuking the Philippines for sending what it called the "wrong signal" by caving in to the demands of terrorists.
The fate of two Bulgarians taken hostage, meanwhile, remained a mystery. Iraqi police found a headless corpse dressed in an orange jumpsuit in the Tigris River, near the town of Baiji, about 100 miles north of Baghdad and turned it over to American forces. A United States military spokeswoman said this evening that it was unclear whether the body was that of a Bulgarian hostage who was reported to have been killed by his captors earlier this week.
The corpse was found Wednesday night less than 10 miles from where the governor of northern Nineveh province was assassinated earlier in the day. A senior United States military officer in Mosul said a terrorist cell was operating in that area.
Government officials and police officers have been favorite targets of the insurgency, and the carnage of the last two days, after nearly two weeks of relative clam, showed no letup in the attacks.
This morning, in a town west of the capital, called Haditha, a car bomb exploded near a government complex that houses police, civil defense and other public services.
Just before sundown, gunmen opened fire on an Iraqi foreign ministry car, killing one official and wounding two others, The Associated Press reported, quoting an Iraqi National Guard source. The foreign minister, Hoshyar Zebari, was not in the car at the time.
On Wednesday, in what was the bloodiest attack in the capital since the June 28 handover of power, a suicide car bombing killed 10 people at the gates of the heavily fortified American-occupied Green Zone.
Speaking to reporters in an Iraqi government building inside the Green Zone, the prime minister offered few details today about the new security division, called the General Security Directorate, except to say that it was specifically targeted to combating the insurgency. In an apparent effort to allay fears that the new agency would be a reincarnation of Saddam Hussein's feared spies, the interior minister, Falah al-Naqib, told reporters it would be staffed by professionals who have "clean hands."
The prime minister has explicitly staked out security as his chief focus. Last week, he announced a raft of emergency measures that, if invoked, would allow him to impose curfews, limit public movement and monitor political organizations. The newly reorganized Iraqi security forces have conducted several high-profile raids, including one this week that captured 15 suspected members of Al Qaeda and its allies.
The prime minister has also suggested that the death penalty could be restored, a notion criticized by members of the European Union.
"We are determined to bring down all the hurdles that stand in the way of our democracy," Mr. Allawi said today. "We would not spare any effort to defeat our enemies, the forces of evil."
The crackdown, Iraqi government officials have said, would be paired with an incentive of amnesty for some low-level insurgents.
The Iraqi president, Ghazi Al-Yawir, had said in a published interview that the amnesty proposal would be announced this week. But the prime minister said today that it would have to wait until next week, suggesting there were either some kinks to be ironed out, or that perhaps he was having a hard time selling the idea to some of his detractors. "It's still being discussed," he said. "It hasn't been finalized yet."
Mr. Allawi also said at the news conference that he had asked several other countries to contribute to the multinational troops fighting in Iraq, including Morocco, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Oman.
He said he was also planning to visit several neighboring countries, including Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait to request assistance "so we can open a new friendly peaceful chapter" among the countries in the region, Mr. Allawi said.
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Iraq Blast Kills 10; Headless Body Found
July 15, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iraq.html?hp
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- Attackers detonated a car bomb near police and government buildings in the western city of Haditha on Thursday, killing 10 Iraqis, while the prime minister said he would create a new security service geared toward halting the insurgency.
A decapitated body in an orange jumpsuit was discovered in the Tigris River in northern Iraq on Wednesday night, the military said. Although it was not identified, there were suspicions it could be that of a Bulgarian driver taken hostage recently and slain.
In an interview with Associated Press Television News, interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi said terrorists aiming to undermine Iraq's new government are determined not only to kill civilians and soldiers but to destroy the nation's infrastructure.
``The terrorists are so evil that they are not only satisfied by hitting the targets, and killing and inflicting loss of life'' but are also bent on destroying the quality of life by attacking Iraq's oil and other vital industries, he told AP.
Also, militants holding a Filipino truck driver hostage said they would release him when the last Filipino soldier leaves Iraq, according to a statement read on Arab television.
The statement on the station Al-Jazeera followed a video of the captive, Angelo dela Cruz, saying he was coming home soon and thanking his government for agreeing to withdraw peacekeepers. The Philippines' withdrawal should happen by the end of the month.
Fingerprints from the body found Wednesday night were sent to Bulgaria for identification, the Bulgarian government said.
Militants led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. a Jordanian accused of attacks and kidnappings in Iraq and elsewhere, killed one of two Bulgarian truck drivers it was holding hostage, the Bulgarian government confirmed Wednesday. The group, which has demanded the release of Iraqi detainees, said early Wednesday it would kill the second man in 24 hours. The deadline passed with no word on his fate.
Elsewhere, gunmen opened fire on cars belonging to Iraq's foreign minister, killing one official and wounding two others, an Iraqi National Guard official said. Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari was not in the two-car convoy at the time the attack about 65 miles south of Kirkuk.
Police apparently thwarted an attack in Karbala, chasing a car after receiving a tip it was filled with explosives. Two militants inside detonated their bomb, killing themselves but causing no other casualties.
The violence was the latest in a series of deadly attacks by insurgents since the U.S.-led coalition handed sovereignty to an interim Iraqi government; 65 people have been killed since the June 28 handover, 14 of them in a July 6 car bombing in the town of Khalis.
On Wednesday, a suicide car bombing in Baghdad killed at least 10 people near Iraqi government headquarters, and insurgents assassinated a provincial governor in an ambush of his convoy.
At a news conference, Allawi said the new General Security Directorate ``will annihilate those terrorist groups, God willing.''
The prime minister said he had asked Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Morocco and Egypt to contribute troops to the multinational force here to help him secure the country. He also announced that he would make his first foreign tour as prime minister to nearby Arab countries.
The attack in Haditha, known as a stronghold of Saddam Hussein's ousted regime, hit a government complex housing police, civil defense and municipal offices. The blast also wounded 40 people, Interior Ministry spokesman Col. Adnan Abdel-Rahman said.
Police and government officials have been targeted repeatedly by insurgents, who view them as puppets of U.S. forces.
Allawi's planned new security service appears to be another step in the fledgling government's efforts to stem the violence plaguing Iraq since the fall of Saddam's regime 15 months ago.
In remarks published in the al-Hayat newspaper, Allawi was quoted as saying Iraqi forces have arrested al-Qaida operatives and is seeing increasing coordination between Osama bin Laden's terror network and Saddam loyalists.
He said those arrested included al-Zarqawi's driver.
Allawi also said millions of dollars are being channeled by Saddam loyalists in neighboring countries help al-Qaida-linked militants such as al-Zarqawi carry out terror attacks.
Since taking power two weeks ago, Allawi's government has made clear it intends to crack down on militants who have caused chaos with assassinations, bombings and sabotage. It has passed emergency measures giving Allawi power to declare curfews and impose limited martial law.
Insurgents detonated a massive car bomb Wednesday at a checkpoint just outside the so-called Green Zone, former home to the U.S. occupation government and current site of Iraq's interim government and the U.S. and British embassies. The blast ripped a crater in the road and killed 10 Iraqis, many waiting in line to apply for government jobs, the Health Ministry said. The U.S. military said 11 were killed.
Hours later, insurgents tossed hand grenades and fired machine guns at a convoy transporting Nineveh Gov. Osama Youssef Kashmoula, killing him and two of his guards. Four attackers also were killed in the ambush north of Baghdad.
Elsewhere in Iraq:
--Saboteurs blasted a crude oil pipeline feeding into a main artery in northern Iraq, halting exports to Turkey and directing another blow to the country's key industry.
-- A rocket hit a home in the oil-rich city of Kirkuk, killing four people and wounding three, police and hospital officials said. A second rocket struck a home in a former army base used by Kurdish refugees, injuring four people.
--A Saudi company employing an Egyptian driver held hostage said it would stop work in Iraq to win his freedom but not pay ransom. Faisal al-Naheet, whose company is a subcontractor for Al-Jarie Transport, said kidnappers were demanding a $1 million for the hostage.
--Two U.S. soldiers were killed and two injured when their vehicle rolled over in northern Iraq, the military said Thursday.
-------- israel / palestine
Israeli missiles rain down on Gaza
Palestinian metal workshops have been routinely targeted
Wednesday 14 July 2004
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/6148903F-597D-42E2-87F4-6552C5C58F35.htm
Israeli helicopters fired missiles at several metal workshops in Gaza City claiming they were used to manufacture bombs.
There were no immediate reports of casualties in the strike in Gaza's Zeitoun neighbourhood early on Wednesday.
Palestinian witnesses said three missiles hit the workshops in the nighttime strike.
The last time Israeli helicopters fired on Gaza, Palestinian resistance fighters retaliated by firing home-made missiles on the Israeli town of Sderot, east of Gaza.
Home-made rockets
Late on Tuesday, Palestinian fighters responded to the Israeli assassination of local leader Numan Tahaina by firing Quds-1 rockets into the Israeli town of Sderot, Aljazeera reported.
An Aljazeera correspondent reported that Numan Tahaina, 38, was on Israel's most-wanted list since the first Palestinian intifadha against Israeli occupation in 1987.
Israeli officials admitted they killed Tahaina after firing on his car which refused to stop at an impromptu checkpoint.
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A PEOPLE ADRIFT | FIRST OF TWO ARTICLES
In Chaos, Palestinians Struggle for a Way Out
July 15, 2004
By JAMES BENNET
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/15/international/middleeast/15pale.html?pagewanted=all&position=
JENIN, West Bank - Sitting in his office beneath two signs deploring smoking, Salahaldin Mousa listens all day as his fellow citizens interrupt his paperwork to complain about their utility bills or to demand jobs. He wonders whom they may be connected to, and if they have guns.
"We live without a social contract now," he said. "We rely on our own relationships."
Across town, in the Jenin refugee camp, Zacaria Zubeidah addresses the same matters, as well as some that are more dire: theft, robbery, even murder.
Mr. Mousa and Mr. Zubeidah met in prison in 1989, as teenagers who joined in the first Palestinian uprising against Israel. In this uprising, this current intifada, now in its fourth year, they have taken very different paths: Mr. Mousa, 34, is the administrative manager of Jenin, and he disavows violence. Mr. Zubeidah, 28, is the leader of Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades, the militant group most feared by Israel.
With a masters degree in law and human rights from a Swedish university, Mr. Mousa dreams of becoming the Palestinian minister of justice. But it is Mr. Zubeidah, with his silver Smith & Wesson pistol at his hip, who administers what passes for law.
"I am the highest authority," Mr. Zubeidah said, echoing a view widely held in Jenin. A slender man with an easy smile, he sat in white tennis shoes, blue jeans and a brown T-shirt on a torn couch in a home in the camp.
For Palestinians, it is a mocking contradiction: President Bush and Prime Minister Ariel Sharon speak of a state of Palestine as almost a historical inevitability. But on the ground, after years of Israeli military raids and blockades and Palestinian political paralysis, the economy is growing more dependent on foreign donors, and institutions of statehood are crumbling.
In the West Bank and Gaza, a contest is under way between warlords and democrats, between Islamists and secular leaders, between those who would destroy Israel and those who would live beside it, between enclaves like Jenin and Gaza and the very idea of a unified national state.
The bulldozers are at work again in Jenin camp. Hundreds of homes are rising to replace those leveled when soldiers squared off with gunmen during an Israeli offensive two years ago. Out in the fields beyond the camp stands another legacy of the conflict, Israel's barrier against West Bank Palestinians.
For Israel, the barrier is a sign that after 37 years of occupying the West Bank and Gaza, it is deciding what it wants: to cut itself off from the Palestinians, to give up Gaza, to hold onto as much of the West Bank as it can, and to retrain a Jewish majority in a democratic state.
But for Palestinians, there is no such clarity; they have made no national decisions, and the mechanisms for making and enforcing any are breaking down.
For many residents of Jenin, their city of 45,000 has become an island, relying on itself rather than the Palestinian Authority.
"Over three years, Jenin turned back into a small village that must depend on itself," said its mayor, Waleed A. Mwais. "Israel destroyed all forms of authority. Everyone has their own weapon. This is the problem of Jenin: We have an absolute state of chaos."
Criticism of the aging Palestinian leadership, and even of Yasir Arafat, has reached a new pitch. But reform-minded leaders are struggling to find a way to start over, now that more than 3,200 Palestinians and almost 1,000 Israelis have died violently in a conflict that has become a way of life.
"You'd like to feel something has a connection to tomorrow," said Muhammad Horani, a Palestinian legislator from Hebron who has been trying for years for democratic change.
Private investment has all but vanished. But donors stepped in, doubling their contributions, to a billion dollars a year, an amount equal to one-third the Palestinian gross national product last year of $3.1 billion. That works out to roughly $310 a person, more aid per capita than any country has received since World War II, the World Bank says.
With the help of Arabs, Europeans and others, the Palestinian Authority continues running schools and paying salaries that support tens of thousands of families. This national dependency is obvious here. In the camp, some residents whose houses survived the raid envy those getting keys to new homes, built by the United Nations with help from the United Arab Emirates.
Like Palestinian society in general, Jenin is losing ground, but it is enduring. It is muddling through. This is a story of decay, not of sudden collapse; of the corrosion of an educated, relatively affluent society that Palestinian and Israeli officials say may still have the makings of a model democracy.
The Palestinian national dream has not died. There are still people fighting to hold life together, to pick up the garbage, light the streets and salvage a chance at better days. But for some of them, the breakdown in leadership seems complete.
After sunset here recently, Mr. Mousa went to his windswept rooftop to show off his view of the city he loves, and grieves for. He believes that Jenin has become a kind of "mini-state," but controlled by no one.
"We are running this place, we are not ruling it," he said, as he looked down on the lights of Jenin. "Just running, running, running. Because we have no choice."
Zubeidah, the Militant Leader
"I was busy solving a problem related to the construction," Mr. Zubeidah said, explaining his late arrival to a recent meeting. A resident had opened fire on the office of the United Nations agency that oversees the camp. The man was angry at the pace of construction of his new home.
Mr. Zubeidah, who is known throughout the city simply as Zacaria, said he managed to fill "about 70 percent" of the "absence of law" that he said was caused by Israeli pressure on the Palestinian Authority. Indeed, Mr. Zubeidah, who like others complained that too many Palestinians here have guns, appears to spend more time on internal matters than on Al Aksa's stated goal: resisting the Israeli occupation.
Since September 2000, 28 suicide bombings or shootings originated in Jenin - 38 percent of all such attacks, according to Israeli security officials. Since the Israeli barrier went up in the northern West Bank, however, the number has dropped. So far this year, the number is zero, though attempts continue.
In Israeli cities like Tel Aviv and Haifa, it is possible now to forget about the conflict, at least for a time. But on this side of the barrier, the conflict suffuses life. In June, Israeli forces regularly raided Jenin by night, arresting or killing young men the Army accused of being militants.
Jenin is a place where everyone seems to have lost a relative or friend to violence or prison. "Every second," said Mahmoud Ajawi, 45, when asked how often he thought of his boy, Anas, dead at 17. "No father would push his son in that direction."
Jamilah Nubani, 58, goes every evening to the Martyrs' Cemetery to mourn two sons and a son-in-law buried there. All were fighters or members of the security services. "God, we ask you for your mercy," she said, gripping one son's headstone to pull herself to her feet, before making her way to her other son's grave.
On his radio show, "The Town," Ziad Shelbak, 44, debates himself endlessly over the right mix of morale-boosting nationalist songs and love songs. As the conflict has worn on, he has begun playing more love songs, which he prefers, switching back to nationalist ones only if a Palestinian is killed locally. "If someone is killed in Nablus or Ramallah, I don't switch to national songs, unless it's a big character," he said.
Jenin is also place where, in spite of the conflict, life goes on. Along Faisal Hussein Street through the middle of town, men gather in the evenings to play cards for hours and drink glasses of sweet tea for a shekel apiece. (A shekel is worth about 22 cents.)
People with a little more money may go to the Gardens restaurant at the edge of town, to sip tea for three shekels a glass. The Gardens also has a pool, and at 10:45 one recent night, a swimmer did a back flip off the high dive.
But in a sign of the times, the Gardens has established a separate seating area for the shebab, the rowdy young men and fighters who unnerve the other guests.
By midnight, the card-players and tea drinkers return home, abandoning the dark streets to the fighters, who cruise in the stolen Israeli cars that somehow still manage to make it past the barrier and into Jenin. Gunfire rings out most nights.
About two years ago, Israel began forbidding the Palestinian police here and in other West Bank cities to carry guns. The police and other security men were firing on Israelis, they said. Now, in tidy blue uniforms, policemen cluster on the sidewalks during the day, but they do nothing to enforce the law, residents and city officials said.
The lack of enforcement ripples through the society. At the Jenin driving school, Abdul Karim Jarrar, 40, cannot pay his modest electricity bill. The police do not enforce traffic laws, so few new drivers bother to get licenses or instruction, he said.
Yassin Abu Saryeh, 32, a city employee who tries to collect fees for utilities, said he understood that Mr. Jarrar could not pay. But he said he also understood that Nidal Jaradat simply would not.
"You're not going to pay?" he asked on a recent visit to Mr. Jaradat's sundries store. He said that Mr. Jaradat, 40, had three years' worth of accumulated bills, amounting to thousands of shekels.
Standing behind racks jammed with candy, Mr. Jaradat argued that since his brother, a militant, was in an Israeli prison, he should not have to pay. The city owes millions of dollars for electricity and water supplied by Israeli companies. The mayor says that without a new infusion of foreign aid, the municipality will shut its doors later this year. Already, it has had to stop repaving the Palestinian-American Friendship Road, a rutted track around the city. Bill-collection rates are running at about 15 percent, and collections agents have been threatened and even attacked.
Mr. Jaradat said that if Mr. Abu Saryeh pressed the matter, he would go to the municipality to explain.
"If they don't listen to me, I'll bring some people along," Mr. Jaradat added. "My brother is well known." He added hastily to a reporter that while some people might make threats, he was not doing so.
During the Israeli incursion into the Jenin camp, Israeli bulldozers flattened Jamal Nashrati's home. He escaped with his family to his brother's house, where, as the fighting continued for days, they were forced finally to drink water from the toilet, he said.
Mr. Nashrati, 47, spent his own money to dig a cistern beneath a courtyard in his new house, built by the United Nations. Above it, he set a fountain clad in blue tile, a safe place for his children to play. Behind the fountain, in the wall, he installed an enlarged version of his United Nations refugee card, certifying that his family was dispossessed in the Israeli-Arab war of 1948.
He wants the fountain to help his children "forget what happened" two years ago and "live a normal life." He put up the display, he said, "because I want my children to keep in their memory that we come from a village called Zaharin."
Asked if he expected to return to his old village, Zaharin, in what is now Israel, Mr. Nashrati said: "This is impossible. I know that."
While Mr. Nashrati, who once worked as a welder in Israel, spoke of peace and a two-state solution, his children, maturing in this time of violence and separation, sounded a harsher note. Rukon, 10 years old, said he wanted to grow up to be a fighter like Mahmoud Tawalbe, an Islamic Jihad leader killed in the raid two years ago.
"I'm disturbed when I hear my son say that," Mr. Nashrati said. "This is a general problem for us, that we don't feel we can control our children."
Asked if he thought he could be friends with an Israeli boy his age, Rukon drew a hand across his throat. "I want only to stab him," he said.
Mr. Nashrati hastily said Rukon was young and ignorant. "This son is old enough to understand," he said, indicating Munir, 20.
Asked if he could be friends with an Israeli his age, Munir Nashrati said, "It's impossible."
Asked whom he admired among Palestinian leaders, he replied, "Zacaria.''
Arafat, the Absent Leader When Israel briefly lifted its siege on Mr. Arafat's compound in Ramallah more than two years ago, the Palestinian leader paid a visit to Jenin. But for fear of hecklers or even assailants, Mr. Arafat did not stop in the wrecked camp. Hundreds of residents clustered before a podium set up by a giant portrait of Mr. Arafat, but his motorcade whisked by behind them. Someone cut down the portrait, while a young man in a baseball cap muttered, "He didn't want to get his shoes dusty."
Now, Mr. Arafat's face still beams down from the wall of every public office, but Palestinians here freely criticize him.
"He doesn't care," Zacaria Zubeidah said of the leader of his faction, Fatah.
Of Mr. Arafat's leadership generally, he said, "For me, the one sitting in Ramallah, in his villa, in his air-conditioned room while we suffer in the heat - he's closing his windows so he doesn't hear the noise of the tanks we hear."
Last year, Mr. Zubeidah and his gunmen kidnapped Jenin's governor, a Fatah member appointed by Mr. Arafat, and held him for several hours. Released after pleas from Mr. Arafat, the man fled to Jordan.
"He was making a lot of mistakes," Mr. Zubeidah said of the governor. "We kept waiting for two years for the Palestinian leadership to do something. They did nothing."
Both Mr. Zubeidah and Mr. Mousa, the city manager, grew up in Mr. Arafat's Fatah movement, the mainstream secular faction that embraced the Oslo peace process and dominates the Palestinian Authority. Their diverging paths illustrate the ideological confusion that has upended Fatah and sown chaos in the West Bank and Gaza. It is a confusion fed by the turmoil of Palestinian politics and the social and class divides in cities like this one.
While Mr. Zubeidah speaks of achievements from this uprising, Mr. Mousa rolls his eyes at claims about the intifada made by other Palestinians he calls "the heroes of the satellite channels."
"I will never worship any leadership again," he said.
Mousa, the Optimistic Leader
Like Mr. Zubeidah, Mr. Mousa has credentials as a fighter. He spent seven years in Israeli prisons for beating a settler during the first intifada. He was released at the outset of the Oslo peace process.
The Israeli judge who sentenced him asked what he would have done with his life had he not found himself facing prison. The whole courtroom burst into laughter, he recalled, when he replied that he dreamed of being a lawyer.
"I kept dreaming about this," he said, "and now I am a lawyer."
While Mr. Mousa seized on the possibilities of Oslo, Mr. Zubeidah was shaped by its failure. Sentenced to more than four years in the first uprising, he was also released in the mid-1990's.
In prison, he said, other Palestinians taught him the primacy of armed struggle. But once released, he "faced a new reality." With an Israeli woman, his mother began staging plays here about Palestinian suffering and the hope of peace. For Israeli visitors, Mr. Zubeidah would translate from Arabic into the fluent Hebrew he learned in prison.
But after the uprising began he, unlike Mr. Mousa, again felt the pull of armed struggle.
Fatah members initially led the fighting in the second intifada. It was not until five months after the conflict began that Hamas conducted its first suicide bombing of the uprising. In the view of some Palestinian politicians, that early leadership by Fatah legitimized Hamas violence for the Palestinian public.
As Hamas then began to gain popularity, Fatah found itself competing to conduct sensational attacks. The very name of the Fatah militia - Al Aksa Martyrs Brigade - reflects what some Palestinian officials lament is an Islamicization of the faction, as it tried to top Hamas.
In January 2002, as Israel struck back and the conflict intensified, Al Aksa Martyrs Brigade added suicide to its arsenal.
Hamas vs. Al Aksa
Hamas is officially bent on Israel's destruction, while Mr. Arafat has endorsed a two-state solution. Many Fatah leaders believe Fatah should confine its attacks to Israeli soldiers and settlers in the territory that Israel occupied in the 1967 war.
But Al Aksa Martyrs Brigade began attacking Israeli civilians outside the West Bank and Gaza, persuading Israelis that Fatah had the same goal as Hamas and confusing Palestinians about what the faction stood for.
Mr. Zubeidah says he opposes killing civilians and seeks a state in the West Bank and Gaza, with its capital in Jerusalem. But, referring to the so-called Green Line between Israel and the West Bank, he asked, "Why is the '67 line something I should respect, while they don't?"
Many if not most Al Aksa gunmen, like Hamas members, emerged from the refugee camps. Nurturing a desire to return to homes in what is now Israel, residents of camps like Jenin's remained apart from city life, not even taking part in municipal elections.
The camps bred militancy against Israel, giving Al Aksa Martyrs its hard edge. They also bred a sense of grievance against Palestinians living in the cities, who were seen as soft and rich, and prejudiced against refugees. That has fueled some violence and extortion by the group against city residents.
This reporter first interviewed Mr. Zubeidah in the fall of 2001, when he was a low-ranking gunman walking through Jenin's market. Mr. Zubeidah had just been wounded when a bomb he was preparing blew up in his face, scorching it black. He rejected any talk of peace. "I lost my face!" he said at the time. "What did I achieve? I'm a refugee still."
Since then, Mr. Zubeidah has lost his mother, killed in an Israeli raid, and a brother, killed fighting in the big offensive two years ago. Almost all the young actors in his mother's theater have died. Mr. Zubeidah was promoted through the ranks quite literally by a process of elimination. His two predecessors died violently, and Israeli forces have tried to kill him; during a conversation here, he pulled up his shirt to show bullet scars in his shoulder and back.
After paying a higher price than most Palestinians, members of Al Aksa Martyrs Brigade are reluctant to lay down their weapons for anything less than the sovereignty this uprising was supposed to achieve. They may have another reason to keep fighting: Israeli security officials say some Al Aksa cells in this part of the West Bank have begun receiving money from Iran, through the Lebanese guerrilla group Hezbollah.
For a year, Fatah has been trying to rein in Mr. Zubeidah, along with other Al Aska leaders. In June, he rejected an overture by the Palestinian Authority to integrate Al Aksa into the security forces. Many Palestinian officials and analysts say it is Al Aksa, not the overall leadership, that is showing initiative. In late June, the militants issued a 10-page manifesto attacking corruption in the Palestinian Authority and demanding political change.
Yet Mr. Zubeidah, who endorsed the manifesto, said Palestinians could not hope for any effective government until the Israelis ended their occupation.
"Until we have a state, no one is going to rule us," he said. "Anyone can say he is the leader of the Palestinians. It doesn't concern me."
Kadoura Mousa, the top Fatah leader in Jenin, played down Al Aksa Martyrs Brigade as a passing phenomenon. "When occupation ends, this phenomenon will disappear," he said, "and everything will return back to Fatah."
In the meantime, he said, Mr. Zubeidah was useful as a "striking force against any person who tries to misuse power." He did not appear to find it odd that a group created to fight Israelis would be turned instead against Palestinians.
Mr. Mousa spoke while sitting by a grape arbor in his garden above Jenin, watching the sun sink beyond the barrier, behind the Carmel hills. He said the conflict had set Jenin back 20 years. But that did not matter, he continued.
"We still have people living in tents in other places," he said. "We are seeking independence and freedom, not comfortable living conditions."
Despite the high profile of Al Aksa, some local leaders say that Fatah is on its way out, and that Hamas would win any municipal election here.
The most influential Muslim prayer leader here, Khaled Suleiman, 37, said Fatah's internal contradictions were tearing it apart.
"In my opinion, Fatah is at a crossroads now," said the imam, who is not officially connected to any faction but is seen here as close to Hamas. "Its existence is based on the survival of Arafat. Without Arafat, it will be split."
Asked to describe the split, he replied: "Between Gaza and the West Bank, between village and city, between city and camp. Because it's a movement that has no political thought. It's based on the leader."
Mr. Mousa, the city manager, also believes that Fatah is at a crossroads, with two options left to reassert leadership. The first is to dissolve the Palestinian Authority and declare that Israel has left Palestinians no choice but all-out war. The second option, which he favors, is one very few Palestinians speak of.
"The Palestinian Authority should stand in front of the people and say, 'We are defeated,' " Mr. Mousa said over dinner one evening. " 'But this is not the end of the world. This is a new stage of our life.' And then you say to the world, 'Please help us.' "
After years of saving money for his own apartment, Mr. Mousa married in June - a sign, he said, of his enduring hope of a better future. He declined the offer of Palestinian fighters to supply a volley of celebratory gunfire.
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New Group Helps U.S. Jews Move to Israel
July 15, 2004
By GREG MYRE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/15/international/middleeast/15isra.html?pagewanted=all
LOD, Israel, July 14 - With immigration to Israel down sharply in recent years, a charter flight delivered nearly 400 new arrivals from the United States and Canada on Wednesday as part of an expanding program that has been luring middle-class Jews from North America.
In a sweltering ceremony that filled a huge hanger at Ben-Gurion International Airport, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and two of his cabinet ministers greeted the immigrants moments after they stepped off an El Al jumbo jet from Kennedy Airport in New York.
"We have to bring hundreds of thousands of Jews from America to Israel," Mr. Sharon said. "We need them here. It is important for you. It is important for us."
The immigrants are among 1,500 from the United States and Canada, almost a third of them from New York State, who are arriving this summer under the sponsorship of a private group, Nefesh B'Nefesh, or "soul to soul."
North American Jews, most of whom are comfortably middle-class at home, have traditionally migrated to Israel in small numbers, averaging 3,000 to 5,000 annually for the last quarter-century, according to Israeli government figures.
But Nefesh B'Nefesh is seeking to raise those figures substantially. In its first try, the group brought in just over 500 immigrants in the summer of 2002. More than 1,000 came last year, despite the continuing Middle East violence and an Israel economy that was just beginning to crawl out of a recession.
Dr. Jonathan Paley, an orthodontist from Cedarhurst, N.Y., on Long Island, landed with his wife, Sarah, and their five children, ages 11 years to 4 months.
Dr. Paley, 33, will quickly settle his family in Jerusalem and then commute to New York for two weeks each month to keep working at his old practice until he can establish himself in Israel.
"It's not easy, but this is something very important to all of us," Dr. Paley said. "I first came to Israel when I was 11, and I've been dreaming about this ever since."
The immigrants said the violence in the Middle East was not a deterrent to immigrating, and in some cases it motivated them to show solidarity with Israel during a time of turmoil. Most of the young men will be required to perform military service.
"At some point I expect to serve in the army, which I'll do gladly," said Jason Silberman, 25, who was living in Queens and working at a Manhattan law firm.
While the new arrivals cited personal reasons for coming, the immigration issue is also linked to the demographic battle between Israelis and Palestinians.
In the combined areas of Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, Jews outnumber Arabs by about 5.4 million to 4.9 million, according to figures from the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority. But the Arab birthrate is significantly higher, and under the current trends, Arabs will outnumber Jews within the next 10 to 20 years, according to demographers.
Israel's Jewish population rose with a wave of immigration that began in 1990 as the Soviet Union was collapsing. A year earlier, Israel had just 24,000 immigrants. In 1990, a record 200,000 came, the vast majority from the Soviet Union.
Immigration has fallen in recent years, because many Jews in economically distressed countries, like the former Soviet republics and Ethiopia, have already left. Last year, immigration fell below 25,000, hitting a 15-year low.
This year's crop of North American immigrants comes from 33 states and 4 Canadian provinces, and 98 percent of the families have at least one member with an undergraduate or postgraduate degree.
"We promise we are going to bring many more planes in the future," said Rabbi Yehoshua Fass, one of the leaders of Nefesh B'Nefesh.
Many will be living in Jerusalem or Beit Shemesh, about 20 miles to the west. At least a few new immigrants will be moving to Jewish settlements in the West Bank, a practice that strikes a nerve among Palestinians.
In recent years, new immigrants from India, Peru and elsewhere have been placed in West Bank settlements on their arrival. On Thursday, 50 French families will be arriving and moving to the West Bank while studying Hebrew, the newspaper Yediot Aharonot reported.
The Middle East peace plan known as the road map calls for Israel to suspend "all settlement activity." Israel has interpreted this to mean that the development of existing settlements is permissible.
The Palestinians call for the dismantling of all settlements, which have been built in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip on land that Israel captured in the Arab-Israeli war of 1967. The Palestinians want those territories for a future state.
-------- nato
No requests for US troops to provide Olympic security: US defense officials
WASHINGTON (AFP)
Jul 15, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040715202953.uweil6ph.html
The United States has not been asked to provide troops as part of security arrangements at the Olympic Games in Greece next month, US defense officials said Thursday, adding that NATO discussions with Greek authorities continue.
NATO agreed last month to provide AWACS radar planes, maritime surveillance, intelligence sharing and a battalion trained to defend against chemical and biological attack.
The US European Command has also taken part in three exercises since November "to help the Greeks determine their real-world needs before the games," a defense official said.
But Greek authorities have been adamant that security for the Olympics August 13-29 is Greece's responsibility and foreign troops are not needed, officials said.
"The United States has not been asked for any specific troop support," a senior defense official told AFP on condition of anonymity.
US intelligence has warned that al-Qaeda is plotting major attacks, citing the Olympics and the US elections in November as likely targets.
Asked on Wednesday whether US policy remains "if it has to act unilaterally, it will," Pentagon spokesman Larry DiRita said, "We'll always act to defend our national interests and to defend US citizens around the world." Brigadier General David Rodriguez, of the Joint Staff, said NATO is coordinating with Greece on their security plans, and the United States is supporting NATO.
"But there have not been a lot of specific agreements and specific force contributions at this point in time because the negotiations are still going on between NATO and the government of Greece," he said.
-------- prisoners of war
Lawyers sue U.S. government for 15 Guantanamo detainees from Yemen
7/15/2004
(AP)
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2004-07-15-gitmo-lawsuit_x.htm
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico - A team of lawyers sued the U.S. government Thursday on behalf of 15 detainees from Yemen held on suspicion of terrorism at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, a spokesman said.
The lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court in Washington, bringing to about 50 the number of detainees for whom suits are pending, said Clive Stafford-Smith, a human rights lawyer who leads the New Orleans-based group Justice in Exile.
The actions all demand court hearings and argue the men should be freed. The U.S. Supreme Court opened the door to such suits in a June 28 ruling that said detainees may appeal to civilian courts.
All of the 15 Yemenis were detained in Pakistan, said Pamela Chepiga, a lawyer with New York-based Allen & Overy, the leading law firm on the case.
Stafford-Smith, who also helped prepare the case, said he visited families of many of the Yemenis in their homeland and most told similar stories: the men left to work in Pakistan and didn't return. Relatives authorized the lawyers to prepare cases.
"All we're asking for is a fair hearing," Stafford-Smith said by phone from New Orleans. "These are not terrorists."
The U.S. military says the nearly 600 men at Guantanamo are "enemy combatants" from the war in Afghanistan, held on suspicion of links to the fallen Taliban regime or al-Qaeda.
Four of the detainees have been formally charged and are to be tried by military tribunals.
-------- spies
New Zealand jails alleged Israeli spies
PM launches verbal attack and slaps diplomatic sanctions on Israel over passport fraud
July 15, 2004
by Matthew Clark
Christian Science Monitor
http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0715/dailyUpdate.html
New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark launched a "blistering verbal attack" and slapped diplomatic sanctions on Israel Thursday. Ms. Clark announced this after two suspected agents of Israel's Mossad intelligence agency were imprisoned for six months for illegally attempting to obtain New Zealand passports, reports The Scotsman. The two, who were arrested last March, were also ordered to pay a fine of 50,000 New Zealand dollars each.
Why would fraud cause such a strong diplomatic response? The answer may have to do with the value of an New Zealand passport.
In a July 4 article, the Israeli daily Ha'aretz reported that "intelligence specialists in New Zealand, including one individual who said he had once worked for the Mossad, said in interviews that the members of a group associated with the case had been working systematically for years to obtain New Zealand passports, which are considered 'door-openers' and do not arouse suspicion in the Arab world."
Writing for the US libertarian-leaning website Antiwar.com about the arrest of the two Israelis last spring, editorial director Justin Raimondo asserts that New Zealand passports "are very much sought after and highly prized on the black market, especially by terrorists, on account of the visa-free access they provide to a wide range of destinations, including the US."
In her comments Thursday, Clark pointed to Mossad's past connection with false passports and assassination attempts. "Israeli agents caught in an unsuccessful assassination attempt in Jordan in 1997 were found to be carrying fraudulent Canadian passports," she said.
Urie Zoshe Kelman and Eli Cara were arrested in March after they "tried to collect a passport in the name of a New Zealand national who is a wheelchair-bound cerebral palsy victim," reports The Scotsman. At an earlier hearing they both admitted to trying to fraudulently obtain a passport, but have denied working for Mossad.
The Australian reports that the two pleaded guilty earlier this month to illegally obtaining a passport for another Israeli, Zev Barkan, who fled to Sydney before he could be apprehended.
Ms. Clark said she believes the two men were Israeli intelligence agents and that the case was "far more than simple criminal behavior by two individuals," reports the BBC. "New Zealand condemns without reservation these actions by agencies of the Israel government," she said.
"The New Zealand government views the act carried out by the Israeli intelligence agents as not only utterly unacceptable but also a breach of New Zealand sovereignty and international law." Clark said the actions of the men and those of the Israeli government had "seriously strained relations" with New Zealand.
Clark also said she would suspend government visits to Israel, Israeli officials would need visas to enter New Zealand, and foreign ministry contacts would be suspended, reports BBC. Clark said that New Zealand would refuse any request for Israel's President Moshe Katsav to visit later this year when he is due to go to Australia, because Israel had ignored requests made three months ago for an explanation and an apology, reports The Associated Press.
Arutz Sheva of Israel reports that Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom expressed sorrow over Clark's decision, and said that Israel would take steps towards restoring relations with New Zealand. The popular Israeli news source also quotes Alon Liel, former Director-General of the Foreign Ministry, as having said that Israel must protest the diplomatic sanctions, "for if not, it's a silent admission that the two men worked for the Mossad."
The Australian reports that the rebuke is "New Zealand's toughest diplomatic stance since it broke official relations with France over the 1985 Rainbow Warrior bombing, when two French secret agents were convicted of manslaughter for blowing up the Greenpeace ship in Auckland harbor."
[Clark] vowed there would be no repeat of Wellington's 1985 agreement with Paris, under which two French agents convicted of the fatal bombing were quietly allowed to leave the country. "There will be no deals this time," the Prime Minister said.
New Zealand's Jewish community is "reacting with both embarrassment and concern" to Clark's decision to impose sanctions on Israel, reports The Jerusalem Post. The Post quotes Mike Regan, editor of The New Zealand Jewish Chronicle, as saying: "New Zealand is not particularly friendly to Israel."
"[Regan] said Clark's decision has more to do with the possibility of Mossad being in the country than it does with the men's attempt to obtain illegal passports." The Post continues:
'Clark imposed her own judgment. She's trying a different case here,' he said, adding that there is no strong evidence that the two men are actually secret agents. ... 'It lowers the standing of Jews in New Zealand and adds support to the Palestinian cause,' Regan said. New Zealand has donated in the past hundreds of thousands of dollars to a United Nations body that aids Palestinian refugees.
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INTELLIGENCE
Acting Chief Insists Agencies Aren't at Fault in War Debate
July 15, 2004
By DOUGLAS JEHL
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/15/politics/15inte.html
WASHINGTON, July 14 - The country's new acting intelligence chief said Wednesday that American intelligence agencies should not be blamed if there was inadequate debate about the decision to go to war against Iraq.
Those comments, by John E. McLaughlin, were aimed at the Senate Intelligence Committee, which issued a report last week that portrayed American intelligence agencies as having exaggerated the evidence that Iraq had illicit weapons. But the comments also were an implicit retort to arguments that the Central Intelligence Agency, not President Bush, was primarily responsible for sending the country to war.
The Senate panel dissected the intelligence behind a National Intelligence Estimate of October 2002. That document included flat assertions that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons and was reconstituting its nuclear program, statements that the Senate committee called unfounded and unreasonable.
But to treat the document as a pivotal element in the march to war would be "an oversimplification of the situation,'' Mr. McLaughlin said on CNN, in one of a series of interviews intended to counter the sharp criticism of the agency, adding, "If there wasn't sufficient debate about these issues, it wasn't the fault of the people who prepared this estimate.''
The document included some qualifications and dissents, and Mr. McLaughlin suggested that these might well have given rise to more vigorous debate than was heard about the degree to which Iraq posed a threat to the United States.
The 30-minute television interview put Mr. McLaughlin on the public stage in a way that his predecessor, George J. Tenet, who left office Sunday, and most other directors of central intelligence have shunned. It followed an interview on Wednesday in which the acting intelligence chief answered callers' questions on a radio program, and two interviews on Tuesday with news agencies.
Before the war, White House officials reached beyond the assessments spelled out in the intelligence reports. But in his appearances, Mr. McLaughlin demurred when asked whether the White House had exaggerated the intelligence.
Mr. McLaughlin's interviews occurred as Mr. Bush continued to defend his decision to go to war, which he has said was the right thing to do though no banned weapons have been found in Iraq. But a leading Republican senator said he doubted that Mr. Bush would have ordered an invasion of Iraq based on what is now known of its arms program.
The senator, Pat Roberts of Kansas, is the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which reported that American intelligence agencies badly overreached in declaring before the war that Iraq possessed chemical and biological weapons and was reconstituting its nuclear weapons programs.
Like Mr. Bush, Mr. Roberts was a supporter of the war who has said the world and Iraq are better off with Saddam Hussein out of power.
But in an hourlong interview on Wednesday morning in his office, Mr. Roberts said he was "not too sure" that the administration would have invaded if it had known how flimsy the intelligence was on Iraq and illicit weapons. Instead, the senator said, Mr. Bush might well have advocated efforts to maintain sanctions against Iraq and to continue to try to unearth the truth through the work of United Nations inspectors. "I don't think the president would have said that military action is justified right now," Mr. Roberts said. If the administration had been given "accurate intelligence," he said, Mr. Bush "might have said, 'Saddam's a bad guy, and we've got to continue with the no-fly zones and with inspections.' "
At one level, Mr. Roberts's comments can be seen as offering support for the White House, by underscoring the view that intelligence agencies, not Mr. Bush, should be held responsible for fundamental misjudgments about Iraq. But the suggestion that Mr. Bush might well have chosen a different course appeared to run counter to the White House suggestion that the president had been obliged in the case of Iraq to head off a potential threat.
Mr. Roberts said he was speaking solely on the basis of his own inference, not on any conversations with the president or White House officials. But the comments followed those of other senators, including Senator John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, the top Democrat on the intelligence panel, who have said they would have voted against a war resolution had they known that intelligence assessments about Iraq and illicit weapons were not solid.
Senator Rockefeller said last week that he believed a war resolution would have failed in Congress had the flimsiness of the intelligence been known; Senator Roberts has said he was "not sure.''
Seeking to defend the intelligence agencies' reputation, Mr. McLaughlin spent well over an hour in all on Wednesday answering questions from reporters and callers, even traveling to a CNN studio for an interview with Wolf Blitzer, an anchor.
In the radio interview on the "Diane Rehm Show,'' which is broadcast on public radio stations, Mr. McLaughlin said his agency was intensely focused on what he called its real work, and he said that the credibility of recent intelligence about possible terrorist attacks had raised concern in the administration to a level as high as it had been since the Sept. 11 attacks.
"In the summer of 2001, we had ample warning of attack, but we didn't know anything about specificity: timing, targets, and so forth'' he said. "But we did have conviction that something big was coming at us. We have that same conviction now.
"And the reason I say that is serious is that I think the information I've seen is very, very solid. We have very little doubt about the information we have in terms of its sourcing and specificity.''
Intelligence officials have said that Mr. McLaughlin should not be ruled out as a candidate for the permanent post, but his name has not been mentioned by White House officials, who say that Mr. Bush intends to nominate a successor soon, though almost certainly not this week.
Mr. McLaughlin has said that he will stay on as long as Mr. Bush likes and that he is willing to help any new intelligence chief.
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Iraq Forms New Spy Agency, Car Bomb Kills 10
July 15, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-iraq.html
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraq's interim prime minister announced the formation of a new spy agency to tackle insurgents Thursday, hours after a car bomb killed 10 people including several policemen and two children northwest of Baghdad.
Iyad Allawi said he was creating the General Security Directorate, a domestic intelligence agency, which he hoped would infiltrate and expose those behind an insurgency that has raged since U.S.-led forces toppled Saddam Hussein last year.
``We are determined to bring down all the hurdles that stand in the way of our democracy,'' Allawi told a news conference, a day after a suicide car bomb in Baghdad killed 11 people and the governor of the northern city of Mosul was assassinated. ``Terrorism will be terminated, God willing.''
In the town of Haditha, officials said 10 people were killed and 40 wounded when a car bomb exploded near the main police station. The blast damaged a municipal building and a bank in the town, 200 km (125 miles) northwest of Baghdad.
``Some of the dead are police, some work in the Haditha bank, while two are children,'' Najim al-Din, a doctor at a Haditha hospital, told Reuters.
A Filipino hostage in Iraq told his family in a videotaped message he would be returning home after the Philippines agreed to withdraw its small military contingent from Iraq.
Addressing his family, truck driver Angelo de la Cruz said: ``Wait for me, I'm coming back to you,'' Arabic television channel Al Jazeera said in its translation of his remarks.
But the group holding him said it would only free him after Manila withdraws the last of its soldiers from Iraq by the end of this month, a statement read by Al Jazeera said.
In Manila, the Philippines military awaited orders to pull its contingent of 51 personnel out of Iraq despite pressure from the United States not to cave in to militants' demands. Allawi too urged Manila not to give in to the hostage-takers' demands.
Bulgaria watched a deadline for the execution of a Bulgarian hostage pass without news Wednesday but stood firm on its pro-U.S. policies and refused to pull out its troops.
HEADLESS BODY FOUND
Militants linked to al Qaeda ally Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi have killed one of two Bulgarian truck drivers held hostage and are threatening to execute the second.
Guerrillas holding an Egyptian truck driver Thursday gave his Saudi employers 48 hours to show they would meet demands to quit Iraq. The Saudi transport company has said it would pull out to save the driver from execution, but has not given a date.
The U.S. military said Iraqi police had pulled a headless body out of the Tigris River Wednesday night, but could not confirm whether it was one of the missing hostages.
``The body had been decapitated. It was dressed in an orange jumpsuit,'' a military spokeswoman said. A diplomat at the Bulgarian embassy in Baghdad also said he could not confirm whether the body was one of the two captured Bulgarians.
Guerrilla video tapes of foreign hostages in Iraq have often shown them wearing orange jumpsuits, which are typical of U.S. jails and associated around the world with images of Muslims detained at Guantanamo Bay.
Wednesday's car bombing in Baghdad was the first big guerrilla attack in the capital since the interim Iraqi government took over from U.S.-led occupiers on June 28.
Allawi said security was improving despite fresh attacks.
The prime minister did not give specific details on what functions the new security body would carry out or how it would operate with Iraq's fledgling police force, but he said it would function under the judicial system.
For many Iraqis a new spy agency may have overtones of the Mukhabarat, Saddam's feared domestic intelligence agency which for decades kept tight tabs on the nation, but Allawi said it was for the good of the country.
Many had expected Allawi to announce an amnesty to insurgents who lay down their arms. He said the issue was being discussed, but that any offer would only last a short time.
Allawi said the death penalty -- used frequently under Saddam -- was also under consideration.
In Kirkuk, a mother and her three children were killed when a rocket landed on their house late Wednesday as they slept on the roof to escape the summer heat, police said. Reuters Television pictures showed spattered pools of blood and blood-drenched furnishings on the roof of the house.
In the southern city of Kerbala, a car bomb exploded near a base where Bulgarian troops are based. No bystanders were hurt.
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Mossad Risks Slip - Ups in Race Against Qaeda, Iran
July 15, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-newzealand-israel-mossad.html
JERUSALEM (Reuters) - With al Qaeda and Iran now topping an already hefty ``hit list'' of Israel's enemies, analysts say Mossad may have too many missions and too few spies to carry them out.
Two Israelis jailed by an Auckland court Thursday for trying to obtain a New Zealand passport by assuming the identity of a wheelchair-bound cerebral palsy victim displayed the rashness of intelligence agents under pressure to perform, experts say.
``When you step up the war on terrorism abroad, the stakes are higher. Professionalism can suffer,'' said a Mossad veteran involved in the 1973 killing in Norway of a Moroccan waiter mistaken for a top Palestinian guerrilla wanted by Israel.
At the time, Mossad was hunting the masterminds of a Palestinian attack at the 1972 Munich Olympics in which 11 Israeli athletes died.
These days, experts say, the agency is racing to stop attacks by al Qaeda -- a diffuse network notoriously hard to penetrate and anticipate -- and keep an eye on arch-foe Iran's atomic program, making for heavier risks and likelier mistakes.
``New Zealand is famed for being politically moderate and its citizens are welcomed everywhere. They could be very useful for Mossad,'' said intelligence analyst Yossi Melman of the Haaretz newspaper. ``A government-issue passport is much more foolproof than a forged one, of course.''
New Zealand suspended high-level contacts with Israel on Thursday, saying there were ``very strong reasons'' to believe Uriel Zoshe Kelman and Eli Cara were government spies.
``We don't think this was an isolated act,'' New Zealand Foreign Minister Phil Goff told Israel Radio after all high-level contacts with the Sharon government were frozen.
Israel kept mum. ``The only rule in these cases is: Don't get caught,'' ex-Mossad agent Gad Shimron told Israeli television.
According to former Mossad chief Danny Yatom, such scandals are no gauge of the agency's real feats.
``Mossad is one of the best intelligence agencies in the world,'' Yatom said. ``Yet even the best agencies are bound to suffer mishaps. Because of the secret nature of intelligence gathering, most ... achievements are never made public.''
BACK ON THE COUNTERTERRORISM TRAIL
Yet many intelligence experts say Mossad has lost its edge since the 1960s and 1970s, when it assassinated Arab guerrilla leaders and abducted Nazi fugitive Adolf Eichmann for trial, earning a reputation for ruthlessness and ingenuity.
In recent decades, the Jewish state has been more worried about arms programs in the Arab world and Iran -- the main purview of Israeli Military Intelligence, leaving Mossad to deal primarily with Palestinian threats abroad and back-door diplomacy.
But Mossad got a new mandate in 2002, after al Qaeda bombed an Israeli-owned hotel and tried to shoot down an Israeli airliner in Kenya. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon ordered Mossad chief Meir Dagan to hunt down the perpetrators worldwide.
At least two Lebanese accused by Israeli security sources of al Qaeda ties have since died in booby-trooped blasts that locals blamed on Mossad. The agency has also tried to boost recruitment with a new Web site advertising ``special tasks.''
Thirty years after the Norway killing, the Mossad veteran and five other agents who took part in the incident are still barred from entering the country.
``Our zest to get the enemy at all costs sometimes costs us dearly in terms of international standing,'' said Yigal Eyal, a counterterrorism lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
-------- us
Miltary Recruitment in the US. - Jo Wilding
2004-07-15
Flagstaff, Arizona
http://www.unobserver.com/layout5.php?id=1803&blz=1
"If a school takes even a single dollar of Federal funding they're obliged to hand over all of their confidential information to the State, for the military recruiters. By the time the kids leave high school they've had 50 to 60 phone calls at home from the recruiters, visits, cold calls from them at home, a mailbox full of glossy brochures, as well as careers advice from them."
It's part of a programme called "No Child Left Behind". Or No Child Left Alive, if anyone was ever honest about these things. Susanne said recruiters have even been known to take kids on ski-ing trips to seduce them into the army. Veterans for Peace had a table at the talk, full of leaflets about recruitment issues. The recruiters frequently promise work-related training and money for college to kids without many opportunities in those departments.
The veterans say the training you receive in the military rarely translates into useful qualifications for civilian jobs. On average in 31 months of active duty a service person receives 1.78 moths - less than 8 weeks - of job training. 12% of male and 6% of female veterans make any use of the skills they gained in the military in their subsequent civilian jobs and more than 50,000 unemployed veterans are waiting for re-training. On average, veterans earn 85 cents per hour or $1700 a year less than non-veterans of comparable socio-economic status.
They say the money for college often depends on a series of conditions and the real funding is rarely forthcoming. Less than a third of recruits ever get any money for college and colleges can reduce their financial aid to students by the amount of the army scholarship so there's no net gain at all. Even among those who pay a non-refundable deposit into the Montgomery G.I. Bill scheme, two thirds get no money at all, not even the amount that was deducted from their pay, and the programme made a profit of $720 million in its first 10 years, to 1995.
They say once you find out that the options you wanted aren't going to be available to you after all, it's too late to get out except with a dishonourable discharge which wipes out any pensions and healthcare you might have been entitled to and makes it hard to get anywhere in civilian life afterwards.
They say that pensions, benefits and healthcare are being dismantled leaving lots of them destitute. Around a third of homeless people in the US are military veterans. Two thirds of army families are living on food stamps or other public aid. It's common for the Veterans' Administration to refuse health claims arising out of military service, relating to depleted uranium, to Agent Orange and to radiation sickness for example.
Dick Cheney, more truthful than the military recruiters, which is a fairly damning indictment of the latter, declared that the military is "to fight and win wars... It's not a jobs program." Quite.
They also point out the comparative costs: the price of a blanket is roughly the same as that of a hand grenade. And it reminded me of the mourning tent in the entrance of the squatter camp at Shuala where Circus2Iraq used to go, the mourning tent for a two month old baby girl who, as Abu Ahmed put it, "died of the cold." But there was no shortage of gunships to send to Shuala during the nation-wide uprisings in April.
Cheney, with all his shares in Halliburton, which has profited so handsomely from overcharging US taxpayers for meals it never served to soldiers and for petrol driven in from neighbouring countries, might also have said that the purpose of invading a country is "to make a lot of money for my company... It's not a humanitarian programme." Only he never did. In fact he said more or less the opposite.
The local Veterans for Peace group is trying to counteract some of the military influence in schools by getting vets into schools to talk about the truth of life in the army, the recruiters' promises and war. The front row was filled with young Native American students.
Recruitment is not yet at such a stage in the UK but war video games, the economic draft, misleading TV ads and military access to schools are on the rise and need to be fought, by vets, teaching unions and all of us and by creating more alternatives, more co-ops, more training, more free education, more compelling non-party-based resistance movements that empower people to be part of something that's 'bigger than the individual' but at the same time belongs to us.
Susanne, who started telling us about all this, used to teach public speaking at the University of Amsterdam to members of the International Relations course, students from 55 countries who would go home and run radio and TV. She's married to a Dutchman who was part of the Dutch resistance during the Nazi occupation. He'd been, among other things, part of the camera group.
Water has been a continuing theme in what I've written from the south west. Flagstaff was no different. In a canyon we met a park ranger called Merl who was busy re-routing the trail away from the golf course, funded by the course's operators who had got tired of things been thrown onto the course by walkers. It sucks up the water, Merl said, and by way of demonstration the sprinklers sprung into action among the cacti and the dust-dry rocks and ground.
"It sucks up the water and it's ugly, but Conservancy tried to buy the land for $17 million and the tribal leaders said it was worth $30 million. Well, Conservancy couldn't afford that, so the golf course people bought it."
Past secoros, the tall cacti with upheld arms, past mobile phone masts that looked a little similar, Brenda told us about the many, many uninvestigated killings of Native Americans in the area. One was campaigning vociferously against the uranium mining in the area until he was found dead in his car with no apparent cause. Another was looking into some local corruption. He was murdered.
Brenda was looking into pollution problems from crop spraying flights and was threatened, told to stop, told to go and ask another would-be detective what would happen. He - I'll call him A - told her he was campaigning against the crop sprayers. His neighbour was working in A's garden and was shot dead, mistaken for A. Apparently the campaign was drawing attention to 'Black Ops' flights out of the air strip, flying weapons, drugs, people and so on to places the US was covertly supplying.
A local radio journalist got irate at us because it says somewhere on my website: "The media are lying to you." A TV crew came down to the talk and did a piece from the angle that we were telling stuff you wouldn't hear on the news, that the mainstream media in Iraq wasn't getting out enough to tell the truth about what's going on there.
Let me explain. The media are lying to us. They lie by printing misinformed or misleading stories or writing captions which deliberately misinterpret what a picture shows, as in a lot of the anti-capitalist protests where non-violent demonstrators have been attacked by police..
They lie by simply quoting the government and military spokespeople without investigation, as in the New York Times and many others on the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq.
They lie by trivialising or over simplifying, as with the environmental protests, especially the road protests: a real and common sense debate over the merits of road building? No, let's just talk about lifestyles and hairstyles on a road protest camp.
They lie by filling their space with celebrity crap and neglecting to tell people that they're being shafted by the World Trade Organisation, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the Free Trade Area of the Americas, the Paris Club, the Carlisle Group and all the rest of them.
They lie by exclusion, simply not telling stories that don't fit with their editorial line and in Bristol, where all the local newspapers, free sheets, entertainment and listings mags and commercial radio licences are owned by the same Northcliffe Group, that's a pretty comprehensive lie.
They lie by telling us there's nothing we can do, that things are the way they are because it's the only way they can be and they lie because they're all owned by the people who benefit the most from the status quo.
And Laurel, either you're part of that and you're lying too and you know it or else you're not part of that, you're part of the "alternative" and you know that the rest of them are lying. If the cap fits, wear it. If not, keep fighting.
Jo Wilding
For more from Jo Wilding - in the U.S. and Iraq - please visit: http://www.wildfirejo.org.uk
Please also visit Veterans for Peace http://www.veteransforpeace.org/
Please also see:
MAKING A KILLING: The New War Profiteers http://www.southernstudies.org/reports/Intro.htm
Occupation, Inc. War profiteers in Iraq pursue quick fixes and high profits by overcharging for shoddy work, while Iraqis protest that they could do the work better and cheaper. http://www.southernstudies.org/reports/OccupationInc.htm
Defense Infrastructure: Factors Affecting U.S. Infrastructure Costs Overseas and the Development of Comprehensive Master Plans. GAO-04-609, July 15. http://www.gao.gov/cgi-bin/getrpt?GAO-04-609 Highlights - http://www.gao.gov/highlights/d04609high.pdf
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National Guard Allows Army Vets Who Feel Deceived to De-enlist
July 15, 2004
BY BRYAN DENSON
Newhouse News Service
http://www.newhouse.com/archive/denson071504.html
PORTLAND, Ore. -- Joe Talik marched to the Army National Guard recruiter's office here last week and filed papers to de-enlist.
Talik thought he had worn his last camouflage uniform when he concluded nearly five years of service with the Army last year. But he signed up with the National Guard six weeks ago after recruiters told him -- and his worried mother -- that he might be on a list of soldiers the Army was planning to recall for duty in Iraq.
"They made it sound like (the Guard) was a safe haven," said Talik, 26, who's working his way through college with two jobs. "I really feel like someone should answer for the deceit."
Oregon's Army National Guard signed up Talik and 108 other soldiers from the Individual Ready Reserve during a recruitment effort in mid-May. The ready reserve is composed of 111,000 soldiers across the nation who have served Army hitches but remain eligible under their military contracts to be called to duty for up to eight years after their service began.
In what appears to be an unprecedented move, National Guard units across the nation are allowing ready reserve enlistees who feel misled by the recent recruiting effort to file papers that, if approved, will void their contracts, said Lt. Col. Richard Guzzetta, chief of the Army National Guard's recruiting retention force in Crystal City, Va.
"It's the right thing to do," he said. "Nobody would want someone to be in the military -- especially our military -- that didn't want to be. It's a voluntary force. There's not a draft out there."
Oregon National Guard officials say Talik is one of at least nine ready reserve soldiers who have filed paperwork to void their enlistments.
Guzzetta said the great majority of ready reserve soldiers who signed up for the National Guard in May have no plans to opt out of their contracts -- and for good reason.
Early last week, as Guard recruiters warned during their recruiting blitz, the Army announced plans to notify 5,600 members of the ready reserve that they might be deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan.
The military's plans for National Guard and Individual Ready Reserve troops have put reluctant soldiers in play across the nation as the Pentagon -- with diminished forces after the Cold War ended -- decides how to maintain more than 140,000 soldiers in Iraq and 20,000 in Afghanistan.
Like many soldiers, Talik views the overseas deployments of the National Guard and ready reserve as little more than a de facto draft.
"In some ways it's worse," he said. In the past, he said, the draft picked soldiers at random but looked past those -- such as himself -- who had already served hitches in the military. "In my opinion, they paid their dues."
It is unclear whether the Army will allow Talik to remain out of uniform if he is allowed to de-enlist from Oregon's Army National Guard. His combat specialty is driving armored vehicles in forward positions, a skill much in demand in Iraq.
The Army National Guard unit in which he enlisted six weeks ago -- B Company, 141st Support Battalion -- has not been alerted for deployment but is eligible for call-up, according to Lt. Col. Scott Haynes, the Guard's head Army recruiter in Oregon.
Oregon's Guard is in the midst of its heaviest deployment since World War II. By late fall, an estimated 1,300 of its troops will be in Iraq. Hundreds of others have served there and returned.
The world seemed a safer place when Talik entered the Army on May 5, 1998. Back then, soldiers served their hitches and returned to civilian life. But terrorism changed all that. Three months after Talik began serving in the Army, terrorists bombed U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. They followed with the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000 and the devastating Sept. 11 attacks.
Talik did not escape serving in a combat zone. He drove an armored Humvee in Macedonia during the war in Yugoslavia, hustling through daily air raid drills.
Talik ended his service at Fort Lewis, Wash., on Jan. 31, 2003, six weeks before U.S. and allied forces invaded Iraq. He spent some time with his mother in Salem, then moved to Portland, where he enrolled at Portland Community College.
Then on May 15, an officer with the Oregon National Guard phoned Talik's mother, Lorisa Gardiner, 57, a freelance book editor. The officer, she recalled, told her that her son had 48 hours to enlist in the Guard or would be fair game for deployment to Iraq by the regular Army. The news left Gardiner worried and perplexed.
"You'd think that after a person has already been in a combat zone ... they'd be exempt," she said.
Talik signed up for the Army National Guard the next day. He later said he thinks recruiters took advantage of him and other ready reservists. Talik strongly supports soldiers but thinks the war in Iraq is unjustified. He has no plans to add his body to the mix -- even if that means facing imprisonment.
"I'm done, personally," he said. "I'm just not going to be involved in something I just absolutely, fundamentally disagree with."
(Bryan Denson is a staff writer for The Oregonian of Portland, Ore. He can be contacted at bryandenson@news.oregonian.com.)
--------
Missing Marine Returns to the U.S.
July 15, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Marine-Iraq.html?hp
QUANTICO, Va. (AP) -- A U.S. Marine who disappeared in Iraq and turned up in Lebanon three weeks later arrived at a Marine Corps base south of Washington, D.C., on Thursday after six days of evaluation in a U.S. military hospital in Germany, a military official said.
Lt. Col. David Lapan, a Marine Corps spokesman, said Cpl. Wassef Ali Hassoun would continue to undergo a ``repatriation'' process until it is determined he is fit and capable of returning to normal duty. He said the process could take from weeks to months.
Hassoun was not made available at Quantico for questions from reporters.
He left Ramstein Air Base in Germany on a morning flight aboard an Air Force C-5 Galaxy heavy transport plane and stopped first at Dover Air Force Base, Del., where he boarded an Air Force C-12 jet for the flight to Quantico.
A spokesman at Quantico, Marine Corps Capt. Jeff Landis, said Hassoun arrived at 3 p.m. EDT, and was received by a military support team that came from Hassoun's home base at Camp Lejeune, N.C.
Quantico is home to the Marines' Officer Candidate School and is a focal point for the service's leadership training and development of new warfighting concepts and technologies.
The Navy has said it is investigating whether the kidnapping might have been a hoax, but the Naval Criminal Investigation Service is not expected to question Hassoun until his repatriation procedure is completed, the Marine Corps said.
As Hassoun left the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center on Wednesday, he said he was eager to get home.
``I am in good health and spirits, I look forward to my return home to friends and family,'' he said in a written statement provided to The Associated Press, his first public comment since he vanished June 20 from his base near the troubled Iraqi city of Fallujah.
Hassoun had been flown to Germany on Friday after reappearing July 8 at the U.S. Embassy in Beirut. It remains unclear how he traveled from Iraq to Lebanon, where he was born and still has some relatives.
``All thanks and praises are due to God for my safety,'' he said. ``I am also very thankful for all the kind wishes, support and praise for me and my family from my fellow Marines, all the people in the United States, Lebanon and around the world.''
Hassoun signed the statement ``Semper Fidelis,'' the Marine Corps motto meaning ``always faithful.''
While he was missing, conflicting reports emerged about Hassoun -- first that he was kidnapped and beheaded, then that he was alive. There were suggestions it was a hoax.
Hassoun's debriefing in Germany was designed to help U.S. military specialists learn any lessons about the circumstances of his disappearance that could help others who find themselves in similar situations.
Associated Press writer David Rising in Berlin contributed to this report.
--------
City Has 5-Year Expansion Plan for Navy Yard Industrial Park
July 15, 2004
By WINNIE HU
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/15/nyregion/15navy.html
Calling it one of the city's great economic success stories, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced a five-year plan yesterday to expand the industrial park at the Brooklyn Navy Yard to attract hundreds of new jobs.
Mayor Bloomberg said the city would spend $71 million on infrastructure improvements at the Navy Yard, laying the groundwork for private development of 560,000 square feet of manufacturing, industrial and retail space along the west side. That development is expected to cost $60 million, to be raised from investors.
Already under construction is Steiner Studios, a $118 million film and television complex. The mayor said he expected to cut the ribbon in a few months on one of the largest sound stages on the East Coast.
The Navy Yard also houses about 3.5 million square feet of industrial space, which is nearly all occupied by more than 220 industrial and manufacturing businesses, including a billboard and graphics company, a seafood distributor and several specialty furniture makers. "In fact, the Navy Yard is bursting at the seams," he said.
Under the plan, construction would begin next year on a 180,000-square-foot industrial building on what is now part of a Police Department tow pound. A 100,000-square-foot food-processing complex with freezer and refrigeration storage would break ground in 2006. The rest of the industrial and manufacturing space would be built in subsequent years.
In addition, work would begin next year on 60,000 square feet of commercial retail space along Flushing Avenue, which would be used for neighborhood-oriented stores.
City officials said the expansion plan would bring an additional 500 to 800 new jobs to the Navy Yard, which currently has about 4,000 employees, and improve the quality of life for residents in nearby communities.
Mayor Bloomberg said that the city would hire a consultant to coordinate efforts to help local residents secure jobs at the yard. The city's $71 million will be used for capital improvements: paving streets, upgrading electrical systems and installing water and sewer lines.
"We are confident that these public investments will be repaid many times over in private investments and jobs for residents of all five boroughs," the mayor said.
The Brooklyn borough president, Marty Markowitz, who appeared with the mayor at a news conference yesterday at the Navy Yard, was one of several Brooklyn officials who praised the expansion plan. "Brooklyn's ship has come in, for sure," he said. "This represents Brooklyn yesterday, it represents the best of Brooklyn today and the opportunity and hope and expectation of Brooklyn tomorrow."
--------
Pentagon War Game Based on China Threat to Taiwan
By REUTERS
July 15, 2004
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A crisis-simulation drill based on a growing Chinese military threat to Taiwan was played out this week by U.S. decision makers, Pentagon officials said on Thursday.
The exercise, called Dragon's Thunder, was held on Monday at the Pentagon's National Defense University, or NDU, even as China prepared to stage a mock invasion of the self-governing island.
Pentagon officials cautioned against reading anything into the timing of the strategy drill or into the deployment of seven U.S. aircraft carrier strike groups worldwide simultaneously.
``Neither the deployment of carrier strike groups worldwide nor this NDU tabletop exercise should be seen as sending a signal to any specific country,'' said Navy Lt. Cmdr. Flex Plexico, a Pentagon spokesman.
The Defense Department announced June 5 it would deploy seven carriers to demonstrate a new Navy plan for ``surging'' its operations to project force if necessary.
China's state media said on Tuesday the People's Liberation Army was gearing for an amphibious landing in land, sea and air exercises on Dongshan Island, a response to tension across the Taiwan Strait.
The scenario in the U.S. exercises, ninth in a series prompted by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, ``specifically examined responses to an increasing possibility of military action by China against Taiwan,'' the National Defense University said.
Details of the scenario and ``lessons learned'' were classified, but such crisis-simulation was meant to be as realistic as possible, said David Thomas, a defense university spokesman.
``Participants examined the gravity, complexity and difficulty inherent in responding to a sequence of escalating tensions between China and Taiwan,'' he added in a statement.
``The exercise sought to understand the full range of policy options and associated consequences available to the U.S. to restore stability to the Taiwan Straits and surrounding region, while avoiding nuclear confrontation with China,'' NDU said.
Opening the session, Navy Secretary Gordon England noted the value of such games for addressing ``some of the complex security problems the nation confronts today,'' it said.
Participants were from Rumsfeld's office, the Pentagon's Joint Staff, U.S. Pacific Command, White House National Security Council, National Intelligence Council and departments of State and Commerce, according to NDU.
Also taking part were 14 members of Congress, including Rep. Roscoe Bartlett, a Maryland Republican who chairs the House of Representatives Projection Forces Committee.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- homeland security
Convention's Security Praised
Democrats' National Assembly Will Be First Since 9/11
By Jonathan Finer
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, July 15, 2004; Page A19
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A50158-2004Jul14.html
BOSTON, July 14 -- Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge on Wednesday praised preparations for the upcoming Democratic National Convention, telling reporters after a tour of the site that the security apparatus for the gathering is "very, very strong."
Ridge was briefed by a host of government agencies charged with securing the convention, which begins July 26. In an afternoon news conference on the Boston waterfront, he lauded "the immense resources and the meticulous preparations that have been put in place to ensure the safety of the citizens of Boston and the well-being of all convention participants."
About 35,000 Democratic delegates, members of the media and other guests are expected in Boston for the four-day gathering. Preparations for what will be the first national political convention since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks include unprecedented security precautions such as closing a large section of highway and one of the city's two major rail hubs because of their proximity to FleetCenter, where the convention will be held.
Ridge, who as governor of Pennsylvania was host of the 2000 Republican National Convention in Philadelphia, acknowledged that "there's going to be some inconvenience" for locals, but said it would be outweighed by "the rewards and the positive impact on your community."
With police and Coast Guard boats bobbing behind him, and FleetCenter visible across the mouth of the Charles River, Ridge repeated the warning officials have issued over the past few months that "credible reporting . . . indicates al Qaeda is moving forward with plans to carry out a large-scale attack on the United States in an effort to disrupt" the November elections.
He said that no specific threats had been made against the political convention here, or next month's Republican gathering in New York, but rejected suggestions that his election year warnings were politically motivated. "We don't do politics at Homeland Security," he said.
As part of the security precautions, area hospitals earlier this week received shipments of "chempacks" from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that contain treatments for chemical or biological agents that could be used in a terrorist attack. "They give us additional resources in the event of a major incident," said Rich Serino, head of Boston's Emergency Medical Services. He would not disclose the contents of the kits or what kinds of agents they are designed to protect against.
After arriving in Boston on Wednesday morning, Ridge was taken to what officials called an "undisclosed location in the Boston area" where convention security will be coordinated. He and Mayor Thomas M. Menino (D) received a private 90-minute briefing. Menino thanked Ridge for his agency's help in preparing for the convention.
Later, security officials showed off mobile command vehicles that will be used to coordinate responses to any emergency that occurs during the convention, including a $600,000 van operated by the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency that is equipped with enough power to run on its own for seven days.
Federal Protective Service officials will monitor 75 wireless cameras stationed around the city that can zoom in on faces and license plates and beam the images to handheld devices carried by agents in the street, officials said.
--------
Report: U.S. Cancels Air Passenger Screening Upgrade
July 15, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-security-airlines.html
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. government is dropping a plan to collect personal data on airline passengers to assess security risks because of privacy concerns, USA Today reported on Thursday, citing the U.S. homeland security chief.
Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge said officials had all but scrapped plans for the controversial Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System, known as CAPPS II, which has come under criticism from privacy advocates and some members of Congress.
The program, which has never been tested fully, was launched after the Sept. 11, 2001, hijacking attacks to refine electronic techniques for using personal information to identify and rate potential threats.
Asked whether the program could be considered dead, Ridge jokingly gestured as if he were driving a stake through its head and said: ``Yes,'' USA Today reported.
He cited privacy concerns, particularly those arising from proposed legislation that would have required airlines to hand over information about passengers as part of a test of the program, the newspaper said.
Ridge said a new program with a different name might be developed to replace CAPPS II. It could be replaced by a new ``registered traveler'' program if enough people volunteer to provide personal information, the report said.
David Stone, the acting administrator of the Transportation Security Administration, on Tuesday said at his Senate confirmation hearing that the TSA might alter or eliminate aspects of the CAPPS II program that have generated lawsuits and other complaints from privacy and consumer groups.
Airlines, some facing lawsuits, have been caught up in the controversy because they provided passenger information for use in testing the screening system.
-------- immigration / refugees
Immigrant Smuggling Targeted
Agents Patrol L.A. Airport in Crackdown on Trafficking
By Sara Kehaulani Goo
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, July 15, 2004; Page A02
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A50529-2004Jul14.html
Federal agents are patrolling terminals at Los Angeles International Airport in a new effort to crack down on smugglers who have been routing illegal immigrants through major airports in recent months, the Department of Homeland Security said yesterday.
Officials at the department's Immigration and Customs Enforcement division said they are responding to new tactics used by sophisticated smugglers who collect big fees to bring people into the country illegally. Officials say smugglers are now bringing migrants across the Mexican border by land through Arizona, then booking them on low-fare airline flights from Los Angeles and other major airports to destinations elsewhere in the country, including the Washington area.
In April, 13 migrants were arrested at Baltimore-Washington International Airport after Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents learned they were smuggled onto a flight from Los Angeles. The same month, 88 migrants on a Continental Airlines flight from Los Angeles were arrested in Newark, N.J. Authorities also said there have been several arrests at Los Angeles International's Terminal 1, where Southwest Airlines is stationed.
"Obviously, [the smugglers] look at it from a cost-benefit risk standpoint," said Asa Hutchinson, undersecretary for Homeland Security's Border and Transportation Security unit. "If you look at [land] transportation costs from the Southwest border to Newark, N.J., or North Carolina or a whole host of other places, and you compare it with the cost of discounted airfares, just like other air passengers, they are going to make those decisions."
Most of the migrants have traveled on domestic flights out of large airports in Los Angeles, Seattle, Phoenix and Las Vegas, officials said. Federal law requires only a government-issued identification card to board a flight within the country. That can include a document from another country, such as a driver's license, and the documents are not checked by customs agents. Homeland Security officials said the problem is concentrated at airports in the West, although many of the flights carrying smuggled migrants are headed to the East Coast.
Officials at Washington area airports said they are not aware of any recent increase in the number of people detained by federal agents as part of human smuggling rings.
The agents at Los Angeles International, some in plain clothes and others in uniform, are expanding a program that officials say already has proved successful at major airports in Phoenix and Las Vegas. Persons familiar with the new effort, who declined to speak publicly about the methods used, say agents walk the terminals looking for suspicious behavior and requesting identification from those they believe may be connected to a smuggling ring.
The National Council of La Raza, a civil rights organizations that advocates for Latinos, said immigration agents have been conducting sweeps of bus and train stations in Southern California in the last month, questioning passengers and asking for identification documents to prove they are legal citizens.
The airport initiative sounds similar, said Cecilia Muñoz, La Raza's vice president for policy. "It would be so much more heartening, especially to the Latino community, if the bulk of the activity were on the smugglers themselves and not the people being smuggled," she said.
Hutchinson said agents are trained not to conduct ethnic profiling, and are acting on specific intelligence about smuggling operations. "We're not going for everyone, checking their papers," he said.
Steven Camarota, director of research at the Center for Immigration Studies, a nonprofit group that supports immigration enforcement, said the government should require passports from all nonresidents boarding domestic flights. "It's not reasonable for a person from Des Moines to know what a Mexican driver's license looks like," Camarota said.
-------- police
Mysteriously Purchased 3 Years Ago, Security Doors Elude Police
July 15, 2004
By SABRINA TAVERNISE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/15/nyregion/15doors.html
Missing persons they are not. But they have proved just as elusive.
The Police Department is looking for four large security doors that were ordered for its headquarters at 1 Police Plaza three years ago. The $50,000 doors were too heavy and were never installed.
But after that, the paper trail goes cold. No documents that show their whereabouts have been found, said Paul J. Browne, the department's deputy commissioner for public information. The doors seemed simply to have disappeared.
On July 9, the department began investigating, Mr. Browne said.
The case of the missing doors was first reported by The Chief Leader, a weekly publication in New York that covers civil service matters.
The doors were ordered in June 2001 from Georal International, a company that serviced doors for the city in the past.
It is not clear who authorized the purchase of the doors, Mr. Browne said. The timing of the purchase and the subsequent delivery three days later were surprising, coming shortly before the end of the fiscal year on June 30, 2001.
"That is warp speed in city purchasing," he said. "It was a highly unusual end of fiscal year purchase."
But the heavy-duty security doors were too heavy for the floor at 1 Police Plaza, Mr. Browne said.
Then, last month, the president of the door company, Alan Risi, was charged with submitting false and inflated invoices for servicing other city doors, according to a statement by the Department of Investigation, whose inquiry had led to the arrest.
According to the indictment, Mr. Risi overcharged the city by $50,000.
Mr. Risi's lawyer, Murray Richman, said: "I know of no wrongdoing on behalf of Al Risi; he's the hardest working person I know."
Emily Gest, a spokeswoman for the Department of Investigation, said the agency's inquiry is not limited to the June case.
While the Police Department so far has not found out what happened to the doors, Mr. Browne said, "I think they'll be hard to miss."
-------- terrorism
British Intelligence Warned Of Attacks in Baghdad
By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, July 15, 2004; Page A12
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A50228-2004Jul14.html
In February 2003, a month before the United States and coalition forces invaded Iraq, British intelligence received reports that Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab Zarqawi was establishing sleeper cells in Baghdad that would attack U.S. forces after they occupied the city, according a report on British prewar intelligence released yesterday in London.
In a prediction that has proved deadly accurate, the British Joint Intelligence Committee in March 2003 wrote, "These cells apparently intend to attack U.S. targets using car bombs and other weapons," according to yesterday's report by the Butler Commission. In the past year, Zarqawi has publicly claimed to have put together an Iraqi network that has committed dozens of bombings and killings, including the beheading of a Bulgarian truck driver that was revealed yesterday.
The March 12, 2003, JIC report also warned that "al Qaeda-associated terrorists continued to arrive in Baghdad in early March." Summarizing this information, the Butler panel noted that the JIC "did warn of the possibility of terrorist attacks on coalition forces in Baghdad."
A senior U.S. intelligence official said yesterday that the CIA was made aware of the reporting "simultaneously." The CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency passed on warnings to Bush administration policymakers that U.S. forces would probably be attacked by "stay behind" Iraqi forces and Islamic terrorists who would be drawn to Iraq by the invasion, officials said.
The U.S. inability to dismantle Zarqawi's network has become one of the most prominent examples of the failure to tackle the post-invasion insurgency and to provide security for Iraq's fledgling interim government.
Zarqawi, who has operated independently of Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network, has played a leading role in organizing terrorist operations in Iraq. He recently threatened to kill Iraq Prime Minister Ayad Allawi.
Last January, U.S. intelligence intercepted a Zarqawi letter intended for bin Laden. Zarqawi, a Sunni, said his plan was to create internal clashes with the Shiites, who he believed would cooperate with the Americans. He said that if an Iraqi government took hold, his insurgency would "wither" but he would take up the Islamic cause elsewhere.
The Butler report discusses how British intelligence operations related to those of the CIA and other U.S. agencies.
For example, British intelligence based its prewar 2002 assessment that Iraq was seeking uranium in Africa on reports that Baghdad had made such inquiries in the Congo and in Niger more than two years earlier, according to the Butler report.
It showed that British and CIA intelligence were relying on similar, though less than conclusive, reports that Iraqi officials had visited several African countries in 1999. Last week, a Senate committee report on U.S. prewar intelligence concluded that the CIA overstated what it knew about Iraq's attempts to procure uranium in Africa. President Bush, in his 2003 State of the Union speech, cited Iraqi efforts to procure uranium in Africa.
When it came to Niger, whose main export was uranium, the JIC "judged that Iraqi purchase of uranium could have been the subject of discussions," the Butler report said.
In 2002, the British got separate intelligence reports about the Congo and Niger, but they were inconclusive as to whether any deals with Iraq were reached, according to the Butler report.
However, based on what was known in 2002, the Butler panel concluded that references in Britain's September 2002 dossier that Iraq was seeking to buy uranium in Africa and its repetition in Bush's State of the Union address in January 2003 were "well founded."
More recently, the Butler panel learned from International Atomic Energy Agency officials that the leader of the Iraqi delegation told IAEA that he and the others went to Niger in February 1999 to invite that country's president to Iraq, not to seek uranium. The Niger president was supposed to visit Baghdad in April 1999, but he died before the trip.
David Kay, the former chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq, said in an interview that his group had discovered a memo in Iraq from Congolese officials offering to sell the Saddam Hussein government items including uranium. He added that it had a note in Arabic saying the country was under too much scrutiny at the time for such a deal.
Unlike the much more voluminous Senate committee report, the Butler Commission included in its inquiry an analysis of how British intelligence performed on weapons of mass destruction in four situations outside Iraq.
In each case it concluded that, unlike the shortcomings in Iraq, there "were to a greater or lesser extent success stories" that led to the exposure of otherwise covert programs. In two cases, uncovering the network of Pakistani nuclear scientist A.Q. Khan and persuading Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi to discontinue his nuclear and chemical programs, the Butler panel concluded close cooperation with U.S. agencies contributed to the success.
-------- POLITICS
-------- investigations
House Panel Reviews Iraq Prison Reports
By Josh White and R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, July 15, 2004; Page A14
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A50297-2004Jul14.html
Members of the House Armed Services Committee reviewed nearly two dozen confidential reports yesterday about U.S. prison operations in Iraq, documents that some Democrats said should have alerted officials to a pattern of problems and potential abuses of detainees long before the Abu Ghraib prison scandal became public earlier this year.
The Pentagon provided the International Committee of the Red Cross reports to Congress beginning yesterday, allowing restricted access to about 150 pages of material that detailed prison conditions for detainees across Iraq. Members of the Senate are scheduled to have access today, although Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John W. Warner (R-Va.) told members yesterday that the ICRC documents are not a complete set.
Sources said there were repetitive complaints about detainee living conditions, food, general treatment, interactions with interrogators and other humanitarian requirements, with some of the harshest criticism coming around the time of the alleged serious abuses at Abu Ghraib last fall.
While those who viewed the secret reports declined to provide specific details, some Democrats on the Armed Services Committee said they felt the information was stale, tracked news reports over the past few months, and failed to describe the current state of the Iraqi prisons. Several Republican committee members did not return phone calls seeking comment yesterday afternoon.
According to those who saw them, the reports appeared to show that U.S. authorities in Iraq should have known there were rampant problems in places such as Abu Ghraib long before a military police soldier came forward in January with a compact disc filled with the now-infamous incriminating photographs of abuse.
"All it did was confirm what reasonable people, I think, understand," said Rep. Ellen Tauscher (D-Calif.). "There were many red flags. There was contemporaneous reporting by the ICRC to the chain of command . . . of deep concerns on their part on treatment issues of detainees. [It is] unambiguous in my mind that there was conduct and a pattern and practice . . . that were inappropriate.
"Whoever got them did not have the presence of mind to hit the panic button," Tauscher said.
The ICRC reports, which are typically kept secret to protect the rights of detainees and to ensure that human rights officials can have continued access to prisons around the world, were provided to Congress with the organization's approval, according to the Pentagon.
Armed Services Committee members said the reports were contained in a three-ring binder in a room in the Rayburn House Office Building, copies were not allowed, and the materials could not leave the room. No one was permitted to take notes.
Rep. Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.) said he found the briefing and access to the documents "unsatisfactory" because it provided little new information and because he believed Pentagon officials who briefed members were unable to shed any light on the abuses.
Cooper said there were several reports indicating problems before the Abu Ghraib abuses came to light, yet he said it appears they were ignored.
"Lots of problems were raised," Cooper said. "They would have known about them if they can read English."
According to the reports, the ICRC apparently began alleging more serious abuses last fall, about the same time U.S. military officials ramped up interrogation efforts in Iraq in an attempt to locate elusive weapons of mass destruction and to find Saddam Hussein. Rep. Gene Taylor (D-Miss.), who reviewed the reports yesterday, said he believes it is possible that U.S. troops lapsed into "Hussein-type behavior" under pressure from Bush administration officials to produce results.
"Is it possible that someone from above was telling them to take the gloves off because we have to find Hussein?" Taylor said. "I have not had assurances from this administration that that did not happen."
Meanwhile, Pentagon officials also briefed staff members of the Senate Judiciary and Armed Services committees yesterday on a series of videotaped incidents involving detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. According to Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), the DVDs show the conduct of an "Initial Reaction Force" and treatment of prisoners.
Leahy said the sampling of videos appears to show that detainees at Guantanamo Bay were not subjected to the "egregious abuses" that occurred at Abu Ghraib or at prisons in Afghanistan, but he said it is "mystifying why the Department of Defense's procedures for the treatment of detainees vary so dramatically from one facility to another."
-------- propaganda wars
PATRIOT Act Foes Lose Book Battle
by Chris Getzan,
July 15, 2004
NewStandard
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/getzan.php?articleid=3034
Members of the book industry and civil liberties advocates are scratching their heads over why House Republican leaders decided to bully their way out of passing a bipartisan piece of legislation intended to secure the rights of due process and privacy of library patrons and bookstore customers.
"It should make people ask, what are they trying to stop and what are they trying to cover up," says Nancy Talanian, director of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, a clearinghouse for activism and information on the USA PATRIOT Act and other measures civil libertarians see as infringements on civil liberties in the "War on Terror."
House Amendment 652, which would have been attached to the $39.8 billion appropriations bill, would have rolled back Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act. Section 215 expanded federal law enforcement officials' ability to secretly comb "business records," including library book and computer records, as well as bookstores' business customer databanks without having to convince a judge that a crime has been or is being committed. Agents merely have to designate such a search contingent to a terrorism investigation. Bookstore employees and librarians are also barred from speaking publicly about any search conducted under the requirements of Section 215.
Backers of the measure, which included lawmakers from all parties, as well as library and booksellers' associations and civil liberties advocates, said the amendment was important to prevent people's reading habits from broad government scrutiny.
The night before the July 8 vote, the White House condemned outright any amendment that would "weaken" the PATRIOT Act, and declared the president would veto the entire bill if the amendment passed.
Even more dramatically, a short letter from the Justice Department addressed to House Judiciary Committee chairman James Sensenbrenner (R-Wisc.) materialized among House members on the day of the vote. It stated that "as recently as this past winter and spring, a member of a terrorist group closely affiliated with al-Qaeda" used library internet services. The letter, according to the Associated Press and a press release from Representative Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), mentioned no specifics beyond that. Sanders is one of the measure's main supporters.
"I do have a copy on my desk of the letter the DOJ circulated, and it really is very weak," Talanian told The NewStandard. "It could be President Bush's veto threat worked, but I can't get inside their heads, or the President's head."
In addition, House leadership held the vote on the amendment open an extra 23 minutes, long enough for ten Republicans, some of whom occupy the most conservative wing of the party, to change their "Yes" votes to "No" on the amendment. The final tally on the amendment was 210-210, with a majority needed to win. The appropriations bill passed the House without the amendment.
"As we've always said, this is not a partisan issue. They've taken an oath to uphold the Constitution, and they should stand by that," says Talanian of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee.
The amendment was "a very narrowly-tailored amendment to protect First Amendment Rights," according to Jeanne Herrick-Stare, the Senior Fellow for Civil Liberties and Human Rights for the non-partisan Quaker group the Friends Committee on National Legislation. She also called it a slimmed-down version of the Freedom to Read Act, introduced in 2003 by Rep. Sanders. Despite having over 140 co-sponsors on both sides of the aisle, the Freedom to Read Act has languished in committee for over a year.
"I was shocked at hearing [Virginia Republican] Representative [Frank] Wolf saying we need hearings on this matter," she said. Wolf took to the floor before the vote to argue strongly against the amendment. "Representative Sanders has been asking, begging, pleading for hearings on the bill."
"The President has gone way out on a limb supporting the PATRIOT Act," says Herrick-Stare. "A vote supporting this amendment [may have been] an embarrassment to the President's very public stance on the PATRIOT Act."
Talanian said legislation that would have passed on its merits was squelched. Now, says, Talanian, the constituents, rather than their political representatives, will have to take the lead on this issue.
-------- us politics
Marriage amendment stopped
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
By Amy Fagan
July 15, 2004
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20040715-121129-9390r.htm
A constitutional amendment defining marriage as the union of a man and a woman didn't make it past a procedural vote in the Senate yesterday, but homosexual "marriage" likely will continue to be a leading issue this election season.
Opponents of the amendment hailed yesterday's action as a major setback for Republicans pushing the issue, but supporters said it's just beginning of a long process.
"Today's Senate vote is a well-deserved repudiation of this effort by President Bush and the Senate Republican leadership to divide the nation for political advantage," said Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, Massachusetts Democrat.
Matt Daniels, president of the Alliance for Marriage, which is the driving force behind the Federal Marriage Amendment, said the goals of the Senate debate were to "get people on the record before the election" and "educate the public" about the threat being posed to traditional marriage by the courts.
"Both goals were achieved," he said.
The measure - sponsored by Sen. Wayne Allard, Colorado Republican, and pushed by Mr. Bush and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, Tennessee Republican - failed to garner the 60 votes needed to pass a procedural motion that would have limited debate and forced a final up or down vote.
The motion didn't even get a majority, losing a 50-48 vote, with six Republicans joining 43 Democrats and one independent to vote against it. Three Democrats and 45 Republicans supported it.
The only senators who didn't vote yesterday were Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts and his running mate, Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina.
Both men released statements saying they would have voted against the actual amendment.
Mr. Kerry accused Republicans of using the debate "to divide us for political purposes," while ignoring "the important work of the American people." Mr. Edwards echoed the sentiment, accusing the amendment's backers of trying to "use the Constitution for political gain."
The Senate vote already was being used in campaigns.
South Dakota Republican John Thune, who is challenging Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, issued a strongly worded statement, saying Mr. Daschle, with his no vote yesterday, "failed the vast majority of South Dakotans who oppose gay marriage."
Mr. Bush said he was "deeply disappointed" that the measure was "temporarily blocked" in the Senate, but urged backers to persist and urged the House to pass the amendment, which defines marriage and limits the ability of courts to rule on the issue.
"Activist judges and local officials in some parts of the country are not letting up in their efforts to redefine marriage for the rest of America and neither should defenders of traditional marriage flag in their efforts," Mr. Bush said.
Senate supporters of Mr. Allard's amendment said they never expected it to win on the first try and are happy with the vote and confident that the effort will continue to build steam.
"We're not going to lose the courage of our convictions, we're not going to sit on the sidelines ... we're not going to give up," said Sen. John Cornyn, Texas Republican.
Mr. Daniels said once liberal activists start filing lawsuits across the country to force states to accept Massachusetts' same-sex "marriages" - as they are planning to do after the election - public support for the amendment will shoot up and "that will change the politics."
But opponents of the amendment said it was a clear embarrassment to Republican leaders and Mr. Bush that the measure couldn't even garner 50 votes on a simple procedural motion yesterday. And they would have been even more embarrassed if the Senate had voted directly on Mr. Allard's proposal, the amendment's opponents said.
About eight to 10 senators who supported yesterday's procedural motion would have voted against the actual amendment, said Chris Anders, legislative counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union. He said Mr. Frist and other Republicans "completely miscalculated" support and pushed the amendment to the floor too soon, and it "blew up in their face."
Still, some Republicans agreed that their leaders pushed the issue too soon.
"I thought the timing was bad," said Sen. Mike DeWine, an Ohio Republican who voted yes yesterday and would have done the same on the actual amendment. "I wouldn't have brought it up now."
Mr. DeWine said it was "unwise" to bring it up in "the heat of a political campaign," when Republicans would be accused of playing politics and "when you know you were going to lose."
He said leaders should have waited until it wasn't a highly charged election year or until a court definitively rules against the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which says a state cannot be forced to accept same-sex "marriages" from other states.
Supporters of the amendment argued repeatedly this week that now is the time to act because DOMA likely will be overturned, forcing states to accept same-sex "marriages" from Massachusetts. They also note more than 35 lawsuits across the country challenging state marriage laws as unconstitutional.
"The only way to protect traditional marriage from these undemocratic forces is to pursue a constitutional amendment," said Sen. Jon Kyl, Arizona Republican.
Many Democrats and some Republicans however argued that with DOMA still standing, an amendment is unnecessary.
"It is premature to amend the Constitution based upon a hypothetical scenario," agreed Sen. John E. Sununu of New Hampshire, who was one of the six Republicans who opposed the procedural vote.
"It has never been challenged in court successfully," Mr. Daschle said of DOMA. "That is the law of the land."
But not all Democrats were on the same page either. Mr. Kerry was one of 14 Democrats who voted against DOMA in 1996 and told NBC's "Meet the Press" in 2002 that he did so, "because I thought it was an example of raw politics, of gay bashing, of wedge issues."
Mr. Kerry did not mention DOMA in his statement yesterday on the Senate vote.
During the debate this week, Mr. Kennedy said Republicans are pushing Congress to "write bigotry back into the Constitution."
But Sen. Rick Santorum, Pennsylvania Republican, said Democrats are trying to have it both ways. While Democrats call Republicans all kinds of names, he noted, all the senators who came to the floor, except for Mr. Kennedy, said they strongly supported traditional marriage.
Meanwhile, House Republican leaders say the House will vote on the amendment this fall. First, however, they plan to vote next week on a bill limiting federal courts' ability to rule on DOMA.
--------
Cheney Insists He Will Be on GOP Ticket
Associated Press
Thursday, July 15, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A50155-2004Jul14.html
Vice President Cheney said yesterday he cannot envision any circumstance in which he would not run for a second term, saying President Bush has been "very clear he doesn't want to break up the team."
There has been persistent speculation that Cheney would step down for political or health reasons.
"He's made his decision," Cheney said of Bush. "I've made mine. I suppose right now, because we're in the run-up to the convention, people don't have much to talk about so you get speculation on that. It's normal. When we get to the convention, I think that'll put an end to it."
The vice president made his comments in a C-SPAN interview to air Sunday.
While the GOP's conservative base strongly supports Cheney, some Republicans have quietly suggested that he should be replaced. He has had four heart attacks, and his approval ratings have plummeted amid questions about his role in promoting the Iraq war and in handling the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
Asked whether he could envision any circumstances in which he would step aside, Cheney told C-SPAN: "Well, no, I can't. If I thought that were appropriate, I certainly would. But he's made it very clear that he wants me to run again. The way I got here in the first place was that he persuaded me four years ago that I was the man he wanted in that post, not just as a candidate but as somebody to be part of the governing team. He's been very clear he doesn't want to break up the team."
Cheney's wife, Lynne, was emphatic that he would accept the vice presidential nomination again at the GOP convention in New York. "Oh, it'll happen," she told C-SPAN.
--------
U.S. Works to Sustain Iraq Coalition
4 Nations Have Left, 4 More Are Getting Ready to Leave International Force
By Robin Wright and Bradley Graham
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, July 15, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A50417-2004Jul14?language=printer
The Bush administration faces growing challenges in holding together the 32-nation coalition deployed in Iraq, with four countries already gone, another four due to leave by September and others now making known their intention to wind down or depart before the political transition is complete next year, according to officials from 28 participating countries.
The drama over the Filipino hostage in Iraq, which led the Philippines government to say this week that it will pull out before its August mandate expires, is only the latest problem -- and one of the smaller issues -- in U.S. efforts to sustain the 22,000-strong force that, with 140,000 U.S. troops, forms the multinational force trying to stabilize postwar Iraq.
Norway quietly pulled out its 155 military engineers this month, leaving behind only about 15 personnel to assist a new NATO-coordinated effort to help train and equip Iraqi security forces. New Zealand intends to pull out its 60 engineers by September, while Thailand plans to withdraw its more than 450 troops that same month, barring a last-minute political reversal that Thai officials consider unlikely, say envoys from both countries. "It's 90 percent definite that we're going," a Thai diplomat said.
The Netherlands is likely to pull out next spring after the first of three Iraqi elections, while Polish military officials told the Pentagon that Poland's large contingent will probably leave in mid-2005, other diplomats say.
Any dwindling of the coalition -- by choice or after hostage seizures and other violence -- further complicates the already difficult job of sustaining the multinational force, which is critical to Washington's assertion that it has international support for the Iraq mission. It could also encourage further abductions or attacks to heighten the psychological pressure and undermine the U.S.-led mission, coalition diplomats say.
"We think withdrawal sends the wrong signal and that it is important for people to stand up to terrorists and not allow them to change our behavior," State Department spokesman Richard Boucher told reporters.
Some attrition was inevitable after the U.S.-led occupation officially ended on June 28, say envoys in Washington. "This was expected as sovereignty was handed over. Some have been desperate to get out of there, because they were handcuffed to the process," said a diplomat from a prominent member of the coalition who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.
"In certain countries, public opinion was against them going in -- so they were under political pressure that they either shouldn't be there or they should be there only for so long. Sovereignty was always a point at which countries look at how long they'll stay. It becomes a segue for pulling out," he added.
To track commitments, the Bush administration keeps a color-coded chart of coalition members: red for countries withdrawing, yellow for nations considering a pullout and green for countries staying.
The size and abilities of the coalition forces have been a source of controversy and embarrassment for the administration since the war to oust Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.
In many ways, the symbolic importance of international participation has been at least as vital for the Bush administration as the often-limited military role the troops have played. And while administration officials have stressed the number of countries that have sent troops, others have noted the small size of many military contingents and the continued absence of some major powers.
Several participating countries sent fewer than 100 troops. In other cases, forces diminished significantly over time. Moldova's contingent is the smallest -- down to 12 from 42. Singapore has quietly reduced its presence from 191 to 33.
The Bush administration contends the coalition is holding, pointing to the renewed troop commitments from large contributors such as Britain and Italy. "Their support has solidified as the political process has come to pass," said Lincoln Bloomfield, assistant secretary of state for political-military affairs.
"If you look at how many voices were doubting that the transfer of sovereignty would actually occur, you can now see a momentum behind the military coalition to rally around the Iraqi government and complete the process all the way through the electoral stages leading to full sovereignty at the end of 2005. Despite all the security challenges, the big picture is that the plan is working," Bloomfield said.
El Salvador renewed its commitment of 380 troops after President Bush hosted Salvadoran President Antonio Saca at the White House this week, the latest of several White House visits by leaders of coalition countries. Lithuania renewed its 105-troop commitment last week.
Several other countries have promised to significantly add to their contingents. South Korea is increasing its force from 600 to 3,700, while Azerbaijan offered an additional 250 soldiers to join the 150 already in Iraq. Georgia said it is ready to more than double its 159 troops -- to more than 400.
"We don't see any major defections; we see troops coming and going as they said they would; and there have been more plus-ups than withdrawals," said a senior Pentagon official involved in Iraq policy.
But some pledges the administration cites are misleading or contain caveats that call into question whether many troops will stay much beyond the first round of Iraqi elections scheduled for January.
Australia's pledge to increase its commitment will bring its troop strength to 880 -- fewer than half the 2,000 troops it had during the war. And only about 250 are in Iraq, with the rest in air and naval support positions nearby, Australian envoys say. For Australia and some other countries, increases are mainly meant to enhance security for their own troops, embassies and personnel.
Support is also tenuous in nations Washington considers to be key players. The vote this week in Italy's House of Deputies to extend its deployment was 257 to 207, a reflection of the almost even public split, an Italian envoy said. Playing to strong public antiwar sentiment, Australia's opposition pledged to withdraw troops by Christmas if elected, while revelations about the Abu Ghraib prison abuse led Hungary's opposition to call for a withdrawal despite originally supporting the deployment.
Hostage seizures of nationals from Japan, South Korea, Poland, Italy, Bulgaria, the Philippines and the United States have heightened public and political pressure, with several countries expecting debates to intensify this fall.
The first blow to the U.S.-led force was the decision by new Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero to withdraw his country's 1,300 troops, which led Honduras and the Dominican Republic to bring home their few hundred troops this spring. Britain and Spain had been the two closest U.S. allies in the Iraq war. Zapatero's election upset after a terrorist bombing at a Madrid train station deepened opposition to Spain's deployment.
For other countries, however, the issue is capability. "We have limited resources and huge commitments, like Afghanistan, the Solomon Islands, Bosnia, Kosovo and Timor," a New Zealand diplomat said. "Hostage dramas have not influenced our plans or thinking, and it was not a political decision. We're just stretched."
The countries most committed to staying are East European and former Soviet countries. "We benefited in our own recent history from foreign peacekeepers, so we understand the value of action. Our stand on Iraq is firm, and our participation is not questionable," said Macedonian Ambassador Nikola Dimitrov.
The day Spain pulled out, Albania wrote Washington to reaffirm its commitment and has since pledged to increase its troops from 71 to 200. "We're the most pro-U.S. nation in Europe," Ambassador Satos Tarisa said, "and we're in Iraq for the long haul."
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Election Troubles Already Descending on Florida
July 15, 2004
By ABBY GOODNOUGH
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/15/politics/campaign/15vote.html?pagewanted=all&position=
MIAMI, July 14 - Three years after Gov. Jeb Bush announced a new voting system that he called "a model for the rest of the nation," Florida is grappling with some of the same problems that threw the 2000 presidential election into chaos, as well as new ones that critics say could cause even more confusion this November.
The touch-screen voting machines intended to cure many of the ills of 2000 have raised a host of other concerns here just four months before the election. A new state rule excludes the machines from manual recounts, and the integrity of the machines was questioned after a problem was discovered in the audit process of some of them. Voting rights groups filed a lawsuit last week challenging the recount ban, and a Democratic congressman has also sued to request a printed record of every touch-screen vote.
The controversy over the new equipment is just one of Florida's challenges, which also include confirming which voters are ineligible, training poll workers on new policies and processing a flood of new registrations.
State officials announced on Saturday that they would throw out a controversial list used to remove felons from the voting rolls, acknowledging that Hispanic felons were absent from the list. Secretary of State Glenda E. Hood, appointed by Governor Bush last year, had earlier dismissed concerns from lawmakers and advocacy groups about the list of 48,000 suspected felons, which the state made public only after a judge's order.
The United States Civil Rights Commission, which issued a scathing report on the last election here in 2001, will examine problems with the list of felons in a hearing Thursday in Washington.
"The most important thing is to really show the voters that there are reasons to have confidence in these systems," said Bobbie Brinegar, president of the League of Women Voters of Miami-Dade County. "But the mantra has been 'trust us.' And that is not good enough."
Jacob DiPietre, a spokesman for Governor Bush, said the governor was "taking full responsibility" for the problem with the list, adding: "His No. 1 priority is to have a seamless election and an election where people have confidence that their vote will be counted."
The state, whose 36-day recount after the 2000 election stunned and divided the nation, is expected to be a major battleground again this year, with President Bush (the governor's brother) and Senator John Kerry, his probable Democratic opponent, fighting fiercely for its 27 electoral votes. Mr. Bush won Florida by 537 votes last time, but thousands of votes were discarded because of voter error on poorly designed ballots and other problems.
The Republican-led Legislature quickly passed an overhaul of the voting system in 2001, banning the punch-card ballots that caused so much trouble in 2000, giving counties money for new voting equipment and setting recount guidelines. It adopted two-thirds of the recommendations from a bipartisan task force that Governor Bush appointed after the 2000 election, but stayed away from some of the more contentious issues.
Most notably, lawmakers passed over recommendations to make the positions of county elections supervisors nonpartisan and to review the state's policy of permanently stripping felons of voting rights. The package that the Legislature adopted has played a role in the new turmoil. Tucked into the law was a provision keeping registration records secret. A state judge struck it down on July 2, opening the way for a close examination of the list of suspected felons to purge from the rolls.
Newspapers then reported that the list had a simple but glaring flaw: it guaranteed that no Hispanics, who tend to vote Republican here, would be purged, while thousands of blacks, who tend to vote Democratic, might be purged. Governor Bush moved quickly to drop it, but he was too late to avoid accusations from Democratic lawmakers and groups. The critics have denounced the effort to keep the list secret, the touch-screen problems and other troubles as purposeful efforts by Florida's Republican leadership to give President Bush an advantage here.
Unlike her predecessor Katherine Harris, who was co-chairwoman of President Bush's 2000 campaign in Florida even as she oversaw elections, Ms. Hood has publicly stayed away from politics. But critics say that Ms. Hood, a Republican and former Orlando mayor whom Governor Bush appointed, has sown doubt by dismissing criticism of the electoral system and by not answering questions sufficiently.
The abrupt resignation of Ed Kast, the state's director of elections, last month - he said he wanted to pursue other interests - only deepened public distrust, said Sandy Wayland, a member of the Miami-Dade Election Reform Coalition.
While previous secretaries of state were elected, Ms. Hood was the first appointed by the governor, the result of a 2003 change in the State Constitution. She reports to Governor Bush, who is therefore more directly responsible for her office's successes and failures.
"She is dealing with some really sophisticated, aggressive partisans," said Lance deHaven-Smith, a political science professor at Florida State University, speaking of the Jeb Bush administration. "She has been a good soldier, getting up and saying, 'Everything is fine, not to worry.' And come to find out, some of the problems that people feared were actually there. "
The coalition asked Ms. Hood's office last month to allow an independent review of the touch-screen machines now used by 15 of 67 counties, including Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach. The office said that only counties were authorized to seek such audits, and told reporters that the request was an effort to undermine voter confidence.
Through a public-records request, the coalition obtained e-mail messages and other documents from Miami-Dade election officials who referred to a flaw in the touch-screen equipment's ability to audit election results, a backup way of recording votes. The e-mail messages date back as far as June 2003.
Constance Kaplan, the Miami-Dade County elections supervisor, publicly acknowledged the problem this spring. This month, the company that makes the machines, Elections Systems and Software, provided software to correct the flaw, which the county and state say will not affect the machines' accuracy.
"It is important to note that the anomaly was rare, and all votes were counted as the anomaly did not affect the vote itself but rather the audit after," Ms. Hood's office wrote in a statement Tuesday.
Nicole de Lara, Ms. Hood's communications director, said that Ms. Kaplan's office had "unfortunately" not alerted Ms. Hood to the problem, and that she first learned of it from an article in The Daily Business Review in late May. Some critics suspect that Mr. Kast's resignation was related to the malfunction, but Mr. Kast said in aninterview it was not.
Ms. Wayland is among many here who contend that counties like Miami-Dade and Broward adopted touch-screen technology too soon, swayed by aggressive lobbyists. The 52 counties that do not use touch-screen equipment use optical-scan machines, which produce records that can be manually recounted.
A recent analysis by The Sun-Sentinel found that touch-screen machines in South Florida failed to record votes eight times more often than optical-scan machines in the March presidential primary.
Nonetheless, Ms. de Lara said touch-screen machines were wholly reliable for tabulating votes. She added that they would never require a recount because under state law the only reason for a manual recount is "voter intent" when a voter makes too many or too few choices. Touch-screen machines do not allow people to vote for more than one candidate, she said. And if people do not choose any candidate for a given office, that is their prerogative, she said.
The rule says no manual recounts will be conducted when votes are cast by touch-screen machine.
The election reform coalition and other groups have also expressed concerns about a new policy on provisional ballots, used by Floridians if poll workers cannot verify their registration on the spot. The Legislature decided that provisional ballots cast outside a voter's home precinct can be thrown out, which voting-rights groups call unfair.
Florida is one of several states where people are questioning touch-screen technology. California's secretary of state, Kevin Shelley, has prohibited the use of machines from Diebold Election Systems in four counties for the November election, and has ordered that touch-screen systems bought after July 1, 2005, produce a paper record that is verifiable by the voter.
"There's no question in my mind that ultimately there will be paper trails in every county in Florida," said Representative Robert Wexler, a Florida Democrat whose suits challenging paperless voting systems are on appeal. "The only question is when."
Ford Fessenden contributed reporting from New York for this article.
-------- ENERGY
-------- energy
Environmentalists Want Probe of Texas Power Plants
July 15, 2004
WASHINGTON, DC, (ENS)
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/jul2004/2004-07-15-09.asp#anchor3
The nonprofit Environmental Integrity Project has formally petitioned the U.S. Justice Department to open a criminal investigation of American Electric Power (AEP) for alleged violations of the Clean Air Act at three Texas power plants. The group cited allegations made by a former air quality engineer for the Texas facilities.
Texas environmentalists also filed notice on Tuesday with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) of their intent to sue the agency if the alleged violations are not investigated.
The allegations documented by the engineer, Bill Wilson, center on activities at three large AEP power plants in east Texas - Welsh, Pirkey and Knox-Lee. AEP is the nation's largest electricity generator.
The alleged violations include:
- repeatedly and illegally burning chemical waste in utility boilers
- violating emission limits for smog forming chemicals, particulate matter and carbon monoxide
- misrepresenting emissions data to state environmental officials
- failing to satisfy the Clean Air Act's New Source Review program
"I was told that under the recently passed Sarbanes-Oxley law I had to report any evidence of misconduct at the company that could be of material importance to shareholders," Wilson said. "Obviously, the prospect of civil, regulatory or even criminal action arising from Clean Air Act violations fell under that heading."
Wilson was fired by AEP in May after reporting the problems to the company's ethics division.
"I was not the party that did something wrong here," he said. "AEP was the one I saw breaking the law over and over again."
AEP officials said Wilson was fired for causes not related to the environmental claims he reported to the company's ethics division.
"We do not retaliate against an employee who files a complaint," said Michael Morris, AEP chairman, president and chief executive officer. "We encourage employees to raise issues of concern so we can ensure we are meeting high ethical and legal standards while conducting our business. But filing a complaint does not make an employee immune to disciplinary actions for issues not related to the complaint."
Morris said company officials reviewed Wilson's allegations and determined most were unfounded. The few that had some merit, he said, were properly reported.
"We take our environmental compliance responsibilities very seriously, so claims like this are also taken seriously," said Morris. "We conducted an internal investigation, reviewed the facts related to issues raised by Mr. Wilson and determined that appropriate corrective action had been taken or that no violations had taken place."
But the Environmental Integrity Project says its interviews with Wilson and review of documents he has provided warrant further investigation by federal officials.
"There is more than enough evidence to trigger a criminal investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice," said Eric Schaeffer, director of the Environmental Integrity Project and a former enforcement official at the EPA. "For some time now, we have been concerned about the cozy relationship between the nation's largest utility polluters and the Bush administration. We will be watching to see if they take the action that is needed here, and send a message that even the most powerful companies are not above the law."
----
Chavez, Uribe discuss energy, border security
Thursday, July 15, 2004
By Jorge Rueda,
Associated Press
http://www.enn.com/news/2004-07-15/s_25866.asp
EL TABLAZO, Venezuela - Plans to build a US$200 million natural gas pipeline from Venezuela to Colombia topped the agenda at a presidential summit Wednesday at a petrochemical complex.
Venezuela's Hugo Chavez and Colombia's Alvaro Uribe also were discussing security along the 2,200-kilometer (1,400-mile) border, gasoline smuggling, and trade in their first bilateral meeting this year.
The setting was El Tablazo, a petrochemical complex on the eastern coast of Venezuela's oil-rich Lake Maracaibo some 500 kilometers (300 miles) west of Caracas.
Amid tight security, Uribe and Chavez began talks at the plant after a brief tour of parts of the oil region by helicopter.
Venezuela, the world's fifth-largest oil exporter, has recently stepped up its petroleum diplomacy, announcing plans for a South American oil cooperative and a new company to deliver Venezuelan oil to Caribbean nations.
Initially, Colombia will use the pipeline to send gas from its northeastern La Guajira region to western Venezuela, said Venezuelan Energy Minister Rafael Ramirez. Eventually, Venezuela will send gas to Colombia, and the pipeline will form part of a network delivering gas to Central America and Mexico, Ramirez said.
Other topics included building a bridge connecting Venezuela's Tachira state with Colombia's Norte de Santander department; sharing electricity; a contingency plan for oil spills in the Gulf of Maracaibo; and growing numbers of refugees fleeing Colombia's civil war.
Colombian Foreign Minister Carolina Barco said Tuesday that the presidents' opposing views on a proposed hemispheric trade pact won't affect bilateral ties.
An advocate of regional integration, Chavez this week urged Colombia and other Andean nations to oppose the Free Trade Area of the Americas, calling it "an imperial proposal that seeks to dominate us for 100 years."
Uribe, along with the leaders of Ecuador and Peru, are negotiating trade pacts with the United States.
Chavez and Uribe also were addressing rampant smuggling of cheap Venezuelan gasoline into Colombia.
Ramirez told El Nacional newspaper in remarks published Wednesday that Venezuela would propose selling gasoline directly to Colombia's state oil company Ecopetrol, or another firm selected by Colombia, to guarantee prices and eliminate black market smuggling.
-------- OTHER
-------- environment
Animal welfare groups threaten to sue US navy on harm to whales
Jul 15, 2004
LOS ANGELES (AFP)
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040715204147.3298vfsr.html
Animal welfare groups on Thursday threatened to sue the US navy unless it stops using a type of sonar that they say could cause internal bleeding and even death in whales and other marine mammals.
A coalition of groups sent a letter to US Navy Secretary Gordon England detailing mass strandings and deaths of whales associated with the navy's training using mid-frequency sonar.
"There are effective ways to reduce harm to marine life that do not interfere with military readiness," said Joel Reynolds, a senior attorney and director of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).
"The navy is needlessly endangering whole populations of marine mammals. We'd rather not resort to litigation, so we are once again asking the navy to sit down to discuss this in a spirit of cooperation.
"The navy can no longer ignore the unnecessary infliction of harm associated with this technology," he said.
The NRDC forms part of a coalition of environmental groups, which is taking aim at the military sonar used at sea. Also included are the International Fund for Animal Welfare, the Humane Society and Jean-Michel Cousteau's Ocean Futures Society.
The group laid down its ultimatum two weeks after US and Japanese naval training exercises off the coast of Hawaii coincided with what the group called a "stampede" to shallow water by up to 200 melon-headed whales.
The warships shut off their active sonar after learning of the stampede, but the exact sequence of events remains unclear.
"Right now nobody knows if sonar is to blame, but this incident was similar enough to previous stranding events caused by sonar that we think the navy needs to investigate it thoroughly and transparently," said Naomi Rose, marine mammal scientist for the Humane Society.
Nearly 60 percent of the US navy's 294 ships and submarines use mid-frequency sonar systems.
Citing the journal Nature, the groups said intense blasts of that type of sonar can damage vital organs and cause internal bleeding in marine mammals.
Last year, the US Navy agreed to scale back deployment of a different kind of sonar that uses low-frequency sound waves, after losing a lawsuit brought against it by groups in the coalition.
In that case, a federal court ruled that the navy's permit to use low-frequency sonar violated federal laws because it did not adequately assess or take steps to mitigate the risks posed by the system to marine mammals and fish.
-------- health
'Superbug' Kin Infects Athletes, Kids
Reuters
Thursday, July 15, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A50116-2004Jul14.html
A drug-resistant "superbug" found in hospitals has a close cousin that is affecting athletes, prisoners and small children in growing numbers across the United States, disease experts said yesterday.
Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus or MRSA can become fatal if not treated with the right antibiotics, said Daniel B. Jernigan of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
"MRSA is showing up in places it had never been seen before -- as a predominant cause of skin disease among children in some regions of the country, as clusters of abscesses among sports participants, as the most common cause of skin infections among inmates in some jails, and among military recruits and, rarely, as a severe and sometimes fatal lung or bloodstream infection in previously healthy people," Jernigan told reporters.
Most commonly it takes the form of an abscess or boil, and doctors routinely try to treat it with penicillin-based antibiotics, Jernigan said. These will not work.
In hospitals, MRSA resists almost everything but an intravenous antibiotic called vancomycin. But community-acquired MRSA can be treated with antibiotics including doxycycline and co-trimoxazole, sold under the brand name Bactrim.
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Mandela Lends Weight to Fighting Tuberculosis and AIDS
July 15, 2004
By LAWRENCE K. ALTMAN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/15/international/asia/15CND-AIDS.html
BANGKOK, July 15 - Nelson Mandela came to the 15th International AIDS Conference here today to lend his prestige to the battles against tuberculosis and AIDS, two deadly diseases that are intricately linked.
The former president of South Africa was diagnosed with tuberculosis while in prison, where he spent 27 years for opposing the former apartheid regime before his release in 1994.
"We cannot win the battle against AIDS if we do not also fight TB," Man-dela said at a press conference today. "TB is too often a death sentence for people with AIDS."
Mandela has acknowledged that, as president, he did not recognize the severity of the AIDS epidemic in South Africa, which now leads the world with 5.3 million people infected with HIV, the virus that causes the disease. Since Mandela left office, he has embraced the fight and has pushed his successor, Thabo Mbeki, to confront HIV and tuberculosis.
Tuberculosis causes from 15 percent to 50 percent of deaths among HIV-infected people, making it the leading cause of death among people with AIDS, according to the World Health Organization.
While the AIDS virus and the tuberculosis bacterium each can cause fatal illness, the two diseases can form a deadly combination, each amplifying the other's progress. By weakening the immune system, the AIDS virus leaves infected people particularly vulnerable to developing tuberculosis.
Mandela said he spoke about his case of tuberculosis because he felt that the disease is ignored, and to help the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation open a $44.7 million program to conduct research to develop strategies to control tuberculosis in communities where HIV is highly prevalent.
Mandela said prison doctors diagnosed his case of tuberculosis by testing his sputum. "Fortunately, we sent the specimen before there were holes in the lung," Mandela said.
After doctors told Mandela that it would take four months to cure his tuberculosis, he told his friends in prison about the diagnosis. He said: "My friends objected to me sharing my personal affairs. But I consoled them and told them that the doctors and hospital staff knew about my status and I therefore had no reason to hide this information from those close to me."
Mandela said he took the same steps of disclosing his more recent case of prostate cancer. "I knew that once people were aware of the effects, they would support me," Mandela said. "I'm convinced that the support of my family, friends and the public in general contributed to my healing process."
Mandela said it was a blessing that "the world has made defeating AIDS a top priority." But an additional fight against tuberculosis is required, he said.
The problem, said Dr. Richard Chaisson of Johns Hopkins University in the United States, a recipient of one of the new Gates grants, is "a catastrophic collision of two epidemics."
Determining whether tuberculosis or HIV caused the death of a person with AIDS can be difficult and depends on specific medical facts in each case.
Because such determinations involved medical judgments, the percentage of deaths caused by tuberculosis has varied widely in different studies.
Tuberculosis was widely prevalent even before the AIDS epidemic began to take hold in 1981. But now more people are dying from tuberculosis worldwide than ever, the United Nations says.
In sub-Saharan Africa, where 25 million people are HIV-infected, two- thirds of tuberculosis patients also have the AIDS virus. And of the estimated 1.6 million deaths that tuberculosis causes each year worldwide, one-fourth occur among HIV-infected people. Worldwide, as many as 50 percent of HIV-infected people develop tuberculosis.
Treatment of tuberculosis can prolong and improve the quality of life for HIV-infected people, but cannot alone prevent people from dying of AIDS.
The current strategy for managing tuberculosis in poor countries generally depends on patients seeking care, and aims at treating patients with active tuberculosis, not those with silent infection. The Gates Foundation grants are to support research to determine the cost-effectiveness and feasibility of two interventions in communities with a high prevalence of co-infection of HIV and tuberculosis. The two steps are improved case-finding and preventive therapy with a drug, isoniazid.
Research has shown that isoniazid prevention can be more than 85 percent effective in reducing an individual's risk of developing active tuberculosis. But scientists have not determined the effect of widespread isoniazid use during a tuberculosis epidemic.
The Gates studies will be conducted in Brazil, South Africa and Zambia and take more than seven years to complete. The Global Fund spends from 15 to 20 percent of its $3 billion budget on tuberculosis.
-------- ACTIVISTS
NEWS ANALYSIS
Protesters? Where?
July 15, 2004
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/15/nyregion/15mayor.html
By inviting the Republican Party to hold its convention in New York City this summer, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has by proxy invited those who want to protest it, too. On Tuesday, however, he made it clear just what his administration perceives to be the limits of free speech in the era of terror.
Finding the right balance between protecting the civil liberties of protesters and keeping the city safe and orderly has become perhaps the most difficult conundrum the mayor has grappled with in preparing for the convention.
Mr. Bloomberg cannot afford to create the impression that the city is stifling protest, nor does he want the considerable ire that many peaceful protesters feel toward President Bush to be turned onto him instead.
But against a background of terrorist threats, he cannot risk a situation like Seattle's during the World Economic Forum in 1999, when the city came close to shutting down in the midst of violent protests. His Republican guests do not care to take in the spectacle of protesters in Times Square as they make their way to the theater, and city shopkeepers and commuters have no interest in long detours around angry antiwar rallies.
And so yesterday his administration announced that it was the protesters who would be inconvenienced rather than tourists and citizens.
After listing a number of groups that have also been granted protest sites, complete with some discussion of what props those groups will bring (one group, in a comment on the state of the nation's economy, will brandish giant pink slips), Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly reiterated that protests do not belong in Times Square, one of the requested sites of the largest protest group, United for Peace and Justice.
Up next was the parks commissioner, who said once again that he would not brook the trampling of the grass on the Great Lawn of Central Park. Transportation Commissioner Iris Weinshall then stepped up to say that she wanted to keep traffic flowing on the East Side of Manhattan, which thereby knocked down another requested protest area. Instead, the group could hold its rally along the West Side Highway.
Bill Dobbs, a spokesman for United for Peace and Justice, said yesterday that Mr. Bloomberg was simply trying to "roll out the red carpet" for the Republicans, at the expense of dissenting voices.
Mr. Bloomberg has not denied that he is trying roll out the carpet for the G.O.P. But he also claims that he has a carpet - or at least a large area rug - that he wants to extend to the rest of the city.
"My first concern is to protect the civil rights of 8.1 million people who live here," Mr. Bloomberg said this week, explaining why he does not want protests to cause the same inconveniences that extensive security measures inevitably will. "Nobody is going to take away the rights of our citizens to go about their business, go to school, go to work," he said.
Organizers say those kinds of trade-offs are now the norm when holding huge political gatherings in the new age.
Holding a convention in the city is "tenfold more complicated than it would have been even four years ago," said Kevin Sheekey, president of the host committee. "The concerns before were simple mundane crowd control. And now you have to think about terrorism, and that means you are talking about political leaders, delegates and visitors, protesters, citizens, the media and organized labor. And it is always the case that the mayor is the final arbiter on these things."
Police officials say their overarching focus is on a possible terrorist attack, rather than the myriad protests or the small cadre of troublemakers they worry will mask themselves behind the mass of peaceful demonstrators. However, the department is concerned about possible disruptions emerging from a protest as large as the 250,000 people expected by United for Peace and Justice.
"Even if these were 300,000 little old ladies, we would still want to keep them towards West Street rather than to create a mass of gridlock in the midst of the city somewhere," said Paul J. Browne, the department's deputy commissioner for public information. "We like to have marches where we can allow a significant portion of the rest of the city to function."
Norman Adler, a political consultant in New York, said most New Yorkers would likely accept the notion of protesters' getting short shrift in the name of their safety, as long as the police do not emulate those in Chicago three decades ago.
"I can't see Gifford Miller saying, 'Don't vote for the mayor because he forced the protesters to the West Side,' " Mr. Adler said, referring to Mr. Bloomberg's most likely Democratic rival for re-election. "But he could say 'Don't vote for the mayor because the police engaged in unnecessary violence.' "
William K. Rashbaum contributed reporting for this article.
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Police Offer Convention Demonstrators a Rally Site Far From the Garden
July 15, 2004
By DIANE CARDWELL
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/15/nyregion/15protest.html
The Police Department drew a line in the sand yesterday for the group planning the largest protest during the Republican National Convention next month, telling the protest organizers they can hold a giant rally only along the West Side Highway, four long blocks from the convention site. If the group disagrees with the site, police officials said, its leaders can sue the city.
"This is our final offer," said Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly, flanked by the city's parks and transportation commissioners, at a news conference at Police Headquarters. "Obviously they have the ability to go to court and resolve it in some fashion that way."
The group, United for Peace and Justice, sought a permit for 250,000 people to rally on the Great Lawn in Central Park for speeches against the war in Iraq and other Bush administration policies on Aug. 29, the day before the convention begins. But the Parks Department rejected that site, saying that the area cannot hold that many people and that a huge rally could damage the lawn. Instead, police officials have suggested that demonstrators march past Madison Square Garden, where the convention will be held, and then rally, stretched along 30-odd blocks, from West and Chambers Streets to possibly as far north as 12th Avenue and 34th Street.
"It is, we believe, a reasonable alternative, and we need closure on this issue now," Mr. Kelly said. "The ball is in their court."
Protest organizers said they were "blindsided" by the news conference and were never informed that the West Side Highway was a take-it-or-leave-it option. They said that the site would make it hard to construct a sound system that participants miles from the stage could hear, and that protesters would be excessively hot and marginalized at the edge of the city.
"We do not think this is the way this rally should be conducted," said Leslie Cagan, national coordinator for United for Peace and Justice, which plans to demonstrate today at City Hall in support of a Central Park site. "We will continue to work for what we believe is the best way to have our demonstration." Calling the protest site on the far West Side the worst alternative to the park, she asked city officials to remain "open to the range of possibilities that we have put on the table and not give us ultimatums."
But the city's decision, and its very public way of communicating it to the organizers, made it clear that the Bloomberg administration is placing a premium on preserving order during the convention in heavily used areas like Central Park and Times Square.
The Police and Parks Departments have approved permits for 14 organizations to stage protests during the convention, including a prayer vigil by the Christian Defense Coalition opposite Madison Square Garden, a reading of the Constitution by People for the American Way at the Central Park band shell and a 12-hour anti-gun-violence display at Union Square Park organized by Silent March.
In addition, the Police Department has reached an agreement with another antiwar group, Not in Our Name, for a rally on Eighth Avenue south of 31st Street on the evening of Sept. 2, when President Bush is scheduled to accept his party's nomination. The group originally applied for a permit for a march and rally leaving from Union Square, but the department rejected that and instead offered the stationary rally. Protest organizers had originally been reluctant to agree to the proposal because of concerns about searches and about the potential use of four-sided metal barricades, like those used in a February 2003 antiwar protest, that keep demonstrators within the length of each block
The use of such pens has been a sharp point of contention between the police and the protesters, and the department is involved in a civil lawsuit that is seeking a court order barring universal bag searches and discouraging the use of four-sided pens. The suit was brought by the New York Civil Liberties Union and three people who say they were treated roughly by the police at the February 2003 protest, organized by United for Peace and Justice.
But Not in Our Name, at least, was willing to agree to the Police Department's proposal because officials have said that they will not search people unless they have a specific reason to do so and that they plan to use three-sided enclosures with entrance and exit points, as they did at a rally in March.
"They'll be able to come and go, and we are going to search only if there is a reason," said Paul J. Browne, the Police Department's deputy commissioner for public information.
For United for Peace and Justice, though, the negotiations have yielded little progress. An umbrella group formed in 2002 as the country moved toward war with Iraq, it has grown from a handful of local and national organizations to more than 800 across the country. Although some of its events have been marred by clashes with the police, many of them have gone smoothly, with few arrests and little or no disorder.
Indeed, city officials insist that the sticking point stems from the protest's size, not its politics. The Police Department approved the group's request to march directly past the Garden before the convention begins, but have rejected alternative rally proposals at Times Square and along Third Avenue from Midtown to the 60's. Mr. Kelly said yesterday that squeezing a quarter of a million people along a proposed route to Times Square from 59th Street was impractical, and Iris Weinshall, the transportation commissioner, said that a rally on Third Avenue would overwhelm residential side streets and clog access to Manhattan from East River crossings.
But organizers appeared to want to keep their options open, neither accepting nor rejecting the site outright, and deflecting for now Commissioner Kelly's challenge to sue.
"We are fully prepared to maintain the negotiations with the city," Ms. Cagan said, adding that they would attend a meeting with police officials set for tomorrow morning, in the hopes of reaching an agreement and obtaining the legal permits. "We are not on that day engaging in civil disobedience."
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