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NUCLEAR
Chinese produce new type of sub
Radiation in Iraq equals 250,000 Nagasaki bombs
Israel's Soreq nuclear reactor -- the one they show to journalists
North Korea makes bombs as disarmament talks continue
N.Korea Is Bigger Threat Than Iraq, Clinton Says
Bush's Foreign Fantasy
Pilot Who Dropped A - Bomb on Nagasaki Dies
'Most dangerous' Flats building coming down
Flats demolitions set
Los Alamos beset by yet another scandal
'Cowboy' nuclear scientists disregard lab security
Los Alamos weapons lab: Steeped in history, but dogged by trouble
Los Alamos Stops Work in Crisis Over Lost Data
Los Alamos Defense Lab Suspends Operations
U Texas weighs bid on Los Alamos lab contract
Nuclear Site Workers Exposed to Vapors
Hanford's vapors may pose health risk
State plans suit to bar waste shipments
State seeks to expand Hanford suit
MILITARY
U.N. Report Denounces Rwanda
Sudanese Rebels Walk Out of Peace Talks
Was our son murdered by the CIA?
How judge was misinformed about Iraq's WMD threat
No 10 admits Hutton cover-up
Interior Dept. Inquiry Faults Procurement
G.I.'s in Battle of Wits With Rebels Over Bomb Technology
Head of Gaza Police Kidnapped By Gunmen and Paraded in Streets
Arafat Rejects Palestinian Prime Minister's Resignation
Arafat Under Pressure After Palestinian PM Quits
NATO to Boost Force in Afghanistan for Election
Pentagon pushes quick Guantánamo hearings
Pentagon creates office to deal with detainee affairs
Bush Defers Decision on CIA Chief
Colonel Is Investigated in Iraqi Death
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Interviews Of Muslims To Broaden FBI Hopes to Avert A Terrorist Attack
Justice Dept. Says Threat Is Not Issue for Election
Dress Code May Hinder Their Work, Air Marshals Say
Protecting us without tainting the Constitution
Plan for Intelligence Outlined
Detainee Reviews Become the Routine
U.S. Is Readying Review Panels for Cuba Base
POLITICS
9/11 Panel Is Said to Urge New Post for Intelligence
Inquiry into British WMD intelligence watered down to protect Blair
Bit by bit, Blair is forced to face the truth
Kerry Backs Much of Pre-Emption Doctrine
OTHER
AIDS Meeting Focuses on Prevention
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- china
Chinese produce new type of sub
July 16, 2004
By Bill Gertz
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20040716-123134-8152r.htm
China's naval buildup has produced a new type of attack submarine that U.S. intelligence did not know was under construction, according to U.S. defense and intelligence officials.
The submarine was spotted several weeks ago for the first time and has been designated by the Pentagon as the first Yuan-class of submarine.
A photograph of the completed submarine in the water at China's Wuhan shipyard was posted on a Chinese Internet site this week and confirmed by a defense official as the new submarine. Wuhan is located inland, some 420 miles west of Shanghai.
One official said the new submarine was a "technical surprise" to U.S. intelligence, which was unaware that Beijing was building a new non-nuclear powered attack submarine. U.S. intelligence agencies have few details about the new submarine but believe it is diesel-powered rather than nuclear-powered, said officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
The new boat, which appears to be a combination of indigenous Chinese hardware and Russian weapons, suggests that China is building up its submarine forces in preparation for a conflict over Taiwan, defense analysts say.
"China has decided submarines are its first-line warships now, their best shot at beating carriers," said Sid Trevethan, an Alaska-based specialist on the Chinese military. "And China is right."
"One has to marvel at the enormity of the investment by the People's Liberation Army in submarines," said Richard Fisher, a specialist on the Chinese military.
China also is building two nuclear-powered submarines - one Type 093, believed to be based on the Russian Victor-III class and armed with intercontinental ballistic missiles, and a Type 094 attack submarine, which the Pentagon believes has a finished hull and will be ready for deployment next year.
According to Mr. Trevethan, China currently has a force of 57 deployed submarines, including one Xia-class nuclear ballistic missile submarine, five Han submarines, four Kilos, seven Songs, 18 Mings and 22 Soviet-designed Romeos. Beijing also has eight more Kilos on order with Russia.
Disclosure of the new submarine comes as the United States is trying to sell eight diesel submarines to Taiwan, which Beijing views as a breakaway province. Taiwan currently has just two World War II-era Guppy-class submarines and two 1980s Dutch submarines.
Mr. Fisher, an analyst with the International Assessment and Strategy Center, said that despite the imbalance of power on the Taiwan Strait in favor of Beijing, the Bush administration has been slow to sell the submarines it offered Taiwan in April 2001.
"It is simply appalling that the United States cannot get its act together to organize the production of eight new submarines for Taiwan," Mr. Fisher said.
U.S. defense officials have said delays with the Taiwan submarine deal are the result of the Taipei government's budget problems.
Chinese leaders told National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice last week that China would "not sit idly by" as Taiwan moved toward formal independence, and President Hu Jintao denounced U.S. weapons sales to Taiwan.
But Miss Rice said the United States will go ahead with its Taiwan arms sales plan because of China's missile buildup opposite the island.
A Pentagon report made public in May stated that China is changing its warship forces from a coastal defense force to one employing "active offshore defense."
"This change in operations requires newer, more modern warships and submarines capable of operating at greater distances from China's coast for longer periods," the report said, noting that submarine construction is a top priority.
Mr. Fisher said the Chinese submarine buildup should prompt the Pentagon to step up U.S. anti-submarine warfare capabilities, which he said are "at an historic low" because of cutbacks in specialized ships and aircraft.
The Navy should consider building its own diesel attack submarine to be able to "effectively duke it out with the new tidal wave of Chinese subs, that if left unchecked, may soon dominate the Asian littoral regions," Mr. Fisher said.
The Pentagon is also building up U.S. naval forces in the Pacific, with the addition of up to six attack submarines in Guam and the possible deployment of an aircraft carrier battle group to Hawaii in the coming months.
-------- depleted uranium
Radiation in Iraq equals 250,000 Nagasaki bombs
By Bob Nichols
July 13, 2004,
Online Journal Contributing Writer
http://www.onlinejournal.com/Special_Reports/071304Nichols/071304nichols.html
As a writer I do not have a set of words to describe what 142 degrees in the shade is like. I've seen 120 degrees in Phoenix and 110 degrees in the spa's sauna I use. One hundred forty-two degrees leaves me speechless. Try to imagine 142 D temperature while wearing a helmet, long sleeve shirt, long pants, a bulletproof vest, boots, and carrying a 70-pound pack.
By contrast the Inuit of Alaska and Canada are said to have 37 words to precisely talk about different kinds of snow.
So, since the temperature is heating up in Iraq it seemed like a good time to float this story to different Internet sites and news publications. There was one story in 2003 of a 19-year old British soldier whose military job was to work in a British tank. In Iraq. In the summer. Word is, from London, that he forgot to drink enough water and he literally cooked in his tank.
But, this story is not about the temperature in Iraq. You can bet, though, the weather will be really important for those Americans unfortunate enough to still be in Iraq this summer.
This story is about American weapons built with depleted uranium components for the business end of things. Just about all American bullets, tank shells, missiles, dumb bombs, smart bombs, 500 and 2,000-pound bombs, cruise missiles, and anything else engineered to help our side in the war of us against them has depleted uranium in it. Lots of depleted uranium.
In the case of a cruise missile, as much as 800 pounds of the stuff. This article is about how much radioactive depleted uranium our guys, representing us, the citizens of the United States, let fly in Iraq. Turns out they used about 4,000,000 pounds of the stuff, give or take, according to the Pentagon and the United Nations. That is a bunch.
Now, most people have no idea how much Four Million Pounds of anything is, much less of depleted uranium oxide dust (UOD), which this stuff turns into when it is shot or exploded. Suffice it to say it is about equal to 1,333 cars that weigh 3,000 pounds apiece. That is a lot of cars; but we can imagine what a parking lot with 1,333 is like. The point is this was and is an industrial strength operation. It is still going on, too.
No sir-ee, putting Four Million Pounds of Radioactive Uranium Dust (RUD) on the ground in Iraq was a definitely "on-purpose" kind of thing. It was not "just an accident." We, the citizens of the United States, through our kids in the Army, did this on purpose.
When the depleted uranium bullets, missiles, or bombs hit something or explode most of the radioactive uranium turns instantly into very, very small dust particles, too fine to even see (they call it: uranium oxide, that's the really bad stuff). When US troops or Iraqis breathe even a tiny amount into their lungs, as little as one gram, it is the same as getting an X-Ray every hour for the rest of their shortened life.
The depleted uranium cannot be removed, there is no treatment, there is no cure. The depleted uranium will long outlast the veterans' and the Iraqis' bodies though; for, you see, it lasts virtually forever.
But, it gets worse. Seems an admiral who is the former chief of the naval staff of India wanted to know how much radiation this represented. He also wanted to express the amount in a figure that the world, especially the non-American world, could easily understand.
The admiral decided to figure out how many Nagasaki plutonium bombs it would take to include the equivalent of the total amount of radiation deployed in Iraq in 2003 in the Four Million Pounds of depleted uranium.
The admiral also wanted to figure out how much radiation the United States Military Forces have deployed in the last five American wars, the so-called Five Nuclear Radiation Wars.
That is a simple enough task for somebody like the naval chief of staff for a country that is a member of the Nuclear Club. Using the Nagasaki bomb for the measuring stick is a particularly gruesome twist, though. For those of you in the States who do not know it, United States military forces dropped two nuclear bombs on Japan at the close of World War II. The rest of the world remembers that.
One atom bomb was dropped by Americans on the city of Hiroshima, the other bomb on the city of Nagasaki three days later. About 170,000 to 250,000 people were vaporized or incinerated immediately. It was a really big deal.
It is a measuring stick that plays very well in the rest of the world; but, not very well on American Fox News (Fair & Balanced)(c) channel or the rest of the Fox-like American media. The Department of Energy still lists the Hiroshima and Nagasaki detonations as "tests".
The admiral released the data months ago at a scientific conference in India. This article is the first report of the data in the United States. It will first be released on the Internet.
The admiral in India calculated the amount of radiation in the Nagasaki bomb and compared it with the number in the 4,000,000 pounds of depleted uranium left in Iraq from the 2003 war. Now, believe me, it is a lot more complex than that; but, that is essentially what the experts in India did.
How many Nagasaki bombs equal the radiation in the 2003 Iraq war? Answer: about 250,000 Nagasaki bombs.
How many Nagasaki bombs equal the radiation in the last Five American Nuclear Radiation Wars? Answer: about 400,000 Nagasaki bombs.
Who would do something like this?
We would. The only people in the history of the world to engage in nuclear wars are Americans, citizens of the United States. Allegedly, the Germans and Japanese of WWII also wanted to engage in nuclear wars, except the American military beat them to the draw, so to speak.
Respected academic scholars could debate forever whether or not Herr Hitler, Fuhrer of Germany, would have deployed uranium munitions in the Sudetenland if the weapons had been available. Certainly the Germans knew just as much about uranium wars as we did at the time. It seems doubtful that Adolph Hitler would have ordered the use of uranium munitions there because the Sudetenland was so close to the Fatherland, Nazi Germany.
An American general named Leslie Groves was in charge of the bomb making operation called The Manhattan Project. In 1943 The War Department knew exactly what uranium bullets and bombs were good for.
If the nuclear weapons did not detonate in Japan, the use of uranium bullets and bombs were the fall back position. It was not 'til Ronald Reagan was president in 1981 did the re-named Defense Department resurrect the deadly radioactive uranium bullets, shells, bombs, and missiles. No wonder his popular nick-name was Ronnie Ray-Gun.
The American military knew the symptoms of radiation poisoning in 1943, too; starting with the irritated sore throat through to an agonizing death from being cooked from the inside out.
President [sic] Bush promised to invade and attack many countries in the 2003 State of the Union speech. I believe the man. For some reason, some misguided Americans do not believe him, or think he was "exaggerating." The rest of the world has every reason to believe him and fear him, though.
Not to worry, Americans, the president [sic] has plenty of raw material for radioactive uranium munitions left. There are more than 77,000 tons stored at the 103 nuclear waste plants and a stunning 1.5 billion pounds at the several nuclear weapons labs and related facilities in the US.
Each nuke waste generating plant makes another 250 pounds of radioactive material a day for radioactive bullets, shells, bombs, and missiles. Not to put too fine a point on it; but that is enough for 288 more gloriously successful campaigns like the 2003 Nuclear Radiation War in Iraq. Who's next?
Every year about this time the southern winds leave a fine desert sand on the windshields of cars parked outside in Africa then Continental Europe and Britain. Soon this sand dust will carry a surprise. Thanks to the Americans. Thanks to us. We did this to the world. And, we wonder why they hate and despise us so.
These depleted uranium weapons' indiscriminate killing effect gives a whole new meaning to the age old term: cannon fodder. In Iraq, what goes around, comes around. If not the depleted uranium munitions themselves, the depleted uranium dust will be in the bodies of our returning armed forces, time bombs slowly ticking away the lives of the gullible and the ignorant with their very own personal internal radiation source, the cannon fodder of the 21st Century American Nuclear Radiation Wars.
A lot of people have done everything they can think of to stop these nuclear wars. Even more specifically to stop the use of depleted uranium in munitions and shut down the nuclear power plants. We have tried and failed for years. Why don't you give it a try? Can't hurt anything! Write what steps you would take to turn this situation around. Contact me at: bobnichols@cox.net.
-------- israel
Israel's Soreq nuclear reactor -- the one they show to journalists
Sat Jul 17, 2004
(AFP)
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=1511&ncid=1511&e=11&u=/afp/20040718/wl_afp/mideast_israel_nuclear_040718021606
SOREQ NUCLEAR FACILITY, Israel, (AFP) - Soreq is the nuclear facility Israel is willing to show journalists, unlike the Dimona reactor which is suspected of making plutonium for atomic bombs and is strictly off limits.
The centerpiece at Soreq, an elegant complex that has won architectural awards, is a five-megawatt reactor whose concrete outside looks like a huge upside-down white cup.
Inside, the small block of the reactor lies under nine metres (30 feet) of demineralized water, which is a pale blue that looks sparkling clean as it blocks gamma rays and other radiation to protect technicians and onlookers.
Soreq was donated to Israel by US president Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1955 "as part of the Atoms for Peace program" to develop the peaceful use of nuclear energy.
The Dimona reactor, which is in the Negev desert, was built with French help in the late 1950s, and is believed able to generate 40-150 megawatts of energy, much more than Soreq. It is thought to be where Israel makes the raw material for its atomic bombs.
Former technician Mordechai Vanunu was jailed for 18 years when he revealed the inner workings at Dimona and effectively blew the whistle on Israel's nuclear program.
"Soreq is active in applied research, making hi-tech products" such as radioactive materials used in medical diagnostic tests, Soreq's director Ehud Azoulay told journalists on a visit this month to the site, which is in the center of Israel, near the coast of the Mediterranean Sea.
Azoulay deflected in advance questions about whether Soraq is used for nuclear weapons development by saying the research center is the only one "in the world that doesn't have a nuclear physics department."
But John Pike, of the US-based GlobalSecurity weapons monitoring organization, told AFP by telephone that Soreq is "the functional equivalent of the US Livermore or Los Alamos national weapons laboratories. It is responsible for nuclear weapons research, design and fabrication."
Israel maintains a position of "strategic ambiguity" about whether it has nuclear weapons, neither confirming nor denying questions about this.
Most foreign experts believe Israel possesses up to 200 nuclear warheads, however.
Israel developed its nuclear program starting in the 1950s when then prime minister David Ben-Gurion realized that "all oil shipments to Israel must go along 2,000 miles of unfriendly coast," scientist Yude Paiss said at Soreq.
Israel does not use nuclear energy to produce electricity, as it is cheaper to use oil and gas, but does do atomic research.
The public face of Soreq is one of a facility active in non-atomic-bomb projects, such as using solid-state physics to make night-viewing systems or developing one of the first nuclear cameras used is treating thyroid problems, Azoulay said.
Scientists at Soreq are even looking into how to identify suicide bombers with machines that will be able to see beneath outer garments.
Indeed, while the nuclear weapons issue is not up for discussion, Israel's quest for national security permeates much of what Soreq does.
There are the arms-related projects.
Scientists at Soreq have developed a laser for snipers that can measure cross-wind along the path to a target, to be used in parallel with a laser used to measure range to a target.
This can be a valuable "support for snipers in hostage-taking situations," Azoulay said.
Then, there is the regional situation.
Mark Goldberg, who works in Soreq's radiopharmaceutical division, proudly showed journalists a cyclotron, the outside of which is a big metal barrel with wires coming in and out, used to make radioisotopes for medical diagnosis.
Such radioisotopes have relatively short half-lives, which make them valuable only for local use, which in Soreq's case means the Israeli market although it could be much more.
"If we had peace, we could do quite a lot of business with our neighbors," he said, referring to countries like neighboring Syria.
He said "all of us would like to help at all levels."
"We know Damascus has acquired a cyclotron machine and is having trouble getting it to run. We would be glad to help them with this," Goldberg said.
But "setting up contacts with neighboring countries is not easy to do," he said about Israel's Arab neighbours, two of whom remain in a state of war with the Jewish state.
-------- korea
North Korea makes bombs as disarmament talks continue
July 17, 2004
Washington Post
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/07/16/1089694567125.html?oneclick=true
Washington: North Korea was likely to be making nuclear bombs even as it negotiated with the US and four other countries on ending its weapons programs, the senior US official responsible for those talks said on Thursday.
"Time is certainly a valid factor in this," James Kelly, the assistant secretary of state for East Asian affairs, testified before the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
"We don't know the details, but it's quite possible that North Korea is proceeding along, developing additional fissionable material and possibly additional nuclear weapons."
North Korea has admitted producing weapons-grade plutonium since the crisis over Pyongyang's nuclear programs began 20 months ago.
US intelligence analysts believe the number of nuclear weapons held by North Korea has increased from two to at least eight during that time.
But it is unusual for a senior Bush Administration official to concede publicly that North Korea's stockpile of nuclear weapons may be growing.
The first round of talks included China and later expanded to involve South Korea, Japan and Russia.
Democrats on the committee scolded the Administration on Thursday for waiting too long to present North Korea with a detailed proposal on ending the crisis. At the most recent round of six-nation talks,in Beijing last month, the Administration proposed that once North Korea declared it would end its programs, US allies such as South Korea could provide energy assistance.
North Korea then would have three months to reveal its programs and have its claims verified by US intelligence. After that, the US would join in providing Pyongyang with written security assurances and participate in a process that might ultimately normalise relations.
"The bottom line is that we now confront a much more dangerous adversary than we did in 2001," said Senator Joseph Biden, of Delaware, the committee's senior Democrat.
Under questioning, Mr Kelly made it clear that improving relations with North Korea would take much more than dismantling its nuclear programs. In particular, he said, North Korea would need to improve its human rights record.
--------
N.Korea Is Bigger Threat Than Iraq, Clinton Says
July 17, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-korea-north-clinton.html
AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - Former U.S. President Bill Clinton sees North Korea as more of a threat than Iraq was, but thinks another ``preemptive'' war by the United States is unlikely, he was quoted on Saturday as saying.
Clinton told the Dutch daily NRC Handelsblad in an interview that U.S. difficulties in Iraq meant President Bush's doctrine of preemptive strikes would not be used against other states like North Korea or Iran, despite the threats they posed.
``North Korea has almost a million people in the army. They have powerful rockets and if we attacked preemptively, they would no longer have a reason not to attack South Korea,'' Clinton said, according to a Reuters translation from the Dutch.
``There are circumstances under which I would support the president if he attacked North Korea. In Europe, perhaps nobody would do that, but I would,'' Clinton told the Dutch newspaper during a visit to Amsterdam to promote his memoir ``My Life.''
``This is the most isolated country on earth, which cannot even feed its own people... this country is under great pressure to sell dangerous weapons to people up to no good.''
Pyongyang accuses Washington of preparing to attack North Korea despite diplomatic negotiations to try to end a nearly two-year-old impasse over its nuclear weapons programs.
Clinton said the idea of preemptive strikes, while laudable in principle, had not worked in practice, with neo-conservatives in the Bush administration underestimating how difficult it would be to bring stability and democracy to Iraq.
He noted that Bush was now softening his stance toward Pyongyang after long rejecting the approach Clinton favored during his presidency, of holding talks or offering incentives to induce the communist state to halt its nuclear programs.
``They are now almost back to the point where we got to. The Chinese have done the most to keep onto them. The South Koreans too because they want reconciliation. We now just have to go along with them while they do the work. And, if it gets that far, sign the non-aggression pact we want,'' he said.
Ahead of November's election, Bush has been eager to show progress on North Korea as Democratic challenger John Kerry has used the issue to attack the Republican's foreign policy.
Bush once branded North Korea part of an ``axis of evil'' along with Iran and pre-war Iraq but last month offered security guarantees and South Korean aid in return for North Korea agreeing to dismantle its nuclear programs.
-------- mideast
Bush's Foreign Fantasy
The president thinks the world is safer than it was three years ago. Which world is he living in?
ByFred Kaplan,
Slate Magazine
Friday, July 16, 2004
http://slate.msn.com/id/2103989/
"Safer": a slippery concept
Earlier this week, at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, home of the Y-12 nuclear-weapons facility, in Tennessee, President Bush gave one of his best-written speeches. This was his "America is safer" speech, and we will no doubt hear variations on it many times in the next four months. In it, he lists the world's hot spots, one by one (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan), contrasts what each was like three years ago with what it's like now, and concludes each success story with the refrain, "and the American people are safer." After the last item on the checklist, he expands the viewfinder, exclaiming, "and America and the world are safer."
It's a very effective speech (the Oak Ridge scientists greeted each repetition with stormy applause), unless you take a closer look at the examples it cites-in which case questions of comparative safety (are you safer now than you were three years ago?) seem at best ambiguous and in some cases downright depressing.
The "slam dunk" case would seem to be Libya. Three years ago, Muammar Qaddafi was acquiring materials for nuclear weapons. Today, he's surrendered the materials, invited in international inspectors, and stepped into the civilized world. Libya has a particular resonance for Oak Ridge, because it's the national lab where Qaddafi's nuclear materials are now stored.
Without question, any action that keeps Qaddafi away from an A-bomb is an unequivocal plus. But just what did turn him away from such ambitions? And how close was he to building a weapon, anyway?
In the past, Bush has suggested that Qaddafi changed course because he saw what happened to Saddam and wondered if his own crown might be next. Bush implied as much at Oak Ridge: "[T]he Libyan government saw the seriousness of the civilized world and correctly judged its own interests." It seems plausible that fear of impending invasion may have played a role in Qaddafi's calculations. But there are a few facts that weaken this theory.
First, when Bush first touted Libya's disarmament in his State of the Union address last January, he heralded the move as the result of "nine months of intense negotiation" involving Libya, the United States, and Britain. Qaddafi made his announcement in December. "Nine months" suggests the talks started the previous March. That was before the war in Iraq began.
At the same time, Bush said at Oak Ridge, the crucial step came when U.S. and British intelligence tracked a large shipment of nuclear equipment on a German-registered cargo ship bound for Tripoli. They informed the Germans, who diverted the ship to an Italian port, where the cargo was confiscated. This incident took place just last autumn-months after Saddam's toppling. If Qaddafi was trembling from the great display of American power, his fear didn't stop him from continuing his quest for black-market nuclear gear.
So, Qaddafi was negotiating about giving up his nuclear ambitions before the war in Iraq, yet he furtively persisted in these ambitions after Saddam's regime had tumbled. Maybe his nuclear gambits-the arming and the disarming-had little to do with the war, after all.
How close was Qaddafi to getting a bomb-that is, how much disarmament did his sacrifice involved? Mohammad ElBaradei, the director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, after examining the cache and the facilities, said Libya's nuclear program was "at a very initial stage." Not just an initial stage, a very initial stage.
David Albright, a specialist at the Institute for Science and International Security, breaks it down. Libya had ordered 10,000 centrifuges but almost none of the associated components needed to connect them into a spinning cascade for enriching uranium hexafluoride-that is, almost none of the stuff you'd need to turn uranium into bomb-grade material, much less into a bomb.
It looks like Qaddafi knew his nuclear program was going nowhere-he'd tried it once before, in the 1980s, to no avail. Then he got caught. Meanwhile, his economy was tanking. And maybe he sensed it would be a good idea, for now, to chummy up to the West. So, he made a big deal of giving up something he didn't really have, with hopes of reaping a big reward in return.
That's fine. But it had little, if anything, to do with what Bush calls America's "new approach in the world" after 9/11.
About Afghanistan, Bush's speech celebrated the crushing of the Taliban and the new reign of Hamid Karzai, "a good and just president." The military defeat of the Taliban was indeed Bush's singularly great accomplishment. But what happened afterward? The U.S. troops left in place-even with NATO assistance-were too paltry to stabilize the territory. As a result, warlords are once again slicing up the country. Elections have been put off due to poor security. Poppy growth and subsequent heroin exports to Europe are at nearly an all-time high. Taliban fighters are gaining ground here and there. And the eastern border to Pakistan, not at all secure, almost certainly still harbors Osama Bin Laden.
On Iraq, Bush-as usual-was very careful with his language. Three years ago, he told the Oak Ridge scientists, Iraq was ruled by "a proven mass murderer who refused to account for weapons of mass murder." (Note: "weapons of mass murder," not "weapons of mass destruction"; and "refused to account for," not "refused to disarm.") Now, Bush went on, Iraq is "becoming an example of reform to the region." Because America "helped to end the violent regime of Saddam Hussein, and because we're helping to raise a peaceful democracy in its place, the American people are safer."
As the pundits say, that remains to be seen. Maybe Iraq will emerge from the chaos as an exemplar of reform; maybe it will slide further into chaos and only encourage neighboring tyrannies to intensify their clampdowns. Meanwhile, terrorists, who it turns out didn't enjoy safe haven in Iraq before the war, have carved out camps in its aftermath. Leading Shiites are forming unsettling alliances with Iran. The Kurds are balking at any incursions on their autonomy. And, in the first month of Iraqi sovereignty, the most cherished consumer item for many citizens-thousands line up for one-is a passport to get the hell out of there.
Another case of progress, according to Bush's speech, is Saudi Arabia's decision to join us in the war on terror and to crack down on the jihadist "charities" in its midst. But this came about (to the extent it truly has come about) only after terrorist bombers mounted attacks in Riyadh. Bush acknowledges the Saudis' belatedness on this matter. And, no question, better late than not at all. Still, the shift (again, to the extent it's genuine, lasting, and effective) has little to do with Bush's foreign policy, which had tolerated the Saudis' diffidence before and after 9/11.
Most troublesome of all are Bush's claims about nuclear proliferation. Yes, Western intelligence agencies traced and shut down A.Q. Khan's vast black-market supply network and even persuaded the Pakistani government to relieve him of his duties (if not to punish him personally). Good has also come of the Proliferation Security Initiative, a truly multilateral effort to police nuclear trafficking.
However, the world's most alarming and concrete instance of proliferation-the open emergence of North Korea as a nuclear state-has been appallingly mishandled by the Bush administration. For over a year, Bush refused even to discuss the matter with the North Koreans, despite their clear desire to negotiate. A month ago, he finally offered a deal nearly identical to the deal the North Koreans offered us at the beginning of 2003-but it's too late. They have since moved much closer to mass production of A-bombs, and so they've stiffened their terms. Possibly even more than the war in Iraq, this could go down as Bush's deepest diplomatic disaster.
This says nothing of the frustrated effort to stall Iran's nuclear program. Bush didn't say much about that, either.
The key failure is that Bush said nothing-and has planned nothing-about devising a general international policy toward nonproliferation. Police enforcement can go only so far. An effective policy must deal with the reasons certain nations want to go nuclear-and the incentives, as well as the punishments, that might deter them from doing so.
Toward the end of his speech, Bush said this:
Three years ago, the world was very different. Terrorists planned attacks, with little fear of discovery or reckoning. Outlaw regimes supported terrorists and defied the civilized world. ... Weapon-proliferators sent their deadly shipments. ... The world changed on September the 11th, and since that day, we have changed the world. We are leading a steady, confident, systematic campaign against the dangers of our time. Today, because America has acted and because America has led, the forces of terror and tyranny have suffered defeat after defeat, and America and the world are safer.
Stirring words. But what world is he talking about?
Fred Kaplan writes the "War Stories" column for Slate. Photograph of George Bush by Larry Downing/Reuters.
-------- u.s. nuc weapons
Pilot Who Dropped A - Bomb on Nagasaki Dies
July 17, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Obit-Sweeney.html
MILTON, Mass. (AP) -- Charles W. Sweeney, a retired Air Force general who piloted the plane that dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki in the final days of World War II, has died at age 84.
Sweeney died Thursday at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, hospital spokeswoman Christine Johanson said. She did not disclose the cause of death. The Associated Press left messages Saturday at phone numbers listed to the Sweeney family in the Boston suburb of Milton.
Sweeney was 25 when he piloted the B-29 bomber that attacked Nagasaki on Aug. 9, 1945, three days after the Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima and six days before Japan surrendered.
About 70,000 people were killed in the explosion of the bomb, dubbed ``Fat Man.'' It was the first bomb Sweeney ever dropped on an enemy target.
Sweeney was an outspoken defender of the bombings, appearing on CNN and speaking at colleges and universities.
Sweeney also wrote a book, ``War's End: An Eyewitness Account of America's Last Atomic Mission,'' to counter what he considered ``cockamamie theories'' that the bombings were unnecessary.
``I looked upon it as a duty. I just wanted the war to be over, so we could get back home to our loved ones,'' Sweeney told The Patriot Ledger of Quincy in 1995. ``I hope my missions were the last ones of their kind that will ever be flown.''
Sweeney also played a role in the bombing at Hiroshima, where he flew an instrument plane that accompanied the Enola Gay during that attack.
His own B-29, the Bock's Car, is not as well-known, although the bombing was harrowing for the crew. The flight had fuel problems from the start, and clouds and smoke were covering the mission's primary target, the city of Kokura.
After making several dangerous passes over the city, Sweeney abandoned the primary target for Nagasaki. Only a break in the clouds allowed the bomb to be dropped, Sweeney said.
Sweeney was a graduate of North Quincy High School who traced his passion for flying to a local airfield. He became a brigadier general in 1956, and at the time was the youngest man in the Air Force to reach that rank. He retired in 1976.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- colorado
'Most dangerous' Flats building coming down
Building 771 demolition to be completed by fall
By Todd Neff, For the Enterprise
July 17, 2004
http://www.dailycamera.com/bdc/broomfield_news/article/0,1713,BDC_2495_3041852,00.html
At 10:40 a.m. Tuesday, the jaws of excavators tore into the heart of the former Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Facility, marking the beginning of the end of what was once deemed "America's most dangerous building."
Demolition should be complete by the fall. By next spring, what was Rocky Flats Building 771 should look like "just another hill," said Steven Gunderson, the Rocky Flats cleanup coordinator for the Colorado Department of Health and Environment.
Beneath it will remain at least some contaminated concrete.
Building 771 is the largest and most complex plutonium-processing building ever demolished in this country, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.
From 1954 until 1989, the building was Rocky Flats main plutonium processing facility, creating the radioactive metal for tens of thousands of grapefruit-sized triggers for nuclear weapons. The triggers - also known as cores or pits - packed a destructive force of some 20,000 tons of TNT.
Along the way, there were countless spills and fires, and, in 1957, a catastrophic fire that led to the release of unknown quantities of plutonium into the local skies and baked contamination into the building itself. Infrared aerial images of the Building 771 incinerator in December 1988 showed it to be illegally operating.
The images, in part, led to the June 1989 FBI raid, which led to the plant's temporary shutdown, which became permanent with the end of the Cold War.
The cleanup of Building 771, led by Kaiser-Hill, has taken hundreds of workers nine years. Because nuclear weapons workers had expected production to restart, they left thousands of gallons of toxic and plutonium-contaminated solutions in 11 miles of corroding piping and 251 decaying tanks.
The presence of such liquids so close to population centers led the Department of Energy in 1994 to place Building 771 atop its list of most vulnerable nuclear weapons facilities.
On Tuesday, Christopher Gilbreath led a troupe of journalists and others into building 771's first floor.
Those inside wore only hard hats, safety glasses and flashy orange vests as protection. Gilbreath is Kaiser-Hill's project manager for building 771. When he first walked into the plant in the 1990s, he looked up to the ceilings network of contaminated pipes and saw spaghetti.
"It was like eating an elephant, one bite at a time," he said. "We had to take it apart piece by piece, glovebox by glovebox, to get it to this state."
The 240 stainless-steel gloveboxes - through which workers reached into the plutonium assembly line - had been badly contaminated by decades of use. Steelworkers cut them apart with plasma-arc torches to fit into nuclear-waste containers, an effort that took years.
Inside, the 175,000-square-foot structure was vast concrete catacombs lit by an occasional construction torch. Its reinforced concrete floor, ceiling and pillars were scarred by the repeated passes of hydrolyzers. Designed to peel away contaminated concrete, hydrolizers use bursts of water compressed at up to 50,000 pounds per square inch.
"It can take off your arm," Gilbreath said.
The word HOT spraypainted in red on the rafters indicated an area that would have to be either hydrolized yet again or cut out and removed, as was the case for a 600-square-foot area in the northwest portion of the building.
It had once been an infinity room, an internal pumphouse whose leaks had so contaminated the former room 141 it was unmeasurable. It had been sealed for 25 years until 2002, when crews began to remove it like a decayed tooth.
Gary Schuetz, who is overseeing the closure of Rocky Flats Building 776/777 for the Department of Energy, watched as a Caterpillar excavator's red claw ripped apart what was the former plant cafeteria.
He said initial estimates to clean and demolish the building had ranged from 30 to 50 years, and it hadn't surprised him.
"In terms of scale, in terms of risk and hazard, nobody's done anything quite like this," he said.
----
Flats demolitions set
By RICHARD VALENTY,
July 17, 2004
Colorado Daily Staff Writer
http://www.coloradodaily.com/articles/2004/07/13/news/news01.txt
The cleanup of the former Rocky Flats plutonium trigger plant is scheduled for a Dec. 15, 2006 completion, and at least two things are clear -a lot of cleanup work has been done already and a lot remains to be done.
On Monday, the Rocky Flats Coalition of Local Governments (RFCLOG), a group of elected officials from governments with holdings adjacent to Rocky Flats, discussed cleanup plans as well as strategies to deal with a soil sample and a water sample testing with radiation readings above recommended standards.
Victor Pizzuto, project manager from cleanup contractor Kaiser-Hill Company, gave a presentation Monday detailing the decommissioning and demolition plans for Flats building 776/777, roughly 500,000 square feet of wall and floor area.
Crews have either removed or are in the process of removing contaminated gloveboxes, overhead pipes as well as wall and floor sections from the building, and demolition of the entire building is scheduled for an April 2005 completion.
John Corsi, Kaiser-Hill spokesperson, said Monday that most of the contaminated parts of "76," (776/777), will be sent to the Envirocare facility outside of Salt Lake City for disposal.
On May 11, 1969, a fire broke out at 776 and left portions of the walls and floor severely contaminated, and Corsi said that fire has made demolition plans a bit more challenging.
"Seventy-six differs from other buildings at Rocky Flats in the sense that we cannot 'free release' that structure," said Corsi. "In free release, you can do open-air demolition without using any controls. We cannot free release 76 because of the 1969 fire, and therefore we have to go to additional controls and measures."
The controls include using water cannons for dust control and smaller water hoses to conduct "point source dust suppression," and monitoring wind speed and direction during the demolition process.
Building 776/777 has no basement, but Corsi said there is known contamination beneath the concrete slab that it sits on, at least in the northwest corner of the building.
"The reason we think we found contamination there is during the 1969 fire, they used a lot of water to put it out, and the water drained out of the building predominantly in the northwest," said Corsi. "After we address those areas in the northwest corner, we'll do confirmatory samples of the other areas (beneath 76) to make sure we've met our cleanup objectives of 50 picocuries (per gram of soil)."
A picocurie is one-trillionth of a curie, a measure of radioactivity.
Flats areas in the "industrial zone," where buildings such as 76 are or were located, will not be designated for human recreational use within the Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge planned after site cleanup is completed. Some areas in "buffer zones" on the outskirts of the property could have Refuge recreational trails constructed in the future.
Most of the buffer zone lands are divided into 30-acre "grids" for radiation testing, and five soil samples from each grid are "composited" into one batch. One batch taken from a buffer zone grid in April came back with a reading averaging 7 picocuries per gram, equal to an informal, suggested limit for allowing land to be turned over to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for Refuge use.
Steve Gunderson, Rocky Flats project coordinator for Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment (CDPHE), said the sample section was on the northern end of the Flats site near Highway 128 "where the Rock Creek drainage crosses the road." Gunderson also said a second analysis of the same batch tested at about 2.5 picocuries/gram.
Gunderson said the sample will now be marked as an "estimated value," and that crews will now do additional testing in the grid.
"They will now go back and take samples at each of the five same points again, but analyze each sample individually," said Gunderson. "It's also very likely that the state or the EPA will collect their own samples out there, but my staff hasn't sat down and talked with their staff in detail as to what the proper path forward is."
Shaun McGrath, Boulder City Council member and RFCLOG vice chair, said the board would need more information on the sample before recommending a course of action.
"On the positive side, it does look like the safeguards that were put in place to detect these kinds of readings are working," said McGrath.
Both Boulder County and the City of Boulder own Open Space near Rocky Flats, and RFCLOG discussed Monday whether both entities should conduct soil sampling on the city/county lands. McGrath said no such plans are in place yet.
"I think we would want to visit with the county and see what makes the most sense," said McGrath. "Clearly, we have the responsibility to understand what the threat is to our Open Space lands and to the users of those lands."
RFCLOG executive director David Abelson said Monday that surface water tested at Flats monitoring point "GS-10" measured between .22 and .36 picocuries per liter, above the recommended standard of .15.
Corsi said GS-10 is a "point of evaluation, not a point of (regulatory) compliance." He added that the reading could have been caused by sediment from abundant on-site soil removal work, and that Kaiser-Hill will commit to "enhancing erosion control across the site" to prevent sediment from reaching on-site water.
-------- new mexico
Los Alamos beset by yet another scandal
H. JOSEF HEBERT
Sat, Jul. 17, 2004
Associated Press
http://www.bradenton.com/mld/bradenton/news/local/9175850.htm
WASHINGTON - Steeped in history going back to the birth of the nuclear bomb, the government's Los Alamos National Laboratory has been dogged in recent years by one embarrassment after another, from credit card fraud and allegations of espionage to disappearing files and safety lapses.
The latest flap: two missing computer disks full of nuclear secrets.
All classified work at the laboratory in the hills of northern New Mexico has been ordered stopped as some of the country's smartest nuclear weapons scientists and engineers search for the missing disks.
At the Energy Department, senior officials are steaming at what they view as yet another security foul-up at the facility where 61 years ago scientists put together the world's first atomic bomb.
Investigators have been stymied on the whereabouts of the two computer disks, known to the scientists as "classified removable electronic media."
The latest in a string
Stretched across 43 square miles, the Los Alamos weapons lab employees more than 1,700 people, two-thirds of them working for the University of California, which has managed the facility since it was created as part of the World War II Manhattan Project that launched the age of nuclear weapons.
It's been 18 months since Peter Nanos, a retired vice admiral, took over as lab director after a scandal involving lab employees using laboratory credit cards to buy personal items including - as alleged - a new Mustang automobile.
"We are not a bunch of crooks," Nanos told lab workers his first day on the job. "The trouble is I can't prove it."
Last week, faced with the latest computer disk flap, Nanos blamed "a small number" of people who cannot follow the rules and who again have "brought disrepute to Los Alamos."
No one has said what is on the disks, and it's possible they may have been destroyed without anyone bothering with the required paperwork. To increase security, the lab has begun a program to phase out the use of removable discs from all its classified computers.
But it is far from the first embarrassing incident at the lab.
The Los Alamos nuclear weapons program was at the center of a 1999 espionage controversy involving lab scientist Wen Ho Lee. Though never charged with espionage, Lee was fired for security violations. He pleaded guilty to a felony count of mishandling classified information and admitted to copying classified files and taking them home. Authorities never found the files that Lee insists he destroyed.
A year later, two computer hard drives containing nuclear secrets disappeared from a guarded vault at Los Alamos only to turn up behind a copy machine. The mystery has yet to be solved.
Last December, an inventory couldn't account for 10 computer disks, also used in the nuclear weapons program, prompting - as was the case this week - a brief standdown of classified work. Another disk was reported missing in May. Lab officials believe that in both cases the materials were destroyed with no records kept.
Systematic problems
The repeated security flaps as well as the scandal over fraudulent use of credit cards prompted the Energy Department last year to put its lab management contract up for bid when it expires in 2005, possibly ending the University of California's 61-year involvement.
"We have a huge number of exceptionally bright people here," Los Alamos spokesman Kevin Roark said Friday in a telephone interview. "But we still have what appears to be a small number of knuckleheads who ruin it for everybody."
But others suggest there are systemic problems at the heart of the lab's frequent flirtation with trouble.
And it doesn't always involved security.
The credit card fraud scandal in 2002 brought charges of an attempted cover-up after the lab fired two investigators it had assigned to get to the bottom of the case. One of them eventually received a nearly $1 million settlement with the university. Auditors found $4.9 million in questionable credit card expenses over four years, although lab officials said all but about $260,000 had been accounted for.
Twice in four months last year two Los Alamos workers were contaminated from exposure to plutonium. The more recent case last August prompted a $770,000 fine from the Energy Department. But the fine will never have to be paid because by law the University of California, as a DOE contractor, is immune from such penalties.
'Brilliant scientists'
Steve Aftergood, director of the Washington-based Federation of American Scientists' project on government secrecy, says a key question is whether the security flaps stem from sloppiness or willful disregard for the rules.
"Why would they do such things?" he wondered, noting that the lab is the workplace of some of the country's smartest scientists - many of them long involved in highly classified defense work.
"These are brilliant scientists," added Danielle Brian, executive director of Project on Government Oversight, a watchdog group that has worked closely with whistleblowers at Los Alamos. "They are told daily they are brilliant scientists. That creates a hubris . . . almost a defiance. . . . They believe the work they are doing is so important that it supersedes everything else."
----
'Cowboy' nuclear scientists disregard lab security
17 July 2004
http://www.mg.co.za/Content/l3.asp?ao=118887
Secret work on United States nuclear weapons at one of the top US laboratories has been halted and a government inquiry launched after two computer disks went missing, the third such security breach in eight months.
The disappearance of the disks from the Los Alamos base in New Mexico was blamed on sloppiness among laboratory scientists, whom their manager described as "cowboys" for their disregard of security rules, rather than on espionage.
"It's a problem of culture," Peter Nanos, the lab manager, said. "We have to turn that around."
The scandal has jeopardised the University of California's contract to manage Los Alamos, where nuclear weapons are designed and maintained, and which the university has run for more than half a century.
Last year, the Energy Secretary, Spencer Abraham, warned that it would have to compete for its contract for the first time, after a string of embarrassing incidents.
In 1999 a Los Alamos scientist, Wen Ho Lee, was wrongly accused of spying for China after taking classified material out of the laboratory.
In 2000 two computer hard-disk drives containing an encyclopaedia of all the world's known weapons designs went missing and were later found behind a photocopier. Last year two vials of plutonium went missing and there have been a string of data disappearances since December.
In the latest incident, two disks and two disk drives went missing, but the drives were found hours later, when it was discovered a laboratory employee had taken them to another building without checking them out. The two disks, containing highly sensitive data from the weapons physics directorate, are still missing.
The suspension of work is likely to continue for several days.
"The investigation to date indicates widespread disregard of security procedures by laboratory employees. This is absolutely unacceptable," Abraham said. "While our first priority must be to locate the missing material, the government will insist that the University of California, which operates Los Alamos, ensures that the laboratory takes strong measures to correct the systematic flaws that allowed this problem to occur."
He also signalled his displeasure at the University of California management.
"Although it appears the laboratory management is taking vigorous action to locate the missing material, short-term responsiveness is no substitute for sustained action to impose effective procedures and ensure they are followed," Abraham said.
He appointed his deputy, Kyle McSlarrow, and the head of the National Nuclear Security Administration, Linton Brooks, to carry out an inquiry into the laboratory's security.
Peter Stockton, a former energy department security expert now working for the Project on Government Oversight, argued that the management had failed to fulfil its responsibilities.
"The system is broken," Stockton said. "Each time they say they have designed a foolproof security system, and then it happens again."
----
Los Alamos weapons lab: Steeped in history, but dogged by trouble
By H. Josef Hebert,
AP,
Monday July 19, 2004
http://www.smdailyjournal.org/article.cfm?issue=07-17-04&storyID=32880
WASHINGTON - Steeped in history going back to the birth of the nuclear bomb, the government's Los Alamos National Laboratory has been dogged in recent years by one embarrassment after another, from credit card fraud and allegations of espionage to disappearing files and safety lapses.
The latest flap: two missing computer disks full of nuclear secrets.
All classified work at the laboratory in the hills of northern New Mexico has stopped as some of the country's smartest nuclear weapons scientists and engineers search for the missing disks.
At the Energy Department, senior officials are steaming at what they view as yet another security foul-up at the facility where, 61 years ago, scientists put together the world's first atomic bomb.
Investigators have been stymied on the whereabouts of the two computer disks, known to the scientists as "classified removable electronic media." Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham said the disappearance reflects "a widespread disregard for security" by lab officials.
"This is absolutely unacceptable," he fumed, ordering his top deputy, Kyle McSlarrow, to the laboratory to get to the bottom of it all.
Stretched across 43 square miles, the Los Alamos weapons lab employs more than 10,700 people, two-thirds of them working for the University of California, which has managed the facility since it was created as part of the World War II Manhattan Project.
It's been 18 months since Peter Nanos, a retired vice admiral, took over as lab director after a scandal involving lab employees using laboratory credit cards to buy personal items including - as alleged but still in some dispute - a new Mustang automobile.
"We are not a bunch of crooks," Nanos told lab workers his first day on the job. "The trouble is I can't prove it."
Last week, faced with the latest computer disk flap, Nanos blamed "a small number" of people who cannot follow the rules and who again have "brought disrepute to Los Alamos."
No one has said what is on the disks and it's possible they may have been destroyed without anyone bothering with the required paperwork. To increase security, the lab has begun a program to phase out the use of removable discs from all its classified computers.
But it is far from the first embarrassing incident at the lab.
The Los Alamos nuclear weapons program was at the center of a 1999 espionage controversy involving lab scientist Wen Ho Lee. Though never charged with espionage, Lee was fired for security violations. He pleaded guilty to a felony count of mishandling classified information and admitted copying classified files. He said he disposed of them on site, but they were never found.
A year later, two computer hard drives containing nuclear secrets disappeared from a guarded vault at Los Alamos only to turn up behind a copy machine. The mystery has yet to be solved.
Last December, an inventory couldn't account for 10 computer disks, also used in the nuclear weapons program, prompting - as was the case this week - a brief standdown of classified work. Another disk was reported missing in May. Lab officials believe that in both cases the materials were destroyed with no records kept.
The repeated security flaps as well as the scandal over fraudulent use of credit cards prompted the Energy Department last year to put its lab management contract up for bid when it expires in 2005, possibly ending the University of California's 61-year involvement.
"We have a huge number of exceptionally bright people here," Los Alamos spokesman Kevin Roark said Friday in a telephone interview. "But we still have what appears to be a small number of knuckleheads who ruin it for everybody."
But others suggest there are systemic problems at the heart of the lab's frequent flirtation with trouble. And it doesn't always involve security.
The credit card fraud scandal in 2002 brought charges of an attempted cover-up after the lab fired two investigators it had assigned to get to the bottom of the case. One of them eventually received a nearly $1 million settlement with the university. Auditors found $4.9 million in questionable credit card expenses over four years, although lab officials said all but $195,246 had been accounted for.
Twice in four months last year two Los Alamos workers were contaminated from exposure to plutonium. The more recent case last August prompted a $770,000 fine from the Energy Department. But the fine will never have to be paid because by law the University of California, as a DOE contractor, is immune from such penalties.
Steve Aftergood, director of the Washington-based Federation of American Scientists' project on government secrecy, says a key question is whether the security flaps stem from sloppiness or willful disregard for the rules.
"Why would they do such things?" he wondered, noting that the lab is the workplace of some of the country's smartest scientists - many of them long involved in highly classified defense work.
"These are brilliant scientists," added Danielle Brian, executive director of Project on Government Oversight, a watchdog group that has worked closely with whistleblowers at Los Alamos. "They are told daily they are brilliant scientists. That creates a hubris ... almost a defiance. ... They believe the work they are doing is so important that it supersedes everything else."
In truth, problems are not new at Los Alamos. In 1945, Klaus Fuchs, a German-born physicist involved in the Manhattan Project, gave the Soviet Union the main elements of the design of the atomic bomb. He later admitted the espionage and was sentenced to 14 years in prison.
--------
Los Alamos Stops Work in Crisis Over Lost Data
July 17, 2004
By KENNETH CHANG
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/17/national/17lab.html
Reflecting the crisis at Los Alamos National Laboratory since the disappearance of two computer storage devices with classified data, its director stopped all research activities last night and said all employees would review safety and security policies.
In a memorandum to employees, the director, G. Peter Nanos, said he was expanding a suspension announced on Thursday from just classified work to all work at Los Alamos, one of the nation's two nuclear weapons research laboratories.
"I'm simply convinced that we need time to reflect on our shared responsibilities and on how we do our jobs," Mr. Nanos wrote.
Departments are to return to work after managers review security and safety with each employee.
The laboratory is also continuing to inventory 40,000 data storage devices with classified data.
Los Alamos has been under close scrutiny for years because of managerial and security lapses. Officials said the disappearance last week indicated that some employees retained lax attitudes on security.
The University of California, which has managed Los Alamos since it was created 61 years ago to build the atomic bomb, could soon lose the contract.
The Energy Department decided last year to invite competing bids and will soon put out a request for proposals.
"Frankly, nobody understands how we have gotten ourselves into this mess," Mr. Nanos said in his memorandum. "I emphasized to everyone I met with that this willful flouting of the rules must stop, and I don't care how many people I have to fire to make it stop. If you think the rules are silly, if you think compliance is a joke, please resign now and save me the trouble."
A parade of officials will descend on the laboratory next week. Deputy Energy Secretary Kyle E. McSlarrow and Linton Brooks, administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, will arrive on Monday to oversee the inquiry, accompanied by Representative Joe L. Barton, the Texas Republican who is chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and Representative Diana DeGette, Democrat of Colorado, a member of the panel.
Dr. Robert C. Dynes, president of the University of California, and Gerald L. Parsky, chairman of its Board of Regents, also plan to visit soon.
The university official who oversees Los Alamos said yesterday that the disappearance of the devices could be a national security problem. He refused to be more specific.
"We're doing a risk analysis of the material," said the official, Bob Foley, vice president for laboratory management at the university, which manages Los Alamos and Livermore, the nation's two nuclear weapons laboratories, under a contract with the Energy Department.
Officials have refused to describe the missing information, saying just that it involves an experiment in the weapons physics division. They have also declined to specify the type of the missing devices, which could be floppy disks, CD-ROM's, memory cards or other removable media.
Mr. Foley acknowledged that the security lapse damaged the university's chances of retaining its Los Alamos contract. After finding that some employees had misused laboratory money, Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham decided in April 2003 that the department would put the contract up for competitive bidding for the first time.
"This erodes your position, without any question at all," Mr. Foley said. "It's about as bad as it could be when you're trying to prepare for a re-competition."
The contract runs through September 2005. The University of Texas and Lockheed Martin are among those that have expressed interest in competing for the contract.
Mr. Foley said that the research credentials at Los Alamos remained impeccable, but that employees might have become complacent about security and business practices. "The science and technology has always been good," he said. "They just got too comfortable."
Officials at Los Alamos discovered the loss of the devices on July 7 in preparing for an experiment. In addition, two other devices containing data related to the experiment were briefly thought to be missing as well, but were found in a few hours.
"Those items were, in fact, never missing," Kevin Roark, a spokesman for the laboratory, said. But, he added, "It appears that procedures weren't strictly followed."
Mr. Foley said that 11 employees had access to the devices and that all 11 were under investigation.
In remarks on Thursday at a meeting of the University of California regents, Mr. Nanos called the employees who disregarded the rules "cowboys" and promised to change the prevailing culture.
Los Alamos is reducing its removable computer media devices holding classified data by destroying old data and reclassifying information that does not need to be kept secret. The laboratory has 40,000 items with classified data, down from 90,000 last year. Within a few months, the items will be consolidated at central libraries, Mr. Foley said.
--------
Los Alamos Defense Lab Suspends Operations
July 17, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-arms-losalamos.html
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - The Los Alamos National Laboratory, a key U.S. center for nuclear weapons research, has suspended virtually all its operations after an intern sustained a serious eye injury while working with a laser, a spokesman said on Saturday.
The Friday accident, capping a series of embarrassing security and safety lapses for the lab, led new director Peter Nanos to determine that a lab-wide assessment of all operations was needed, spokesman Jim Fallin said. Nanos on Thursday had suspended all classified research.
Fallin said certain unspecified national security obligations are continuing during the assessment, but that most of the operations performed by the lab's 1,200 employees are on hold.
``We are not going to hamper national security needs,'' said Fallin. ``We understand that the nation is at war.''
Los Alamos National Laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico is the site where the atomic bomb was created during World War II, and remains a key center of nuclear weapons research.
But in recent weeks the lab has been the site of a series of security lapses, including the disappearance of two electronic data storage devices. Over the past year, a number of storage disks containing classified information have gone missing.
``If you think the rules are silly, if you think compliance is a joke, please resign now and save me the trouble,'' Nanos said in a harshly worded memo to employees explaining the suspension.
Fallin described the suspension of operations as an ``extraordinary and unprecedented step'' intended to send a clear message that all the recent security lapses are being taken seriously.``chest deep'' into what would be a ``top-to-bottom risk assessment'' of all Los Alamos operations.
He said the lab hoped to bring operations back on line gradually, as the security and safety reviews were completed.
Fallin said it was not clear if the eye injury sustained by the intern on Friday resulted from a failure to follow safety procedures, but he did say the lab had measures in place designed to prevent such accidents.
He said the intern was being flown to a hospital on the East Coast.
-------- texas
U Texas weighs bid on Los Alamos lab contract
By Patrick Mcgee.
Dallas / Fort Worth Star-Telegram Staff Writer
http://www.dfw.com/mld/startelegram/news/state/9178552.htm?1c
AUSTIN - In the midst of another apparent security breach at Los Alamos National Laboratory, the University of Texas System's Board of Regents met Friday to discuss whether they should make a bid to manage the facility.
UT System Chancellor Mark Yudof opened the discussion by acknowledging that there are serious considerations to be made about pursuing the lab's management contract but said that the northern New Mexico lab is a bastion of great science necessary for the nation's defense.
"Los Alamos is not, as some have suggested, a bomb-making factory," Yudof said. "If we got rid of every nuclear weapon tomorrow morning we would still need to understand the technology to protect ourselves."
Rep. Lon Burnam, D-Fort Worth, accused Yudof of making statements that were "lacking factually" about Los Alamos National Laboratory.
The lab has been managed by the University of California since it was founded during World War II, but Congress, concerned about security lapses, has ordered that the management contract be put out to bid.
In the latest incident last week, two computer disks full of nuclear secrets have come up missing.
Investigators have been stymied on the whereabouts of the disks, known to the scientists as "classified removable electronic media."
Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham said the disappearance reflects "a widespread disregard for security" by lab officials.
In the meantime, all classified work at the laboratory has been ordered stopped.
The University of California, Lockheed Martin Corp. and at least eight other companies have expressed interest in bidding on the contract.
UT officials have said they're interested in making inroads to the lab in collaborations that they hope will boost the system's research programs.
Burnam, peace activists and some UT students said Texas would be unwise to seek responsibility for the lab's nuclear weapons, plutonium pits and litigation risks. They said the UT System has little or nothing to gain.
"We should utilize the genius of the University of Texas for higher goals," said Karen Hadden, chairwoman of Peace Action Texas. "We should work on diplomacy and renewable energy."
Austin Van Zant, a UT senior, urged regents to drop interest in the lab contract and concentrate on academics.
"I don't think you're acting in our best interests," said Van Zant, a member of UT Watch, a student watchdog group. "I don't see any advantage to pursuing this managment contract."
The regents listened and sometimes applauded the contract opponents. Chairman James Huffines thanked the speakers for their time and read letters from elected officials supporting the system's consideration of bidding.
U.S. Rep. Mac Thornberry, R-Amarillo, wrote to "encourage the board to participate in this competition." U.S. Rep. Lamar Smith, R-San Antonio, wrote that UT System management of the lab would be a good move to merge some of Texas' greatest minds with an important national security interest.
Richard Smalley, a Rice University professor and winner of the Nobel Prize in chemistry, praised Los Alamos as "one of the great scientific temples of this country" that could significantly contribute to searches for new medicines and energy sources.
This report contains information from the Associated Press. Patrick McGee, (817) 548-5476 pmcgee@star-telegram.com
-------- washington
Nuclear Site Workers Exposed to Vapors
Associated Press
Saturday, July 17, 2004; Page A05
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A56557-2004Jul16.html
SPOKANE, Wash., July 16 -- Some workers at the Hanford nuclear reservation have been exposed to dangerous vapors from tanks that store radioactive waste, a federal report said Friday.
The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health investigated complaints from employees of CH2M Hill Hanford Group, a private contractor that operates underground tanks of waste from nuclear weapons production. The workers said their health was at risk when working near the tanks.
NIOSH recommended that an air-purifying respirator be provided to any worker entering a tank farm, with higher-quality equipment available for those entering known vapor-release areas.
--------
Hanford's vapors may pose health risk
By Hal Bernton
Saturday, July 17, 2004
Seattle Times staff reporter
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2001982013_tankworkers17m.html
The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health reports that chemical vapors venting from Hanford waste tanks may pose significant health risks, a finding that adds new credence to dozens of worker complaints about job-related illness.
Workers who labor close by the 177 waste tanks at the Eastern Washington nuclear complex have cited a wide range of health problems, including bloody noses, memory loss, shortness of breath, frequent headaches and lung scarring.
Such illness reports have been met with skepticism by Hanford contracting officials, who say that they had no evidence of vapor emissions that exceeded federal safety standards.
Investigators for the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) said that the contractor - CH2M Hill Hanford Group - often failed to monitor vapors until hours after worker-exposure incidents, and that health problems cited in 35 interviews with employees "could be related to their exposures to vapors." But the gaps in monitoring made the "true exposure potential" difficult to ascertain, the report concluded.
The NIOSH investigators visited the site in early March after receiving a confidential request from tank-farm workers. The Seattle office of the Government Accountability Project also has investigated worker-safety concerns.
Some 500 workers are tending to tanks that hold about 53 million gallons of high-level radioactive waste along with more than 1,200 chemicals. And since 2001, workers have been involved in at least 70 reported cases of vapor exposure, according to the NIOSH report.
These wastes are the toxic leftovers of the federal effort to produce plutonium for nuclear bombs, and are now being transferred from leaking single-shelled tanks to more secure double-shelled tanks.
Back in 1995 and 1996, respirators were required to be worn by tank-farm workers involved in the transfers. But they were discontinued after a risk evaluation by Westinghouse Hanford concluded that vapor exposure was under control.
But NIOSH investigators found that vapor concentrations, during transfers, could increase to "sufficiently high concentrations to pose a health risk to workers."
And they recommended that workers be once again equipped at a minimum with air-purifying respirators to help protect them from the vapors, and urged CH2M Hill to increase "real-time" monitoring of workers facing potential exposures.
The NIOSH visit, as well as a separate visit by the Department of Energy's inspector general, helped spur new safety measures at the tank farm. Currently, all workers must once again wear the respirators, and CH2M Hill has stepped up monitoring. CH2M Hill also has hired an ombudsman to work with employees with health concerns.
"We've already started taking actions on a lot of the recommendations, and a comprehensive corrective action plan is being put into place," said Erik Olds, a spokesman for the Department of Energy's Office of River Protection, which oversees the tank farm.
Joy Turner, spokeswoman for CH2M Hill Hanford, told The Associated Press that the contractor will cooperate with NIOSH. The company already has been working on changes based on its own review, she said.
This is not the first time that NIOSH has looked into tank vapors at Hanford. In 2000, NIOSH said contractors needed to improve collection of worker information, but those recommendations were not carried out, the investigators said.
Many of the workers with health problems now are trying to get insurers to pay medical bills for what they say are job-related illnesses.
One of those, Steve Lewis, said yesterday he hopes the new NIOSH report will help in what so far has been a losing battle to gain compensation for more than $2,000 in medical bills after a 2002 vapor exposure that he says triggered nosebleeds, headaches and other symptoms and "hundreds upon hundreds of hours of stress."
Lewis said he was pleased with the new policy that requires the respirators. But he still is skeptical that the monitoring actually is pinpointing the areas venting the most vapors.
"Right now, they still miss the boat on a lot of things," Lewis said.
Hal Bernton: 206-464-2581 or hbernton@seattletimes.com
----
State plans suit to bar waste shipments
Saturday, July 17th, 2004
By Annette Cary
Tri-City Herald staff writer
http://www.tri-cityherald.com/tch/local/story/5309904p-5247417c.html
The state of Washington plans to sue the Department of Energy to bar shipments of low-level radioactive waste and low-level waste mixed with hazardous chemicals from being sent to Hanford.
The state already has won an injunction in federal court temporarily halting transuranic waste, typically waste tainted with plutonium or its decay products, from being shipped to Hanford.
State officials announced Friday that they will expand that suit to include the low-level and mixed low-level waste that DOE plans to ship from other nuclear complexes and bury permanently in central Hanford.
"We're not talking about an insignificant amount of waste," Attorney General Christine Greg-oire said in a telephone interview.
The state concluded an environmental study earlier this year that looked at how much nuclear waste it should send to Hanford. In a record of decision issued June 23, it committed to sending no more than 62,000 cubic meters of low-level waste and 20,000 cubic meters of mixed low-level waste to Hanford.
That's about a quarter of those types of waste that DOE needs to dispose of throughout its nationwide nuclear complex. Low-level waste could include material such as radioactively contaminated rubble from old buildings used in nuclear processing.
"There's nothing to keep them from tripling the amount of waste shipments they want to bring to Hanford," Gov. Gary Locke said in a prepared statement. However, that would require an amendment to the record of decision.
"We need absolute certainty that the clean up work will be completed before we are willing to even consider allowing more waste to come into the system," Locke said.
The state is calling for shipments to be halted until DOE addresses the environmental effects of shipping and storing more radioactive waste at Hanford.
It will argue that DOE has not provided a full accounting of the basis for selecting Hanford as the disposal site for nuclear waste produced elsewhere in the nation.
"DOE has failed to prove that shipping more waste to Hanford won't make the nation's most contaminated site even worse," Gregoire said in a prepared statement. "We expect DOE to fully comply with environmental safeguards."
That includes meeting regulatory requirements in the Tri-Party Agreement before any waste is added to what Gregoire called "an already troubled situation."
"The federal government cannot be allowed to walk away from cleaning up the ground water at Hanford," Gregoire said.
The state is concerned that the DOE environmental study did not do an adequate analysis of the risk posed by ground water contamination at Hanford. Production of plutonium at Hanford during World War II and the Cold War has left plumes of radioactive and chemical contamination beneath the nuclear reservation.
Washington, Oregon and some tribes told DOE they were concerned about language in the environmental study that referred to groundwater as "irreversibly and irretrievably committed."
"DOE believes that already-present contamination from past practices precludes the beneficial use of groundwater beneath portions of the Hanford site for the foreseeable future as a matter of protecting public health," DOE said in the record of decision that followed.
But DOE intends to meet its responsibilities for cleanup and is not changing existing ground water activities or commitments, ac-cording to the record of decision.
"They have not left us with a definitive answer," Gregoire said.
The state will challenge in court DOE's decision that some ground water is irreversibly contaminated.
Since the record of decision was issued, Hanford has accepted 109 drums of mixed low-level waste produced at the Rocky Flats, Colo., nuclear site. The drums already had been shipped to Richland to be treated by PEcoS, a company with a thermal treatment system, and were transferred to Hanford for permanent disposal shortly after the record of decision.
The legal move to block more waste from entering the state precedes a November vote on Initiative 297, which is intended to block waste shipments.
"It shows strong unity for the position that you should not add more waste until Hanford is cleaned up," said Gerald Pollet, executive director of the watchdog group Heart of America Northwest. "Voters will have the chance to put that same standard in state law this fall."
But a spokesman for the Eastern Washington Section of the American Nuclear Society questioned the wisdom of the suit.
"This recent action will further delay and frighten the public and prolong the nation's efforts to responsibly manage these (nuclear) materials," spokesman Mike Fox said in a prepared statement. "It puts Americans on notice that Washington state is not a very good contributor to the common good, when we have the facilities -- paid for by the same taxpayers -- to do so."
DOE has planned to ship some low-level nuclear waste to Hanford, but waste produced at Hanford with far more radioactivity would be shipped to a national repository, likely Yucca Mountain in Nevada. Transuranic waste is being shipped to a repository in New Mexico.
"We know the nation faces a problem," Gregoire said. "We are willing to do our fair share."
But the nation's governors and attorneys general should have a say in how nuclear waste streams are distributed, she said.
"We don't want a lawsuit, we want an agreement," she said.
DOE accused the state of Washington on Friday of attempting to hinder cleanup activities through-out the DOE complex.
"We are disappointed by the threatened legal action announced by Washington state," said a prepared statement released by DOE. "Our cleanup plans, environmental impact statements and record of decision meet every environmental and regulatory requirement. We are keeping our cleanup commitments to Washington state and meeting the requirements of the Tri-Party Agreement."
----
State seeks to expand Hanford suit
By John K. Wiley
The Associated Press
Saturday, July 17, 2004
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2001982004_hanfordsuit17m.html
SPOKANE - Washington state will ask a federal judge to expand its lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Energy, seeking to halt new shipments of low-level radioactive waste to the Hanford nuclear reservation.
The DOE has not fully complied with federal environmental laws, and the agency should complete the Hanford cleanup before bringing in more waste, Gov. Gary Locke and Attorney General Christine Gregoire said in a statement yesterday.
"DOE has failed to prove that shipping more waste to Hanford won't make the nation's most contaminated site even worse," Gregoire said.
Groundwater contamination is a key concern.
State attorneys will ask a U.S. District Court judge next week for permission to expand the 2003 lawsuit to include low-level and mixed low-level radioactive waste, Assistant Attorney General Dave Mears said.
The original lawsuit challenged only shipments of transuranic waste - debris from the making of nuclear weapons.
The state will seek an injunction to halt further waste shipments until the Energy Department has adequately addressed environmental concerns related to storing more radioactive waste at Hanford.
The DOE prepared an environmental analysis before authorizing low-level waste shipments, Mears said. But the state contends the document falls short.
In June, the DOE began shipping low-level radioactive waste from the Rocky Flats nuclear complex in Colorado.
"We are disappointed by the threatened legal action announced by Washington state," the federal agency said in a statement. "Our cleanup plans, environmental-impact statements and record of decision meet every environmental and regulatory requirement."
Based on the state's concerns, DOE made major revisions in its original environmental analyses, reducing the amount to be shipped to Hanford to 25 percent of the original proposal, ending use of unlined trenches and providing for comprehensive groundwater cleanup and monitoring, the statement said.
For 40 years, Hanford made plutonium for the nation's nuclear arsenal. Now it is the nation's most contaminated nuclear site and its primary mission is cleanup.
Transuranic waste is defined as plutonium-contaminated gloves, rags, tools, dried sludge and other debris from nuclear weapons making. Low-level waste has lower radiation levels than transuranic waste or spent nuclear fuel and processing waste, and includes such materials as building rubble, contaminated dirt, tools and clothing. Mixed low-level waste contains hazardous chemicals.
Under DOE's current plan, about 62,000 cubic meters of radioactive waste - in addition to 20,000 cubic meters of mixed low-level waste, and 15,500 cubic meters of transuranic waste - would be shipped to Hanford.
-------- MILITARY
-------- africa
U.N. Report Denounces Rwanda
Support for Congo Rebels Is Called Violation of Sanctions
By Colum Lynch
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, July 17, 2004; Page A16
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A56164-2004Jul16.html
UNITED NATIONS, July 16 -- The Rwandan military is backing a rebel group that has battled Congolese forces and U.N. peacekeepers in eastern Congo, a flagrant violation of U.N. sanctions and the terms of a fragile peace accord, an unpublished U.N. report says.
The 49-page report, which was prepared by a panel of four U.N. sanctions experts, also charges that Rwandan troops forcibly entered a U.N.-controlled refugee camp in Cyangugu, Rwanda, rounded up 30 young men and pressed them to join the Congolese rebels. They were released after officials from the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees protested, according to the report, scheduled for release on Tuesday.
A rebel force headed by two renegade Congolese officers, Col. Jules Mutebutsi and Brig. Gen. Laurent Nkunda, first emerged as a threat to the delicate Congolese peace process in early June, when more than 3,000 troops seized control of the strategically important town of Bukavu in eastern Congo, the report says.
The capture of Bukavu sparked nationwide protests against the government of President Joseph Kabila and the United Nations, whose force of 400 U.N. peacekeepers in Bukavu was unable to repel the attack. U.N. officials have expressed concern that it may also mark the beginning of a trend in which former rebel leaders who joined Congo's transitional government in June 2003 take up arms again.
The followers of Jean-Pierre Bemba, a former rebel leader who was appointed vice president of Congo's transitional government, are transporting a "considerable amount" of heavy weapons and ammunition on Bemba's private planes to the airport in Gbadolite, the report says. It adds that Bemba's troops have barred U.N. military observers from entering the airport.
The Congolese government reacted to the attack on Bukavu by accusing Rwanda of backing the rebels, and by deploying more than 8,000 troops in the region to drive the rebels out of Bukavu. The United Nations, which has 10,800 peacekeepers in Congo -- formerly called Zaire -- sent about 900 additional peacekeepers to Bukavu to help restore calm.
Stanislas Kamanzi, Rwanda's ambassador to the United Nations, said the allegations that his government aided the rebels, which were first reported by Radio France Internationale, "are not true. We were not involved in this crisis in the DRC [Congo] in terms of supporting the dissidents."
Congo, a former Belgian colony, was the scene of Africa's deadliest regional war in 1998. Troops backed by Rwanda and Uganda sought to topple Congo's ruler then, Laurent Kabila, a man they had helped bring to power.
Angola, Namibia and Zimbabwe entered the war on behalf of the Congolese leader. Under the 1999 peace accord reached in Lusaka, Zambia, the five countries agreed to withdraw their troops from Congo.
The Security Council in July 2003 imposed a ban on military and financial support for armed groups in eastern Congo. A panel was set up to monitor compliance.
After the attack on Bukavu, the U.N. panel traveled to eastern Congo and Rwanda in two teams, collecting evidence on the armed groups' ties to Rwanda and documenting Rwandan violations of the embargo on military assistance to such groups in eastern Congo. The panel said it was "highly likely" that the rebels were supplied with weapons coming from Rwanda.
"Rwanda's violations involved direct and indirect support . . . to the mutinous troops," the new report says. "Rwanda has also exerted a degree of command and control over Mutebutsi's forces."
More than 150 rebels loyal to Mutebutsi retreated on June 8 into the Rwandan town of Cyangugu. They regrouped and crossed the border back into Congo, where they opened fire on a U.N. patrol in Kaminyola. The U.N. peacekeepers returned fire, forcing the rebels back into Rwanda.
"The group of experts observed that Mutebutsi had not disbanded his troops," the U.N. report says. "Approximately 300 of them, in uniform, remained in a coherent command structure under the protection of Rwandan troops."
--------
Sudanese Rebels Walk Out of Peace Talks
July 17, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Sudan-Darfur.html?hp
ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia (AP) -- Sudanese rebels walked out of peace talks Saturday, saying government representatives had refused to meet their conditions for a new round of negotiations.
The talks were aimed at ending a 17-month war that has killed tens of thousands and displaced more than a million in Sudan's western Darfur region.
``These talks are now finished,'' said Ahmed Hussain Adam, a representative of the rebel Justice and Equality Movement, one of two rebel delegations at the talks. ``We are leaving Addis Ababa.''
The Sudan Liberation Army also was pulling out of the negotiations, Adam said.
Sudanese government representatives and African mediators could not immediately be reached for comment.
Mediators had met late into the night with the two rebel groups, trying to save the talks, which began Thursday in the Ethiopian capital.
But the insurgents had insisted that the Sudanese government fulfill a list of previous commitments before beginning fresh negotiations to resolve what U.N. officials describe as the world's worst humanitarian crisis.
Chief among rebel demands was a timeline for Sudan to make good on its promise to disarm the shadowy Arab militias accused of conducting a campaign of ethnic cleansing with government backing against African farmers.
The rebels also were seeking government commitments to respect previous agreements, allow access for an international inquiry into the killings, bring those responsible to justice, lift restrictions on humanitarian assistance in Darfur and release political detainees and prisoners of war.
Finally, the insurgents wanted a more neutral venue selected for negotiations, arguing that Ethiopia has close ties with Sudan.
Most of the rebels' demands were contained in a widely ignored cease-fire deal signed April 8 with the government, which denies any involvement in the militia attacks.
``There's no progress being made because the government has refused these demands,'' said Adam, alleging that government-backed attacks continued this week in southern Darfur. His claim could not be independently verified.
The Janjaweed, the Arab militia that has torched hundreds of villages and is blamed for much of the violence in Darfur, did not attend the negotiations.
The African Union and Chad, which borders Sudan and is hosting more than 200,000 Darfur refugees, were mediating the talks.
Nomadic Arab tribes have long been in conflict with their African farming neighbors over Darfur's dwindling water and usable land. The tensions exploded into violence in February 2003 when the two African rebel groups took up arms over what they regard as unjust treatment by the government in their struggle with Arab countrymen.
U.N. officials, rebels and refugees have accused Sudan's government of backing the Janjaweed with airplanes, helicopter gunships and vehicles.
The United Nations estimates up to 30,000 people have been killed in the attacks and the rebellion that triggered them, but some analysts put the figure much higher.
The latest peace initiative follows a concerted diplomatic push by U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan and U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, who visited the region earlier this month.
Powell said Friday that he expects to hear from U.S. experts next week on whether Sudan officials should be charged with genocide.
Sudan signed an agreement with Annan on July 3 calling for disarming the Janjaweed, deploying soldiers, facilitating aid and allowing international troops and monitors into Darfur. On Friday, the Sudanese government also promised to try anyone who violated human rights in Darfur.
-------- britain
Was our son murdered by the CIA?
JENNY SHIELDS,
Sat 17 Jul 2004
The Scotsman
http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=815622004
IT HAS been a difficult month for Robin and Daphne Wild. In July last year, their son Richard was murdered in Iraq, shot in the back of the head as he crossed the road in Baghdad.
Since then, the parents of the Cambridge University graduate have tried to piece together the events of that day. Mr and Mrs Wild - who feel they have been hindered, rather than helped, by the Foreign Office at every turn - have come to a startling conclusion; they believe their son's murder was ordered by the CIA.
The Wilds are intelligent, educated people, not generally given to conspiracy theories or flights of fancy. The tale of their horrendous year is told in simple, moving terms, with a constant air of disbelief at what has happened.
"We are not naive, we know unpalatable things are done," says Mrs Wild. "But when you are drawn into it, it is terrifying."
She is shivering as she speaks, as a squally wind and heavy mist casts a summer chill over the Wilds' baronial home in the shadow of the Eildon hills in the Scottish Borders. As she wonders if she should light a fire, Mrs Wild recalls how different things were last summer.
"It was blazing hot and everyone was outside, hunting for shade," she remembers. Richard had come home for a few days and the family spent many fruitless hours trying to dissuade him from going to Iraq. It was his first foreign trip as a freelance journalist and his parents were alarmed. "He wouldn't listen to us," says Mr Wild.
Mrs Wild was irritated by her son's stubbornness, but the family still had a very happy few days before he left. "One afternoon, it was very warm and I was having a nap at the bottom of the garden. Richard and a girlfriend were walking round, laughing. There was a heavy scent of roses and I thought, 'Enjoy this day, hold on to it, remember it'."
Two weeks later, Richard was dead. He was 24.
The youngest of the Wilds' three children enjoyed a gilded youth: dux of the local prep school, head boy at Sedbergh School, a good degree from Jesus College, Cambridge. He was also a talented sportsman, tall, handsome and effortlessly popular with a huge circle of friends.
An early flirtation with investment banking and a short spell at Sotheby's left him unfulfilled. He decided he wanted to be a journalist, badgering news organisations and writing articles. He spent six months at ITN working as a logger - monitoring hours of TV footage from the Gulf war - and made himself useful.
Last spring, he began making plans to go to Iraq. His parents insist he was not a gung-ho war junkie, but was more interested in covering the aftermath of the war. Richard spent a small fortune on kit - video camera, laptop, satellite phone - and hitched a lift with the BBC from Amman to Baghdad. His death made news, but he wasn't the first journalist to die; the story ran for a day, some papers carried a report of his funeral and that was it.
Mr and Mrs Wild heard about their son's death in a late-night Foreign Office call. "We were told he had been surrounded by an angry mob and shot. They have never presented us with new information; we have had to put the pieces together ourselves," says Mr Wild.
"There was no equivocation [from] the Foreign Office," his wife continues. "They seemed to have a very clear idea of what had happened and so of course we believed it, absolutely. We had no reason to question what we were being told."
Initially, the Wilds believed Richard died immediately. They later discovered that a young Iraqi medical student went to his aid. "Somehow he managed to get Richard to a hospital; Richard was in a very bad way but still breathing," says Mr Wild. "But no-one came to help Richard and maybe it's as well - there would have been no quality of life."
The Wilds, both 63, understand the assassin parked in the university car park and waited for Richard to come out of the natural history museum. He crossed to the taxi rank where Richard was standing and shot him in the back of the head, then walked into a crowd and disappeared.
Shortly after Richard was shot, two British journalists - Michael Burke, an independent TV producer for whom Richard was working two days a week, and Lee Gordon - arrived at the British office in Baghdad to report the incident. "They weren't even let into the building; all they got was a brusque exchange over the intercom," says Mrs Wild. "The official said they knew about the shooting, but said it had nothing to do with them. Richard, they were told, had been in the army so they should be told about it."
Mrs Wild is outraged by this: "In 1996, he had a gap year commission which involved a short time at Sandhurst and being a platoon commander for six months - hardly an army career."
Beneath the outward composure as the Wilds tell their story is a seething anger at the way they have been treated. In the immediate aftermath of his death, Mrs Wild publicly railed against her son's foolhardiness in going to Iraq, saying it was "no place for a rookie". Now her anger is directed at the government.
"We don't expect to ever know the whole story - and we won't spend the rest of our lives trying to," says Mrs Wild. "But we wanted people to know that the story the Foreign Office gave us was not the truth."
They say the repatriation of Richard's body was handled incompetently - and when he was finally flown home, there was more heartbreak. "We discovered that he had lain, unrefrigerated, in the Baghdad heat for ten days - for a mother to discover that her child was actually left to rot is something almost too cruel to bear," says Mrs Wild.
The Wilds buried their son in a small country churchyard close to home and were trying to adjust to life without him when their lives were turned upside down again last autumn. They were contacted by Michael Burke, who had returned from Iraq with some of Richard's possessions. He suggested a meeting and the Wilds saw him at Euston station; they were surprised at Mr Burke's insistence that their conversation should not be overheard. Mr Wild recalls: "We were sitting in that glorious pale autumn sunlight and for the next two hours, we heard things that made hair on the back of our necks stand up."
As a former chief dental officer for England and Wales, Mr Wild "knows how things work"; yet even he could barely believe what Mr Burke - who had spoken to eyewitnesses - told him. "Far from being picked off on the spur of the moment by a mob, we were being told our son had been assassinated, probably by the CIA. He had not been in Baghdad long but he was asking questions, rocking the boat, maybe making himself unpopular. As a journalist he was not 'on message'. We think he knew something that could have destabilised, or certainly embarrassed, the coalition and that's why he was killed."
More than this, the Wilds have resigned themselves to never finding out. They will not spend the rest of their lives campaigning and harrying government for answers. "Political assassinations involve cover-ups," says Mrs Wild. "We do not have the resources to find out exactly what went on, but we have certainly found out more than we were told."
They are relieved to hear that Yunis Kuthair, a freelance Iraqi journalist who had been investigating Richard's death, has been released from Abu Ghraib prison, but whether he, or anyone, will ever be able to shed more light on Richard's death, they don't know. Through the Rory Peck Trust - established in memory of the freelance cameraman killed during the coup in Moscow ten years ago - they have met the families of other young Britons whose lives have been cut short, some in suspicious circumstances.
That has eased some of the pain, but the anger at the official handling of Richard's death will never completely abate. The Wilds were shocked to hear that the Foreign Office admitted initial reports about Richard's death had been "misleading" but were delivered in good faith.
The Foreign Office also claimed to have given the family new information when it came to light. "That is a complete falsehood," says Mr Wild. "They have never been proactive in this and all the new information we have received has come to us from other sources."
Mrs Wild takes a letter from the Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, from a pile of papers. "Look at this," she says. "He waffles on about the coalition military authorities being severely limited in their ability to investigate crimes and then says: 'I can assure you that the nature of Richard's work had no impact on whether or not there was an investigation'. Is he being deliberately obtuse? The whole point is that it was the nature of Richard's death that might have influenced whether there was an investigation."
Last month, the Wilds spent another fruitless hour at the Foreign Office. "We saw someone else this time, a nice young woman and I could see she was shocked at what we had to tell her - she was in tears twice - but I don't expect her concern will motivate them to find out what really happened to Richard," says Mrs Wild.
The Wilds know that at some point soon, they must move on - emotionally and physically. "One day, we have to be sensible and move to a smaller house. Much of the time, it's just the two of us rattling around," says Mrs Wild.
However, the thought of ever leaving the only family home Richard ever had is causing her great anxiety: "He was here, in these rooms, I remember where I used to place his pram, I remember him playing in the garden. This was his home."
----
How judge was misinformed about Iraq's WMD threat
By Kim Sengupta,
17 July 2004
UK Independent
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/story.jsp?story=541881
In Autumn 2002 the dossier on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction - the clinching argument which Tony Blair believed would swing a deeply sceptical public behind the war - was just weeks away. There had been draft after draft, with copious suggestions on "presentation" from Downing Street.
But there was one serious worry nagging away at MI6. There was a lack of hard evidence that Iraq had an active chemical and biological weapons programme.
One source, believed to be a high-ranking Baath party member, had supplied some information about such a capability. But it was, he readily admitted, chatter he had picked up from his "high-level" contacts in Baghdad, and thus hearsay.
Then came the break. An Iraqi source, not an exile who was full of fanciful tales, but a general who sat at Saddam Hussein's table, came forward with claims of an ongoing chemical and biological programme.
What is more, the man, although new as an agent, had already supplied information, albeit of much lower value, which was deemed to be credible.
However, the informant had revealed that he was getting his material about chemical and biological weapons from another man, and this man had links with the exile groups that MI6 had been so cautious about. The case officer duly noted the problem, and Lord Butler acknowledged that a caveat had been included in the intelligence docket.
This new information underpinned another sensational allegation that Iraq could launch chemical and biological weapons hitting British bases in Cyprus within 45 minutes of an order to deploy them.
Such was the sense of excitement within MI6 that Sir Richard Dearlove, the head of the service, personally visited Downing Street to tell the Prime Minister and Sir David Manning, his foreign affairs adviser, about the new source. This visit was a break from protocol. The intelligence should have been channelled through the Joint Intelligence Committee. Sir Richard told Mr Blair and Sir David that the new source was "potentially important" but also pointed out that he "remained unproven ... on trial".
Twelve days after the meeting, the Iraq weapons dossier was published and Mr Blair declared in the foreword that the document was "extensive, detailed and authoritative", and declared that intelligence had "established beyond doubt" that the Iraqi regime was continuing to produce WMD.
That is where it rested until MI6 agents went out to Iraq after the fall of Baghdad. From the end of April onwards they interrogated prisoners and interviewed their informants. They tracked down and spoke to the man said to have supplied Sir Richard's prize source with the chemical and biological programmes details. He flatly denied saying any such thing.
This was passed on to MI6 in London by the end of June last year. By the second week of July, it is believed, MI6 had informed the JIC, chaired by John Scarlett, that it was withdrawing that intelligence. The normal practice is that all those who had received the original intelligence, now proved to be untrustworthy, should be informed at the earliest opportunity. This included the Prime Minister.
The Hutton inquiry began on 11 August. Giving evidence, the Prime Minister, Mr Scarlett and Sir Richard all failed to mention the withdrawal of intelligence and saidagents in Iraq were believed to be reliable.
Yesterday, Downing Street insisted that the first time Mr Blair knew about the discredited intelligence was when he saw the Butler report. And the reason Mr Scarlett had not mentioned it, giving evidence two months after MI6 had withdrawn the intelligence, was that "the validation process was still ongoing".
----
No 10 admits Hutton cover-up
By Colin Brown, Kim Sengupta and Andrew Grice
17 July 2004
UK Independent
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/story.jsp?story=541887
Downing Street admitted yesterday that MI6 embarked on an unprecedented cover-up after it withdrew intelligence supporting the Government's dossier on Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction because it was unreliable.
In an astonishing admission after the disclosure of the cover-up in yesterday's Independent, Tony Blair's official spokesman said MI6 decided not to tell the Hutton inquiry - set up to investigate the death of the government scientist David Kelly - that crucial intelligence on Saddam's chemical and biological weapons was unsound. The security services, he said, felt it was "too sensitive'' to be made public. The head of MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove, also decided not to tell Mr Blair. The Prime Minister's spokesman said Mr Blair only became aware of the withdrawal of the intelligence as a result of the inquiry by Lord Butler of Brockwell, which was delivered three days ago.
Senior sources close to last year's Hutton inquiry said they were unaware that crucial intelligence had been withdrawn, and had this been known, a number of government witnesses would have faced questions about the matter. The sources insisted that the fact that intelligence had been withdrawn by MI6 was not revealed to Lord Hutton either orally or in written evidence.
After the death of Dr Kelly, Mr Blair asked Lord Hutton to conduct an inquiry. Mr Blair's official spokesman said on 21 July last year: "The important point is that we have said that he will have whatever papers and people he needs."
The inquiry began on 11 August. Giving evidence, the Prime Minister, Sir Richard Dearlove and John Scarlett, the head of the Joint Intelligence Committee, all failed to mention the withdrawal of intelligence. All three insisted that intelligence from agents in Iraq was believed to be reliable.
Downing Street insisted yesterday that the first time Mr Blair knew about the discredited intelligence was in the Butler report. And the reason Mr Scarlett had not mentioned it, when giving evidence two months after MI6 had withdrawn the intelligence, was that "the validation process was still ongoing".
Senior MPs said Downing Street's comments had all the hallmarks of a damage limitation exercise. Had Mr Blair known, he would face fresh allegations of misleading Parliament on Tuesday when he opens a debate on the Butler report.
Downing Street gave three reasons for not telling the Hutton inquiry: it was not relevant to the investigation into Dr Kelly's death; it was only one element in the chemical and biological weapons "picture"; and, because validation of the intelligence and its source was continuing, it was too sensitive to make public. "Lord Hutton was not misled. He saw everything that was relevant to his picture," said Mr Blair's spokesman.
Two parliamentary committees were also kept in the dark and last night there was a backlash as MPs claimed they had been misled. The Prime Minister's Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) will meet next week to decide whether to hold a fresh inquiry into the disclosures in the Butler report.
A senior member of the ISC said: "We were not told about this. We were shown some of the evidence. I think it is a real issue of concern that the SIS [Intelligence and Security Committee] have done this without telling us." Lord King, a former chairman of the ISC, said: "It was for Lord Hutton to decide whether it was not relevant. "
The intelligence services also failed to tell the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, which investigated the death of DrKelly, that it had "withdrawn'' the crucial intelligence.
The decision to withdraw the intelligence was taken in July, last year, the same month that Mr Blair was forced to call the Hutton inquiry into the circumstances surrounding the death of Dr Kelly, who was named as the source for reports that the dossier had been "sexed up'' by Downing Street.
Exactly a year ago, Dr Kelly went for his fateful walk in the woods. Mr Blair is finding it impossible to draw a line under the events that his death set in train.
-------- business
Interior Dept. Inquiry Faults Procurement
By Ellen McCarthy
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, July 17, 2004; Page E03
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A56191-2004Jul16.html
The Department of Interior's inspector general found that lax procurement controls in one of the agency's contracting centers allowed information technology contracts to be misused to hire prison interrogators.
CACI International Inc. of Arlington and Lockheed Martin Corp. of Bethesda were hired to provide interrogation support under umbrella contracts designed to give government agencies quick access to the companies' technology products and services.
The inspector general's report, released last night, blamed a "fee-for-service operation, where procurement personnel in their eagerness to enhance organization revenues have found shortcuts to federal procurement procedures."
Lockheed's employees were hired by the Navy for interrogation work at its base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. CACI provided interrogators to the Army in Iraq, and one of its employees was implicated in an Army report on abuses at Abu Ghraib prison.
Both contracts were awarded by the General Services Administration and managed by the Interior Department's National Business Center in Fort Huachuca, Ariz. The agency's inspector general, Earl E. Devaney, said a lack of oversight of procurement officials at the center contributed to the improper contracting.
Devaney recommended that the agency end contracts with CACI and Lockheed Martin that fall outside the scope of their intended purpose. He urged Interior to develop new policies and management controls.
Interior spokesman Frank Quimby said this week that Interior is going to "get out of the interrogation business." Calls to Quimby were not returned last night.
A GSA investigation of CACI's contract found that it was awarded improperly but cleared the company to continue doing business with the federal government.
-------- iraq
STREET WEAPONRY
G.I.'s in Battle of Wits With Rebels Over Bomb Technology
July 17, 2004
By JAMES GLANZ
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/17/international/middleeast/17bomb.html?pagewanted=all
MOSUL, Iraq, July 16 - In a deadly game of technological one-upmanship, insurgents have been adapting their most effective weapon, a concealed and remotely detonated bomb, to increasingly sophisticated American attempts to detect the devices before they explode.
During a morning security sweep of city streets on Thursday, American soldiers based here at Camp Freedom said the modifications suggested that there was a kind of technical elite, sometimes referred to generically as "the bomb makers," who were guiding the changing designs.
"It's this constant chess match," said Capt. J. Philip Ludvigson, a member of the Stryker brigade combat team, named for the nimble armored vehicle that made the sweeps.
"They change their techniques around and find out new ways to kill us," he said, "and we figure out new ways to counter it."
The test of wits is important in itself, expressing itself in lives gained and lost. But soldiers involved in detecting and analyzing the devices said the game might also be providing new insight into the mysterious, dedicated and skilled core of people who might be leading the insurgency, with devastating effect across Iraq.
"The education level of the ordinary Iraqi is not sufficient to be able to initiate these things," said Capt. Kenneth Mitchell, commander of the Stryker brigade's engineer company.
"I couldn't build one of these," Captain Mitchell said. "They are smart. There is a training network out there. There is an instructor."
Alongside that dark assessment, though, is a new sense that many of the operations involving the bombs also rely on a kind of local contractor force that is much less committed to the cause of terror than the leaders.
Those contractors are unlikely to have more expertise than the ability to take apart a garage-door opener or a two-way radio - the kinds of devices that are used to detonate the bombs remotely - and put it back together again, but this time connected to a blasting cap.
Others, especially those who put the bombs in place, are simply laborers without any specialized knowledge or much motivation when it comes to committing terrorist acts.
"In some cases I feel straight up that the guys are just making money," said Capt. Robert D. Cope, an expert on destroying unexploded bombs in the 744th Ordnance Company. "They see that their devices are not working properly and they don't modify it."
For months, private and governmental threat reports have listed the bombs, referred to generically as "improvised explosive devices," as the prime threat to Western military and civilian convoys.
A senior military officer said that in Mosul, of 778 attacks since Jan. 1, 40 to 50 percent had been the result of such bombs. Although there are also large numbers of mortar attacks, those weapons are notoriously inaccurate and much less lethal than the remotely detonated bombs, which an attacker can set off as a target passes.
The bombs generally involve a blasting cap, detonated by an electric current by something as simple as a cordless phone, a garage-door opener or a remote-controlled toy. The cap may detonate a plastic explosive that has been placed into the nose of a mortar round. When the round explodes, it may set off other shells or plastic explosives placed near it.
Explosives experts here said early devices often had wires running from a porch or a house to the bomb, making it easy to trace the perpetrator. Later, the remote-controlled bombs became more common.
The ways in which the bombs have been concealed has also become more sophisticated. Recently, soldiers said, bombs have been disguised as curbing on the side of the road.
The explosives inside have also evolved. In just the last few weeks, insurgents have for the first time tried to explode bombs with a kind of homemade napalm called fougasse, a concoction of gasoline and detergent.
The Americans use electronic jamming to disable some of the bombs, but those methods are largely considered secret and are not discussed openly by soldiers. During the sweep on Thursday, one soldier, Sgt. Benjamin West, peered at a television screen in one of the vehicles, switching back and forth from visible to infrared imagery in a search of the streets for suspicious objects.
Three more soldiers - Staff Sgt. Robert Renfro, Sgt. Nathan Francis and Specialist Joshua Donoho - stood looking out hatches in the top of the Stryker vehicle, watching for anything suspicious.
However technologically advanced the battle becomes, eyes and ears are still the first line of defense against the bombs, said Brig. Gen. Carter F. Ham, commander of the American-led multinational forces in northern Iraq, which have their headquarters at Camp Freedom.
"If there's a trash can where there's not normally a trash can, then they'll investigate that," he said.
-------- israel / palestine
Head of Gaza Police Kidnapped By Gunmen and Paraded in Streets
Chief Accused of Corruption as Palestinian Fissure Grows
By John Ward Anderson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, July 17, 2004; Page A12
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A54453-2004Jul16.html
JERUSALEM, July 16 -- The top police officer in the Gaza Strip was kidnapped Friday by Palestinian gunmen, who paraded him through the streets of a refugee camp and accused him of stealing $22 million in public funds, Palestinian security officials and eyewitnesses said. The gunmen later released the officer unharmed and said the incident was intended to publicize his corruption.
Ghazi Jabali, who has led the Gaza police force for most of the past 10 years, was abducted at about 3 p.m. when several cars pulled in front of his convoy and cut it off as it traveled along Gaza's Mediterranean coastal road, according to Palestinian security sources. Gunmen opened fire and bundled Jabali into a car that then sped away, they said. Two of his bodyguards were wounded in the incident, the sources said.
Jabali was taken to the Buraig refugee camp in central Gaza Strip, where his abductors, members of the Jenin Martyrs Brigades, paraded him through the streets, firing their weapons into the air and accusing him of plundering the public treasury, eyewitnesses said. They said the gunmen claimed it was the first step in a new campaign against corruption.
Senior officials from the governing Palestinian Authority opened negotiations with the group soon after the abduction, and Jabali was released after about two hours.
Militants also kidnapped four French citizens in the southern Gaza town of Khan Yunis and held them at the offices of the Red Crescent Society there. Hours later, the four -- two men and two women -- were released unharmed.
Later Friday, two senior Palestinian security officials in Gaza -- Rashid Abu Shbak, the head of the Preventive Security agency, and Amin Hindi, chief of intelligence -- resigned over the incident. They cited "the state of anarchy and chaos" in the security situation in Gaza and the refusal by the governing Palestinian Authority to implement reforms, according to Qadura Fares, the Palestinian cabinet's minister of state.
[Saturday, a security panel headed by the Palestinian Authority leader, Yasser Arafat, declared a state of emergency in the Gaza Strip, the Associated Press reported.]
Fares said the pair were angry at being undercut by politicians who negotiated a deal that allowed the kidnappers to go free, rather than holding them accountable.
The abduction underscored the growing discontent among Palestinian militants and the general public with rampant corruption within the Palestinian Authority. It also highlighted the growing security disarray in Gaza, where radical militant groups increasingly rule the streets and are challenging the leadership of Arafat and the Palestinian Authority.
"We gave three years to the Palestinian Authority to carry out reforms. We waited a long time. But they didn't do anything. We are doing this in our way," Abu Iyad, who was identified as a spokesman for the Jenin Martyrs Brigades, said on al-Jazeera satellite television. "Ghazi Jabali was kidnapped to hold him accountable for his mistakes against our people."
Jabali was appointed by Arafat and has been his right-hand man on security matters in Gaza for years. Jabali has also been the subject of rumors concerning corruption.
In February, Jabali was involved in a clash with Palestinian gunmen inside his Gaza police headquarters. Forces aligned with former Palestinian security chief Mohammed Dahlan reportedly surrounded and assaulted Jabali, then shot and killed a police officer and wounded 11 others.
The Jenin Martyrs Brigades is a cell of the Popular Resistance Committees, a loose-knit group of disaffected members of larger Palestinian militant organizations, principally the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades. The Committees rose to prominence two years ago by planting massive roadside bombs in Gaza that blew up three Israeli Merkava tanks, killing seven soldiers.
Special correspondents Islam Abdulkarim in Gaza and Sufian Taha in Jerusalem contributed to this report.
--------
Arafat Rejects Palestinian Prime Minister's Resignation
July 17, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Israel-Palestinians.html?pagewanted=all
RAMALLAH, West Bank (AP) -- Prime Minister Ahmed Qureia submitted his resignation Saturday to Yasser Arafat, plunging the Palestinian government into crisis, but Arafat rejected it, a top official said.
The resignation came as Qureia and Arafat discussed a shake-up of security forces during a rapidly deteriorating security situation in the Gaza Strip. Six people, including the national police chief and four French charity workers, were briefly kidnapped in Gaza a day earlier.
``There is a crisis. There is a state of chaos in the security situation,'' Qureia told reporters as he emerged from the meeting.
Although events in Gaza precipitated the government crisis, tension has been building for a long time. Palestinians have complained the government was unable to improve the daily lives of the people, rein in rampant corruption or bring an end to the 37-year Israeli occupation.
Saeb Erekat, a Palestinian Cabinet minister, said Qureia told members of the legislative council that he submitted his resignation to Arafat, who is president of the Palestinian Authority.
Arafat did not attend Saturday's Cabinet meeting, but Erekat said the veteran Palestinian leader had refused to accept the resignation.
Qureia said his decision to quit was firm ``and he will not withdraw'' the resignation, said Jamal Shobaki, the minister for local government. The Cabinet will meet again Monday to discuss the political crisis, Shobaki said.
Qureia's resignation followed the announcement that Arafat was replacing his national security chief and his national police chief, in addition to consolidating the Palestinian Authority's disparate security forces into three services -- a key international demand for reform.
The head of the Palestinian Intelligence Service, Maj. Gen. Amin al Hindi, and the head of Preventive Security in the Gaza Strip, Rashid Abu Shbak, also quit Friday.
Qureia, also known as Abu Ala, was appointed in September 2003, when the first prime minister of the Palestinian government, Mahmoud Abbas, quit after just four months on the job.
Arafat's rejection of Qureia's resignation left his status uncertain, and it was unclear whether Qureia would continue to lead the government.
The prime minister, one of the main negotiators of the 1993 Oslo peace agreement with Israel that created the Palestinian Authority, has proven incapable of asserting his authority over the official security services or over the militant groups that led attacks against Israel in the Palestinian territories and in Israel itself.
Unlike his predecessor, Qureia never met Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon or other top Israeli Cabinet officials.
Earlier Saturday, Arafat's National Security Council declared a state of emergency and sent troops to protect government buildings and officials from militant factions.
Palestinian security services have undergone several shake-ups since the outbreak of Israeli-Palestinian fighting nearly four years ago, but none lived up to the international community's expectations for reform.
However, the latest realignment appeared to be more sweeping than any previous attempt.
The Palestinian government declared an emergency after Police Chief Ghazi Jabali and another senior security officer were seized by militants Friday and later released.
Four French charity workers also were abducted and held for several hours, as militants made an apparent show of force before the announced withdrawal of Israeli forces and thousands of settlers from the Gaza Strip.
``This is a true disaster,'' Qureia said Saturday outside his offices before meeting Arafat. ``This is a level of chaos that we have never seen before.''
Egypt and the quartet of international peacemakers -- the United States, Russia, the United Nations and the European Union -- have been pressing Arafat to bring rival security factions under unified control. More than a dozen security branches now operate in the areas, often fighting each other.
An Egyptian plan specifically called for the streamlining of the services into three branches in Gaza and the West Bank.
Arafat aide Nabil Abu Rdeneh said the security forces would be the national police, public security forces and intelligence.
Mousa Arafat, who has been with his first cousin since the early days of the Palestinian national struggle in 1965, replaced Abdel Razzak Al-Majaideh as national security chief. Al-Majaideh was considered ineffectual.
The Palestinian leader also appointed Saeb al-Ajez as the new police chief for the West Bank and Gaza, replacing Jabali who has been widely accused of corruption.
The chief of intelligence was not immediately named.
(UPDATES throughout with more comments from Qureia, Cabinet to meet again Monday, two other security chiefs resigning Friday, more context and details; corrects spelling of Erekat in 3rd graf; ADDS photo numbers)
--------
Arafat Under Pressure After Palestinian PM Quits
July 17, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-mideast.html
RAMALLAH, West Bank (Reuters) - Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qurie quit over chaos in Gaza and militants threatened to lay down their own law, stepping up pressure on Yasser Arafat to stamp out corruption and reform his forces.
Backing their demands with action, gunmen attacked and burned down a Palestinian security post in the Gaza town of Khan Younis early on Sunday, sending officers fleeing into the night.
The Palestinian president -- veteran symbol of a struggle for statehood -- has not faced such a chorus of local and international demands for change in nearly four years of Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Arafat refused to accept Qurie's resignation.
Calls for reform have multiplied amid a brewing factional power struggle in the Gaza Strip in anticipation of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's planned withdrawal of troops and settlers from the occupied territory in 2005.
Submitting his resignation on Saturday, Qurie spoke of unprecedented chaos in Gaza triggered by the brief abduction of four French aid workers, the police chief and another official by gunmen demanding reforms.
Arafat ordered a security shake-up in Gaza, merging 12 competing armed forces into three. After Arafat rejected his resignation, Qurie suggested his decision was on hold at least until a Palestinian Authority cabinet meeting on Monday.
In the past, Arafat has paid little more than lip-service to reforms likely to diminish his influence.
THOUSANDS PROTEST
Thousands marched in Gaza City to protest against Arafat's choice of a new local security chief from the old guard -- the president's cousin Mussa Arafat, who already heads military intelligence.
Later, militants stormed the security post at Khan Younis, which was manned by officers from Mussa Arafat's organization.
Dozens of local leaders from Arafat's mainstream Fatah group quit hours after Qurie in protest at what one called the president's ``unstudied decisions.''
``We call on the president to turn back these steps and fix the security situation in Gaza,'' said Abd al-Hamid al-Masri, who had been head of Fatah in the Gaza town of Khan Younis.
Adding to fears that violence could spiral was a warning to Arafat from the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an armed group within Fatah that has launched suicide bombings and gun attacks against Israelis.
It urged Arafat to try officials accused of corruption and said trouble could spread to the West Bank, home to 2.3 million Palestinians as well as Arafat and most of his Authority's institutions. Some 1.3 million Palestinians live in Gaza.
To those it branded corrupt, the Brigades said: ``We will punish you if you don't repent and return the stolen money back to the people.''
A senior Arafat adviser, who declined to be named, said the trouble in Gaza was a ``conspiracy by parties that wanted to weaken the Palestinian Authority and show it is collapsing.''
Palestinian officials say Arafat's ability to carry out reforms or rein in militants has been hampered by constant Israeli raids.
Israel and the United States accuse Arafat of fomenting violence, which he denies.
Israeli Prime Minister Sharon is due to meet members of the opposition Labour Party and an ultra-Orthodox Jewish party on Sunday for talks on broadening his shaky coalition government so he can carry out the Gaza withdrawal plan.
Sharon devised his plan to ``disengage'' from conflict with the Palestinians as a unilateral measure to relinquish the territory Israel captured in the 1967 Middle East war and four of 120 Jewish settlements in the West Bank.
A U.S.-backed peace ``road map'' has been stalled by the violence.
-------- nato
NATO to Boost Force in Afghanistan for Election
By Keith B. Richburg
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, July 17, 2004; Page A14
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A56145-2004Jul16.html
BRUSSELS, July 16 -- With violence steadily increasing in Afghanistan three months before the country's first democratic election, the NATO alliance is planning to reinforce its 6,500-member international peacekeeping force with two units equipped to move quickly to trouble spots.
Each new unit will have about 1,000 soldiers, with one of the units deployed on the north side of the Hindu Kush mountain range and the other to the south, NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said in an interview Friday at NATO headquarters here.
"For the election, we'll bring in extra forces to have a quick reaction force . . . so when things go wrong, you can move forces quickly in-theater," de Hoop Scheffer said. He said that Spain had agreed to provide one of the two "rapid reaction" units and that the second would likely come from NATO reserve forces on duty in Europe.
The plan also calls for two additional battalions with about 1,000 members each and a brigade-level headquarters to wait in reserve at bases in Europe and be ready to go quickly if called on.
The additional troops sent to Afghanistan would not amount to a permanent increase in force levels there, de Hoop Scheffer said, but would go strictly to secure the presidential election now set for Oct. 9, staying no more than eight weeks. The rapid reaction forces would return in the spring, when parliamentary elections are scheduled.
At present, the NATO force's operations are limited largely to the capital, Kabul, and five of the country's 32 provinces. President Hamid Karzai has called on NATO to dramatically increase its troop numbers in Afghanistan before the election and to send soldiers into the most volatile areas of the country. The alliance's limited response has been called insufficient by some officials and commentators in the West.
"I say to the critics, the concept is a mobile concept," de Hoop Scheffer said. "The focus is to be as flexible as we can with those in-theater. So it's not flooding the country with soldiers. I think the Russians found out that's not a viable concept," he said, alluding to the Soviet Union's failed invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s.
Countries already contributing troops to the contingent, known officially as the International Security Assistance Force, or ISAF, have been reluctant to send more. Germany, currently the leading contributor, has capped its troop level.
The United States has about 20,000 troops in the country, most of them in the south searching for remnants of the former Taliban administration and the al Qaeda network. U.S. forces operate independently of ISAF; the United States contributes no troops to that contingent.
NATO took command of ISAF in August 2003 in the alliance's first military undertaking outside Europe, its traditional area of operation. The move was seen by many member governments as a morale boost for an alliance dispirited by the Bush administration's decision, after Sept. 11, 2001, to go to war in Afghanistan without it. Running ISAF was also seen as a test of whether an alliance founded to confront Soviet armies on the battlefields of Europe could transform itself to meet the new threat of global terrorism.
The force has been hindered by a shortage of equipment and an apparent lack of commitment by many NATO countries. Though ISAF has troops from 36 countries, including a dozen outside the alliance, Canada and Germany continue to provide the bulk of the force. Until recently, it could call on only a few antiquated German helicopters and not a single NATO plane.
Following a NATO summit last month in Istanbul and warnings by the top NATO commander, U.S. Marine Gen. James Jones, that the Afghan mission was at risk of failing, more support has come in. The Dutch, for example, have provided half a dozen Apache attack helicopters. And NATO forces have fanned out slowly into the north, putting civilian-military units known as provincial reconstruction teams in Mazar-e Sharif, Meymaneh, Faizabad, Baghlan and Kunduz.
De Hoop Scheffer said the next step would be to find countries willing to provide troops for the western province of Herat.
Still, he said, NATO has no intention of taking the lead role in securing Afghanistan, nor will it become involved in disarming warlords or suppressing the drug trade. Those tasks, he said, must still fall to Karzai and his Afghan army, which has about 10,000 soldiers.
-------- prisoners of war
Pentagon pushes quick Guantánamo hearings
Neil A. Lewis
The New York Times/IHT
Saturday, July 17, 2004
http://www.iht.com/bin/print.php?file=529878.html
WASHINGTON The Pentagon, moving at what officials acknowledge is extraordinary speed, may begin special military hearings within a week to determine whether the prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, have been lawfully detained.
At the same, time, law firms recruited by civil liberties groups, have been rushing to establish a different route to challenge the detentions by filing petitions in federal court here in Washington based on last month's Supreme Court ruling. By the time hearings begin, as many as half of the detainees may have lawyers who have filed petitions on their behalf in federal court.
In effect, the two sides are engaging in a kind of undeclared legal battle to decide how the fate of the 595 remaining detainees in Cuba will be determined in light of the court's ruling. And both the Pentagon and the defense lawyers evidently believe they need to move speedily to gain an advantage.
In the case of the military, the special tribunals announced only two weeks ago are expected to begin soon. Gordon England, the secretary of the Navy who put together the plan, said Friday that the hearings may begin late in the following week. He said that officials hope to get quickly to a point at which they would be processing 72 detainees a week through the hearings.
"We're confident that we will finish this, on the outside, in three to four months," he told reporters. At the same time, he acknowledged that the procedures for the hearings have not yet been completed.
"This is like moving at the speed of light for the military," said one military lawyer who noted that the Pentagon usually moves in a more deliberate fashion and its plans for military commissions to try detainees on war crimes were formulated more than two years ago and there has yet to be a commission proceeding.
Under the proceedings to review the detentions, each detainee who has chosen to participate will meet with a military officer who will act as his representative, but not as his lawyer or advocate. The detainee will be given a document with an unclassified version of the allegations that formed the basis for designating the prisoner an unlawful enemy combatant.
The detainee with the help of the representative will then argue his case before one of three tribunals, each composed of three officers. Unlike the original plan, England said that the tribunals would be open to a small press contingent, although probably not for the initial proceedings.
Several of the defense lawyers who have challenged the Guantánamo detentions were highly skeptical of the military's purpose in moving quickly to hold these hearings. Michael Ratner, the executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, a New York human rights group that helped bring the court challenge to the Guantánamo system, said it appeared that the Pentagon was trying a last-ditch effort to retain control of the detainees and prevent federal courts from taking jurisdiction.
"Our theory here is that we believe the Supreme Court decision gives the inmates the right to file habeas corpus petitions in federal courts," he said. He said that the Pentagon appears to be moving quickly to be able to argue to the courts that it has since provided a fair process.
Joseph Margulies of the University of Chicago Law School, who argued the case before the Supreme Court, said that what the ruling required was that the detainees get an opportunity to contest their detentions under standards that are reviewable by federal courts for fairness. "There is no way that these tribunals could meet that standard," he said, citing several features of the plan, including that the detainees would be represented not by advocates but by military officers with whom they would not be able to talk in confidence.
But both Pentagon officials and the defense lawyers on the other side appear to agree that the tribunals might accomplish one goal, that of reducing significantly the population of Guantánamo through large-scale releases.
Asked what happens when the tribunal deems an inmate not to be an unlawful enemy combatant, England replied: "They go home."
----
Pentagon creates office to deal with detainee affairs
2004-07-17
(Xinhuanet)
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2004-07/17/content_1608033.htm
WASHINGTON, July 16 -- The US Defense Department announced Friday that it is creating an office to deal with detainee affairs, in the wake of the revelation of American soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners at the Abu Ghraib in Baghdad.
The Office of Detainee Affairs was being created under a directive signed by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on Friday, Ryan Henry, principal deputy undersecretary for policy, told a news briefing at the Pentagon.
The office is to report to the secretary via the undersecretaryfor policy and will be the single focal point in communicating with the International Committee of Red Cross (ICRC) on behalf of the department, he said.
The Pentagon created the Office of Detainee Affairs after it was sharply criticized for having ignored ICRC reports that raised warning flags about prisoner abuse at the Ghraib prison long before abuse videos and pictures surfaced.
"We want to have a system to elevate their concerns to key policymakers as responsively as possible," Henry said.
Since May this year, Rumsfeld has testified at four different hearings and the deputy secretary or undersecretaries of the Defense Department at 12 different hearings over the abuse scandal, he said.
-------- spies
Bush Defers Decision on CIA Chief
White House May Not Move on Tenet Successor Before Nov. 2
By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, July 17, 2004; Page A04
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A56162-2004Jul16.html
The White House has put off for now a decision on whether to name a new CIA director before the November election, as officials continue to search for a candidate they believe could do the job and survive Senate confirmation during a heated campaign, according to senior administration and congressional officials.
For four weeks, administration officials have said President Bush would come forward with a nominee to succeed George J. Tenet, who left the post last week so the job would not be held by an acting director if terrorists attempt an attack on the U.S. homeland to disrupt the election.
The early White House favorite, Rep. Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.), a former CIA case officer who is chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, was expected by administration officials to breeze through confirmation because of his position on Capitol Hill. That view dissolved after senior Democrats on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, including the panel's vice chairman, John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), said they considered Goss too partisan.
With the CIA under attack for faulty intelligence on Iraq and lawmakers in both parties pushing for reform of the intelligence community, the Democrats threatened to turn a confirmation hearing for Goss or any other nominee they consider too partisan into a review of the Bush administration's prewar case for ousting Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.
More recently, White House aides, always speaking anonymously, have floated other names as they continue looking for a viable nominee. John E. McLaughlin, the deputy director, has taken over as acting head of the CIA, and officials said he is a candidate to hold on to the job.
Other names offered by administration officials have included Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage; former senator Sam Nunn (D-Ga.); former ambassador Thomas R. Pickering; Lt. Gen. Michael V. Hayden, director of the National Security Agency; John J. Hamre, deputy defense secretary in the Clinton administration and now president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies; and former New Jersey governor Thomas H. Kean (R), now co-chairman of the commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Bush's deputy national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley, has also been mentioned in news reports, as has former Navy secretary John F. Lehman, although a White House official said last week Lehman was not under consideration.
Nunn and Pickering have said they are not interested. Armitage, a close friend of Tenet, has told friends he wants to leave government this year.
Pickering, a former senior ambassador, said in an interview that it would be a bad idea to name a director before the Nov. 2 election, given the campaign-year battle over intelligence failures.
"I could not think of a worse time" for a new director to try to take over the CIA, Pickering said. "The politics are terrible," and to survive the nominee "ought to have a solid background" within the agency and "ideas of how to reorganize it."
Nunn, who is practicing law and working on nuclear control matters through the Nuclear Threat Initiative, said in a statement he is "not interested."
When McLaughlin took over on Monday as acting director, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice hinted there may be a delay in naming a permanent successor to Tenet when she told CNN that the president is still "considering his options."
She said Bush is "looking hard at what will be needed for intelligence reform," noting that the 9/11 commission will make recommendations later this month, the Senate intelligence committee will have reform hearings next week and the president's panel, the Silberman-Robb Commission, will not report until March next year.
Rice said the president has confidence in acting director McLaughlin, describing the 32-year CIA veteran as "a very fine professional who is going to run the agency and is quite capable of doing that in a way that supports our most important priorities, including the war on terrorism."
A senior administration official, who said he believes Bush may yet put forward a nominee before the election, said the White House realizes that Senate confirmation hearings would have to be delayed until September, just weeks before Election Day.
Last Sunday, on NBC's "Meet the Press," Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence, said Bush will have to send up "an extraordinary nominee." If he does, Roberts went on, "we will go full time into the hearings to get him -- or her -- confirmed." Rockefeller, on the same program, said the "standard" for the nominee should be that "whoever is reelected or elected president will [want to] continue to use that person."
In his first week on the job, McLaughlin gave interviews to National Public Radio and CNN and is scheduled to appear on Fox News Sunday, in effect introducing himself to a wider audience than he has reached before.
"Being acting director doesn't mean being part-time director. This is a full-time job," he said on CNN. "That's what the president has asked me to do." He added, "It's his decision whether I continue in this capacity or whether he nominates someone else."
Yesterday, in a pep talk to CIA employees, McLaughlin acknowledged that "as an agency and a community, we are taking some heat right now, and there will be more when the 9/11 commission releases its findings, perhaps as early as next week."
"Some criticism is justified; much is not," he said, adding, "we will correct the record when critics go too far."
-------- war crimes
Colonel Is Investigated in Iraqi Death
July 17, 2004
By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr. and ERIC SCHMITT
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/17/international/middleeast/17jord.html?pagewanted=all
WASHINGTON, July 16 - Army officials investigating the death of an Iraqi detainee at Abu Ghraib prison are questioning officers who were at the prison to determine whether there is evidence of a conspiracy in connection with the death, according to officials who have been briefed about the matter.
The body of the Iraqi detainee, pictured wrapped in plastic and packed in ice, became one of the most infamous and enduring images to emerge during the prisoner abuse scandal.
A senior Army official said Friday that Army investigators had questioned Lt. Col. Steven L. Jordan, the head of the interrogation center at Abu Ghraib prison, and other officers at the prison about the death of the Iraqi prisoner. They have also been questioned about the deaths of other detainees at Abu Ghraib.
But the Army official said that Colonel Jordan was not at this time a target of the investigation into the death of the Iraqi prisoner. "He's one of many who are being questioned in connection to this and other deaths," the official said.
CBS News reported Friday that Colonel Jordan had been informed by the Army's criminal investigation division that he was under investigation for conspiracy to commit murder in connection with the Iraqi's death.
The Army official said that Colonel Jordan had not yet been formally put on notice that he could be charged with conspiracy in connection with the death, nor had he been singled out during the inquiry.
In an interview on Friday night, one of Colonel Jordan's lawyers, Jonathan Shapiro, said, "Steve Jordan is a professional who served his country for a number of years very well and has done nothing wrong, and I'm sure the military will reach the same conclusion."
Colonel Jordan, a reservist, worked at the Army's Intelligence and Security Command at Fort Belvoir, Va. Army officials have said he was called to active duty in September to lead the interrogation center.
Last month, the commander of the military police company whose members have been charged with abusing prisoners testified at a hearing in Iraq that someone he referred to as Jordan was present one night in November 2003 among a group of people in a room at the prison with the bloodied body of the Iraqi prisoner, who had died during interrogation.
It was not clear from the testimony of the commander, Capt. Donald Reese, whether he was referring to Colonel Jordan. Captain Reese testified that the group of people were discussing what to do. While the group was gathered around the body, he testified, the man he identified as Jordan ordered a lower-ranking officer to "get some ice out of the chow hall" to store the body.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- homeland security
Interviews Of Muslims To Broaden FBI Hopes to Avert A Terrorist Attack
By Mary Beth Sheridan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, July 17, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A56080-2004Jul16?language=printer
FBI agents have launched a series of interviews of Muslims and Arab Americans in the Washington area and across the country, hoping to glean information that could prevent a major terrorist attack during this election year.
A few dozen voluntary interviews of community leaders, students, businesspeople and others have been conducted so far, according to attorneys and Muslim activists. Authorities said they do not know how many people will be contacted, but the effort is expected to expand significantly in the next week or so.
The new round of questioning is also far more targeted than an earlier program of voluntary interviews with men from Arab and Muslim countries, which followed the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and was criticized for being ineffective and using profiling.
"This is not a general population. They are identified by intelligence or investigative information," said an FBI official who spoke on condition of anonymity, in line with department policy. He added that the questioning did not signify that the people were under investigation themselves.
The questions being posed vary widely, according to attorneys, activists and interviewees. Several people in California and Arizona have been asked whether they knew anyone who had recently been in the Pakistani border region of Waziristan, regarded as a possible refuge for al Qaeda figures. They were also asked about Abu Nour, which agents identified as a mosque and school in Syria that was popular with American converts to Islam, the attorneys and activists said.
"We were told by the FBI agents that they're concerned there could be a coming threat from people who are recent converts to Islam," said Stacy Tolchin, a San Francisco lawyer who accompanied a Turkish Kurdish immigrant to an interview this week.
Law enforcement officials decided to step up efforts to contact Muslims and Arab Americans because of intelligence reports that al Qaeda is planning a large-scale attack in coming months in the United States, Attorney General John D. Ashcroft said recently.
"While we currently lack precise knowledge about when, where and how they are planning to attack, we are actively working to gain that knowledge," Ashcroft said in a news release July 9. "As part of that effort, we are again reaching out to partners in the Muslim and Arab American communities for any information they may have."
Law enforcement officials appear to be using different approaches in the interviews. In some cases, they have asked prominent local Muslim figures to simply pass on any helpful information, activists said. Asim Ghafoor, a Muslim attorney in Washington who was visited by two FBI agents about a week ago, said they noted that he had represented various Muslim organizations and charities and asked, "Is there anything we need to know?" He said he assured them that there was not.
Other interviews are highly specific. James Hacking, a Muslim activist in St. Louis, accompanied a U.S. graduate student of Iranian descent to an interview with the FBI this week. The student was asked about Iranian groups based in the Middle East and in the United States and whether he knew people who had been in contact with the Iranian Mission to the United Nations, Hacking said.
The young man did not have such information, Hacking said.
"I recognize the FBI are in a tough spot. They're just trying to do their job. They have information they want to investigate," Hacking said. But he added that he was uneasy that a U.S.-born person was singled out. The young man declined to offer information about people he knew.
Some of the interview subjects were also asked broad questions, such as their opinion of the U.S. invasion of Iraq or of the Syrian government, activists said.
Those being sought for interviews appear to represent a broad spectrum. Attorneys and activists said they had heard from students, high-tech professionals, Muslim leaders and others who had been contacted. Most were immigrants, but at least one African American Muslim and some U.S.-born residents were also included.
"Within two days, I received 10 calls from people freaking out because the FBI was contacting them," said Deedra Abboud, executive director of the Arizona chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
She said that the FBI agents went out of their way to be low-key but that Muslims were fearful when they got the calls, worrying that they were under investigation themselves.
Leaders of Muslim and Arab American organizations have been trying to build bridges with federal officials since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Many say that the earlier interviews cast too wide a net and reflected the wrong approach.
"It creates fear in the community and accomplishes absolutely nothing," said James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute. The Justice Department has defended earlier interviews with Middle Eastern men and Iraqi immigrants, saying they provided useful information and were a way to build contacts.
Some activists said that Muslims and Arabs were nervous about responding to the FBI, in part because thousands of immigrants wound up being deported after being contacted in earlier phases of the government's anti-terrorism campaign. Several people in the Washington area have told FBI officers that they will meet with them only if their attorney is present.
Ghafoor said he was happy to talk to the FBI. But he was concerned that they were going to people's workplaces.
"I said, 'Hey, some people lose their jobs when the FBI shows up at their offices,' " he said.
The FBI is carrying out the interviews in collaboration with the regional Joint Terrorism Task Forces, which include law enforcement officers from other agencies. Those officers have sometimes done the interviews on behalf of the FBI.
Yaser Alamoodi, a student at Arizona State University, was surprised to get a visit at home recently from a campus police officer with the local Joint Terrorism Task Force. The 27-year-old student, who is a Yemeni citizen applying for U.S. residency, said that he agreed to the interview and that the officer was friendly and polite.
Alamoodi said the questions included whether he knew anyone who had recently returned from Pakistan, anyone who had shown interest in a government building or agency or anyone who had shown extreme hostility toward Americans.
"The questions were just ridiculous," he said. "I said, 'You guys really think you're going to get anywhere with these kind of questions?' "
Alamoodi said he was puzzled about why he was selected for an interview.
"I don't go to the mosque that often," he said, "unless they have free food."
Staff writer Dan Eggen contributed to this report.
--------
Justice Dept. Says Threat Is Not Issue for Election
July 17, 2004
By DAVID JOHNSTON
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/17/politics/17elect.html?pagewanted=all
WASHINGTON, July 16 - The Justice Department has no plans to examine federal laws or legal precedents to determine whether the Nov. 2 presidential election might be rescheduled because of the threat of a terrorist attack, department officials said this week.
The Department of Homeland Security had asked the Justice Department to review the law regarding an election delay, a step reported Sunday in Newsweek.
The magazine said the homeland security secretary, Tom Ridge, had been urged to make the request by DeForest B. Soaries Jr., chairman of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, which was established after the November 2000 elections to help states with logistical issues.
Mr. Soaries wrote a letter saying that the New York Board of Elections had suspended primary elections in New York on Sept. 11, 2001, after the terrorist attacks that morning. "Unlike New York, the federal government has no agency that has the statutory authority to cancel and reschedule a federal election," Mr. Soaries said.
The possibility that an election might be postponed stirred immediate concerns among lawmakers who said that the voting should go forward as planned and suggested that the government was wrong to consider a change in a core democratic institution in response to threats of terrorism.
The issue seemed to resonate more deeply because of concerns expressed by counterterrorism officials about the March commuter train bombings in Madrid. The officials said Al Qaeda believed that the attack had influenced the outcome of the Spanish elections and might prompt the terror network to try a similar assault in the United States.
After Newsweek's article, a spokesman for the Homeland Security Department said a request for a review had been made to the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel. On Monday the spokesman said the request was only an informal communication and represented little more than an effort to advise the Justice Department of Mr. Soaries's letter, not a formal request for a legal opinion.
A Justice Department official, after a brief inquiry into the matter, said that no communication of any kind had been received from the Homeland Security Department and that no one at Justice had any intention of reviewing whether to delay the election. Moreover, the official denied that there had ever been any conversations between officials of the two agencies on the matter.
Homeland Security officials said the informal communication was sent.
Beyond that, the Justice Department official said lawyers at the department had concluded that no one in the executive branch had any legal authority over the timing of elections, which he said was an issue for Congress to decide.
Other Bush Administration officials said they had never considered a legal review of the matter. Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, said the subject was a nonissue.
"We've had elections in this country when we were at war, even when we were in civil war, and we should have the elections on time," Ms. Rice said. "That's the view of the president. That's the view of the administration. No one is thinking of postponing the elections."
--------
Dress Code May Hinder Their Work, Air Marshals Say
July 17, 2004
By BRIAN WINGFIELD
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/17/politics/17marshals.html
WASHINGTON, July 16 - Beards are out. So are jeans and athletic shoes. Suit coats are in, even on the steamiest summer days.
That dress code, imposed by the Department of Homeland Security, makes federal air marshals uneasy - and not just because casual clothes are more comfortable in cramped airline seats. The marshals fear that their appearance makes it easier for terrorists to identify them, according to a professional group representing more than 1,300 air marshals.
"If a 12-year-old can pick them out, a trained terrorist has no problem picking them out," said John D. Amat, a spokesman for the group, the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association.
Documents and memorandums issued by the Department of Homeland Security and field offices of the Federal Air Marshal Service say air marshals must "present a professional image" and "blend unnoticed into their environment." Some air marshals have argued that the two requirements are contradictory.
Federal air marshals must have neatly trimmed hair and men must be clean-shaven, the documents say. Some of the service's 21 field offices have mandated that male officers wear suits, ties and dress shoes while on duty, even in summer heat. Women are required to wear blouses and skirts or dress slacks. Jeans, athletic shoes and noncollared shirts are prohibited.
In April, the officers' group sent a letter to members of Congress saying that the "military-style grooming standards and a blanket 'sports coat' dress policy," along with conspicuous boarding procedures, jeopardize the safety of air marshals.
At least two airline industry unions, the Allied Pilots Association and the Association of Flight Attendants, have publicly backed the assertions of the officers' group.
A spokeswoman for Senator Herb Kohl, Democrat of Wisconsin, said that he became aware of the issue when The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel contacted his office after one of its reporters spotted several air marshals in the Milwaukee airport. The spokeswoman, Lynn Becker, said that the senator was working with the director of the Federal Air Marshal Service, Thomas D. Quinn, primarily to address the boarding procedures, but that they were also discussing the dress code issue.
Since May, the Air Marshal Service has changed the check-in procedure for its air marshals, no longer requiring them to sign a logbook when they board.
The Federal Air Marshal Service acknowledges that a dress code for its marshals does exist, but it will not give many specifics, saying that it is "security sensitive information."
However, Dave Adams, a spokesman for the service, said, "There is nothing in the policy that says we have to wear a suit and tie" and "there is nothing in the policy that places our federal air marshals at risk."
Mr. Adams said that the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association "is misrepresenting our dress code policy." Mr. Adams said a dress code was put in place in April 2002 after the airline industry complained that air marshals' attire was too casual. He said some marshals had worn shorts, blue jeans, sandals and T-shirts while on duty.
"In order to gain respect in a situation, you must be attired to gain respect," Mr. Adams said in an interview. He said if air marshals were allowed to be too casual in their dress, "they probably would not gain the respect of passengers if a situation were to occur."
Andrea Houck, 52, who was traveling through New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport this week, said that she thought federal air marshals should be "totally undercover."
"Look around you," Ms. Houck said as she pointed to other passengers waiting in the food court. "Most people are traveling in T-shirts, sweatshirts and khakis." She added: "If I was a terrorist and I spotted someone dressed like an air marshal in a suit, I wouldn't get on that flight. I would get on another one."
Eddy Ramírez contributed reporting from New York for this article.
-------- justice
Protecting us without tainting the Constitution
By Geoffrey Forden
July 17, 2004
Boston Globe
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2004/07/17/protecting_us_without_tainting_the_constitution/
UNFORTUNATELY for Jose Padilla, Attorney General John Ashcroft believes in disaster movies as much as Padilla does. The plot: high school dropout follows Internet instructions to make a weapon of mass destruction. Fortunately for all of us, Hollywood thrillers usually get the details wrong. And it is the details that make a weapon deadly. Nevertheless, this story line has been used to deny a US citizen his constitutional rights.
In June of 2002, Ashcroft accused Padilla of planning to explode a "dirty bomb," basically a bag of radioactive material wrapped in dynamite. Dirty bombs are the national security community's current favorite disaster with analysts vying with each other to see who can predict the most dire outcome.
Some alarmists have even predicted that half of Manhattan would have to be abandoned due to a single terrorist dirty bomb. This fear is what the Bush administration used to deny Padilla his civil rights. The truth about dirty bombs is far less frightening, and that wasn't even what Padilla was originally trying to do.
Instead, we learn that the government believes that Padilla was intent on a far more conventional attack on the United States.
According to government allegations released recently in an attempt to explain why Padilla has not been allowed to see his attorney in two years, Padilla first tried to convince Al Qaeda that he could build an atomic bomb based on information he found on the Internet.
When Al Qaeda didn't seem to believe that was possible, Padilla tried to sell them on his building a dirty bomb.
It has become an urban legend that the Internet contains instructions for making almost any weapon of mass destruction. However, the practical details are almost always missing.
For instance, Internet instructions for nuclear bombs always seem to contain the line "place the sphere of plutonium inside the high explosives" without explaining how to make a sphere of plutonium.
In a similar way, analysts of dirty bombs always assume that the terrorists can manage the difficult task of creating a cloud of radioactive particles just the right size to float over large areas. In fact, nearly all the radioactive particles of any dirty bomb made by Padilla would have fallen in a small area and have been easily decontaminated. That, of course, assumes that Padilla could have stolen highly radioactive material and assembled the bomb without first being killed by the radioactivity.
What is truly frightening is that Al Qaeda seemed to know these difficulties while Ashcroft did not. In fact, the papers the government released to the public make it clear that Al Qaeda is nothing if not practical. Al Qaeda's chief of operations dismissed both of Padilla's terrorist fantasies and insisted that Padilla stick to a much more practical plan: blowing up apartment buildings using rooms filled with natural gas.
Let us assume for the moment everything the government now alleges against Padilla is true. Padilla possesses no unique knowledge for this attack. His Al Qaeda superiors had to tell him how to accomplish this attack. There is nothing to prevent Al Qaeda from sending in other agents to complete the attack. Padilla, on the other hand is completely known to the FBI and was at the time of his arrest. If he is released now, he could be watched and prevented from doing anything harmful.
If Padilla stands trial now, it seems likely that any of the "evidence" the government has accumulated would be thrown out of court. That is the issue we should be debating right now: how to protect the populace and still guarantee the accused, and the government, a fair day in court.
A credible threat to use a weapon of mass destruction, even one as ineffective as a dirty bomb, is enough to suspend a citizen's rights while the plot is being foiled. But once that is accomplished, the citizen should be returned to the protection of the Constitution. We need to find a way to protect the population without tainting the ultimate prosecution of a suspected criminal.
What is now happening to Padilla has more to do with protecting Ashcroft's reputation than protecting American lives.
Geoffrey Forden, who was chief of multidiscipline analysis at the UN weapons inspection agency UNMOVIC, is a research associate in MIT's Security Studies Program.
-------- police
Plan for Intelligence Outlined
Kerry Proposes New FBI Branch, More Spies Abroad
By Dana Priest and Jim VandeHei
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, July 17, 2004; Page A06
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A56192-2004Jul16.html
Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kerry yesterday proposed at least doubling the number of American spies overseas and building a separate domestic intelligence capability within the FBI, rather than a new independent domestic spy agency that had been proposed by his running mate, Sen. John Edwards (N.C.).
The Kerry campaign rolled out several other changes to the intelligence community, including the creation of a Cabinet-level national director of intelligence, but described the proposals in broad terms without specifics.
Speaking to reporters at his Washington campaign headquarters, the Massachusetts senator criticized President Bush for failing to take responsibility for a series of intelligence failures, including Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and faulty prewar intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.
"As commander in chief, the president of the United States must take responsibility for what happens on his or her watch," said Kerry, who served six years on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Nearly three years since the al Qaeda attacks, "this president has not taken action sufficient to fix the intelligence problems that plague us," he said.
Asked yesterday whether he would have voted to authorize the use of force against Iraq if he had known the weakness of the prewar intelligence, outlined in a Senate intelligence committee report last week, Kerry said he would not answer a hypothetical question. "My goal is not to find a way to go to war," he said. "My goal will be to find a way to avoid going to war, not create an atmosphere of pressure."
Campaign aides declined to say what level of funding or staff a Kerry administration would propose for the CIA's clandestine service, saying that such figures are classified.
Even before Sept. 11, CIA Director George J. Tenet had begun increasing the number of operatives being brought into the agency. After the attacks, the CIA embarked on one of its greatest recruiting drives. Tenet asked for a 70 percent increase in the number of new spies and a 25 percent increase in the Directorate of Operations, the agency's clandestine service, which manages the agency's counterterrorism center, espionage and paramilitary operations. The increases have been much larger than 25 percent, government officials say.
Kerry rejected a plan outlined earlier this year by Edwards, who currently serves on the Senate intelligence panel, to create a British-style domestic intelligence agency. Instead, Kerry wants to accelerate a plan proposed by FBI Director Robert H. Mueller III to create a separate professional track for domestic intelligence training and operations within the FBI.
Supporters of the Edwards approach believe the FBI will never be able to transform itself from an institution that collects information for criminal prosecutions to one that collects intelligence on terrorist networks with the primary goal of thwarting plots against U.S. interests. Critics say a domestic spy agency would not be compatible with traditional U.S. privacy concerns.
Kerry's other proposals include creating a Cabinet-level director of national intelligence post to coordinate the budget, operations and strategy of the 15 U.S. intelligence departments and agencies. Such a position is opposed by the administration but favored by a long line of independent panels that have studied reform, including one headed by former White House national security adviser Brent Scowcroft, who served under President George H.W. Bush.
To better coordinate operations and information sharing, Kerry would create interagency task forces organized around subjects and targets such as terrorism, proliferation or particular hostile countries.
Speaking later in the day to members of the American Federation of Teachers, Kerry criticized Bush's education policies, accusing the president of underfunding programs for schools, teachers and students. "Millions of children have been left behind," Kerry said. "Politicians who talk about valuing morality and personal responsibility ought to start by keeping their own promises."
Kerry was most critical of Bush for failing to "fully fund" the No Child Left Behind education law, which established new accountability standards and penalties for schools that fail to meet them. Still, Bush has greatly increased education spending, and Republicans say there is ample money for states to implement the changes.
Kerry, who voted for the No Child Left Behind law, said he would provide several billion dollars annually in additional funding and would allow more leeway to schools struggling to meet the standards.
Kerry touted his plan to recruit and train 500,000 new teachers over the next four years at a cost of $30 billion, and he vowed to push for better teacher salaries. "Pay for teachers is a national disgrace," he said. Kerry also outlined plans to expand after-school programs and to provide incentives to lower college tuition.
Kerry says he would finance these programs by repealing the Bush tax cuts for people making more than $200,000. Republicans say he is overpromising because the tax cut repeal is not big enough to finance all of his proposals.
Edwards spent yesterday in Los Angeles, dropping by a farmers market to greet voters and attending a fundraiser at the Millennium Biltmore Hotel. Last night, he spoke at a dinner hosted by the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project, where he talked about Kerry's proposals to help working families and to reform immigration policies. The group, which is celebrating its 30th anniversary, is in the midst of a massive voter registration drive for the 2004 election.
Edwards likened his bootstraps story -- growing up in a working-class family in Robbins, N.C., to become a wealthy man and a candidate for the second-highest office in the country -- to the quest of many immigrant families.
"In Robbins, I learned about hard work, responsibility, faith and family. . . . And today those values are what still bring families to Robbins -- the only thing that's changed is the town's now 50 percent Latino," he said. "I have lived the American dream, and when John Kerry is our president more people will, too."
He said Kerry's proposals for health care reform, job creation and college tuition assistance would help immigrant families move into the middle class.
Staff writer Vanessa Williams in Los Angeles contributed to this report.
-------- prisons / prisoners
Detainee Reviews Become the Routine
Occupation Forces Clear Backlog of Cases That Grew With Iraqi Insurgency
By Jackie Spinner
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, July 17, 2004; Page A15
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A56261-2004Jul16?language=printer
CAMP VICTORY, Iraq -- Three officers in camouflage fatigues divvied up a stack of green, pink and cream-colored folders in the courthouse on this sprawling U.S. Army base outside Baghdad. Each file contained witness statements, charging documents and handwritten appeals in Arabic from security detainees in the custody of U.S. forces.
For more than five hours one day last month, the soldiers -- a British military intelligence officer, a U.S. Army military police officer and a U.S. Marine Corps judge -- presented the details of the cases to one another, debated their merits and then voted whether to recommend that the detainees stay in custody or be set free.
A Sudanese man detained at the Iraqi border in November was recommended for release after the officers determined that he lived in Iraq and was just trying to get home. But a man caught in December with a financial ledger indicating that he might be selling weapons would have to remain at Abu Ghraib prison, one of two facilities in Iraq where U.S. forces hold people they consider security threats.
This review board is one component among several in the process that the military uses to decide whether to keep detainees in custody and how long to hold them. Military lawyers make the initial decisions about whether there is sufficient evidence to hold a suspect, and then cases are passed to the review board. U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, deputy commander of detainee operations in Iraq, has final authority over who is released. At each stage, military officials have extraordinary discretion over who stays and who goes.
Now, three weeks after political authority was transferred to an Iraqi interim government, the U.S.-led military occupation has cleared a backlog of cases that started building last fall as insurgent attacks increased. From February through June, the board reviewed more than 8,000 cases and approved releases in nearly a quarter of them.
"There is a process," said Maj. Patricia Harris, Miller's chief of detention operations. "We've taken great steps to reduce the population to that bare bones of bad guys. We're not rounding up people and holding them without a review in place."
Officials have adopted more-rigid standards for keeping people detained, largely because of political pressure arising from the abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib. One of the changes Miller made when he came to Iraq in March was to require the review board to put a written justification in the file for why someone was being kept in detention.
"If we don't have the evidence, we don't hold them, and we've become much more careful about that," said Capt. Keith Petty, an Army lawyer with the 1st Calvary Division's 2nd Brigade. "There were people we detained who aren't a threat. It just makes people more angry, and it doesn't help us out."
For civilians picked up by U.S. forces, the first stop is the detention facility operated by the unit that grabbed them. For the 1st Calvary Division's Black Jack Brigade, that is 29 Palms, a former hunting lodge on the north side of Camp Victory.
At 6:15 one recent morning, Staff Sgt. Jesse Jackson, an Army combat engineer with the 91st Engineer Battalion, brought in five men who been captured outside a home in the west Baghdad suburb of Ghazalia on suspicion of making explosive devices.
Before the suspects were allowed in, guards checked to see that the captors had completed a mandatory packet for each of them, including a standardized form with information on how and where the suspect was detained and two sworn statements from soldiers about the arrest.
After the initial processing, soldiers took the suspects individually to a bank of showers in a covered patio area, where they washed and changed into orange jumpsuits. Each man's clothes and personal items were recorded in a log and placed in a plastic bin marked with the man's detention identification number.
The suspects were fingerprinted and photographed and their retinas were scanned; the resulting data was electronically stored.
A large sign posted in the processing center instructed the detainees to keep their heads bowed at all times and their hands behind their backs.
Sgt. 1st Class Douglas Bawden is the warden of 29 Palms. He closely guards the evidence against detainees so that guards do not know why they were brought in, a rule he put in place after having to process a detainee accused of killing a buddy of his. "It was one of the hardest things I ever did," he said. "I had to smile and shake my head."
Bawden estimated that more than 600 detainees have passed through 29 Palms in recent months. "I don't let these guys call them prisoners, either," he said. "They're detainees because we don't know if they are innocent or not."
Detainees spend an average of 96 hours at first-stop detention centers such as 29 Palms while their cases are reviewed by two military lawyers. While there, they are given a Koran and prayer rug and soldiers' rations. They also receive a thorough medical examination and treatment for conditions such as diabetes or ulcers.
Petty is one of the two military lawyers who review the cases, which must be looked at within 24 hours of capture. His job is to recommend whether a detainee should be sent to Abu Ghraib or freed. "People we sent to Abu Ghraib, we're pretty confident these are bad guys and they should be sent away," he said.
Once detainees arrive at Abu Ghraib, their cases are reviewed by another set of military lawyers.
One of those lawyers, Marine Capt. Chris Gaffney, said he looks for standard probable cause in deciding whether a detainee should be kept behind barbed wire. "We're not making a finding if the person is innocent or guilty," he said. "We're trying to determine if the person is a security threat."
Petty said the process has improved significantly since last year. "During combat operations, it was difficult to focus on anything but combat operation," he said. "But now we've had the opportunity to clear it up."
The next stage of the review process is the three-member board here at Camp Victory.
On the day the board agreed to free the Sudanese man, the trio reviewed 300 cases and recommended that 60 detainees be freed. In the file of each detainee who would remain in custody, the Marine Corps judge, not identified here because of security concerns, scribbled the person's alleged offense: Attacked coalition forces. Possessed explosive materials. Weapons dealer. Financed attacks.
Because the entire process takes as long as it does, some detainees are held without clear cause and others are kept longer than they should be, military authorities acknowledge. As a result, there is a widespread perception among Iraqis that U.S. soldiers pick people up at random and hold them for no reason.
As he waited outside Abu Ghraib recently, Jaber Mansour, 60, a farmer from Diyala province with three relatives inside the prison, voiced a common complaint.
"They arrested them without telling them what they are charged with," Mansour said. "Arresting people without telling them why is a crime by itself. The democracy they brought is just an illusion."
--------
U.S. Is Readying Review Panels for Cuba Base
July 17, 2004
By NEIL A. LEWIS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/17/politics/17gitmo.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, July 16 -Moving at what officials acknowledge is extraordinary speed, the Pentagon may begin special military hearings by the end of next week allowing prisoners held as unlawful combatants at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to try to convince a board of officers that they are being wrongly detained.
At the same time, law firms enlisted by civil liberties groups have been rushing to establish a different route of challenging the detentions, by filing court petitions. By next week, petitions may have been filed in federal court here on behalf of as many as a third of the detainees.
In effect, the two sides are engaged in a kind of undeclared legal battle to decide how the fate of the 594 detainees remaining in Cuba will be determined in light of a Supreme Court ruling issued last month. And both the Pentagon and the defense lawyers evidently believe that they need to move speedily to gain an advantage.
In their decision, the justices held that the federal judiciary's reach extended to Guantánamo Bay and that prisoners there must be allowed an opportunity to challenge their detention before a judge or other "neutral decision-maker.''
The Defense Department responded last week with plans for hearings at Guantánamo before newly created Combatant Status Review Tribunals, which would qualify as neutral, the department said, since the officers serving on them would have no stake in the fate of a particular detainee.
The civil liberties groups maintain that this solution has less to do with the Defense Department's intention to comply with the justices than with a determination to maintain control of the challenge process. The Pentagon evidently hopes that these hearings will be enough to persuade the courts not to intervene, say the critics, who as a result have added incentive to file their petitions as quickly as possible.
Gordon R. England, the secretary of the Navy, who put together the Pentagon's plan, said at a press briefing Friday that the first hearing might take place late next week. He said officials hoped to get quickly to a point of moving 72 detainees a week through the process.
"We're confident that we will finish this, on the outside, in three to four months," Mr. England said, though he acknowledged that the procedures to be followed at the hearings were not yet complete.
One military lawyer noted that the Pentagon usually moved in a more deliberate fashion; its plans for military commissions to try some detainees for war crimes were developed more than two years ago, for instance, and there has yet to be a commission proceeding. Of the new review process, the lawyer said, "This is like moving at the speed of light for the military.''
Under procedures for the review, each detainee choosing to participate will meet with a military officer who will act as his representative, but not as his lawyer or other kind of advocate. The detainee will be given a document with an unclassified version of the accusations that were the basis on which he was deemed an unlawful combatant.
With the help of his representative, the prisoner will then argue his case before one of three tribunals, each composed of three officers. Secretary England said the proceedings would be open to a small press contingent, although probably not in time for the earliest hearings.
Several of the lawyers who have challenged the detentions were highly skeptical of the military's purpose in moving quickly on the hearings.
Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights, a New York group that helped bring the challenge leading to the Supreme Court's decision, said it appeared that the Pentagon was engaged in a last-ditch effort to retain control of the detainees by arguing that the military had provided a fair process and so persuading the courts not to take jurisdiction.
"Our theory here,'' Mr. Ratner said, "is that we believe the Supreme Court decision gives the inmates the right to file habeas corpus petitions in federal courts.''
Joseph Margulies of the University of Chicago Law School, who argued the case for Mr. Ratner's organization before the Supreme Court, said the justices' decision required that detainees have an opportunity to contest their imprisonment under standards that are reviewable by federal courts for fairness.
"There is no way that these tribunals could meet that standard," Mr. Margulies said, citing several features of the plan, among them that the detainees will be represented not by advocates but by military officers with whom they will have no lawyer-client relationship. In the absence of a confidential relationship, any information a military representative obtained from a detainee could be shared with the tribunal.
Secretary England said the proceedings were not supposed to be like trials.
"This is a fact-based determination," he said. "This isn't guilt or innocence. This is a look at facts. Here's a person: are they, are they not, an enemy combatant?''
But Mr. Margulies said he believed that the hearings were part of an effort by the Bush administration to "keep Guantánamo an enclave outside the law.''
"The entire process,'' he said, "is a sham."
Defense lawyers said they believed that in order to press their cases before the courts, they needed to be allowed to meet with their clients. Some have been promised that they will be able to meet them, but none have yet been given permission to do so. Thomas Wilner, a Washington lawyer who represents 13 detainees from Kuwait, said of the process, "I hope they are not delaying this on purpose.''
Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman, said in an interview that there was no intention to delay lawyers' visits to Guantánamo.
"It's obviously not a place you can just fly to," Mr. Whitman said. "We are working on the issues of clearances and logistics."
Pentagon officials and the defense lawyers appear to agree that the hearings may well bring a significant reduction in Guantánamo's population. Asked what would happen when a tribunal deemed detainees not to be unlawful combatants, Mr. England replied, "They go home."
Mr. England said that in the last few days, officials had notified all the Guantánamo detainees of their right to a hearing. About 95 percent asked to participate and to see a representative, he said. The remaining 5 percent, he said, angrily rejected the process, some crumpling up and throwing away the information sheet telling them of it.
The information sheet, which officials said had been translated for each of the detainees, also notified them of a right to challenge their detentions in federal courts as well. Mr. England said he did not know how many of the detainees inquired about that right when shown the notices.
In another announcement related to detainees of the American military, the Pentagon said it was setting up an office to keep senior officials better informed of reports from the International Committee of the Red Cross. At Congressional hearings into abuses at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad, senior officers acknowledged that they had not responded properly to a Red Cross report about conditions there.
Ryan Henry, the principal deputy under secretary of defense for policy, told reporters that the new Office of Detainee Affairs was being created as a "correction vector."
-------- POLITICS
-------- investigations
9/11 Panel Is Said to Urge New Post for Intelligence
July 17, 2004
By PHILIP SHENON
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/17/politics/17panel.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, July 16 - The final report of the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks will recommend the creation of a cabinet-level post to oversee the nation's intelligence agencies, a position that would take power away from the C.I.A., the F.B.I., the National Security Council, the Pentagon and other agencies that face blistering criticism from the panel, government officials who have seen the report said.
They said that the creation of the post of a national intelligence director would be the most important of the recommendations in the long-awaited report, which is due out next week.
The proposal is likely to face especially fierce opposition from the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency, which would both have to cede significant authority over the government's estimated $40 billion annual intelligence budget and other policy matters. The White House, however, has suggested in recent weeks that it is willing to consider an overhaul of the intelligence community.
Under the commission's proposal, one official said, the director of central intelligence, who is now responsible for running the C.I.A. and for nominal oversight of other intelligence agencies, would be expected to lose much of that oversight role and would report to the White House through the new national intelligence director.
The bulk of the commission's final report will catalog the chain of intelligence and law enforcement failures that allowed 19 terrorists to enter the United States undetected and carry out attacks that killed more than 3,000 people, damaged the global economy and put the United States on the road to war, first in Afghanistan and then in Iraq.
The officials said the report, which is expected to total more than 500 pages, would make other important recommendations, including a proposal for a major reorganization of the way Congress oversees intelligence agencies and for a restructuring of the F.B.I., which is now responsible for domestic intelligence.
The recommendations were described in separate interviews by three people who have either read or been briefed about the report. They spoke on condition of anonymity because of the strict embargo on publication of the report ordered by the commission.
The officials said that the commission's proposal for the creation of a national intelligence director would be similar in many ways to plans offered over the last two years by a presidential advisory panel on intelligence, by the joint Congressional committee that also investigated the Sept. 11 attacks and by a variety of prominent lawmakers, including Senator John Kerry, the presumed Democratic presidential nominee.
That White House advisory panel, led by Brent Scowcroft, the former national security adviser, called for management of the government's 15 intelligence agencies, and their budget authority, to be put under the direction of a single person in a bid to end the fragmentation that has long plagued the government's efforts to gather and share intelligence.
The proposal by General Scowcroft remains classified, and it has never been clear whether it envisioned an overall intelligence chief who would also be the director of central intelligence, or whether it would separate those responsibilities.
Most of the nation's intelligence budget is now under the control of the Pentagon, which controls the National Security Agency, which intercepts and decodes global communications; the Defense Intelligence Agency, which is the C.I.A.'s military counterpart; and the National Reconnaissance Office, which develops and operates spy satellites.
The leaders of the 10-member bipartisan Sept. 11 commission, which is at the end of a 19-month investigation that has largely rewritten the history of the Sept. 11 attacks, have refused to discuss the panel's recommendations before the release of the report, which is due out on Thursday.
But the panel has signaled for months that it would call for a shakeup of agencies responsible for combating terrorism, especially the C.I.A. and F.B.I., which have been subjected to withering criticism by the panel throughout its inquiry, and for far better sharing of information among agencies that are now scattered throughout the federal government and have a poor history of cooperation.
In its often riveting public hearings this year, the panel of five Democrats and five Republicans has shown how different intelligence agencies had information before Sept. 11 that had it been widely shared, might have allowed the government to apprehend at least some of the hijackers before the attacks and possibly to have pre-empted the attacks entirely.
Both the chairman of the panel, Thomas H. Kean, a former Republican governor of New Jersey, and the vice chairman, Lee H. Hamilton, a former House Democrat from Indiana, have said that evidence gathered by their panel showed that the attacks could probably have been prevented.
The panel has repeatedly pointed to the failure of F.B.I. headquarters to follow up on the work of field agents in Minneapolis, who apprehended Zacarias Moussaoui in August 2001 and immediately warned Washington that they feared Mr. Moussaoui, a student pilot, was part of a terrorist plot involving passenger planes. The report also noted a failure to follow up on the work of an F.B.I. agent in Phoenix who similarly warned that Islamic terrorists might be seeking flight training in the United States.
The commission showed that the intelligence-sharing over Mr. Moussaoui was so poor that while the F.B.I.'s acting director was not informed by his deputies before Sept. 11 about Mr. Moussaoui's arrest, senior officials at the C.I.A. were notified, although they did not act on the information.
The commission has also harshly criticized the C.I.A. for failing to tell the F.B.I. early in 2001 of intelligence about the suspicious movements of two of the hijackers, including the possibility that they had entered the United States.
The logic behind creation of a national intelligence director is similar to that heard two years ago when Congress, over the initial objections of President Bush, decided to create the Department of Homeland Security to oversee the government's efforts to prevent terrorist attacks on American soil. In the end, Mr. Bush embraced that idea, which became the largest reorganization of the federal government since the Defense Department was created.
The department was given control over 22 executive branch agencies, including the Customs Service, the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Secret Service, in hopes that a single superagency could better coordinate domestic security programs.
Officials who have seen the commission's final report said the proposal for a national intelligence officer would not be so sweeping, however, since the new official would have budget authority over the nation's 15 intelligence agencies but would not be responsible for day-to-day management of their work.
In recent months, Mr. Bush and his deputies have suggested that they are open to a major overhaul of intelligence agencies in light of the findings of the Sept. 11 commission. They have said specifically that they are reviewing the work of Mr. Scowcroft's panel, which found that the current organization of the government's intelligence agencies left no one truly in charge on intelligence matters.
-------- propaganda wars
Inquiry into British WMD intelligence watered down to protect Blair: report
Sat Jul 17, 2004
(AFP)
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=1538&ncid=732&e=4&u=/afp/20040717/wl_uk_afp/iraq_britain_weapons
LONDON - Last week's damning report into British intelligence failures ahead of the Iraq war was amended at the last minute to make it less critical of Prime Minister Tony Blair, a report said.
The changes were argued for by Downing Street, and helped Blair rebut the principal charge that he had shown bad faith in arguing that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) made war necessary, the Sunday Telegraph said.
The report, issued on Wednesday by an inquiry team headed by former top civil servant Lord Butler, damned as unreliable most of the pre-war intelligence on WMDs but cleared Blair of deliberate distortion.
The newspaper cited an unnamed member of Butler's five-strong inquiry team as saying Downing Street secured changes to a passage in the report dealing with a parliamentary statement on Iraq's WMDs made by the prime minister in September 2002.
The alterations watered down the contrast between the seemingly compelling case for war made to lawmakers by Blair and the thinness of the intelligence he actually had at his disposal, the Telegraph said.
It happened during an agreed process whereby individuals facing criticism in the report were allowed to see sections of the draft relating to this with a view to giving a response.
The passage in question refers to a British government dossier on Iraq's weapons which reached conclusions at, the inquiry team said, "the outer limits" of what the intelligence allowed.
Blair's parliamentary address "may have reinforced this impression", the Butler report concluded in its final version.
However, according to the Sunday Telegraph, the original draft gave the opinion that Blair had personally masterminded this misleading impression, calling into question his good faith.
Despite being cleared of deliberate deception, Blair -- who argued the case for backing the US-led war almost exclusively on the basis of the threat posed by Iraq's WMDs -- was criticised in the report.
He was by no means in the clear, a member of the inquiry team was quoted as telling the Sunday Telegraph.
"The whole thing points straight to the man in charge ... absolutely to where responsibility belongs, which is the prime minister, which is what we could not say."
A series of reports have said that Butler, who headed Britain's civil service for a decade before his retirement in 2001, had felt it was not his place to produce a report so damning it could make Blair's position untenable.
----
Bit by bit, Blair is forced to face the truth
17 July 2004
Andrew Gilligan
The Spectator UK
http://www.antiwar.com/spectator/spec345.html
It is curious sometimes how life comes full circle. Exactly a year ago I was sitting in an office at the BBC, listening to government ministers denying all wrongdoing. As I write this, I am sitting in an office at the BBC, waiting to be interviewed, listening to government ministers denying all wrongdoing. Their task is rather harder than it was before.
Lord Butler's committee has pronounced on the great question - did the government mislead us all over the reasons for war? To the vast majority of the public, this is an issue about as opaque and mysterious as the religion of the Pope or the sanitary habits of bears in woods; but successive official inquiries, and a stubborn minority of the media, have been unable to bring themselves to say that Tony Blair committed deceit.
For the foreign affairs committee and the intelligence and security committee, the reason is simple. As they both complained, they were denied the evidence they needed to come to a fully informed verdict; the FAC was also directly lied to by Alastair Campbell. For Lord Hutton, who did see most of the paperwork, the reasons are more puzzling. My own feeling is that he was simply an innocent who was a little starstruck by the mandarins in his witness box (how could they possibly be dissembling to me? They've got knighthoods!).
Now, however, we finally have an official inquiry which has reached Key Stage 2 in the syllabus - finding that a government and its servants did something wrong. The members may not quite have got beyond this to advanced coursework - actually apportioning blame - but we cannot have everything.
It is fair to say that the intelligence services emerge even more damaged from this than the Prime Minister does. Their sources were often wrong, inappropriately assessed, second- and third-hand or even, in one critical case, completely untested. No. 10 will make much of the fact that Butler clears the government of knowing embellishment. But some of his findings appear to conflict with that judgment.
Fifteen days before the government told us, in 2002, that the evidence of Iraq's WMD programmes was considerable and incontrovertible, the JIC, it now emerges, was warning ministers that the evidence was patchy and fragmentary.
'More weight was placed on the intelligence than it would bear,' says the report. 'The consequence was to put the Joint Intelligence Committee and its chairman into an area of public controversy ...We see a strong case for the chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee being a person who is demonstrably beyond influence.'
The dossier 'put a strain on [the JIC] in seeking to maintain their normal standards of neutral and objective assessment'. The judgments in the dossier 'went to the outer limits ...of the intelligence available'.
On the 45-minute point, the thing which I claimed had been included as part of a drive to sex up the dossier, Butler is scathing. The intelligence was wrong, it should never have been in there, and this led to 'suspicions that it had been included because of its eye-catching character'. Butler finds that key elements of the dossier were misleading, because they were presented without the necessary caveats and explanations.
Lord Butler is, of course, the ultimate establishment trusty - the man who cleared Jonathan Aitken of lying - so the fact that he has come to these relatively strong judgments shows just how serious the problems were. Yet perhaps his very status as the official's official may also explain the nature of the verdict.
Butler is known to believe that one of his own worst mistakes was to grant Alastair Campbell and Jonathan Powell, two of the central figures in the dossier fiasco, powers to order civil servants around. Downing Street was sentenced by this decision to years of sofa-bound 'den-ocracy', with the country run through unminuted chats in the Prime Minister's study. 'We are concerned that the informality and circumscribed character of the government's procedures risks reducing the scope for informed collective political judgment,' says Butler. This report is almost certainly the mandarins' revenge.
It is interesting, too, that the committee members with the closest links to the military - Michael Mates, a former army colonel, and Field Marshal Lord Inge - were reportedly the keenest to reach a sharp judgment. The armed forces deeply resent being sent to war on a false prospectus.
As I write, I can already see New Labour trusties fanning out into all the key broadcasting studios, proclaiming that the Prime Minister's integrity remains unsullied and that the BBC's dastardly allegations are still not substantiated. But though Lord Butler may not name names, he does name deeds. We can fill in the names.
If Hutton had made the findings that Butler has made, it is possible that the Prime Minister could have been damaged enough to resign. Logically, of course, the same thing might be expected to happen now - but it probably won't. Timing is everything in these matters. The Prime Minister will, no doubt, deploy the same defence which he used during Hutton - that to question his integrity, which has not been questioned by Butler, is simply too inconceivable and ridiculous to be contemplated. He does this rather well, but he is having to do it a little too often for comfort these days.
In his interview at the weekend, I thought the Archbishop of Canterbury's most interesting observation was not merely that Mr Blair would be 'called to account ... at the Judgment Seat' for his actions over Iraq, but that 'the essence of judgment is simply to be face to face with the truth - and no escape'. For 18 months, Mr Blair has tried every possible trick, swerve and wriggle to avoid coming face to face with the truth. He has tried to change the subject. He has picked a largely phoney diversionary fight with the BBC. He has taken people down, won tactical victories, but the truth has come inexorably closer and closer, and now, with Butler, closer still. The Prime Minister is standing on a sandbar which is gradually being washed away.
We may now expect a slight change of tack. Mistakes may be admitted, but always honest ones. With New Labour, there can be no other kind. Mr Blair may apologise - that the spies unfortunately got it wrong. The hapless John Scarlett will be retained in his post, if at all possible. Mr Scarlett may have done British intelligence a great deal of harm. It is difficult to imagine how MI6 can recover its reputation while it is led by the man who got it into the mess in the first place. But he's not a bad spy; and he makes an excellent lightning-conductor.
The reason, I think, that so many people still doubt Mr Blair's good faith is partly the evidence presented to Lord Hutton, which showed a systematic tightening-up of the dossier drafts. In the 10 September 2002 draft, the threat from Iraqi WMD to UK interests was merely potential; by 16 September it had become 'current and serious'. The first phrase was written by an intelligence officer; the second, from the Prime Minister's foreword, was written by Alastair Campbell.
But it is perhaps more the Prime Minister's own behaviour since the war, and that of his team, that undermines their protestations of integrity. If their mistakes were honest ones, what would have been the harm in admitting them? Why were many of the things which Lord Butler now finds as fact actually denied? If Mr Campbell's involvement in hardening up the 45-minute claim was, as he maintains, innocent, why did he conceal it from the foreign affairs committee, when it was the central feature of their inquiry? Why did the Ministry of Defence attempt to conceal the Defence Intelligence Staff's objections to the 45-minute claim - objections completely endorsed by Lord Butler - from the intelligence and security committee?
I will not be holding a grand press conference in front of a sweeping staircase, or calling for resignations at all levels. I recognise what Alastair Campbell and Tony Blair did not - that no one got this completely right. But after a bad year for the BBC, this might be a good week for it to stop picking at the scabs inflicted by Lord Hutton and to regain some faith in its journalism. It remains the most trusted news organisation in the country, better and more respected by a mile than any of its sanctimonious press critics.
It is clear that my story was overwhelmingly correct; and that the mistake I made was a wholly insufficient foundation for the volume of attack belatedly directed at it by the government. Journalism, my journalism, got closer to the truth, more quickly, about Mr Blair's case for war than anything else did. It may well be that we would not have learnt all that we have learnt since without it. So I feel happier this week.
The Prime Minister has not been sentenced to death by Butler. But he may have suffered a worse fate - survival, with an endless cloud marked 'Iraq' above him.
Andrew Gilligan is defence and diplomatic editor of The Spectator.
-------- us politics
Kerry Backs Much of Pre-Emption Doctrine
By KEN GUGGENHEIM
Associated Press Writer
July 17, 2004,
http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/ats-ap_politics10jul16,0,6186133,print.story?coll=sns-ap-toppolitics
WASHINGTON -- Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry said Friday he would be willing to launch a pre-emptive strike against terrorists if he had adequate intelligence of a threat.
Kerry offered some support for one of the most controversial aspects of President Bush's national security policy, even as he criticized the president for not reforming intelligence agencies after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
"Am I prepared as president to go get them before they get us if we locate them and have the sufficient intelligence? You bet I am," he said at a news conference at his Washington headquarters.
The Bush administration laid out the doctrine of pre-emption months before the Iraq war began in March 2003. It argued that the United States cannot rely on its vast arsenal to deter attacks and must be willing to strike first against potential threats. Critics of the policy say the Iraq war shows how the country could be driven to war by flawed intelligence.
Kerry said the intelligence needs to be improved so that the word of a U.S. president "is good enough for people across the world again."
But he added, "I will never allow any other country to veto what we need to do and I will never allow any other institution to veto what we need to do to protect our nation."
Bush-Cheney campaign spokesman Steve Schmidt complained that Kerry proposed cuts in intelligence spending while in the Senate. "John Kerry's attack is another example of his flailing efforts to defend a record that is out of the mainstream," Schmidt said.
Kerry spoke one week after the Senate Intelligence Committee sharply criticized prewar intelligence on whether Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. The report did not address Bush's role, but Kerry said, "as commander in chief, the president of the United States must take responsibility for what happens on his or her watch."
The four-term Massachusetts senator said that nearly three years after the Sept. 11 attacks, "this president has not taken action sufficient to fix the intelligence problems that have plagued us."
Outlining his own proposals, Kerry repeated his call for creating a director of central intelligence who would oversee all facets of the nation's intelligence operations. He also proposed at least doubling spending for clandestine operations, improving interagency coordination and accelerating reforms at the FBI to improve its handling of domestic intelligence.
But Kerry stopped short of supporting a proposal by his running mate, Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina, to create a new domestic intelligence agency similar to the British MI5 agency. Supporters of a new agency say the FBI has been more concerned historically about criminal investigations than intelligence; opponents fear a domestic spy agency threatening Americans' privacy.
Edwards made it clear later at a Democratic fund-raiser in Los Angeles that he had backed away from that approach, proposed during last winter's primary elections, and that Kerry's plan was "our plan."
He said the plan was "just plain common sense."
"It's been almost three hears since 9/11. It won't take us three years to put the reforms in place," Edwards vowed.
-------- OTHER
-------- health
AIDS Meeting Focuses on Prevention
Bangkok Conference Ends Amid Debate on Progress and Funding of Methods
By Ellen Nakashima and David Brown
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, July 17, 2004; Page A13
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A56563-2004Jul16.html
BANGKOK, July 16 -- The 15th International AIDS Conference, dominated by arguments over AIDS drugs and who should pay for them, closed Friday with calls for renewed emphasis on prevention, the oldest weapon in the fight against the pandemic.
"Unless we scale up prevention with the passion and urgency that is being brought to treatment, 'access for all' will remain a dream," Peter Piot, the Belgian physician who heads UNAIDS, said, quoting the slogan of the conference.
A major topic was how to reach the goal of bringing antiretroviral therapy to 3 million AIDS patients in poor countries by the end of 2005. Piot reminded participants that if the rate of new infection isn't slowed, the effort to treat those already infected will be overwhelmed.
"Between today and the deadline for the '3 by 5' initiative, 8 million people will become infected with HIV at the current pace," Piot said. "Without a greatly expanded prevention effort, treatment is simply not sustainable."
Epidemiologists at UNAIDS, which is run jointly by the United Nations and the World Bank, estimate that 37.8 million people worldwide are living with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), the cause of AIDS, which was responsible for 2.9 million deaths last year.
The delegates at this week's conference, the largest on AIDS to date, heard a distinctly mixed report on progress toward a variety of approaches to prevention, such as vaccines, vaginal microbicides and pills to block HIV infection when a person is exposed to the virus.
Work on vaccines is expanding but so far has led to no useful product. Many experts believe a usable vaccine is at least 10 years off.
Nevertheless, there are now 22 promising vaccines in clinical testing, compared to seven in 2002, when the previous international AIDS conference was held, in Barcelona. Ten of the trials are being held in developing countries.
"The development of an HIV vaccine represents one of the most difficult challenges that modern biomedical science is confronting," Jose Esparza, a virologist with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, told the delegates this week.
Nearly as important -- and perhaps somewhat closer to development -- is a practical microbicide that would protect a woman against infection through sexual intercourse. Researchers are working on numerous compounds that could be applied before sexual contact or used in a cervical collar that would release them for weeks at a time. The key is to give women a protective tool they control, and can use surreptitiously if necessary.
In some parts of southern Africa, 25 percent of women are infected by the time they are 22, said Zeda Rosenberg, who heads the International Partnership for Microbicides, a non-profit group based in Silver Spring. In Kenya and Zambia, adolescents who are married are becoming infected faster than sexually active unmarried teens.
"For women in many parts of the world, being poor, young and married are the most significant risk factors for acquiring HIV infection," Rosenberg said. An effective microbicide, however, would benefit not only them, but, indirectly, their children and male partners.
Also under study is the use of a licensed antiretroviral drug, tenofovir, as an HIV-prevention pill. The National Institutes of Health in Bethesda is paying for an experiment trial among a group of high-risk Cambodian prostitutes.
The next international AIDS conference is scheduled for Toronto in 2006.
Brown reported from Washington.
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