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NUCLEAR
The Gold of the Nuclear Age: Lost and Stolen Nuclear Materials
Plutonium cancer risk may be higher than thought
Past Nuclear Tests May Unlock Africa Ivory Sales
Crystal options for nuclear waste
Safety fears as nuclear Britain goes top secret
DTI to defy green lobby and bring more nuclear waste to Sellafield
Plan to clean up
Bhutto: Pakistan Didn't Swap Nuke Secrets
Israel 'ready' to strike Iran
Radioactive pollution in the Caspian Sea
Dirty bombs threaten disruption, panic but not mass destruction
Utility Loses Track of Spent Nuclear Fuel
Nuke nightmare fades
Safety a Concern in Shutdown of the Operations at Los Alamos
MILITARY
In Sudan, 'a Big Sheik' Roams Free
Darfur Peace Talks Collapse
Despite Appeals, Chaos Still Stalks the Sudanese
Mugabe Said to Use Law as Political Tool
Boeing Has a Powerful Ally With Hastert
Iraq's premier denies claims that he executed six prisoners
Elite Squad of Iraqi Soldiers Tests Newfound Autonomy
Two Bombings of Iraqis Leave at Least 6 Dead
Bomber Targets Iraq Justice Minister
Iraqi Prime Minister Reopens Controversial Newspaper
U.S. Military Launches Airstrike in Falluja
U.S. Diplomat Starts New Job by Deferring to Iraq Rulers
Iraqis Slowly Take Their Places in the Ranks of the Security Forces
Building for Calm by Giving Up on Peace
Palestinian Premier Offers to Resign
Palestinian Premier Resigns, Citing Growing Gaza Turmoil
Israeli Leaders Take Steps to Avoid Disarray
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
C.I.A. Sends Terror Experts to Tell Small Towns of Risk
Protecting us without tainting the Constitution
As Police Use of Tasers Rises, Questions Over Safety Increase
POLITICS
New Name, but Same Initials, for G.A.O.
New Reports Again Question Whether Iraq Sought Uranium in Niger
9/11 Panel Calls for Major Changes
9/11 Panel's Report to Offer New Evidence of Iran-Qaeda Ties
Decoding the Senate Intelligence Committee Investigation on Iraq
PM admits graves claim 'untrue'
President Is Still Mum on Agenda For Second Term
ACTIVISTS
Minn. GOP Asks Activists to Report on Neighbors' Politics
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- accidents and safety
The Gold of the Nuclear Age: Lost and Stolen Nuclear Materials
By Kirsten Anderberg (www.kirstenanderberg.com)
Sunday July 18 2004
Infoshop News
http://www.infoshop.org/inews/stories.php?story=04/07/18/3285407
The Los Alamos National Laboratory (http://www.lanl.gov) in New Mexico, USA, the birthplace of the atomic bomb, has halted much of its operations as of July 15, 2004, in an unprecedented, and open-ended, shut down of important "secret work," until security breaches can be seriously addressed. Citing the loss of two computer discs containing classified information from the testing and design facility of the plant, during the first week in July 2004, as well as other security concerns, the nuclear plant is regrouping. In the last year and a half, Los Alamos has admitted losing classified materials four times, according to the Albuquerque Journal. And the Associated Press is reporting that in the last year, Los Alamos employees lost 9 floppy discs, a large-capacity storage disk full of classified information, and a recordable data storage device, and the lab officials say these materials are "believed" to have been destroyed. These continued security breaches at America's top nuclear facilities show that September 11, 2001 did not tighten up security at nuclear plants as one would have thought, and as the U.S. government touted it has.
Eight to nine countries have known nuclear weapons; U.S., Russia, U.K., France, China, Israel, India, Pakistan and most recently N. Korea has shown up on the radar. Security of nuclear materials is most reliable in the U.S., Russia, France, and the U.K. We need to remember that the world's stockpile of nuclear weapons materials
Russia's Atomic Energy Minister has said, "Fissile materials have not disappeared" anywhere in his country, but that is not believable, any more than it is believable that America has not lost nuclear materials. There are 58 nations with approximately 345 nuclear research reactors full of highly enriched uranium necessary to make dirty nuclear bombs. America exported approximately 750 kg of plutonium and 27 metric tons of highly enriched uranium to 39 countries, over 30 years, in its "Atoms for Peace" program. In 1999, Italian police caught people trying to sell enriched uranium on the black market. Research traced that uranium to a U.S.-supplied research reactor in former Zaire, where it was stolen or purchased. The U.S. Dept of Energy estimates 2/3 of the nuclear material in Russia remains inadequately secured, but as you can see, America is having challenges with its own security of nuclear materials. In 1981, the U.S. Dept. of Defense published a list of 32 accidents involving nuclear weapons, many involving lost nuclear materials. One submarine sank with two nuclear torpedoes, and there are other cases, such as nuclear bombs that were lost from planes.
According to the Brookings Institution, 11 U.S. nuclear bombs have been lost and never recovered. Since 1968, the U.S. claims 4 soviet nuclear submarines have sunk, carrying an estimated 43 lost nuclear warheads. In 1994, German police investigated 267 cases of suspected interactions involving the sale of radioactive material, as well as seized smuggled plutonium three times that year. Scientists were also arrested in Germany in 1994 with 7 pounds of weapons grade uranium in their possession. In Kazakhstan, 1000 pounds of highly enriched uranium sat unprotected in the mid-1990's, enough uranium for many nuclear weapons. Insiders working at a Russian nuclear weapons plant were caught in a plot to steal 18.5 kg of highly enriched uranium...the list of these accounts seems endless. With Russia's borders being twice as long as America's, and the routine smuggling of powder drugs, as well as people, over said borders, the possibility of smuggling nuclear materials the size of a football into America, does not seem that challenging, honestly.
Additionally, hacking is becoming a new threat, where a computer hacker could turn a nuclear plant into its own weapon, much like using a plane as an unconventional weapon that is already in the area. In the past, the nuclear risk to America was perceived to be coming via ballistic missiles from Communist countries like Russia or Cuba. This was an excuse U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld fell back on several times during the 9/11 Commission hearings. He kept complaining that the intelligence and defense departments had to revamp everything, as now they were looking for dirty bombs within our borders, as terrorism, rather than bombs coming from outside the U.S., via missiles aimed at the U.S.
In 1964, the U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara said, "A full-scale nuclear exchange between the US and the USSR would kill 100 million Americans during the first hour. It would kill an even greater number of Russians, but I doubt that any sane person would call this "victory." But the nuclear threat now perceived to be endangering the U.S., is potentially the use of a dirty nuclear bomb within American borders on Americans by terrorists.
In 1995, the National Academy of Scientists identified surplus plutonium as a "clear and present danger" to the U.S. Four kilograms, the size of an orange, is enough material to make a nuclear bomb, such agencies warned.
In an essay entitled "The New Containment: An Alliance Against Nuclear Terrorism," by G. Allison and A. Kokoshin, the writers predict what will happen after a nuclear attack on America: "Most officials will no doubt seek cover behind the claim that 'no one could have imagined" this happening. But that defense does not ring true.
Today, we have unambiguous warnings that a nuclear terrorist attack could happen at any moment. Responsible leaders should be asking the questions now."
In 1986, in the former USSR, now Ukraine, the nuclear plant at Chernobyl melted down in the world's worst nuclear accident. The documentaries of the abandoned city around the nuclear plant tells the story well. You see houses, with pots on stoves, toys on chairs, everyday life, being led, and then abandoned, only to have curtains flapping in the wind, in the abandoned ghost town. In one documentary on Chernobyl, they showed how the government had piped in this creepy music to play so that the guards would not go crazy inside the contained area. And it was haunting, even through a TV screen. The world could end up looking like that.
When Chernobyl first occurred, the USSR knew about it and did not tell. It was Sweden who detected the nuclear fallout, and traced it to the USSR. The nuclear fallout blew out of the USSR, and into areas where indigenous Scandinavian reindeer herders, the Sami, lived. Since the reindeer ate the moss on trees that was now radioactive, the government forced the slaughter of their reindeer food supply and made them dependent on government rations thereafter. The Sami people suffered greatly from the fallout of Chernobyl, and they were not in the immediate vicinity of the accident. Nuclear disaster follows the wind, and does not recognize country borders.
In 1961, JFK told Americans to build bomb shelters. Now, in 2004, the U.S. government urges Americans to visit www.ready.gov, where there are instructions on what you should do in the event of a nuclear disaster. The internet will probably be jammed with hits to that site for that information right after a nuclear hit, so you might want to review it now.
They advise, for nuclear blasts, taking cover underground, and using thick shields for radioactivity protection. Do you have your thick shield to protect you from radioactivity stored away for that emergency? Los Alamos officials have said that the July 2004 loss of classified materials was an example of "willful disregard," but what does that actually mean in regards to our national security? Or our worldwide security, is more like it.
Robert Foley, a part of the Los Alamos Laboratory management, said he believes scientists have been reluctant to blow the whistle on colleagues who don't follow the rules. Well, yes, that is problematic. As bumbling mistake after bumbling mistake happens on this planet at nuclear plants and nuclear research laboratories worldwide, one begins to wonder why it is, that no one ever saw, or sees, the oversight of all these nuclear materials, and their security, as a top priority.
It makes you wonder if it is accidental that plutonium is named after Pluto, the God of Death. And that Chernobyl means some variation of Armageddon. Then we have Diablo Canyon nuclear plant in California, which means "Devil's Canyon."
In 1983, Carl Sagan wrote about a "nuclear winter," where nuclear events would block out the sun, killing life on earth, to which Sagan adds, "The ashes of communism and capitalism will be indistinguishable."
----
Plutonium cancer risk may be higher than thought
18 July 04
New Scientist
Rob Edwards
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99996152
Plutonium may be many times more dangerous than previously thought. The cancer risk from exposure inside the body could be 10 times higher than is allowed for in calculating international safety limits.
The danger is highlighted in a report written by radiation experts for the UK government, which has been leaked to New Scientist. The experts are unanimous in saying that low-level radiation emitted by plutonium may cause more damage to human cells than previously believed. Their opinion could provoke a rethink of the guidelines on exposure to radiation.
Several tonnes of plutonium have been released into the environment over the last 60 years by nuclear weapons tests and nuclear plants.
Concern over the harmfulness of plutonium is growing because of discoveries about the subtle effects of low-level radiation. Researchers in Europe and North America have shown that the descendants of cells that seem to survive radiation unharmed can suffer delayed damage, a phenomenon called "genomic instability" (New Scientist print edition, 20 January 2001).
Cells adjacent to those that are irradiated can also sustain damage, known as "the bystander effect". And an increase was found in the number of mutations in small pieces of DNA called mini-satellites that are passed from one generation to the next. The fear is that these effects could trigger cancers and other ill effects.
The report, which is due to be published in the next few months, has been drawn up by the Committee Examining Radiation Risks from Internal Emitters (CERRIE). The committee includes 12 specialists from the UK government's National Radiological Protection Board, the nuclear industry, universities and environmental groups.
All members of the committee agree that the margin of uncertainty over the risks of plutonium and similar radionuclides inside the body "could extend over at least an order of magnitude".
This "should be borne in mind by those making judgements and policy decisions on low-level internal radiation", says CERRIE's chairman, Dudley Goodhead, the former director of the UK Medical Research Council's Radiation and Genome Stability Unit at Harwell in Oxfordshire.
-------- africa
Past Nuclear Tests May Unlock Africa Ivory Sales
Story by Ed Stoddard
REUTERS SOUTH AFRICA:
July 19, 2004
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/26071/story.htm
JOHANNESBURG - Africa's elephant war between those who want to lift the ban on ivory sales and those who want to keep it is about take a new turn.
Nuclear physicist Elias Sideras-Haddad says he can determine when an elephant died as well as its age by a new carbon-dating technique applied to the tusks - a process made possible by the above-ground nuclear tests of the past.
Verifying when an elephant died could, he hopes, enable poor countries to resume ivory sales - banned in 1989 - through regulations which could stipulate that only tusks from animals dead for a specified period of time could be sold.
This could be a huge deterrent to poachers who are unlikely to hoard illegally taken tusks for years. The trade was halted in 1989 in a bid to snuff out rampant poaching.
The new dating system relies on traces of carbon 14 which became abnormally abundant in the atmosphere globally because of early nuclear weapons tests.
The amount of carbon 14 in the atmosphere peaked in the mid-1960s when such testing was banned by the nuclear powers and has since been decreasing - though it won't reach pre-testing, or pre-1945 levels, for about another 20 years.
Using a process called accelerator mass spectrometry, a tusk's root and tip are examined to determine when its owner was born and when it expired by matching the traces of carbon 14 with the amount known to be in the atmosphere at certain times. The initial experiment was conducted on three tusks at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and Sideras-Haddad presented his peer-reviewed work with colleague Tom Brown at an academic conference in Japan two years ago.
ANTI-POACHING DEVICE
Sideras-Haddad says the technique will stop poaching.
"We can impose particular time constraints for (the ivory) trade. For example, we can say that you can only trade ivory from elephants that died 10 years ago," he told Reuters at his office at Johannesburg's University of the Witwatersrand.
"If you are a poacher and you killed an elephant yesterday you will have to put it (the tusks) in the cupboard for 10 years before you are allowed to trade. Ten years is enough time to put any poacher gangster team out of business," he said.
He said it can be used in conjunction with another application which can determine an elephant's diet from its tusk and therefore tell where the animal originated.
The 1989 ban on the trade in ivory is widely credited with stemming a slaughter that saw Africa's elephant population plummet to 600,000 from about 1.2 million in just over a decade.
Critics maintained it was easy for the poaching industry to launder "dirty" ivory with legal supplies and that only a total halt to sales of the commodity, used in a variety of ways from piano keys to decorative carvings, would stop the killings.
A 2002 decision by the U.N. Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) to let South Africa, Botswana and Namibia stage one-time sales of stockpiled ivory was met with protests from conservationists who said it would spark fresh poaching.
The next CITES meeting in Thailand in October could see the issue raised again.
TO CULL OR NOT TO CULL?
Sideras-Haddad says his new technique will put paid to poaching - though one reason he wants to see the ban lifted is sure to provoke outrage from animal welfare groups.
A Greek who came to South Africa 20 years ago, Sideras-Haddad wanted to find a poacher-proof way to restart ivory sales so his beloved Kruger National Park could raise revenue and so that it could cull elephants again.
He says that any tusks from culls could be placed in storage for 10 years to relieve fears that poachers could try to use them as an excuse to mix illegal supplies into the market.
A moratorium on Kruger elephant culls was imposed in 1994 when Nelson Mandela was elected South African president. Many scientists say that as a result, surging populations of the world's largest land mammal are damaging the park's ecosystems.
The park is enclosed and while there are plans to create a super park by dropping the fences with neighboring Mozambique and Zimbabwe, the population will eventually reach a point where it can no longer be sustained.
This could have disastrous consequences for other animals.
Elephants have big appetites, with adults consuming on average around 375 pounds of food a day.
Kruger's population has been growing at 7 percent a year and now stands at close to 11,000 - far above the optimal number of around 7,000 favored by some scientists.
"I love it (the Kruger) and I don't want it to be destroyed ... I think it is inevitable to reintroduce (elephant) culling," said Sideras-Haddad.
-------- britain
Crystal options for nuclear waste
By Jo Twist
BBC News Online science and technology staff
Sunday, 18 July, 2004
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3896463.stm
Current storage technologies are short-term solutions Storing radioactive waste in a safe form is one of the biggest problems facing the nuclear industry.
The UK's Prime Minister, Tony Blair, has talked about a possible renaissance of nuclear power generation as a means to combat global warming.
Many greens are even thinking the unthinkable for the same reason - the evils of climate change could weigh more heavily on the planet than the nuclear dangers they have traditionally warned about.
But any resurgence would also have to include a long-term solution to that waste issue - not just for newly created radioactive products but for all the spent fuel rods and associated materials that have been kept in storage, in various forms, since Britain's Magnox reactor programme began in the 1950s.
Science believes it is moving towards that goal - by finding new containment technologies that could lock away even high-level radioactive waste for thousands of years.
Currently, after a period of temporary storage, when the most radioactive products have had a chance to decay, high-level waste from spent nuclear fuel is encased in a borosilicate glass and sealed in stainless steel drums.
But this is really only a short-term solution because the radiation emitted by the waste will slowly attack the integrity of the containers.
Model world
The emissions jostle the atoms out of their carefully ordered arrangement within the storage materials. Eventually, this can make the materials swell and crack, allowing highly toxic substances to leak out.
Various research groups are now looking to alternative, ceramic materials that can withstand the bombardment much better.
At the Cambridge-MIT Institute (CMI) in the UK, scientists are seeking guidance from the natural world. They have been examining how the mineral zircon (ZrSiO4) has managed to contain radioactive elements.
"If nature has shown it can store radioactive atoms and that they remain intact, then we should be looking at that," the CMI's Professor Martin Dove told BBC News Online.
Zircon is the ore for cubic zirconium, which can be cut and polished to make gemstones, like artificial diamonds.
Professor Dove, an earth scientist at CMI, said his team had developed computer simulations to show how the atoms in zircon rearranged themselves when they were damaged by radioactive emissions.
They have also done some experimentation to support this - although they have been limited because of strict controls on the testing of radioactive materials.
"The simulations suggest that when zircon gets heavily damaged, inside it there is crystalline damage, but on the outside it looks intact," Professor Dove explained.
Scaling up
The simulations track damage over time. The way the atoms sort themselves looks rather like ants scattering to form a protective ring against an intruder.
This means that radioactive materials should find it much more difficult to escape the crystalline structure than if incorporated into a glass.
There are many who believe nuclear has an important future The atoms in zircon will actually spontaneously arrange themselves within the damaged area to form a protective shell.
Using magnetic resonance, the atoms that have moved in response to a single radioactive decay can be counted; and X-ray diffraction techniques can show the extent of the damage.
The computer simulations, said Professor Dove, had been made possible because of coding work within the project team that allowed for the modelling of millions of atoms instead of just a few thousand.
The challenge Professor Dove and his team now face is to prove their principle - to fully understand what is going on at the atomic level; and then explore similar materials that could be produced on a much larger industrial scale.
For that, they will need to be permitted to do more "real-world" experiments.
"People won't accept nuclear power until you deal with waste," said Professor Dove. "It is a problem that lasts for so long; it becomes a moral issue. But what we are doing now is setting the agenda for the future."
Maintained access
The Department of Trade and Industry recently said managing the UK's nuclear waste would cost over £47bn in the coming years, and the waste has to be held safely for centuries.
The official regulatory requirement is that any method to house waste must withstand environmental changes, even ice ages.
There are currently over 30 locations holding waste across the UK, with Sellafield storing 98% of the country's most hazardous materials.
It currently houses over 60 tonnes of plutonium in a powder form.
The government's Committee on Radioactive Waste Management (CORWM) has been charged with finding a publicly acceptable option for storing radioactive by-products, and is set to report its recommendations to the government by 2006.
One of the issues it will have to consider is how recoverable plutonium should be in any storage solution, either to prevent it from falling into the "wrong hands", or to retrieve it to be used again.
Currently, plutonium is not officially classified as a "waste" material, according to Nirex, the UK's nuclear waste agency.
"Plutonium was going to be used as fuel, but because the government has made no decision on that yet, it is being stored for potential future use," explained Samantha King, waste management research scientist at Nirex.
"[CORWM] will have to determine what proportion of materials, including plutonium, should be managed as waste."
----
Safety fears as nuclear Britain goes top secret
Government's anti-terror crackdown on public information will lead to cover-up and abuse, say environmentalists
By Rob Edwards, Environment Editor
UK Sunday Herald
18 July 2004
http://www.sundayherald.com/43449
An imminent crackdown on public information about nuclear plants could enable dangers and mistakes to be covered up, environmental groups have warned.
The government's Office for Civil Nuclear Security (OCNS) is about to issue guidance on the secrecy with which it wants to shroud nuclear facilities, shipments and waste in order to reduce the risk of terrorism. A copy of its guidance has been obtained by the Sunday Herald.
If the guidance is followed, the public will be given far less information about nuclear projects in the future. It defines 53 out of 74 categories of nuclear information as "not releasable".
Planning applications for nuclear plants "should contain only the minimum information required by law", it says .
That means objectors will be deprived of the information they need to make an effective challenge to nuclear developments, environmentalists say. They argue that this could make it easier for the nuclear industry to push through controversial projects.
Details of the safety cases drawn up for nuclear facilities should be kept under wraps, the guidance insists. This includes details of the "potential hazards" of radiation releases and the "strengths and weaknesses" of the systems meant to contain and control nuclear material.
The OCNS also says that the location, quantity and form of nuclear material in the civil programme should be confidential, as should the exact locations where spent fuel from nuclear power stations is stored. The margins of error on the amounts of plutonium and uranium unaccounted for are "not releasable".
There are four major nuclear sites in Scotland that will be covered by the guidance. They are Dounreay in Caithness, Hunterston in North Ayrshire Torness in East Lothian, and the defunct reactors at Chapelcross in Dumfries and Galloway.
"The need for security can be abused to cover up mistakes and prevent emergency planners and local authorities obtaining the information they need in the event of an accident," said Pete Roche, a consultant to Greenpeace.
The nuclear industry presents society with a massive dilemma, he said. "Everyone recognises the need to prevent sensitive information falling into the wrong hands, but we need an open and transparent debate. Clearly nuclear power is not compatible with an open and democratic society."
Andrew Puddephat, who chairs the transparency panel set up by the nuclear waste agency, Nirex, hoped that the guidance would generate a debate about freedom of information in the nuclear industry. He said: "Historically the industry has been secretive and this has cost it a lot of public trust and legitimacy. This will have to be looked at in the context of ensuring maximum transparency."
The OCNS, based at Harwell in Oxfordshire, is part of the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI). It regulates security in the civil nuclear programme, and last year vetted 12,000 employees in an attempt to ensure that they weren't going to help terrorists.
Its 26-page guidance, entitled Finding A Balance, is soon to be published on the DTI website. The guidance is necessary, it says, "to help, if possible, lessen the ease with which those with malevolent intent can obtain the information they need."
It adds: "If nuclear material were to be stolen or sabotaged ... the potential consequences could be extremely grave. Nuclear material, its transport, and the processes in which it is used for civil purposes - principally power generation - need to be well protected."
The OCNS stresses that its document only provides guidance, and has no force in law. Nor does it intend to withhold information about material unaccounted for "solely on the grounds it would cause embarrassment to the companies".
Friends of the Earth Scotland, however, said that in the past the nuclear industry's safety information had often been questionable. "New proposals for nuclear facilities must be subjected to rigorous public scrutiny," said chief executive Duncan McLaren. "This would be impractical with the limited information that would be released under this guidance ."
McLaren also said that the security concerns about nuclear power underlined that it had no place in a sustainable energy future. " Renewables would be better for the environment, jobs and security ," he said. "Whoever heard of terrorists planning to fly a plane into a wind farm."
The DTI declined to comment on the guidance . "We can't comment on something we've not seen," a spokeswoman said.
----
DTI to defy green lobby and bring more nuclear waste to Sellafield
By Clayton Hirst
UK Independent
18 July 2004
http://news.independent.co.uk/business/news/story.jsp?story=542090
Ministers are to allow thousands of extra tons of radioactive waste to be stored in the UK, under plans designed to generate an extra £200m for the nuclear industry....
-------- depleted uranium
Plan to clean up
Superfund site in W. Concord moving forward
By Davis Bushnell,
Boston Globe
July 18, 2004
http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2004/07/18/plan_to_clean_up/
A plan to explore the range of contaminants on the Starmet Corp. Superfund site in West Concord is expected to be approved next month. If that happens, then the first phase of the investigative work will get underway in September, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency.
The 46-acre property off Route 62 went on the agency's Superfund list in June 2001.
A public meeting will be held in Concord some time after Labor Day on the field work plan now being refined by a Connecticut firm, de maximis Inc., said Melissa Taylor, the EPA's remedial project manager charged with the Starmet property cleanup.
On Wednesday, EPA officials will review a work plan draft, Taylor said, with members of two Concord groups, the 2229 Main St. Committee and Citizens Research and Environmental Watch. The latter has a $50,000 technical assistance grant from the EPA.
Also in September, the state Department of Environmental Protection is planning to solicit proposals for the removal of more than 3,700 barrels of depleted uranium that are now being stored in Starmet buildings. A contractor is likely to be selected in November, said department spokesman Joseph Ferson, adding that the project probably will get started next January.
The department had hoped to pick a contractor in the spring or summer, but the complexity of drawing up a request for proposals has altered the timetable, Ferson said. The Army has agreed to pay for the removal of the barrels containing low levels of radioactive material.
In the 1970s, 1980s, and late 1990s, Starmet's predecessor company, Nuclear Metals Inc., made uranium-tipped bullets for the Army.
In June 2003, the EPA cited the Army, US Department of Energy, and three companies for being responsible for the property's contamination. The companies are: Whittaker Corp. of Simi Valley, Calif.; Textron Inc. of Providence; and MONY Life Insurance Co. of New York City.
The delay in naming a contractor to get rid of the barrels of depleted uranium will have no bearing on the work plan now being fine-tuned, said Bruce Thompson, project coordinator for de maximis Inc. The Weatogue, Conn.-based firm is handling the field work for the five responsible parties. The total tab for this work is $8 million, Thompson said.
The barrel-removal process is an important component of the investigative work, "but we can plug that into the plan when the timing is right," he said. The barrels are being guarded around the clock at Starmet's expense.
The most important consideration is that the environmental protection department is giving "top priority to the final disposal of those barrels," said Anne Shapiro, the Concord Board of Selectmen's liaison to the town's 2229 Main St. Committee, which is monitoring activities at the Starmet site.
Meantime, de maximis, which has drafted a 2,000-page work plan, is gearing up for more than 100 days of drilling on the Starmet property, Thompson said, adding that most of this sampling work will be done in the fall.
The second sampling phase will be done next spring, based on the results of the soil and water samples this fall, he said. Then a risk assessment process could begin next summer, followed by a remedial plan for the site, now targeted for 2008 or 2009.
However, everything depends on the "extent of contamination that's revealed," said Judith Scotnicki, of Concord, a founder of the Citizens Research and Environmental Watch group. "It may be that there are other areas" of the property that have to be explored.
The group's technical assistance coordinator, James West, said, however, that "what's being proposed so far is a comprehensive investigation, one that will surely uncover the contaminants that are there."
Davis Bushnell can be reached at bushnell@globe.com.
-------- india / pakistan
Bhutto: Pakistan Didn't Swap Nuke Secrets
Sun Jul 18, 2004
(AP)
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=516&ncid=731&e=10&u=/ap/20040718/ap_on_re_as/japan_pakistan_nuclear
TOKYO - Former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto said her country bought long-range missile technology from North Korea (news - web sites) in the 1990s, but decided against offering nuclear secrets in exchange, a major Japanese newspaper reported Sunday.
In an interview with the national Asahi daily, Bhutto said military officials proposed in 1988 - just after she took office - that Pakistan swap its nuclear technology for the missiles.
But her administration decided instead to pay North Korea for the missiles technology.
"There were people who proposed securing massive funds by selling nuclear (technology)," Bhutto was quoted as saying. "But there were actually only two or three countries that would be buyers, amounting to only about $200 billion or $300 billion. So I persuaded them to drop the idea."
Bhutto, who faces arrest on corruption charges if she returns to Pakistan, spoke with the Asahi in London. She lives in self-imposed exile, dividing her time between London and Dubai in the United Arab Emirates.
In February, Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan's nuclear program, admitted leaking nuclear technology to Libya, North Korea and Iran, but said he acted alone. President Gen. Pervez Musharraf later pardoned him, citing his service to the nation, though Khan remains confined to his home in the capital, Islamabad.
Khan's transfer of nuclear technology to North Korea has raised questions about whether the isolated communist nation could have developed nuclear weapons. The United States, Japan, Russia, South Korea (news - web sites) and China have held three rounds of talks with North Korea aimed at forcing the North to abandon its nuclear programs.
Pakistan declared itself a nuclear power on May 28, 1998, when it conducted underground nuclear tests in response to earlier tests by India.
In recent months, it has test-fired new versions of its Ghauri V missile, which has a range of 930 miles and is capable of hitting most cities in neighboring India.
-------- iran
Israel 'ready' to strike Iran if Russia supplies Islamic state with rods for enriching uranium
July 18, 2004
By Aaron Klein
World Net Daily
http://worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=39506
Israel has conducted military exercises for a pre-emptive strike against several of Iran's nuclear power facilities and is ready to attack if Russia supplies Iran with rods for enriching uranium, Israeli officials told reporters.
An Israeli defense source in Tel Aviv told the London Sunday Times, which first published the story, that "Israel will on no account permit Iranian reactors - especially the one being built in Bushehr with Russian help - to go critical."
The source was also quoted as saying that any strike on Iran's reactors would probably be carried out by long-range F-15I jets, flying over Turkey, with simultaneous operations by commandos on the ground.
Russia is expected to deliver the enriching rods, currently being stored at a Russian port, late next year after a dispute over financial terms is resolved.
"If the worst comes to the worst and international efforts fail," the source said, "we are very confident we'll be able to demolish the ayatollah's nuclear aspirations in one go."
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The source explained that any strike could be accompanied by an attack on other Iranian targets, including a facility at Natanz, where the Iranians have attempted to enrich uranium, and a plant at Arak, which International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors suspect of nuclear activity.
The Sunday Times also quoted a senior U.S. official warning of a pre-emptive Israeli strike if Russia continues cooperating with the Iranians. He said Washington was unlikely to block Israeli attacks against Iran.
The paper quoted a classified document on the Iranian threat which was presented to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon earlier this year and which the paper claims to have seen. The document, entitled "The Strategic Future of Israel," was first reported by Joseph Farah's G2 Bulletin, a premium, online intelligence newsletter published by WorldNetDaily.
G2 quotes the report, which was drafted by four of Israel's senior defense experts, as saying "All enemy targets should be selected with the view that their destruction would promptly force the enemy to cease all nuclear/biological/chemical exchanges with Israel." The report also called on Israel to develop a multilayered ballistic missile defense system and described Iran as a "suicide nation," recommending "targeted killings" of members of the country's elite, including its leading nuclear scientists.
Iran signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and has obligated itself to random inspections supervised by the IAEA. But the treaty allows Iran to produce nuclear material as long as it can plausibly claim the production is for "peaceful purposes."
Experts warn that Iran can build the infrastructure needed to make nuclear weapons, telling inspectors they need the material for "energy and nuclear medicine research," and then kick out the inspectors, renounce the treaty and quickly assemble a nuclear arsenal, as did North Korea, which is now said to have ten nuclear warheads.
Under the Iranian deal with Moscow, waste produced at the Bushehr plant containing plutonium that could be used in bomb-making would be shipped back to Russia for storage, but the material must first be cooled, providing Iran with what Washington fears could be up to two years in which to extract the plutonium.
The paper quotes Israeli sources as saying that a quarter ton of plutonium could be produced each a year if Bushehr is fully functional, enough for 20 bombs.
The Sunday Times reports Israeli sources fear a pre-emptive strike against Iranian nuclear facilities could provoke "a ferocious response," which could involve Lebanese-based rocket attacks on northern Israel or terrorist attacks against Jewish and Israeli targets abroad.
-------- russia
Radioactive pollution in the Caspian Sea
Jul 18, 2004,
Morteza Aminmansour
The Iranian
http://www.iranian.ws/iran_news/publish/article_2980.shtml
The radioactive contamination is one of the most damaging and dangerous types of pollution in Caspian Sea. The nuclear activities of the coastal states, the remnants of the nuclear tests the nuclear wastes and the nuclear side of exploration and exploitation and transportation (specially by pipelines) are the sources of nuclear danger in the Caspian Sea.
Caspian Sea as the greatest lake in the world is not connected through natural channels to the high Seas, and the nuclear pollution is not the same allover the Sea. Iran does have the smallest role in the nuclear contamination of the Caspian Sea. The Caspian ecosystem collects and stores high levels of natural radioactive nuclides. The living organisms contain levels of uranium five times higher than those in other Seas. Because the Caspian Basin does not drain into other bodies of water, it operates as a natural precipitation tank for a significant mass of naturally occurring radioactive elements and these elements do not have any outlet.
The former Soviet Union developed a large nuclear industry for both military and energy purposes. In Russia there are 320 Cities and 1548 other locations used to store radioactive material.In Ukraine 100,000 small nuclear facilities, there are 11,000 in Moldova, In Kazakhstan there are about 80 million tons of radioactive Waste. The direct death toll of the accident (in Chernobyl) at 8,000. In Ukraine 17 million acres of land was contaminated. The role of Russians in the nuclear pollution of the Caspian Sea is substantial.
The former soviet Union (now Russia) secretly pumped billions of gallons of atomic waste directly into the earth and the practice still continues today. Russia had injected half of all the nuclear waste into three sites. The three sites are:
- Dimitrovgrad near the Volga River
- Tomsk near the Ob River
- Krasnoyarsk on the Yenisei River
The Volga River flows into the Caspian Sea. The Ob and Yenisei flow into the Arctic Ocean. The amount of radioactivity injected by Russians is up to three billion curies.
The accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant released about 50 million curies of radiation. Azerbaijan and parts of Kazakhstan due to previous activities and also the oil exploration and exploitation activities are serious sources of nuclear pollution. The main radioactive waste storage facility in Azerbaijan is the Izotop industrial Complex and holds 510 tanks of radioactive waste in 10 storage tanks designed the low- level radioactive waste.
Sources of ionizing radiation was also found out in Syung-Bulag Akstafa region and Nakhchivan on the territories of military object, left by Russian militaries. One of the major factors, complicating radio ecological conditions, is production, transportation and processing of Petroleum. Petroleum extract on the surface of water contain radium, thorium, isotope of calcium, which penetrates into ground, accumulate on walls of pipes. Concentrate on local sites. The level of a radiating background in Gum adasi reaches 600mcR/h. Armenia is burying nuclear waste on territory of Karabakh.In 1997 report shows that 86 kg of radioactive waste from Metsamer were buried in three districts of Karabakh. It was reported that Azerbaijani officials have received $260,000 from a foreign entity for each container of foreign nuclear waste dumped into the Caspian Sea.
-------- terrorism
Dirty bombs threaten disruption, panic but not mass destruction
As to the dirty bomb, panic is the main fear
Richard A. Muller,
Sunday, July 18, 2004
San Francisco Chronicle
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/07/18/ING427JIH21.DTL
Terrorists might attack the U.S. homeland again this summer, the Justice Department and the FBI first warned several weeks ago. The same day, the Department of Energy announced a $450 million plan to counter terrorist nuclear weapons and dirty bombs. And shortly afterward, the Justice Department released some details about Jose Padilla, saying that the one-time street thug had received extensive al Qaeda training and had hoped to explode a dirty bomb in the United States.
But according to the Justice Department announcement, al Qaeda had doubted that Padilla's proposal to build a dirty bomb was practical. They directed him instead to blow up two apartment buildings using natural gas. They apparently felt that such an action would have a greater chance of spreading death and destruction than a radiological weapon would.
Al Qaeda was right. Perhaps that should scare you. Al Qaeda appears to understand the limitations of these devices better than do many government leaders, the media and even many scientists.
Our experience with radiological weapons -- the fancier name for dirty bombs -- is limited. They do not require a chain reaction like fission or fusion weapons, but instead use ordinary explosives to spread pre-existing radioactive material. Saddam Hussein reportedly tested such a weapon in 1987, but abandoned the effort when he saw how poorly it worked.
In 1995, Chechen rebels buried dynamite and a small amount of the radioactive isotope cesium-137 in Moscow's Ismailovsky Park. They then told a TV station where to dig it up. Perhaps they recognized the truth -- that the bomb's news value could be greater if it were discovered before it went off. For such weapons, the psychological impact can be greater than the limited harm they are likely to cause.
I don't mean to suggest that radioactive materials are harmless. Indeed, consider the story of scavengers in Goiania, Brazil, who found and dismantled an abandoned radiotherapy machine in 1987. The machine contained 1,400 curies of cesium-137. (A curie is the radioactivity of one gram of radium.) Two men, one woman and one child died from acute radiation poisoning; 250 people were contaminated. Several of the 41 houses evacuated could not be cleaned adequately and were demolished.
Imagine if that radiation weren't confined to a few houses, but were spread over the city by an explosion. Wouldn't fatalities be higher? The surprising answer is no. If the radioactivity were dispersed in that way, a larger area would have to be evacuated, yet in all probability no specific deaths could be attributed to the event.
To understand the details, let's walk through the design of a dirty bomb similar to what Padilla wanted to build. I'll assume the same amount of radioactive material as was in Goiania: 1,400 curies of cesium-137. Radiation damage is measured in units called rem, and if you stand one meter from that source, you'll absorb 450 rems in less than an hour. That's called LD50, for lethal dose 50 percent. Untreated, you'll have a 50 percent chance of dying in the next few months from that exposure.
To try to enhance the damage, let's use explosives to spread our 1,400 curies over a larger area, say a neighborhood one kilometer square, or .6 of a mile. That will result in a radioactivity of 1.4 millicuries per square meter, and a careful calculation shows that residents will get a dose of 140 rems per year. But radiation illness is nonlinear. For extended exposures, the lethal dose increases by the fourth root of time, to approximately 1,250 rems for a one-year exposure and 2,500 rems for a 16-year exposure. So 140 rems per year is not enough to cause radiation illness, even if you stayed there 24/7 for a decade. Radioactive contamination may be the one case for which the solution to pollution really is dilution.
There will be no dead bodies at the scene, unless someone is killed by the explosion itself. I suspect that's why al Qaeda reportedly instructed Padilla to abandon the dirty bomb concept and try to plan a natural gas explosion instead.
But even a dirty bomb without casualties could spread nuclear panic, based on the danger of long-term cancer. For doses in the 100-rem range, results from historical exposures suggest the increased risk of cancer is about 0.04 percent per rem. That's a 6 percent increase in your chance of dying from cancer for each year you spend in the square kilometer. If the radioactivity were spread over a larger area, such as a 10-by-10-kilometer square, then the dose would be lower (12.6 rems per year) and so would the added risk of cancer: 0.06 percent per year of exposure. (I am assuming, conservatively, that risk is proportional to dose, even at low doses.)
With such contamination, would I evacuate my home? Not if I were allowed to stay. To me, the increased risk -- from the pre-existing average risk of cancer of about 20 percent per year to, say, 20.06 percent -- is not significant.
But I wouldn't be given the choice. The exposure of 12.6 rems per year is 126 times more than the yearly limit allowed to the public. In fact, the Environmental Protection Agency decontamination standard is 0.025 rems per year, meaning that 98 percent of the radioactivity would have to be removed before I would be allowed to return to my home.
In the Sept. 11 attacks, the terrorists took advantage of U.S. policy and prejudices. They knew they didn't need guns to take control because pilots had been instructed to cooperate with hijackers; nobody expected hijackers to turn planes into weapons. Similarly, a terrorist today might use a radiological weapon, not because of its actual damage, but in anticipation the out-of-scale panic and ensuing economic disruption that the weapon could trigger.
Could other radiological attacks be more potent than our hypothesized cesium-137 example? Electrical generators powered by the decay of radioisotopes, found in abandoned lighthouses in Russia, held 400,000 curies of strontium-90. But strontium-90 emits virtually no gamma rays; it is harmful only if you breathe it or ingest it. A cloud of aerosolized Sr-90 can kill, but it does not stay in the air for long. For the same reason, even a radiological bomb made using plutonium is unlikely to be dangerous. Anthrax would be deadlier, and much easier to obtain and transport. Nuclear waste storage facilities and nuclear reactors contain vastly more radioactivity, and the danger from them is substantial, if their radioactivity can be released.
If small dirty bombs threaten so little harm, why are they lumped in with true weapons of mass destruction? Because it's the law, as written in the 1997 National Defense Authorization Act (Public Law 104-201) and other places, including California penal code 11417. Defining them this way was a mistake that could lead to misallocation of resources and a general overreaction if such weapons were used. I hope, and expect, that most of the $450 million to be spent on the anti-nuclear initiative announced last month will be used to protect us from nuclear explosives and attacks on nuclear storage areas, and not specifically from radiological weapons.
If terrorists do attack this summer using a dirty bomb, the resulting deaths might come from automobile accidents as people flee. Dirty bombs are not weapons of mass destruction, but weapons of mass disruption. Their success depends on public and government overreaction. Beware not of radioactivity but of nuclear panic. The main thing we have to fear from a dirty bomb is fear itself.
Richard A. Muller, a 1982 MacArthur Fellow, is a physics professor at UC Berkeley, where he teaches a course called "Physics for Future Presidents." Since 1972, he has been a consultant on U.S. national security. This article first appeared on the MIT Technology Review magazine Web site, http://technologyreview.com.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- california
Utility Loses Track of Spent Nuclear Fuel
Story by Nigel Hunt
REUTERS USA:
July 19, 2004
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/26074/story.htm
LOS ANGELES - Pacific Gas & Electric said last week that it had lost track of three pieces of spent nuclear fuel it last used in the late 1960s, although the utility said there was no threat to public safety.
The San Francisco-based utility, a unit of PG&E Corp. said the nuclear fuel was from the now closed Humboldt Bay nuclear plant near Eureka in northern California.
Pacific Gas & Electric said there was a discrepancy in its records related to the movement of the used nuclear fuel more than 34 years ago.
The used nuclear fuel consisted of three, half-inch diameter by 18-inch long segments, weighing a total of about 4 pounds, which were cut from a single, seven-foot fuel rod in 1968.
"You could use that kind of material for a dirty bomb but it was probably lost long before 9/11 and they are just now accounting for it," said David Lochbaum, nuclear safety engineer for the Union of Concerned Scientists, an environmental advocacy group.
"It is likely it was mistaken for something else and shipped off-site. It is not likely that someone took it off-site either maliciously or inadvertently," he added, noting it may be have been removed during a site clean-up some years ago.
The Humboldt Bay reactor operated from 1963 to 1976. The utility said no fuel has been shipped off-site since 1974.
MINUTES REVIEWED
The utility said it discovered that the fuel was missing on June 23 when it reviewed minutes of "on-site review committee" meetings dating from 1968. Records provided conflicting accounts about what happened to the pieces.
The review was to prepare for moving used fuel from the pool to dry cask storage and decommissioning the plant.
"The fuel rod segments remain in the used fuel pool, or were shipped off-site to an appropriate controlled facility, either for analysis or reprocessing," said Greg Rueger, the utility's Chief Nuclear Officer.
"However, we must ensure that we have accurate records and that entails a meticulous search of the pool itself, to confirm the location of these three used fuel segments," he added. Lochbaum said the Nuclear Regulatory Commission was making nuclear plant operators physically look at spent fuel after operators of the Millstone nuclear plant in Connecticut lost track of a couple of rods about three years ago.
"When they do inventories they really have to look at it (now)," said Lochbaum, noting that as the plant had not operated for many years there would have been a considerable decay in the radioactivity of the rods.
The utility said the investigation into the location of the rods could take several more weeks to complete.
(Additional reporting by Len Anderson in San Francisco)
-------- colorado
Nuke nightmare fades
Demolition of Flats plant a hopeful sign
July 18, 2004
Boulder Daily Camera
http://www.bouldernews.com/bdc/editorials/article/0,1713,BDC_2489_3043002,00.html
In a project as large, daunting, slow and dangerous as the cleanup of a former nuclear weapons plant, milestones are hard to distinguish. But the beginning of the demolition of Rocky Flats' Building 771 is one mark worth noting.
The Rocky Flats nuclear-weapons plant, eight miles south of Boulder, opened in the early 1950s and became an ominous - and, locally, omnipresent - symbol of the Cold War.
The plant fashioned plutonium into hockey-puck-sized spheres, which were key components of nuclear "triggers." Each of those triggers, which were designed to ignite monstrous thermonuclear bombs, was itself a nuclear weapon. A trigger packed 20 kilotons of explosive force, five kilotons greater than the first nuclear weapon dropped on Japan.
Rocky Flats, which eventually grew to 700 buildings on its 385-acre industrial area, is now within 50 miles of 2.5 million residents. So it was something of a relief when in 1989 the feds shut the plant down for safety violations.
The plant never reopened, and the end of the Cold War helped change the mission of Rocky Flats - from producing weapons to cleaning up and moving out. Cleaning such a facility is no small task. As recently as 1995, experts estimated that cleanup would cost as much as $36 billion and take as long as 70 years. Now, the closure is scheduled to be completed in 2006, and the final tab is expected to be less than $7 billion.
The site, on the high plains overlooking Denver, is supposed to become a wildlife preserve. Before that happens, though, a lot more contaminated material must be dismantled and hauled off to waste-disposal sites around the country.
Some observers ask whether the site will be clean enough after clean-up, and they question the idea of transforming a toxic and radioactive industrial facility into public open space. The questions are legitimate. So are the government's efforts to clean it up and close it down.
Building 771, which excavators equipped with powerful hydraulic claws began pulling down on Thursday, was once dubbed by the feds as the "most dangerous building in America."
When it began operation 51 years ago, Building 771 was one of the first major structures at Rocky Flats. In 1957, a fire there spread plutonium throughout the building and beyond. Twenty five years ago, workers sealed off a contaminated room that was so radioactive, instruments couldn't measure it; the vault was called the "infinity room."
During the last nine years of clean-up, employees of contractor Kaiser-Hill have removed from this building 240 plutonium-contaminated "gloveboxes," 251 contaminated tanks containing 12,000 liters of contaminated liquids, 11 miles of piping that contained 2,500 liters of plutonium-tainted liquids and more than 50 kilograms of plutonium waste.
The "infinity room" was chopped into small pieces and hauled away. Now, the "spaghetti" of overhead piping and virtually everything else is gone. The concrete edifice remains.
Building 771 will not disappear overnight. But its demolition began in earnest last week. The excavators pulled down metal stairways, yanked off external walls and crushed sections of the roof.
Two decades ago, when activists tried to form a line around the whole Rocky Flats plant, "encircling" it in the hope of peace and disarmament, the dismantling of this place seemed a distant dream, if not an outright fantasy.
The protesters were not Gideon. Their trumpeted cries didn't cause the walls to collapse. But it's worth noting that the day of Rocky Flats' disappearance is moving inexorably closer. This is the significance of last week's demolition.
-------- new mexico
Safety a Concern in Shutdown of the Operations at Los Alamos
July 18, 2004
By KENNETH CHANG
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/18/national/18labs.html
A series of safety accidents, not just security lapses, prompted the director of Los Alamos National Laboratory to halt nearly all operations there on Friday.
Los Alamos, one of the nation's two nuclear weapons laboratories, is under heavy criticism because of the disappearance on July 7 of two computer data storage devices containing classified information from its weapons physics division.
But, in broadening a shutdown of classified work on Thursday to include the entire laboratory on Friday, G. Peter Nanos, the laboratory's director, cited safety and environmental concerns as well as security issues.
"In no case will I authorize a restart until I'm absolutely convinced that each organization will not risk further compromise of safety, security and environment," Mr. Nanos wrote in a memorandum to employees on Friday.
The latest injury occurred Wednesday, two days before the shutdown, when a 20-year-old woman suffered eye damage from a laser beam. The woman, a student intern who was not identified, had just finished working on a series of experiments involving a pulsed ultraviolet laser, but lingered in the laboratory.
"Everyone was under the impression that the laser was off," said James Fallin, a laboratory spokesman.
Half an hour later, she complained of blurry vision in her left eye, and it was discovered that the laser had not been turned off. She suffered bleeding at the back of her eye from a lesion one-fiftieth of an inch wide, and arrangements are being made to fly her to Johns Hopkins medical center in Baltimore for treatment, Mr. Fallin said.
The injury to the intern did not directly spur Mr. Nanos into imposing the labwide work suspension, but "it certainly was the next and final event that led him to say, stop," Mr. Fallin said. "It is the culmination of numerous things that have happened over recent months."
Mr. Fallin gave two other examples of safety violations, both occurring last year. In one, an employee injecting a chemical solution into a container did not seat the syringe properly, and the solution squirted into his eye. The employee did not suffer lasting damage to his vision, but "it demonstrated folks weren't paying attention," Mr. Fallin said.
In another incident, demolition work almost occurred near an electrical junction box that had not been turned off. Mr. Fallin said a potentially deadly accident was avoided only because one employee repeatedly insisted on checking whether the junction box had been turned off. "We probably would have had, at a minimum, electrocution," Mr. Fallin said. "At the worst, we would have had an explosion. People did not follow the appropriate safety procedure to make sure they had prepared for that day's work."
-------- MILITARY
-------- africa
In Sudan, 'a Big Sheik' Roams Free
Militia Leader Describes Campaign Against Africans as Self-Defense
By Emily Wax
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, July 18, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A58171-2004Jul17?language=printer
KHARTOUM, Sudan -- Musa Hilal sauntered into the lobby of a downtown hotel. Jittery eyes followed the statuesque, copper-skinned man as he settled into an armchair. He had recently been accused by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and others of leading the marauding militia that has plunged the Darfur region of western Sudan into the world's most desperate humanitarian crisis.
But Hilal has a different story. In a rare interview last week, he said the crisis had been exaggerated and offered to give a tour of the vast region where he had spent most of his life. "I'm a big sheik," he said. "Not a little sheik."
Hilal is accused of being a commander of the Janjaweed militia. According to human rights groups, aid workers and U.S. officials, the militia, supported by Sudan's government, has displaced 1.2 million people in Darfur through violence and pillage. What was once a lively crossroads between Africa and the Arab world has become a tableau of hunger, disease and fear.
U.S. officials have pressed the Sudanese government to end its support for the Janjaweed and hold Hilal and six other commanders accountable for the crisis. Powell, in a visit to the region last month, urged the government to disarm the militia and halt the violence.
But just days after Powell's trip, and a similar visit by U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, Hilal sat in plain sight here in the capital, sipping mango juice and joking about his three wives and 13 children as he wound and unwound a lilac scarf around his back and shoulders.
The story of Hilal illustrates the complex relationship between the Janjaweed and Sudan's Arab-led government, which recently promised to rein in the militia but has not. The Janjaweed and its commanders continue to operate freely in Darfur, and many of its fighters have also joined the government's official army.
Hilal said the Janjaweed fighters "are soldiers now and their faith is with the government." Asked whether he would heed calls to disarm, he said, "Whenever we feel the situation is completely secure and the cease-fire is being respected we will hand in our weapons." He added, "Whenever the government undertakes to hand in weapons from all factions and tribes, we will hand in arms."
Hilal portrayed himself as a defender of Arab tribes against African groups, dismissing claims that the Janjaweed have engaged in ethnic cleansing. "No one can wipe out an ethnicity," he said.
Darfur has long been home to Arab herders and African farmers, two Sudanese groups that were both Muslim, shared resources and sometimes intermarried. Clashes occurred sporadically, but tensions grew more serious 25 years ago as drought spread over the continent and the Arabs began to search for better grazing land.
Hilal's family was among those Arabs looking for more fertile areas. In 1976, Hilal's father moved his tribe to Amo, an area in northern Darfur where African tribes already lived, according to an investigation by the Congressional Research Service this year. The inquiry found that Hilal's father obtained the land through a corrupt official.
In 1997, Hilal was jailed for killing 17 Africans in Darfur, according to the inquiry. Years earlier, he had also been imprisoned for killing a security guard and robbing a bank in Nyala, a city in southern Darfur.
The tensions in Darfur exploded in early 2003. African rebels, saying that the Arab-led government in Khartoum had discriminated against them, attacked a military garrison. They destroyed four helicopter gunships, two Antonov aircraft and, according to government officials, killed about 75 soldiers.
At the time, the government was negotiating a settlement in a separate conflict, the country's 21-year civil war in the southern part of Sudan. Officials apparently wanted to send a strong message to other rebellious parts of country, including Darfur, that they would not give in.
The government had two main concerns about fighting the rebels in Darfur. Its forces were already stretched thin by conflicts in other areas, and at least 40 percent of the army was made up of soldiers from Darfur who might not want to fight against their own tribes.
So the government decided to use the Janjaweed militia to help put down the Darfur rebellion. Hilal was in prison again, for crimes allegedly committed in 2002, but the government chose him to help organize the militia, according to Ted Dagne, an Africa specialist for the Congressional Research Service.
Hilal was released from prison after personal intervention by Sudan's first vice president, Ali Uthman Muhammad Taha, Dagne said. Another man, Gen. Abdullah Safi Nur, an Air Force commander and former commissioner of Darfur who is Hilal's cousin, also intervened, he said, adding that the Sudanese government had relied on militia leaders such as Hilal in earlier conflicts, including in southern Sudan. Villages Bombed
The government responded to the rebel attack by bombing hundreds of villages. On the ground, Janjaweed fighters were unleashed. Some of them were jobless young men motivated by old ethnic tensions and lured into a lucrative new profession. They were then authorized by the government to burn villages and loot livestock and food, human rights groups say. They were also allowed to rape with impunity.
At least 30,000 people have been killed in Darfur, according to human rights reports. Among the more than one million people displaced by the violence, at least 200,000 have fled into neighboring Chad. Aid groups say 300,000 people have been left vulnerable to hunger and disease.
U.S. and U.N. investigators say they believe that the most significant leader of the Janjaweed is Taha, the country's first vice president, whom they have accused of orchestrating the attacks in Darfur. In February, Taha publicly told senior U.S. officials that he was going to "take care of the Darfur problem."
"The Janjaweed are just mercenaries and are just one piece of a bigger puzzle," Dagne said. "If I was Hilal, I would be less worried about the U.S. list and more worried about what First Vice President Ali Uthman Muhammad Taha might do."
The U.S. has also circulated a U.N. Security Council resolution to impose an arms and travel embargo on the militiamen. But Dagne said that since the fighters rarely travel outside Sudan and apparently have no major assets, such sanctions would be largely symbolic.
Today, Hilal, 43, describes himself as a sheik, or religious and community leader, as was his grandfather in western Darfur during British colonial times. Hilal says he is responsible for more than 300,000 Arabs in Darfur.
On a recent night, Hilal, pressing his long fingers together, said his job as a leader was to protect his people and their honor. According to him, Africans have killed Arabs for years over grievances about land and water. "Things like that give birth to bitterness," he said.
Hilal said that although he has never carried a weapon, he has rallied other Arabs to fight. "When the government put forward a program of arming all the people, I will not deny I called our sons and told them to become armed, and our sons acquiesced," he said. "Those who became armed were no less than 3,000."
Rep. Donald M. Payne (N.J.), the ranking Democrat on the House subcommittee on Africa and a member of the Congressional Black Caucus, is pushing to set up an international war crimes tribunal for Darfur, like those set up following the Balkan wars and the Rwandan genocide.
Payne has developed a separate list of government officials who he says are supervising and controlling Janjaweed activities. He listed Taha as number one, along with Nur, Hilal's cousin, and several other officials.
"This is a pariah government, which once harbored Osama bin Laden and took more than 20 years to even begin to end its civil war with the south," Payne said. "Darfur could happen again if we don't condemn this government's role in planning and executing the Janjaweed."
Hilal recently visited the U.S. and British embassies, preaching traditional reconciliation methods and telling diplomats and journalists that he wants to learn English. A Recruit's Tale
On April 22, 2003, said Mustafa Yusuf, a slim teenager with high cheekbones and a square face, he was kidnapped by Hilal's men and taken to a Janjaweed training camp in northern Darfur.
About 6,000 people were at the camp, Yusuf told journalists and a U.N. investigator. At 5:30 each morning, the boys and men woke and practiced shooting. They also learned how to spy on the African rebels.
Three times a week, he recalled, a helicopter gunship ferried in supplies, including weapons, ammunition and food. Yusuf, who escaped from the camp and is now a student in Khartoum, said that one day when the helicopter landed Hilal stepped off in a military uniform.
When the recruits arrived, Yusuf said, Hilal made a speech in which he told them that all Africans were their enemies. "Hilal said we should defeat the rebels," said Yusuf, 18, his eyes shifting to the floor.
Before an attack on April 27, Hilal and the troops sang wars songs: "We go to the war. We go to defeat the rebels. We are not afraid of war. We are the original people of this area," Yusuf recalled.
Later, after he fled the camp, Yusuf said he was in the market and watched as Hilal returned in a Land Cruiser from raids on African villages, followed by men on horseback. "They came back with beds and suitcases, blankets and radios," said Yusuf, who recounted his tale nervously. "There were camels, sheep and goats."
According to witnesses and U.N. officials, Hilal also coordinated a Feb. 27 raid on the village of Tawilah, near El Fasher. Hilal, in military uniform, landed by helicopter in a field on the outskirts of town, witnesses interviewed in Tawilah said. He set up a canvas tent and was guarded by Janjaweed fighters on horses and camels.
Witnesses said they saw Hilal receiving weapons and food from men in government helicopters.
Over the next three days, the marketplace was set on fire, 16 schoolgirls were kidnapped and at least 67 people were killed, according to a U.N. report. A video filmed by the governor's office and obtained by the United Nations days after the attack, showed fly-ridden bodies rotting in the street, a fuming and charred marketplace and women crying as they rocked children.
"This was the day the children were taken and all the people started to become displaced," said Saddiq Ismail, 45, a retired teacher and an African resident of Tawilah. "Everybody wanted to fight Musa Hilal, even the little men. But Musa Hilal wanted to get rid of everyone. . . . If you said you were Arab he would say, 'Come fight with me.' They were discriminating against us."
When the attack occurred, Ismail said, he hid in the bushes and took notes, because he felt it was his duty as an educated member of society to chronicle what was happening.
"During the three days, the military helicopter landed and took off each day," Ismail said. "Hilal moved and gave instructions, with men unloading guns off of the helicopter. "One day, the helicopter took the injured. They also got deliveries of food. By the time Hilal left, the town was nearly empty."
On a recent night in Khartoum, Hilal was asked about allegations that the militia was responsible for atrocities in Darfur.
"There is death in war, and until it is all over we will not know the true extent of what has happened," he said, over tea and pastries.
He contended that the crimes in Darfur were being committed by random criminals and not by those trying to put down the rebellion. Even the term 'Janjaweed,' he said, was being used incorrectly.
"Janjaweed is a colloquial word which means thief or bandit or highwayman," he said. "It means nothing and has been used to mean everything."
--------
Darfur Peace Talks Collapse
Associated Press
Sunday, July 18, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A58458-2004Jul17.html
ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia, July 17 -- Talks to end violence in the region of Darfur in western Sudan collapsed on Saturday, with two African rebel groups charging that Sudan's Arab-led government had not kept its end of the bargain.
Mediators worked late into the night trying to save the negotiations, which began Thursday at the African Union headquarters in the Ethiopian capital. But the rebels, insisting that the Sudanese government fulfill a list of earlier commitments first, walked out on Saturday without meeting the government delegation.
"These talks are now finished," Ahmed Hussain Adam said on behalf of his Justice and Equality Movement and the Sudan Liberation Army. "We are leaving Addis Ababa."
Ibrahim Ahmed Ibrahim, spokesman for the government delegation, said Sudan was not prepared to accept preconditions. "The demands of the rebels are not acceptable, and it is a disrespect to the African Union," he said.
Sudanese Foreign Minister Mustafa Osman Ismail said the government remained open to further negotiations.
The rebels' main demand was an internationally supervised timeline for Sudan to make good on its promise to disarm a shadowy Arab militia called the Janjaweed, which is accused of killing tens of thousands of black Africans and driving more than a million more from their homes.
The rebels were also seeking a government commitment to respect previous agreements to allow an international inquiry into the killings, prosecute those responsible, lift restrictions on humanitarian workers and release prisoners of war.
Most of the rebels' demands were contained in a widely ignored cease-fire deal signed with the government on April 8.
--------
Despite Appeals, Chaos Still Stalks the Sudanese
July 18, 2004
By MARC LACEY
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/18/international/africa/18SUDA.html?pagewanted=all&position=
NYALA, Sudan, July 14 - Two weeks after Colin L. Powell and Kofi Annan visited this part of Sudan in the hope that the glare of diplomatic shame might arrest a human crisis, conditions are still miserable.
Days after the American secretary of state and the United Nations secretary general ended their tour, witnesses said, gunmen stormed a girls' school in the desert region of Darfur, chained a group of students together and set the building on fire. The charred remains of eight girls were still in shackles when military observers from the African Union arrived on the scene.
That is a gruesome reminder of the kind of violence that the Sudan government has promised to stop by reining in the Janjaweed militias that it once encouraged when the government's focus was on quelling a civil war that swept Darfur. But since the visits, killing and raping continues, and health conditions are more dangerous.
The government has promised to rein in the militias and is offering a show of force, sending in police officers who were on display here during a visit, lined up in formation and marching in place.
But the Arab militias have continued to drive the African residents of Darfur from their villages, although aid workers say the rate may have slowed. What progress there has been is hard to determine in a region that is so vast and inaccessible.
Even if the marauding and killing can be controlled, sickness and starvation are taking their toll. There is now the threat of an epidemic that could cause more deaths than the months of violence.
In the deaths from illness, many are like the two children whose hearts recently stopped beating as Dr. Jerry S. Ehrlich held them in his arms. Both were chronically malnourished, sapped of their strength over time.
"We're trying to save as many kids as we can," said Dr. Ehrlich, a New Jersey pediatrician working for Doctors Without Borders at the sprawling Kalma camp outside Nyala. He sat on a straw mat in front of a long line of mothers, each of whom cradled a weak baby in her arms.
Nobody knows how many bodies have been buried beneath Darfur's hard earth since violence broke out in early 2003. Estimates begin at 30,000 and go up. In recent weeks, though, graves are being dug faster than ever, relief workers say, because of disease, not guns.
The government told Mr. Powell and Mr. Annan that it would disarm the Janjaweed and bring a modicum of security to Darfur. But pulling in the militias is easier said than done. The challenge is magnified because Darfur is about as big as France and lawless even in the best of times.
The government is eager for the Darfur problem to go away, and wants to escape from the international condemnation it has received. But its more important goal is to stay in power. That is why it encouraged the militias to put down the insurrection in Darfur.
In Nyala, the capital of one of the three provinces in the Darfur region, government officials said they now controlled a 25-mile radius outside of town. Soon, the security zone will reach out 60 miles, officials said, which is still a tiny portion of Darfur.
"Colin Powell is asking us to collect the arms in Darfur in five days," Ahmed Bilal Osman, the Sudanese health minister, said during a tour of Darfur this week. "Let me ask him: the U.S.A. in Iraq, they are a superpower - can they collect the arms in Falluja?"
On this reporter's third visit since April to government-held portions of Darfur, always accompanied by government officials, the signs of misery seemed more acute than ever, and the camps significantly larger.
At the Nyala hospital, one man writhed on the floor with a gash in his bicep that he said he received in a militia attack days earlier. There were skeletal babies, many of whom no longer had the energy to cry. Outside of town, one boy with burn marks on his face, his arms and much of his body approached a visitor and asked for something to eat. He was burned, he said, when his village was set afire.
Most experts predict that the situation in Darfur will get much worse. The Agency for International Development has estimated a death toll of about 300,000 by year's end, even if the aid response is swift, and up to a million casualties if it is slow. The World Health Organization's estimates are lower, but it projects 10,000 deaths a month if infectious diseases break out.
Insecurity is rampant in the countryside, say the aid workers who are fanning out across the region. The attack on the girls' school "reminded me of a scene from Rwanda," said one official who saw photos of the attack, one of many in recent weeks attributed to the Janjaweed.
The conflict is a complex one, part a clash between farmers and herders, partly a rebel insurgency and a military crackdown. In addition, the violence has involved Arab militias attacking black Africans.
The chaos began in early 2003 when two rebel groups initiated attacks on the government. A cease-fire is now in effect, but violations are reported regularly. Talks to end the conflict have gone nowhere.
The Bush administration has been pushing a resolution in the United Nations Security Council that would impose sanctions on some leaders of the militias. Americans officials have also been pressing for serious negotiations.
Sudanese officials vehemently oppose the United Nations resolution and say they are making headway in detaining outlaws in the region. As for the school attack, officials said they were investigating.
"We will follow up on that to find the culprits," said Muhammad Yusef, state minister for humanitarian affairs in Nyala. "They will be brought to justice."
[Mr. Powell said Friday in an interview on "The Charlie Rose Show" on PBS that the Sudan government's promises "to break the back of the Janjaweed" were no longer enough. "We will be measuring them against the action they take, not the promises they make," said Mr. Powell, who like Mr. Annan encountered government attempts to shield what he saw in Darfur.]
There is nobody to arrest when it comes to disease.
Small children are the first to die in a health crisis like the one unfolding here. Diarrhea and dysentery weaken them. Their kidneys stop functioning. Then their hearts begin failing. Over time, their immune systems no longer protect them from the germs that fill the crowded camps now called home by villagers.
Feeding centers for starving children have been set up across the region, and hundreds of babies arrive every week, cradled by desperate mothers. The children are weighed and measured. Only the skinniest and sickest are allowed in.
Until recently, Darfur's hospitals had been turning away those unable to pay. The government has now eliminated the fees, using donor funds.
The health situation is similarly dire across the border in Chad, where several hundred thousand villagers have fled.
A survey conducted in June of 896 children living in desert refugee camps and other settlements in Chad, near the border town of Tine, found that 27 percent of those in the camps and 29 percent of those living outside the camps were severely malnourished.
Tons of relief food are arriving at camps throughout Darfu,r but children continue to grow weaker. The lack of clean water is a prime culprit. Diarrhea is now rife in the camps, sapping whatever nourishments people have managed to take in.
"Diarrhea is a beastly killer of the weak," said Dr. David Nabarro, of the World Health Organization.
Sanitation is another challenge. Latrines are scarce in the camps. In all of Western Darfur, with a million people, there are about 4,000.
"That is minuscule," said Ces Adorna, Unicef's representative in Sudan, standing in a Nyala field covered with human excrement.
With sewage out in the open, diseases spread quicker. When the rainy season begins, doctors fear cholera and typhoid. Measles already flared up, but doctors may have contained the outbreak.
In camps, "it's like sitting on a bomb," said Dr. Nevio Zagaria, who works for the W.H.O. in Nyala.
The rains will also prompt an increase in malaria. Crews have begun moving from shelter to shelter in Darfur's camps spraying for mosquitoes.
Mr. Osman, the health minister, scoffs at suggestions that his government created the crisis. While accompanying Dr. Lee Jong Wook, director general of W.H.O., on a tour of Darfur this week, Mr. Osman disavowed any connection between the Janjaweed and the government and singled out the rebels for blame. Outside governments and relief workers question that.
Mr. Osman said he feared that talk about ethnic cleansing in Darfur from the Bush administration is designed to justify an American military invasion.
"They're saying that so they can bring their troops in," he said.
--------
Mugabe Said to Use Law as Political Tool
Dissidents Face Zimbabwe's Justice System
By Craig Timberg
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, July 18, 2004; Page A18
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A58456-2004Jul17?language=printer
BULAWAYO, Zimbabwe -- Remember Moyo, a burly man with sad, withdrawn eyes, was arrested on Nov. 11, 2001, and beaten repeatedly and savagely over the next several days. He was charged with murder.
The day after the arrest, Moyo said, police pummeled and stomped him by the side of a road. At a police station outside this southern city, he was stripped, his hands were tied behind his back and his feet were shackled to a metal ring hooked to a wet cell floor, he said. Several times, he said, thugs let themselves in at night and beat him bloody and mute.
"This thing, you cannot forget," said Moyo, who had been an intelligence official and bodyguard for Zimbabwe's main opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change. "You can try, but it just sticks."
The beating Moyo suffered and the murder charges against him and several other men were part of an attempt to cover up two killings ordered by officials of President Robert Mugabe's ruling party, the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front, or ZANU-PF, according to human rights activists, opposition members and church leaders. The case, they contend, underscores how Mugabe has used the law as a weapon against his political opponents.
Moyo, who spent more than two years in prison without bail, was released in April. On Monday, prosecutors acknowledged that they no longer had a case against Moyo and five others charged with him.
In the first years after white rule ended in Zimbabwe in 1980 and Mugabe assumed power, this landlocked southern African country of 12 million was largely regarded as a beacon of democracy and prosperity on a troubled continent. But in recent years, Mugabe's government has curbed the right to public assembly, shut down newspapers, expanded police authority to detain suspects without charges, put the main opposition leader on trial for treason and taken control of thousands of private farms.
Amnesty International and other human rights groups have chronicled the decline of the rule of law, saying Mugabe uses the criminal justice system to punish his rivals and protect his allies, and that to oppose him is to invite false arrest, torture and even death.
"These people are innocent," said the city's outspoken Catholic archbishop, Pius A. Ncube. "That's what they do all the time in ZANU-PF. . . . We're dealing with such a devilish government here, all to defend one man: Robert Mugabe."
The government has consistently disputed such claims, blaming them on what it has termed treachery by its opponents, dishonest journalists and meddling from the British, the country's former colonial rulers. Mugabe and other officials have characterized Moyo and his co-defendants as terrorists out to undermine Zimbabwe's peaceful democratic system.
The roots of Moyo's case, as detailed by human rights activists and in court documents and news reports, can be traced to the national election in 2000. It was the first contest in many years in which Mugabe's party faced significant opposition -- from the Movement for Democratic Change, which had been formed the year before.
The new opposition drew support from human rights lawyers, farmers, civic activists and some former members of ZANU-PF. One of them was Patrick Nabanyama, a ZANU-PF activist who believed that the ruling party had grown corrupt. In the parliamentary race in June 2000, Nabanyama made a public break with the party and backed an opposition candidate, David Coltart, a white lawyer.
As the election neared, Nabanyama said he began receiving death threats. The culprits, he said, were so-called war veterans, a loosely organized force loyal to the government and consisting mostly, but not entirely, of former guerrillas in Zimbabwe's war against white rule in Rhodesia, as the country was then known, in the 1970s.
"I have been subjected to several death threats since last month by pseudo war vets," Nabanyama wrote in a letter dated June 19, 2000, addressed to the Daily News, an independent newspaper since closed by the government. "Killing me will not stop the change. Instead, MDC is daily gaining support."
That afternoon, before Nabanyama got a chance to mail the letter, a gang of men seized him at his house and bundled him into a waiting vehicle as his wife and daughter looked on.
The abduction initially drew little attention from authorities. But Coltart and other opposition members organized vigils to keep pressure on the government to investigate.
Over the next few months, authorities arrested 10 war veterans in connection with Nabanyama's disappearance, including Cain Nkala, a Mugabe loyalist and the local head of a war veterans association.
After Nabanyama had been missing for a year, prosecutors upgraded the charges to murder. Nabanyama's body has never been found.
As the trial date approached, reports reached opposition leaders that Nkala intended to implicate top officials from the ruling party in Nabanyama's killing. He never got the chance.
On Nov. 5, 2001, a gang abducted Nkala in much the same style that Nabanyama had been taken, bundling him into a waiting vehicle as his wife watched. Nkala has not been seen since.
Coltart, Archbishop Ncube and others said they believed that Mugabe's party was involved in Nkala's kidnapping, which they described as an attempt to eliminate him before he could implicate party leaders in the killing of Nabanyama.
But the police and the government put the blame for Nkala's disappearance on the Movement for Democratic Change. "The MDC and their supporters should know their days are numbered," Mugabe said at Nkala's funeral, according to news accounts. "The time is now up for the MDC terrorists, as the world has been awakened by the death of Nkala."
Moyo, now 36, was arrested as police began a highly publicized roundup of more than a dozen opposition activists in connection with Nkala's killing.
Two other opposition activists who were arrested in connection with Nkala's murder, Sazini Mpofu and Khethani Augustine Sibanda, were shown on state-controlled television seemingly directing police to Nkala's body, at a site a few steps off a road outside the city. The grave was so shallow and obvious that Nkala's toes stuck through the dirt.
Prosecutors charged Moyo, Mpofu, Sibanda and three other opposition activists with Nkala's murder. Court proceedings began soon afterward, and remained front-page news in Zimbabwe for the next 2 1/2 years.
But in court, where some independent judges remain even after years of Mugabe's efforts to consolidate power, the government's case began to unravel.
Mpofu and Sibanda said police threatened and beat them, then dictated confessions that the two were forced to write and sign. Sibanda said agents from the Central Intelligence Organization had abducted him and compelled him, through torture and threats, to participate in a plot to frame the others for the murder.
Cross-examination of police officers also revealed numerous inconsistencies in their accounts, according to a ruling in March by the trial judge.
Perhaps the most damning was the inability of police to explain why their own investigation diary recorded that Sibanda supposedly pointed out the location of Nkala's body to police hours before the diary showed he was taken into custody. The trial judge rejected police explanations that the illogical diary entries were merely mix-ups.
The diary also revealed that officials from ZANU-PF and Mugabe's office directly intervened in the case to deliver intelligence two days after Nkala's disappearance. That same afternoon, police raided opposition headquarters. What the diary described as an undercover "ferret team" started developing leads tying the activists, including Moyo, to Nkala's disappearance.
Accounts of beatings and torture also emerged during the testimony.
After hearing these and other stories, High Court Justice Sandra Mungwira ruled that the confessions and the police testimony were so tainted as to be inadmissible.
"In conclusion I would comment that overall the evidence of the State witnesses who are police officers is fraught with conflict and inconsistencies," the judge wrote in March. "The witnesses conducted themselves in a shameless fashion and displayed utter contempt for the due administration of justice to the extent that they were prepared to indulge in what can only be described as works of fiction."
Mungwira also held open the possibility that, as the defense claimed, government agents -- whom she called a "third force" -- had twisted the case to their own ends.
The following month, Moyo, Mpofu and Sibanda -- who had been denied bail for more than two years -- were freed from prison. The three other suspects had been given bail earlier.
Then, this week, prosecutors told the judge that they had no case remaining against five of the suspects, including Moyo. The sixth, Sibanda, still faces the possibility of prosecution when the case resumes on July 26.
Attorneys for all the defendants, however, say they are confident that their clients will soon be exonerated. If that happens, no one will have been brought to justice for the killing of either Nabanyama or Nkala.
Coltart, now a member of parliament, said: "This is the history of ZANU-PF in microcosm. They've used violence to achieve political objectives. . . . They have killed their own and portrayed it as an attack on their own by others."
Moyo is broke and sick, suffering from a variety of maladies including dizziness, weakness and headaches that he blames on the beatings he endured in police custody. He fears more violence leading up to the national elections in March.
"This next coming election will be the killing election," Moyo said. "People will die."
-------- business
Boeing Has a Powerful Ally With Hastert
House Speaker Throws His Clout Behind Controversial Air Force Tanker Deal
By Jeffrey H. Birnbaum
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, July 18, 2004; Page A10
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A58084-2004Jul17?language=printer
Congress is poised to appropriate $100 million to keep one of the federal government's most scandal-ridden and contentious programs -- the Air Force's plan to replace its aging aerial-refueling tankers with new Boeing 767s.
Insiders say that the primary reason for the payout is that House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) has made Boeing Co.'s cause his own.
Hastert has worked aggressively behind the scenes to keep the tanker contract in Boeing's hands at least in part, his spokesman said, because Boeing is headquartered in Chicago, not far from his congressional district. Boeing also has needed the help. Questions about the cost of the program, among other worries, have prompted the Pentagon to put off deciding its fate until year-end at the earliest.
"Yes, the Speaker goes to bat for Illinois and he's been personally involved in this; he makes no secret about it," said Hastert spokesman John Feehery. But Feehery portrayed Hastert's interest in the deal as more than pork-barrel politics. "He's not just fighting for the sake of his constituency; it's also for the country's sake," he said.
A fight is what it took. "I don't know how we could have done something this controversial without the Speaker's support," said Rep. Todd Tiahrt (R-Kan.), an advocate for the tanker program whose Wichita congressional district includes a large Boeing factory. "You've got to have someone with a lot of clout on your side and he's been there four-square for us."
"The Speaker has sure weighed in on this one," confirmed George Behan, spokesman for Rep. Norman D. Dicks (D-Wash.), who also labored on Boeing's behalf. "He worked hard."
Hastert, who declined to be interviewed for this story, has had to fight all year for the appropriation. Several lawmakers, led by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), have added language to Senate bills that would restrict the program. Indeed, McCain has regularly tried since 2001 to limit, delay or terminate the Boeing plan. Still, at the Speaker's urging, House and Senate negotiators approved the seed money late Wednesday as part of a Pentagon spending bill. The entire measure is scheduled for votes in both chambers this week.
Boeing declined to comment. But its congressional backers say that they have stayed in close contact with the company's many lobbyists as they pressed the tanker issue. "I've been in contact with the Boeing office," Tiahrt said. "I probably talk to them once a week."
According to PoliticalMoneyLine.com, a nonpartisan campaign finance research group, the $4 million Boeing spent to pay dozens of lobbyists last year (the latest data available) made it No. 20 on the long list of major companies and interest groups that try to influence Washington decision-makers. In the current election cycle, Boeing ranks No. 12 among corporations in campaign giving to federal candidates. Its political action committee has contributed $492,000 so far, of which $10,000 went to Hastert, PoliticalMoneyLine.com records show.
McCain and others have charged that the proposed $23.5 billion deal for 100 Boeing jets -- the costliest lease in U.S. history -- was designed more to benefit Boeing than American taxpayers. Boeing found itself on the defensive after acknowledging that it improperly hired as an executive the former Air Force official, Darleen A. Druyun, who negotiated the lucrative arrangement. Druyun pleaded guilty in April to illegally accepting a job with the company.
Druyun's hiring "is the worst example of the 'revolving door' in quite some time," said Keith Ashdown of Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonpartisan budget watchdog group. The Boeing deal was "absolutely a waste of taxpayer money -- in the billions of dollars."
Nonetheless, seed money was shoehorned into the legislation thanks to heavy and repeated pressure by Hastert and his aides, Tiahrt and others involved in the process say. Hastert's team made its case at the White House, at the Pentagon and to key lawmakers. In the end, they managed to overcome more obstacles than any weapons program in recent memory. "The battle over these tankers is in a class by itself," said Scott Lilly, who spent 31 years as a Democratic congressional staffer, most of them dealing with appropriations.
The only program that came close in controversy, Lilly recalled, was the B-1A bomber, which was canceled by President Jimmy Carter in 1977 after only four prototypes were built. But that plane was shelved not so much for reasons of cost or ethical concerns but because Carter wanted to pursue a different nuclear-weapons strategy. He decided to develop cruise missiles that could be carried by less expensive subsonic aircraft like the B-52 rather than deploy a new, fast-flying jet like the B-1A.
Hastert did not accomplish everything he sought. The House-passed version of the appropriation designated Boeing as the supplier. The final version is less specific. What's more, the Pentagon is conducting two studies of the program and is reviewing its options, which include buying new tankers from another supplier, possibly the France-based Airbus SAS, and refurbishing rather than replacing the existing, 43-year-old fleet. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has put the entire contract on hold until after the November election. It's also unclear whether any new jets would be leased or bought.
Nonetheless, the mere fact that the appropriation survived gives hope to Boeing and its congressional friends. "We're pleased with this language; we hope it will further the program," said Dicks, whose home state of Washington houses major Boeing facilities.
According to Hastert aides, the Speaker worked with Tiahrt and Dicks to round up support in both the House and the Senate, where the Boeing deal faced louder opposition. Hastert counted among his allies there the Republican senators from Kansas, Pat Roberts and Sam Brownback.
Their basic argument: The current fleet is so old that it needs to be replaced and only one American company is positioned to provide the tankers, Boeing.
Boeing has not been coy about saying one reason it decided to move to Chicago from Seattle was that it could count on Hastert's patronage. Hastert, the House's top Republican, makes a habit of helping Illinois-based corporations. He has championed measures for years that have benefited Caterpillar Inc. and UAL Corp., the parent company of United Airlines. In 1998, he added $250,000 to the Pentagon spending bill so that Amurol Confections Co. of his hometown of Yorkville, Ill., could study caffeinated chewing gum.
On the Boeing deal, Hastert had to face down many congressional opponents, including his own state's senator, Peter Fitzgerald (R-Ill.). "The tanker lease was an unusually unfavorable deal for the taxpayers and an unusually favorable deal for Boeing," Fitzgerald said. "It appears to me that he [Hastert] is becoming fairly renowned for doing special little favors behind the scenes here and there at interesting times for some of his corporate buddies."
Regardless of his reason, however, when the Speaker spoke, money moved. "Out of respect for who the Speaker is, when he puts his blessing on something, it's a done deal," said Rep. Ray LaHood (R-Ill.), another Hastert ally on Illinois appropriations.
-------- iraq
Iraq's premier denies claims that he executed six prisoners
BY Damien McElroy in Baghdad
18/07/2004
UK Telegraph
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/07/18/wirq18.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/07/18/ixnewstop.html
Ayad Allawi, Iraq's prime minister, has dismissed allegations that he killed six prisoners in cold blood just days before assuming power from the American-led coalition last month.
An Australian newspaper reported claims that Dr Allawi had pulled a pistol from his belt to shoot a group of blindfolded and shackled insurgents who had been lined up against the wall of a police station in Baghdad. Mr Allawi dismisses the claims
The story in the Sydney Morning Herald, based on the unsubstantiated claims of two anonymous Iraqis, arose from a rumour apparently circulating in Baghdad.
Although the prime minister's office advised the anonymous Iraqis to make a report to the authorities, his officials rejected the allegations. "Dr Allawi is turning this country into a free and democratic nation run by the rule of law," a statement said.
"Numerous groups are attempting to hinder what the interim Iraqi government is on the verge of achieving, and occasionally they spread outrageous accusations hoping they will be believed and thus harm the honourable reputation of those who sacrifice so much."
Neither a date for the incident nor the names of the Iraqis who claim to have witnessed it were given in the Sydney Morning Herald. It reported claims that Dr Allawi and Falah al-Naqib, the interior minister, made a unscheduled visit to the Al-Amriyah police station in Baghdad in mid-June.
When presented with seven detainees who were said to be responsible for attacks on Iraq's security forces, it alleged, Dr Allawi, who once survived an axe attack in London ordered by Saddam Hussein shot each one, killing six and wounding one. About two dozen people, including Dr Allawi's American personal security guards, were said to have witnessed the incident.
One of the newspaper's informants alleged: "The prisoners were against the wall and we were standing in the courtyard when the interior minister said that he would like to kill them all on the spot. Allawi said that they deserved worse than death - but then he pulled the pistol from his belt and started shooting them." Three of the victims were named in the report.
Dr Allawi's British and American allies have applauded his new government as strong and effective. Confidence among Iraqis has soared as the new government has taken steps to tackle the country's insurgency.
Even so, the bloodshed continues. Iraq's justice minister, Malik al-Hassan, narrowly escaped injury yesterday morning when a suicide bomber blew up a vehicle as his convoy left his home.
The insurgents have repeatedly targeted top officials. Last week, a regional governor was killed when his convoy was ambushed.
Five guards were killed in the attack, which was claimed by Abu Musab al-Zarqai, the al-Qaeda militant blamed for a series of deadly suicide bombings, and for executing at least three Western hostages in Iraq.
Five burnt-out cars were littered across the road, with human remains scattered among the wreckage.
In the southern Baghdad suburb of Mahmudiyah, two national guard officers were killed and 25 other people injured when a suicide bomber slammed a vehicle into a recruitment centre.
North of Baghdad, a roadside bomb in the town of Baiji killed an American soldier and wounded another. The death brought to 655 the number of American troops killed in action in Iraq since the invasion last year to oust Saddam Hussein.
--------
MILITARY
Elite Squad of Iraqi Soldiers Tests Newfound Autonomy
July 18, 2004
By IAN FISHER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/18/international/middleeast/18SQUA.html?pagewanted=all
BAGHDAD, Iraq, July 17 - Haider Salem, a 22-year-old Iraqi soldier, tried to be diplomatic, but his bottom line was clear. As members of the Second Battalion of the Iraqi Intervention Force, he and his comrades were the only Iraqi soldiers who could patrol the streets without American troops beside them - and he preferred it that way.
"Maybe if the coalition support is with us, it is safer," he said, using the word for foreign forces here that became interchangeable with the much-disliked American occupation. "But maybe the residents will see us as traitors. So maybe being alone is really safer for us."
At the beginning of the month, to show a change with the transfer of formal sovereignty to an interim Iraqi government, American forces began scaling down their physical presence around Iraq, patrolling the streets with more Iraqi soldiers. Americans still mostly take the lead, except in the case of the Second Battalion, which since the beginning of July has been running its own patrols, alone or with only a few American observers.
The Second Battalion is a small, elite start at independence - only about 700 men, and they still work in close cooperation with American soldiers, who say they act more as advisers than as supervisors. Still, the battalion is more than symbolic, said Maj. Mehdi Aziz, who this week ran a patrol in Doura, a rough southern Baghdad neighborhood.
"In the past people on the streets did not greet us," he said. "Now we get a good reaction. They welcome us. Maybe they are proud of us."
Few Iraqis believe that Iraq's new leaders or its military will be completely independent. But as the Second Battalion soldiers patrolled residential streets in the summer heat on Friday, the reception seemed more than curious, even supportive.
"It's better to have Iraqis because they are from this community, and we are used to them more than the Americans," said Murad Sayid, 44, one in a crowd of men watching the patrol walk by.
The Second Battalion, the only actual members of the Iraqi Army in Baghdad, is more heavily armed and highly trained than other Iraqi soldiers. Its job is counterinsurgency, and both Iraqis and Americans say their biggest role now is to collect intelligence on weapons and potential attacks. The idea is that Iraqis are more likely to give information to fellow Iraqis than to Americans, and in the last two weeks the Iraqis have uncovered several roadside bombs, the biggest killer of American soldiers here.
Despite the battalion's proud role, some of its men were part of a low moment for Iraq's new military: an ambush on the way to the restive city of Falluja in April in which some soldiers refused to fight back because, they said, they would not fight fellow Iraqis.
Major Aziz, whose unit was not involved in that ambush, insisted that the soldiers have reshaped how they view their job since then.
"We are not going to fight our people," he said. "But we are not going to watch as the bad guys do what they want."
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Two Bombings of Iraqis Leave at Least 6 Dead
July 18, 2004
By IAN FISHER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/18/international/middleeast/18IRAQ.html?hp
BAGHDAD, Iraq, July 17 - Two powerful car bombs exploded in Iraq on Saturday, one apparently aimed at the justice minister and the other at civil defense recruits, as violence against the new Iraqi government continued its upward spiral. At least six Iraqis died, the police and hospital officials said.
The justice minister, Malik al-Hassan, who has been outspoken on the need to crack down on insurgents in Iraq, survived the apparently well-coordinated attack near his home in Baghdad. But at least four people, some his bodyguards, were killed. The blast shredded the bomber's car to nothing but an engine block, incinerated two other cars and spewed shrapnel and body parts dozens of yards.
Only hours after the blast, an Islamist Web site posted a claim of responsibility from Jamaat al-Tawhid and Jihad, or Unity and Holy War, the group led by the Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. It was impossible to verify the authenticity of the claim, but it came unusually quickly. In the past, the group has usually waited a day - as it did on Friday, when it claimed responsibility for the high-profile killing of the governor of Nineveh Province a day earlier.
An hour before the Baghdad blast, at about 7:30 a.m., a car bomb exploded in Mahmoudiya, south of Baghdad, as a suicide bomber tried to plow into a line of Iraqis seeking jobs with the civil defense forces.
Two Iraqi soldiers providing security were killed, according to Iraqis at the scene. One was Saddam Obeid, 21, who had spent the last few days painting his room for his new bride. He was to be married in a few days.
"Who is going to get married now?" wailed Riyad Obeid, 22, one of three surviving brothers who held one another in grief outside the morgue of Yarmouk Hospital in Baghdad, where Mr. Obeid's body lay under a pink sheet. "Who is going to get married in your room?"
Baghdad shuddered on Saturday morning with an unusual number of explosions, after what had been nearly three weeks of relative quiet after the transfer of formal sovereignty to the interim Iraqi government on June 28. At least three large blasts and what sounded like three mortar rounds all exploded before noon, on the anniversary of the day in 1968 when the Baath Party executed a coup that brought Saddam Hussein to the presidency several years later.
It is unclear if the violence and the anniversary are related, though former Baath Party members are believed to make up a large part of the insurgency, which regularly attacks Americans and Iraqis.
On Thursday, the first major car bomb in weeks killed at least 10 people in Baghdad just outside the Green Zone, the heavily fortified compound that is the center here for both American and Iraqi officials.
The same day, militants assassinated Osama Kashmoula, the governor of Nineveh, after attempts on the lives of several other Iraqi government officials in the last two weeks.
On Saturday, officials at Yarmouk Hospital said they treated injuries from three explosions, but were so busy they could not immediately say how many victims they had treated.
"We had three explosions, so we are confused now," said Firas Mejid, a surgeon who had treated 10 bomb victims before noon. An official said later they had treated 12 people and received 3 bodies.
An American soldier was killed on Saturday near Baiji, south of Mosul, in the north, after a military convoy was struck by a roadside bomb, according to a military statement. Three other soldiers were wounded, the statement said.
The attack against the justice minister occurred about 9 a.m., several hundred yards from his home in Jamia, a neighborhood in northwestern Baghdad. Ahmed Hussein, 34, one of the minister's bodyguards, said that he saw a Toyota Corolla parked near the convoy and that it exploded just as the car carrying Mr. Hassan passed by.
The windshield of Mr. Hussein's car shattered from the bomb's force, spattering him with glass and severely injuring a colleague, who lay motionless on hospital bed at Yarmouk in a thick puddle of his own blood.
"They are uneducated people, savages," Mr. Hussein said in his hospital bed, his head and left eye bandaged from the flying glass. He said he could not understand why Iraqis might be behind the attack. "They control the government now," he said. "This is the government."
Haider Abed, 32, a painter hit by flying glass, said he expected the violence in Iraq would only intensity now. "As long as there are terrorists, there will be explosions," he said.
Hospital officials and others said there was a second explosion near the site of the first one, but that could not be confirmed.
In Mahmoudiya, a Sunni enclave south of Baghdad and a spot of regular ambushes against American troops and foreign travelers, Iraqi soldiers fired on a car that failed to stop as it careened toward a line of several dozen potential recruits at a civil defense base. The car then exploded, killing Mr. Obeid and his friend, a fellow civil defense soldier, Adel Tahar, 23.
The mother of Mr. Obeid's 17-year-old fiancée, Marwa, slumped in sorrow with his brothers at the hospital morgue, with the thumps echoing in the background from the heavy door into the refrigerated room holding the victims of Saturday's violence.
"My brother! My son!" she cried.
The dead man's brother, Riyad, said he did not know how to break the news to their father, a widower who is paralyzed.
"My father will die if he sees the body," he said.
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Bomber Targets Iraq Justice Minister
5 Die in Convoy Attack; U.S. Soldier, 6 Iraqis Killed in Other Violence
By Doug Struck
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, July 18, 2004; Page A18
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A58187-2004Jul17.html
BAGHDAD, July 17 -- A suicide bomber rammed his car into a convoy carrying the Iraqi justice minister to work Saturday in Baghdad. The official was not hurt, but two of his bodyguards and three other people were killed. A U.S. soldier and at least six other Iraqis were also killed in violence throughout the country.
Meanwhile, the new U.S. ambassador, John D. Negroponte, disputed suggestions that a proposed amnesty for Iraqis who have opposed the U.S. occupation could include those who have killed U.S. soldiers. Negroponte said he supported the idea of an amnesty but was "not aware there is any provision for any amnesty for those who killed U.S. soldiers."
"There may have been at one point some language that was ambiguous and led to the interpretation that somehow people would be given amnesty who assaulted U.S. troops," he said. "My understanding is that ambiguity is no longer there."
Iraqi officials had expressed concern that a wave of violence might occur Saturday, the anniversary of a coup that brought the Baath Party to power in 1968. Deposed president Saddam Hussein, who was vice president at the time, formally became president in 1979.
The attack against the justice minister, Malik Douhan Hasan, came shortly after he left his house in a Baghdad suburb. According to witnesses, a car raced into the convoy of vehicles accompanying Hasan, striking a sport utility vehicle and killing the two bodyguards. It was unclear whether the other people who were killed were part of the convoy or were bystanders. The car used in the attack was torn into pieces and thrown about 30 yards. The explosion shattered windows in many houses surrounding the scene.
Issam Majid, a government employee, said he was driving to work in a car near the convoy when the bomb exploded. "It was like some heavy, massive thing falling on me. Then I realized I was wounded and bleeding," said Majid, who sustained a minor wound to his left arm.
The U.S. soldier who was killed Saturday died when a roadside bomb exploded under a military convoy as it traveled near the town of Baiji, north of Baghdad. Another soldier was wounded in that attack.
In Iskandariyah, south of Baghdad, the chief of police was slain in an ambush. In Samarra, north of the capital, gunmen killed the local head of the Iraqi National Party and his father, according to local reports.
In Mahmudiyah, 15 miles south of Baghdad, attackers hit the Iraqi National Guard headquarters, killing two people and wounding 47, hospital officials told the Associated Press.
A suicide attack earlier Saturday in Baghdad killed at least one guard at a checkpoint when the bomber detonated explosives as he was being questioned. More than a dozen people were wounded in that attack.
Also Saturday, hostage-takers holding an Egyptian man agreed to release him after his company pledged to stop working in Iraq, the firm's owner said. The Associated Press reported that the owner, Faisal Naheet, told the al-Jazeera satellite television network that Alsayeid Mohammed Alsayeid Algarabawi, a driver for the firm, would be released Sunday.
The Philippine government continued withdrawing members of its small contingent from Iraq in an apparent effort to save the life of another hostage, Angelo de la Cruz, who was captured this month.
In Manila, presidential spokesman Ignacio Bunye wrote in a newspaper column that it could take some time to secure de la Cruz's release, the Reuters news agency reported. "We admire Angelo for his sacrifice and courage and we all want him home but it may take time," he said. "Right now, we must not do anything that can put Angelo's life in danger. Those terrorists have killed before and they can kill again."
The United States has criticized the Philippine government for pulling out its 51-member contingent.
Special correspondent Khalid Saffar contributed to this report.
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Iraqi Prime Minister Reopens Controversial Newspaper
July 18, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iraq-Sadr-Newspaper.html?hp
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- Iraq's interim prime minister issued a decree allowing a controversial newspaper to reopen after U.S. officials closed it in March, setting off months of fighting between U.S. forces and militants loyal to radical Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr.
Meanwhile, after a two-month absence, al-Sadr showed up in Najaf in an unannounced visit to the Imam Ali shrine, one of Shiism's holiest sites. With all the pomp of a rock star, the mercurial cleric was ushered into the mosque as guards and aides cut a path through hundreds of chanting and cheering supporters.
Al-Sadr's ``appearance and the disappearance was for security reasons,'' said Ahmed al-Shaibani, the cleric's spokesman in the holy city of Najaf. Associated Press Television News footage showed al-Sadr, looking uneasy, frowning and dismissively waving away people with a flick of his hand as he knelt in preparation for prayers.
The weekly Al-Hawza was the mouthpiece of al-Sadr's ``Sadrist'' movement, routinely carrying his fiery sermons on its front page along with articles sharply critical of the U.S.-led occupation, which formally ended June 28.
Iraq's former American governor, L. Paul Bremer, ordered the newspaper closed for two months on March 28 for allegedly inciting violence against coalition troops.
Bremer's closure order expired May 28, but al-Hawza's editor in chief, Abbas al-Robai, has said that trying to resume publication then could have exposed the newspaper's editorial staff to arrest.
The closure and the arrest a few days later of a close al-Sadr aide in the holy city of Najaf began an anti-coalition uprising by militiamen loyal to al-Sadr in Baghdad and across Shiite areas in central and southern Iraq. A series of truces ended the fighting, which had raged on-and-off for two months.
Interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, himself a Shiite, ordered the paper reopened in an effort to show his ``absolute belief in the freedom of the press,'' his office said in a statement.
Al-Sadr's representatives welcomed the move, but said it was an effort by the new leaders to win favor with the group.
``Closing the newspaper was according to our will, and opening the newspaper will also be according to our will,'' said al-Shaibani. ``The issue is not in the hands of Allawi or others.''
He said the newspaper's slant will remain unchanged and will still be ``directed against the occupation.''
Bremer's decision to close al-Hawza had drawn condemnation from members of the now-defunct Governing Council, who said it ran counter to talk of securing freedom for Iraqis. Privately, some officials of Bremer's now-disbanded coalition authority also criticized the decision, arguing that it had unnecessarily angered a large segment of Iraq's Shiite majority at a time when the U.S. military had its hands full fighting an insurgency in Sunni areas.
The order to reopen al-Hawza appears designed to broaden Allawi's base of support as his administration struggles to tackle a worsening security situation while trying build national support for the new government.
Al-Sadr and his top aides have repeatedly called Allawi's unelected government illegitimate, but said their movement was prepared to adopt a wait-and-see policy as the country prepares for a general election due in January. Al-Sadr also said he wanted to see how much influence the United States, with the bulk of the 160,000 coalition troops here, has on government decisions.
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U.S. Military Launches Airstrike in Falluja
July 18, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iraq-Strike.html?hp
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- A U.S. airstrike on a house in the restive city of Fallujah killed at least 10 people Sunday, hospital and local officials said.
Explosions rocked the city, and angry crowds gathered near the building that was hit.
Several times in recent months, the United States has bombed buildings said to be safehouses used by the network of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian militant blamed for masterminding car bombings and other attacks in Iraq.
Iraq's interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi has promised more intense cooperation between local leaders and the Americans in rooting out terrorism.
The U.S. military confirmed an airstrike but refused to provide details. It referred all calls to the Iraqi Defense Ministry, which had no comment.
``We heard the sound of jetfighters and then we heard four explosions in the house occupied by civilian residents,'' said Lt. Saad Khalaf of the Fallujah Brigade, a local defense force.
He said that about 10 people were killed inside the house.
``After the explosion, we rushed to the hit house and we started to search for the bodies and we could find remains that were buried later on,'' Khalaf said.
Marines besieged the city for several weeks last spring and then handed over security to the new Fallujah Brigade, which was made up of residents and commanded by officers from Saddam Hussein's former army. Many of those who fought the Marines joined the brigade.
Allawi issued an unprecedented statement July 5 after the last strike on an al-Zarqawi safehouse, saying his government provided intelligence for its location so the strike could ``terminate those terrorists, whose booby-trapped cars and explosive belts have harvested the souls of innocent Iraqis without discrimination, destroying Iraqi schools, hospitals and police stations.''
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THE AMBASSADOR
U.S. Diplomat Starts New Job by Deferring to Iraq Rulers
July 18, 2004
By SOMINI SENGUPTA
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/18/international/middleeast/18DIPL.html
BAGHDAD, Iraq, July 17 - John D. Negroponte, the new American ambassador, emerged Saturday and did his best not to make news.
The Americans, after cutting such a huge swath here, are lying low, being careful to defer to the authority of the new Iraqi government. But the unanswered question is how much power the Americans exercise behind the scenes.
And Mr. Negroponte, who runs one the largest diplomatic missions ever assembled, with nearly a thousand Americans on staff and American advisers salted throughout Iraqi ministries, stayed true to his charge to keep a low profile.
Speaking for the first time to the foreign news media since arriving nearly three weeks ago as the United States' ambassador to Iraq, Mr. Negroponte clearly intended to demonstrate that the American presence here, despite the 140,000 troops on the ground and nearly 1,000 foreign service officers, would be distinct from the United States-led Coalition Provisional Authority that formally disbanded on June 28.
He gave a nod to an Iraqi government proposal to offer amnesty to some insurgents who put down their weapons, but said amnesty would not apply to those who had killed American or allied troops.
Mr. Negroponte's briefing was notable for what was left out. Repeatedly, he demurred on questions about Iraqi policy priorities. He punctuated his statements with words like "assist," "empower" and "counsel."
"I'm hopeful, I'm optimistic, I think all the ingredients for success are there," he said. "But I do want to stress this whole enterprise is in support of the Iraqi government and the people themselves. They've got the lead responsibility. They've assumed full responsibility, responsibility for the exercise of their sovereignty on the 28th of June. Really it's a question of trying to enable them as rapidly as possible to meet these various goals."
He said nothing about when American troops would stand, nor when the presidential palace, the Iraqi equivalent of the White House, would be turned over to the Iraqis.
The briefing was in contrast to those by Mr. Negroponte's predecessor here, the American proconsul, L. Paul Bremer III, whose regular news conferences had made him practically a celebrity on Iraqi television. No television cameras were allowed today. The briefing was in the United States Embassy Chancery, a two-story building that houses fewer than 50 staff members, instead of the sprawling palace where Mr. Negroponte and a vast majority of his staff work.
Mr. Negroponte, who most recently was United States ambassador to the United Nations and in Honduras during the Central American civil wars of the 1980's, set out modest goals: train Iraqi soldiers to take over security responsibilities; help the government to hold elections by January 2005; and push ahead on the $18.4 billion United States-financed reconstruction projects that have been hindered by sabotage.
The embassy has opened four branch offices across the country, stationed Foreign Service officers on United States military bases and installed "consultants" in a host of Iraqi government ministries.
Mr. Negroponte said he had begun his assignment here as he would anywhere else, by visiting Iraqi officials, and not just in the heavily fortified Green Zone, home to thousands of Americans who rarely step out. He said his first visits were to the prime minister, Iyad Allawi, and the president, Sheik Ghazi Ajil al-Yawar.
Asked what he would do to overcome sectarian divisions among Iraqis, he said: "How am I going to hold this country together? I'm not going to hold this country together. I think you should ask Prime Minister Allawi and Sheik Ghazi."
Likewise, when asked about whether anti-American forces, like members of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party and the radical Shiite cleric, Moktada al-Sadr, should be invited into the new Iraqi political tent, he said it was not a decision for Americans to make.
"It's got to be an Iraqi decision," Mr. Negroponte said.
Even former Baathists? he was asked. Some of them are leaders in the anti-American insurgency. "I'm not going to go there," he said.
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BAGHDAD
Iraqis Slowly Take Their Places in the Ranks of the Security Forces
July 18, 2004
By SOMINI SENGUPTA
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/18/international/middleeast/18ARMY.html?pagewanted=all&position=
BAGHDAD, Iraq, July 17 - Gradually, ever so imperceptibly, the ground is beginning to shift.
The legions of American soldiers who not so long ago erected checkpoints and roared across the capital, guns pointed out of their Humvees, have diminished.
In their place, Iraqi officers are manning checkpoints and swooping down on suspected criminal gangs. Led by their American counterparts, Iraqi soldiers are combing through palm groves in search of weapons caches. One vanguard unit of the new Iraqi Army, known as the Iraqi Intervention Force, is allowed to patrol the streets without Americans.
More and more, the public face of security here is Iraqi.
"When they see us with them, they're more apt to believe things are going the way we've been saying, that we're turning over sovereignty," said Capt. Tom Pugsley of the First Battalion of the First Cavalry Division, whose men were on a routine mission the other morning with 30 members of the Iraqi National Guard to escort local council leaders to a women's center.
Just ahead, an Iraqi soldier at a checkpoint fired his gun in the air, apparently as a rebuke to an ornery driver. Captain Pugsley called it an example of local culture, and looked the other way.
"It's good for the public to see them on the street," Captain Pugsley said. "They're so used to seeing us."
From the vantage point of First Lt. Muhammad F. al-Safar, a company commander in the Iraqi National Guard, being seen is a mixed bag. Some days, he said, people on the street just glare or hurl insults or aim guns at his men. But on other days, Iraqis ask them, instead of the Americans, to search their homes. Once, a local sheik greeted his men by offering to sacrifice a cow.
"If we go alone, it's better," he said. "It's safer."
The change is part of a calibrated American strategy to win confidence among ordinary Iraqis essentially by not being so visible.
That strategy is also evident in the actions of American civilian leaders here. The American ambassador, John D. Negroponte, has kept a conspicuously low profile. No longer are there near-daily news briefings in English by an American overseer or military officer. Instead there are addresses to the news media, often in a mixture of Arabic and English, by newly appointed Iraqi officials.
"Us not speaking as much as we have been in the past for the situation in Iraq may be one of the things we can do," Mr. Negroponte told reporters on Saturday afternoon. "Let them speak for themselves."
It would be foolhardy to believe - and few Iraqis do - that the Americans are retreating. The American Embassy staff remains in the Republican Palace here, a symbolically important seat of power in the effectively American-run Green Zone.
Not least, there are still up to 140,000 American troops stationed in the country. They command Iraqi soldiers, lead raids on suspected guerrilla redoubts, interrogate suspects, retain custody of detainees. They, and the 18,000 private American security contractors still working here, are still above Iraqi law.
And yet, if honor and appearance matter, then the diminution of the American military presence could signal an important shift. It is a shift that the Iraqi government, struggling to prove its sovereignty, is hoping to use to its advantage. Whether it can remains the crucial test.
"That's the first thing we want the Americans to do: to downscale their presence on the streets," said Adnan al-Janabi, a minister of state. "Psychologically, it is to keep Iraqis believing that we are a sovereign nation, that we are in charge."
Mr. Janabi envisions tangible benefits as well. First, he said, Iraqi police officers and soldiers are better placed to walk the streets and gather intelligence. "You don't talk to a tank," is how he put it.
Second, with fewer American troops on the streets, he said, there would hopefully be fewer reasons for insurgent attacks.
Clearly, not everyone is sold. A spokesman for the militant Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr said he was unimpressed with the lowered visibility of American troops.
For one thing, said the spokesman, Abdel Hadi al-Daraji, there are regular American patrols in the Shiite slum of Sadr City, a provocation even with a cease-fire between Mr. Sadr's militia and the troops. Second, he said, the reality has not changed: American soldiers are still here, only now they are relying more on Iraqi soldiers to do their work. "It is like hitting Iraqis with Iraqis," he said.
Strangers and brothers, Iraqi and American soldiers descended together recently on Arab Jabbour, a quiet neighborhood of Baghdad, where loyalists to Saddam Hussein were believed to be stashing arms and cash.
Dozens of Iraqi soldiers and their American counterparts were ordered to scour a pomegranate orchard, fallow fields and a palm grove for signs of buried weapons. The Iraqi soldiers marched in a row. "Get in those palm groves," Sgt. Greg Wagner yelled.
There was no question who was in charge. The Americans planned and coordinated the raid. They tested for residues of explosives. Aided by interpreters, they interrogated suspects and took 11 to their base for additional questioning. Those who would be detained would be transported to Abu Ghraib prison, which is under American control.
In an opinion poll commissioned by the occupation authority in May, the vast majority of Iraqi respondents said they would feel safer if American soldiers left. The reasons are as pragmatic as they are ideological. American troops are the principal targets of guerrillas, and Iraqis who have the misfortune of being nearby are all too aware of the possibly fatal consequences.
"When the Americans came here with their guns out, I told them, `You will create a sense of terror among the people, and this is not good for you,' " recalled Fadhil Muhammad Ali, 54, a shopkeeper. "The presence of the Americans on the street threatens others."
Another poll, conducted in late June by the Iraq Center for Research and Strategic Studies, turned up an unsurprising ambivalence. Nearly two-thirds of Iraqis polled opposed having the American-led forces in their country, but fewer that half said they would feel safer if they left.
The ambivalence is reflected on the streets.
Mr. Ali, for one, hastened to add that the Americans should not pull out altogether. "If we have an emergency, they could come and give support," he said.
Across town, a beauty salon owner said she too felt safer with fewer American troops on the street. But she too wanted them to remain close by. "The situation is still ambiguous," she said. As if to underscore that point, she said it was still too dangerous to speak publicly, and she requested that her name not be used.
Just outside a pizzeria that American soldiers once patronized, Iraqi police officers recently set up a rush-hour checkpoint, one of many Iraqi-run checkpoints that now dot the city. There were no Americans watching their backs, and Riyadh Abdelkarim, the police commander of this sector, prefers it that way.
"To be alone is better," he said. "All Iraqis reject the occupation. This is our own country and our own people, and we know how to deal with them."
At the joint raid in Arab Jabbour, a toothless old man carrying a plastic jug of water walked down a dirt road as soldiers marched up toward the pomegranate orchard. He approached the Americans, grinning.
"How are you? I am fine. Thank you," the old man bellowed in English and bent over laughing.
"Salaam alaikum," an American major said politely.
That was the end of the conversation. The American officer and the toothless old man smiled at each other and bowed. The old man carried on for a bit in Arabic, but it went nowhere. An Iraqi soldier approached. The old man peppered him with questions, and the two walked off, arm in arm. One of the man's sons had been arrested a few weeks ago, during a similar raid, and the old man wanted to know his fate. It was up to the Iraqi soldier to explain that his son would be brought into the American base for questioning.
Language was but one gulf between the forces.
Later in the morning, on a break, an Iraqi soldier coyly approached Sergeant Wagner from behind and planted a kiss on his left cheek. Iraqi men customarily kiss each other's cheeks in greeting. Sergeant Wagner scrunched up his face. "I hate it when you make me do that," he muttered.
Later an Iraqi soldier, Muhammad Hassan, 23, approached him with a serious concern. A woman complained that the Americans had taken her husband's gun, he said. The law here permits gun possession.
Sergeant Wagner was in no mood to negotiate. It is a "target" house, he said. The woman's husband had fled into the palm groves twice. "Finished, gone," Sergeant Wagner yelled. "He ain't getting it back."
Officer Hassan, who deserted the Iraqi Army when the invasion began last April, turned around to go back to the woman to explain.
He is keen, he said, to learn what the Americans were teaching him: how to kick in doors, how to secure a house before conducting a search.
There were a few things, he said, that the Americans did not understand about Iraqi culture. For example, Officer Hassan said he found it wholly unnecessary for a soldier to pin a man on the floor with his foot.
Earlier that morning, an American soldier had approached Officer Hassan to center the baseball cap he wore on his head. "Looks better if you straighten it," the American said. "More hard core."
Ian Fisher and Mona Mahmoud contributed reporting for this article.
-------- israel / palestine
ISRAEL'S WALL
Building for Calm by Giving Up on Peace
July 18, 2004
By ROGER COHEN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/18/weekinreview/18cohe.html
QALQILYA, West Bank - Inside the "War Room," as it is informally called, Israeli soldiers gaze at banks of computer and television screens. What they see are images of the wall or fence or barrier - it is all these things in different places - that is transforming the physical and mental landscape of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Their job is to stop anyone crossing the barrier and so make Israel safer.
An officer shows off the gadgetry: night-vision cameras trained 24 hours a day on a barrier loaded with electronic gizmos that signal the precise location of anyone who touches it, ensuring that Israeli forces reach the area within two to eight minutes to stop the sort of infiltration of Palestinian suicide bombers that brought nearly 100 Israeli deaths in March 2002 alone.
The barrier, destined to run over 430 miles, from the northern West Bank to its southern rim, with numerous protrusions into the area, has become an article of faith for these soldiers and officers. It is an effective tool, they say, not a political statement. Projected to cost well over $1 billion, it works and must be completed.
If Israelis are going to the beach and to clubs again, and if bombings have become rare, it is thanks in large part, they insist, to these ditches and guard towers and coils of barbed wire and miles of wire fencing that separate two peoples, demarcating the gulf between them.
Belief in the barrier is by no means confined to the army. Most Israelis are tired of the conflict, exhausted by it. They want to forget what goes on over there, in the West Bank. A wall helps them do that. They feel peace was within reach in the 1990's, but now the best that can be hoped for is damage limitation. A fence makes the task of Palestinians who want to kill them harder.
"There is a feeling that you cannot resolve this situation for the coming decades, you can only manage it," says Tom Segev, a historian. "The wall is ugly and terrible, but it is also a way of managing."
So when the International Court of Justice in The Hague rules that the barrier is illegal, or when Israel's Supreme Court says its planned path must be changed, many Israelis shrug. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's insistence that the barrier is necessary for self-defense finds a generally sympathetic domestic reception.
Opinions diverge on the reasons for the precipitous fall in Palestinian bombings this year. Is the intifada exhausted after almost four years? Was Yasir Arafat cowed by the Israeli killing of Hamas leaders? Did the removal of those leaders throw Palestinian militants into disarray? Have the ceaseless patrols by more than 12,000 Israeli soldiers in the West Bank blocked attacks?
Perhaps each theory has its share of truth. But whoever espouses these ideas also tends to see the barrier as an effective, additional guarantee of some semblance of normal life in Israel. Sure, the price is high - the defeat of hope - but so be it.
What often seems to be missing from these Israeli musings is any grasp of the life of the Palestinians on the other side of the barrier. On those war-room screens the most common sight is a Palestinian in a donkey cart trundling along a dirt track. The contrast between the high-tech Israeli cameras that deliver these images and the abject existence of the Palestinians photographed provides an apt summation of the divergence of the societies: a first-world Israel forging ahead as best it can, a third-world Palestinian society going backward.
To move through the West Bank today is to witness the growth of parallel networks. Israelis drive on highways to settlements spreading like garrisons on hills. Palestinians are increasingly confined to dirt tracks beside these roads.
Nowhere is this separation more evident than between Qalqilya and the adjacent West Bank town of Hable. After building the fence around three sides of the towns, the Israeli authorities realized that the two places depended on each other. So now the army is building tunnels under the fence, to be used by Palestinians.
Israeli officers say this is a generous gesture. They are proud of helping the tunnel people communicate. They point to flourishing orange trees as proof of how "we let them into their fields." At one gate, Mutassem Abu Tayem, a 36-year-old Palestinian farmer, waits on a donkey cart to be let onto his land. His view? "We are living in a prison and are treated like beasts."
Fair treatment, many Israelis would say, for a people who adopted a national strategy of blowing up busloads of children. But in the Jerusalem area, where the wall is really a wall of concrete, the offense to the ideals of the Jewish state and the hopes Israel once held for living with its neighbors appears incalculable.
Look one way from the Mount of Olives and you see the golden walls of the Old City, refracting light. Turn east toward the village of Abu Dis and there is this gray monument to defeat, deadening light. To one side, minarets and churches and onion domes and synagogues piled, it seems, one on top of the other. To the other, the razor cut of a wall through land and psyche.
Life is an accumulation, war a dissection. It is clear in Jerusalem today that the logic of war has won.
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Palestinian Premier Offers to Resign
July 18, 2004
By JOSEPH BERGER and GREG MYRE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/18/international/middleeast/18MIDE.html?hp
RAMALLAH, West Bank, July 17 - The Palestinian leadership was embroiled in crisis on Saturday when the prime minister, Ahmed Qurei, submitted his resignation. But officials said the Palestinian leader, Yasir Arafat, had rejected it.
The political drama came in response to a tumultuous day in the Gaza Strip on Friday, when Palestinian militants carried out three kidnappings, abducting four French aid workers and two Palestinian security officials, including the police chief.
By Saturday morning, all had been released unharmed. But the kidnappings vividly demonstrated the absence of law and order in Gaza and were also seen as a challenge to Mr. Arafat's dwindling authority.
In response, Mr. Qurei met members of the Palestinian Legislative Council in Ramallah and told them he had submitted his resignation, said Nabil Amr, a legislator who was at the session.
Mr. Qurei met twice with Mr. Arafat on Saturday morning. Mr. Arafat rejected the resignation, said Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator, and other Palestinian officials.
In brief remarks to reporters, Mr. Qurei said Gaza was in "an unprecedented state of chaos." The Palestinian Authority declared a state of emergency in Gaza early Saturday.
Palestinian politics are turbulent, and it is not uncommon for senior officials to submit their resignations during heated arguments, only to back down and resume their posts several days later.
It was not clear whether Mr. Qurei was determined to quit, or if it was largely an attempt to convey the gravity of the crisis to Mr. Arafat.
Mr. Qurei became the prime minister last October, but has accomplished little as the grinding Israeli-Palestinian fighting has continued.
Mr. Arafat has faced pressure from Palestinians and from abroad to reform his security forces. The Associated Press reported that in response to the latest crisis, Mr. Arafat was consolidating the forces into just three agencies, in line with longstanding demands by the United States and others.
Some Palestinian officials described the political crisis as extremely serious. But they also said they did not expect the government to collapse at this moment because it is in the middle of an important international debate on the status of Israel's barrier along the West Bank.
The International Court of Justice at The Hague ruled on July 9 that parts of the barrier are illegal, and the Palestinians are raising a related resolution in the United Nations General Assembly.
Mr. Arafat, 74, has dominated Palestinian politics for more than 30 years and has always resisted sharing power. Last year he reluctantly agreed to form the post of prime minister when faced with widespread demands for political reform.
The first prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas, lasted only four months, and cited differences with Mr. Arafat as one of the reasons he quit.
Since the Palestinian Authority was established a decade ago, Mr. Arafat has always maintained ultimate control over the security forces, but he is facing pressure to reduce his authority.
The multiple, overlapping security agencies, which consist of 40,000 or more men according to most estimates, have been powerless to stop Israeli military operations, or even to maintain order.
The Gaza police chief, Ghazi al-Jabali, commands a force consisting of thousands of officers, but that did not dissuade militants from attacking his convoy on Friday and holding him hostage for several hours.
The police have not announced any arrests, though the security forces say they know the man and the faction responsible for the abduction.
Palestinians frequently cite the Israeli occupation and the military crackdown in Gaza and the West Bank for the shortcomings of the Palestinian Authority. But Palestinians have become increasingly critical of the Palestinian leadership over corruption and the failure to provide basic services.
Much of the chaos, including Friday's kidnappings, has been linked to militants affiliated with Mr. Arafat's own Fatah party.
A number of the armed factions arose after the Palestinian uprising began four years ago, and the gunmen say they operate independently, without orders from any centralized leadership.
Mr. Arafat has sought to distance himself from groups like Al Aksa Martyrs Brigade, and has denounced attacks they have carried out. But he also appears unable, or unwilling, to rein in the group.
Joseph Berger reported from Ramallah for this article, and Greg Myre from Jerusalem.
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Palestinian Premier Resigns, Citing Growing Gaza Turmoil
By John Ward Anderson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, July 18, 2004; Page A18
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A58455-2004Jul17.html
JERUSALEM, July 17 -- Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qureia submitted his resignation Saturday, but it was rejected by Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in a deepening political crisis over corruption, deteriorating security and resistance to reform in the Palestinian Authority. Cabinet ministers said Qureia insisted his action was final.
Qureia said he resigned over the growing turmoil in the Gaza Strip, where the top police chief, another senior security official and four French nationals were kidnapped by militant groups in three separate incidents Friday. All were released unharmed within hours of their abductions, but the Gaza police chief, Ghazi Jabali, was paraded through the streets of a crowded refugee camp and accused of stealing millions in public funds.
"This is a true disaster," Qureia, who is also known as Abu Ala, told reporters before meeting with Arafat and tendering his resignation. "This is a level of chaos that we have never seen before."
Afterward, in an emergency meeting, "a majority of the cabinet members urged Abu Ala to retract" the resignation and "he said his resignation stands," according to Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator with Israel. Erekat said the cabinet "agreed to continue emergency sessions for next two days," although Qureia told the group that "he did not resign to make negotiations over it."
Arafat moved to quash the rising complaints about corruption and lawlessness in Gaza by declaring a state of emergency there Saturday, replacing Jabali and announcing a major consolidation of 12 Palestinian security services into three agencies. At the same time, Arafat rejected the resignations of two other senior security officials in Gaza who had quit Friday night, complaining about the general state of disorder, political interference with their jobs and a lack of meaningful security reforms.
The events signaled an increasing disenchantment with Arafat's leadership and anger at the lack of significant achievements by Qureia and his government after eight months in office. They also underscored the deteriorating security situation in Gaza, where armed Palestinian groups -- capitalizing on widespread disillusionment -- are challenging the Palestinian Authority and its security agencies for control of the streets.
The security situation is also a concern in Israel, where Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is pushing a plan to withdraw all Jewish settlers and Israeli soldiers from the Gaza Strip by the end of 2005. Some opponents of the plan express concern that a weak Palestinian Authority would leave a vacuum from which militant groups such as the Islamic Resistance Movement, or Hamas, and Islamic Jihad could attack Israel at will.
It was unclear how significant the changes announced Saturday by Arafat would be. Consolidation of the roughly 12 Palestinian security forces into three agencies under a single unified command has been a top demand of the United States, Israel and the international donor community for years. But several consolidations had been announced previously, and none has been fully or permanently implemented.
Although Arafat fired Jabali, long considered his right-hand man in Gaza, as the top police official in Gaza, he replaced him with another loyalist, Maj. Gen. Saeb Ajez. Arafat also appointed his first cousin, Mousa Arafat, as head of Palestinian general security forces in Gaza.
"This is window dressing," said Ziad Abu Amr, a reformist Palestinian legislator from Gaza City. "These are isolated, superficial measures, and the whole Palestinian situation requires major surgery."
Abu Amr called on Qureia to resign, saying his government was "part of the problem, not part of the solution. He never insisted on exercising his mandate and responsibilities. This is a prime minister who put the issue of chaos on the top of his agenda, and chaos has increased ever since he came to power."
Qureia's government was appointed in November after the first Palestinian prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas, resigned. Abbas was in a bitter power struggle with Arafat over who would control the security forces.
Analysts said that Qureia, 66, learned from Abbas's tumultuous term that it was futile to confront Arafat, who as president of the Palestinian Authority is the most senior leader and wields near absolute powers. Qureia's administration has been distinguished by his refusal to stand up publicly to Arafat.
There is no Palestinian leader of equal stature waiting to take over as prime minister should the government be disbanded.
Last week, U.N. Middle East envoy Terje Roed-Larsen told the Security Council that Qureia's government was in "paralysis" and the Palestinian Authority was "in real danger of collapse." The core problem, he said, was "the lack of political will" to enact reforms, particularly in the security services.
In an unprecedented sign of internal dissatisfaction, the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an armed faction affiliated with Arafat's mainstream Fatah political movement, recently gave the Palestinian leadership a blistering anti-corruption manifesto, calling on Arafat to relinquish some of his powers and demanding that corrupt officials in the Palestinian Authority be fired and prosecuted.
--------
Israeli Leaders Take Steps to Avoid Disarray
July 18, 2004
By JOSEPH BERGER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/18/international/middleeast/18CND-MIDE.html?pagewanted=all&position=
JERUSALEM, July 18 - With the Palestinian government in disarray, Israeli party leaders tried today to prevent disorder within their own government so that a parliamentary majority can be put together to remove Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip and return the territory to Palestinian control.
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who has been running the government for several weeks without a parliamentary majority, had breakfast with Shimon Peres, the leader of the Labor Party, to discuss how Labor, which strongly favors a Gaza withdrawal, might join Mr. Sharon's dominant Likud Party in a unity government that can proceed with the disengagement.
But Mr. Sharon finds himself in the awkward position of a ballet master trying to bring many quarreling dancers into an exquisitely intricate dance.
Although he could secure a parliamentary majority of 61 with Likud's 40 seats plus 19 from Labor and the 15 from the current Likud ally Shinui, these numbers may not be enough to achieve his goal. Perhaps half the members of his own party are strongly opposed to the Gaza disengagement plan.
To woo some of these Likud dissidents, he is also talking to leaders of two ultra-Orthodox religious parties, Shas and United Torah Judaism. But many secular Labor and Shinui members do not feel comfortable joining with groups that might press demands for increased subsidies for their schools and more religious control over public life.
"He has a problem of political arithmetic," said Arye Naor, a public policy professor at Ben Gurion University. "Only if he succeeds in bringing in Shinui and an Orthodox Party together in one way or another, then might he have a majority in the Likud and the Knesset."
Nevertheless, the hourlong breakfast conversation was fruitful enough that negotiations between Labor and Likud were able to get off the ground this evening just outside Tel Aviv.
Meanwhile, Yasir Arafat, the president of the Palestinian Authority, had to grapple with a prime minister, Ahmed Qurei, who has decided to resign and a popular revolt in Gaza against his appointment of a cousin, Moussa Arafat, as chief of security. Mr. Arafat met with Mr. Qurei for four hours today at Mr. Arafat's tumbledown compound in Ramallah. Afterward, a spokesman said that Mr. Arafat had once again refused to accept Mr. Qurei's resignation, declaring it "doesn't exist."
But Mr. Qurei, who has been unhappy for the 10 months of his tenure with Mr. Arafat's unwillingness to cede real authority over security, still plans to meet with the Palestinian cabinet on Monday to work out plans for a new government -the third in little more than a year.
There was a report that Mr. Qurei had told one journalist that he would reconsider his resignation if Mr. Arafat met some demands. He did not elaborate, but it is known that when Mr., Qurei formed his government last fall Mr. Arafat rejected his original choice for interior minister, Nasr Yousef, a member of the Fatah central committee, and forced the appointment of Hakam Balawi, the current minister, instead. There may have been some significance that it was Mr. Balawi who left Saturday's cabinet meeting before any of the other ministers.
While discussions over a new revamped power structure dragged on, protests against the leadership of Mr. Arafat and some of his recent appointees continued. At 2 a.m. today, masked gunmen belonging to an offshoot of Mr. Arafat's Fatah movement stormed a building housing offices of Moussa Arafat in the southern Gaza city of Khan Yunis. They set fire to two offices and several cars and stole 10 rifles. The protesters said Moussa Arafat symbolized the cronyism and corruption of the Palestinian Authority and was an unacceptable choice.
Later, firing broke out between militants belonging to Al Aksa Martyrs Brigade and workers at an office under Moussa Arafat's command in Rafah in southern Gaza. No one was injured.
Also, a third official in Gaza quit to protest Moussa Arafat's appointment - Navy chief Gomma Ghali handed in his resignation joining Maj. Gen Amin Al-Hindi, an intelligence chief, and Rashid Abu Shbak, the head of preventive security, both of whom quit Friday.
Moussa Arafat responded to the protests in a rare news conference, saying that they would pass like a summer cloud and that he was ready to go into any battle with the enemy, any enemy, outside or inside.
The breakout of a deeper lawlessness in Gaza is seen by many residents and Israeli military officials as the consequence of a power struggle between Yasir Arafat and such young challengers as Muhammed Dahlan, for years the leader of the Preventive Security Force in Gaza and someone favored by Israeli, European and American officials as strong enough to run Gaza.
"I feel insecure," said Om Ahmad, a 29-year-old woman who lives in Gaza City. "I cannot trust any of these two people who are fighting. Each is fighting for his own interest and power."
Yasir Arafat's chief negotiator, Saeb Erekat, said the senior Mr. Arafat was determined to end the anarchy in Gaza.
"The lawlessness we witnessed in our streets must come to an end," Mr. Erekat said. "Every effort is being exerted to restore public order."
Mr. Peres said the political distress in both Israel and the Palestine Authority may not be a coincidence.
"As we make clear that the date for our leaving Gaza is becoming closer, so they have decided to get organized," Mr. Peres said in an interview in his Tel Aviv office.
Mr. Peres said he had spoken to Mr. Sharon about three conditions he has set down for a unity government - a firm timetable for withdrawal from Gaza, an overture to some Palestinian officials to take part in the withdrawal and a pledge to proceed with withdrawal in parts of the West Bank as well. Mr. Sharon's office did not comment on the conversation, but Mr. Peres said Mr. Sharon did not reject his conditions, though he did raise some of his own.
For example, Mr. Peres said that Mr. Sharon told him he does not think he can pass a bill providing compensation for Gaza's 7,500 settlers until next month. Mr. Peres would have liked to see such a law passed this month.
But Mr. Peres said Mr. Sharon seemed amenable to the idea of a Palestinian "partner" in the disengagement, though he did not believe it could be the senior Mr. Arafat.
"The partner would be at a lower level," Mr. Peres said.
Mr. Peres, with a tart appreciation of his rival's predicament, said that Mr. Sharon can cobble together a parliamentary majority of 61 seats without Labor, but not a majority that would support his withdrawal plan.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- homeland security
C.I.A. Sends Terror Experts to Tell Small Towns of Risk
July 18, 2004
By DAVID JOHNSTON and DOUGLAS JEHL
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/18/politics/18cia.html?pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, July 17 - The Central Intelligence Agency has begun a series of terrorism briefings for state and local law enforcement personnel, for the first time dispatching counterterrorism experts to cities and small towns to warn of the possibility of an attack by Al Qaeda this year, government officials said this week.
The C.I.A. briefings, which are being coordinated by the F.B.I., are conducted by intelligence analysts from the agency's Directorate of Intelligence. They have visited small cities and towns across the country, the officials said, with more meetings planned.
Many of the briefers are analysts from the C.I.A.'s Counterterrorism Center at the agency's headquarters at Langley, Va., which sifts through thousands of pieces of information to track terrorists worldwide. Sometimes they have been joined by the C.I.A.'s officers who work in several large cities in the United States, one intelligence official said.
The center started the briefings in recent weeks to advise local authorities about the terror threat as part of an effort "to put some context and flavor into the current threat environment," which government officials have described as the most serious since the months before the Sept. 11 attacks, the intelligence official said.
In part, the briefings are a direct response to rising fears of a Qaeda attack sometime this year and reflect the government's willingness to take previously untried steps to detect and possibly deter an attack. This week, the country's new acting intelligence chief, John E. McLaughlin, was the latest senior administration official to warn that the threat of terrorist attack on the United States is more significant than at any other time since Sept. 11.
So far the C.I.A. officials have briefed law enforcement officials in about a dozen American cities and the effort is continuing, the intelligence official said. F.B.I. officials in the Midwest have contacted local authorities in many more cities and are trying to arrange briefings for sheriff's offices and police departments throughout their jurisdictions.
The intelligence official would not say what information the C.I.A. analysts were providing to law enforcement officials, but indicated that it was similar to information that C.I.A. officials provided to members of Congress and others in recent classified briefings.
Other officials who have attended the briefings said the content of the meetings tracked closely with what had recently become publicly known about Al Qaeda's intentions. Authorities have said that the reports of Al Qaeda's designs on the United States are continuous, worrisome and corroborated by informants who are believed to be highly credible.
The arrival of a C.I.A. analyst in a small town appears to be a stark contrast from the agency's past approach, some local police chiefs and sheriffs said. Few of them have ever met an intelligence analyst or ever received more than a dry, often uninformative intelligence bulletin containing information already made public by the news media.
"I wouldn't say I was shocked that they were there," said George G. Kehl, who for 26 years has been the police chief of Fishers, Ind., a suburb of 55,000 people north of Indianapolis. "But I was surprised. It was a first in my career."
He said that at the meeting he attended early this month, the briefers identified themselves by what he thought were their true names. "These guys were not the underground people," he said, referring to the agency's clandestine services officers. "I don't think the day will ever come when we see them - and I don't think I'd want to."
Chief Kehl said the meeting provided him with a fresh perspective about the threat, the capabilities of Al Qaeda and the insistent reports that Al Qaeda hopes to carry out a terror attack in the United States sometime this year. "There's so much concentration on large cities that there is always the possibility of being targeted in a smaller area," he said, even as he gauged the possibility of an attack in Fishers as low.
Other officials said C.I.A counterterrorism experts in large cities like New York or Los Angeles have met with local authorities at least periodically over the years, and more often since the Sept. 11 attacks. But they said the briefings in smaller communities represented a significant shift in approach for the C.I.A.
Legally, the C.I.A. is barred from engaging in intelligence collection activities inside the United States, but there is no prohibition on its analysts providing information to local law enforcement officials about subjects like terrorism. Increasingly, local officials, even Chief Kehl, have security clearances to be advised of classified information.
Earlier this week, the F.B.I. director, Robert S. Mueller III, said at a meeting with New York Times editors and reporters that while the intelligence was not clear-cut, concern about possible attacks was growing outside of cities like Boston and New York, where the Democratic and Republican national political conventions will be held. "Both will be hard targets," he said, referring to security at the convention cities. He suggested that the terror network might look elsewhere.
Mr. Mueller said analysts who had studied past attacks believed that Al Qaeda would not begin an attack without meticulous planning and said its operatives appeared to be deterred by security that diminishes their chances for success. With access heavily restricted at the two conventions, Mr. Mueller said authorities must anticipate that the terror network might seek alternative sites for an attack.
But he said that New York and Washington remained high on the suspected list of Osama bin Laden's top targets. "Al Qaeda wants to go after the financial center of the country, which is New York, and the political center of the country, which is Washington," he said.
One intelligence official said the C.I.A. briefings, which came about at the invitation of the F.B.I., represented a major change for the C.I.A., which in the past has had little interaction with local law enforcement officials. The intelligence officials said the briefings were being arranged in some areas by the more than 80 Joint Terrorism Task Forces around the country, which include F.B.I., Homeland Security, Secret Service and other federal, state and local law enforcement agencies.
In the past, state and local law enforcement officials complained that federal authorities refused to provide them with relevant intelligence. Inquiries by Congress and an independent commission into lapses by the C.I.A. and F.B.I. in the months before Sept. 11 have criticized the agencies for not sharing information and not coordinating their activities.
In addition, the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. have been criticized since the hijackings for not doing more to act on information that has emerged from intelligence reports, including the possibility that Qaeda terrorists might be considering a hijacking or using airplanes as a weapon, or might use outlying towns and cities as staging bases for their operations.
-------- justice
Protecting us without tainting the Constitution
Jose Padilla and Saving Ashcroft's Reputation
By Geoffrey Forden
Jul 18, 2004,
http://www.axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/article_10312.shtml
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
As Police Use of Tasers Rises, Questions Over Safety Increase
July 18, 2004
By ALEX BERENSON
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/18/national/18TASER.html?pagewanted=all&position=
NAZARETH, Pa. - As the sun set on June 24, something snapped in Kris J. Lieberman, an unemployed landscaper who lived a few miles from this quiet town. For 45 minutes, he crawled deliriously around a pasture here, moaning and pounding his head against the weedy ground.
Eventually the police arrived, carrying a Taser M26, an electric gun increasingly popular with law enforcement officers nationwide. The gun fires electrified barbs up to 21 feet, hitting suspects with a disabling charge.
The officers told Mr. Lieberman, 32, to calm down. He lunged at them instead. They fired their Taser twice. He fought briefly, collapsed and died.
Mr. Lieberman joined a growing number of people, now at least 50, including 6 in June alone, who have died since 2001 after being shocked. Taser International, which makes several versions of the guns, says its weapons are not lethal, even for people with heart conditions or pacemakers. The deaths resulted from drug overdoses or other factors and would have occurred anyway, the company says.
But Taser has scant evidence for that claim. The company's primary safety studies on the M26, which is far more powerful than other stun guns, consist of tests on a single pig in 1996 and on five dogs in 1999. Company-paid researchers, not independent scientists, conducted the studies, which were never published in a peer-reviewed journal. Taser has no full-time medical director and has never created computer models to simulate the effect of its shocks, which are difficult to test in human clinical trials for ethical reasons.
What is more, aside from a continuing Defense Department study, the results of which have not been released, no federal or state agencies have studied the safety, or effectiveness, of Tasers, which fall between two federal agencies and are essentially unregulated. Nor has any federal agency studied the deaths to determine what caused them. In at least two cases, local medical examiners have said Tasers were partly responsible. In many cases, autopsies are continuing or reports are unavailable.
The few independent studies that have examined the Taser have found that the weapon's safety is unproven at best. The most comprehensive report, by the British government in 2002, concluded "the high-power Tasers cannot be classed, in the vernacular, as `safe.' " Britain has not approved Tasers for general police use.
A 1989 Canadian study found that stun guns induced heart attacks in pigs with pacemakers. A 1999 study by the Department of Justice on an electrical weapon much weaker than the Taser found that it might cause cardiac arrest in people with heart conditions. In reviewing other electrical devices, the Food and Drug Administration has found that a charge half as large as that of the M26 can be dangerous to the heart.
While Taser says that the M26 is not dangerous, it now devotes most of its marketing efforts to the X26, a less powerful weapon it introduced last year. Both weapons are selling briskly. About 100,000 officers nationally now have Tasers, 20 times the number in 2000, and most carry the M26. Taser, whose guns are legal for civilian use in most states, hopes to expand its potential market with a new consumer version of the X26 later this summer.
For Taser, which owns the weapon's trademark and is the only company now making the guns, the growth has been a bonanza. Its stock has soared. Its executives and directors, including a former New York police commissioner, Bernard B. Kerik, have taken advantage, selling $60 million in shares since November.
Patrick Smith, Taser's chief executive, said the guns are safe. "We tell people that this has never caused a death, and in my heart and soul I believe that's true," Mr. Smith said.
Taser did not need to disclose the British results to American police departments, he said. "The Brits are extremely conservative," he said. "To me, this is sort of boilerplate, the fine print." In addition to Taser's animal trials, thousands of police volunteers have received shocks without harm, Mr. Smith said.
But the hits that police officers receive from the M26 in their Taser training have little in common with the shocks given to suspects. In training, volunteers usually receive a single shock of a half-second or less. In the field, Tasers automatically fire for five seconds. If an officer holds down the trigger, a Taser will discharge longer. And suspects are often hit repeatedly.
Over all, Taser has significantly overstated the weapon's safety, say biomedical engineers who separately examined the company's research at the request of The New York Times. None of the engineers have any financial stake in the company or any connection with Taser; The Times did not pay them.
Relatively small electric shocks can kill people whose hearts are weakened by disease or cocaine use, said John Wikswo, a Vanderbilt University biomedical engineer. But no one knows whether the Taser's current crosses the threshold for those people, Dr. Wikswo said.
"Their testing scheme has not included the possibility that there is a subset of the population that is exquisitely sensitive," Dr. Wikswo said. "That alone means they have not done adequate testing."
Mr. Smith said Taser would eventually run more tests. "In a perfect world, I'd love to have studies on all this stuff, but animal studies are controversial, expensive," he said. "You've got to do the reasonable amount of testing." Comparing Taser's tests with the studies conducted by makers of medical devices like pacemakers is unfair, he said.
Dr. Andrew Podgorski, a Canadian electrical engineer who conducted the 1989 study, said he was certain that Tasers were dangerous for people with pacemakers. More research is needed to determine if other people are vulnerable, he said.
"I would urge the U.S. government to conduct those studies," Dr. Podgorski said. "Shocking a couple of pigs and dogs doesn't prove anything."
In More Officers' Hands
Many police officers defend the Taser, saying the weapon helps them avoid using deadly force and lowers the risk of injury to officers. Tasers let police officers subdue suspects without wrestling with or hitting them, said David Klinger, a former police officer and a criminology professor at the University of Missouri at St. Louis. And Tasers are surely safer than firearms.
"I think it is appropriate for deployment in the field," Mr. Klinger said. "You trust this guy or gal with a gun, you should be able to trust them with a less lethal device."
But human rights groups say the police may be overusing the Taser. Because the gun leaves only light marks, and because Taser markets it as nonlethal, officers often use it on unruly suspects, not just as an alternative to deadly force, said Dr. William F. Schulz, the executive director of Amnesty International USA. In recent incidents, officers have shocked a 9-year-old girl in Arizona and a 66-year-old woman in Kansas City.
"We think there should be controlled, systematic independent medical studies," Dr. Schulz said. "We would like to see these weapons suspended until these questions are answered."
A study by the Orange County, Fla., sheriff's office showed that officers used pepper spray and batons much less after getting the guns. But the use of Tasers more than made up for that drop, and the department's overall use of force increased 58 percent from 2000 to 2003. Last week, several police departments in Orange County agreed to restrict the use of Tasers to situations where suspects are actively resisting officers. The sheriff's office is not part of the agreement and says it is still studying the matter.
State and federal agencies do not keep tabs on Taser use, so no one knows how many times officers have fired the weapon. Officers have reported close to 5,000 uses of the M26 to Taser, but the company says the actual number is much higher.
Little evidence supports the theory that Tasers reduce police shootings or work better than other alternatives to guns, like pepper spray. Because of their limited range, Tasers are best in situations where an officer using a Taser is covered by another with a firearm, officers say.
A 2002 company study found that nearly 85 percent of people shocked with Tasers were unarmed. Fewer than 5 percent were carrying guns.
In Phoenix, which has equipped all its officers with Tasers, police shootings fell by half last year. Taser trumpets that statistic on its Web site. But last year's drop appears to be an anomaly. This year, shootings are running at a record pace, according to the Phoenix police department.
A 2002 study in Greene County, Mo., found that Tasers were only marginally more effective than pepper spray at restraining suspects. Pepper spray worked in 91 percent of cases, while the Taser had a 94 percent success rate.
The largest police departments have been slow to embrace the Taser. The New York Police Department owns only a handful of Tasers, which are used by specialized units and supervisors, a spokesman said.
'Gold in Those Hills'
The M26 was introduced only five years ago, but the technology is much older. John Cover, an Arizona inventor, created the Taser in 1969. Its name stands for "Thomas A. Swift Electric Rifle," an allusion to the Tom Swift series of science fiction novels.
Engineers have known for generations that relatively small electric currents cause painful and uncontrollable muscle contractions. Tasers operate on that principle, firing barbs that are connected by wire to the gun and flood the body with current. The gun can deliver its shock even if the barbs do not break the skin because its current can jump through two inches of clothing.
Weak currents are not inherently dangerous if they stop in a few minutes. But stronger shocks can disrupt the electrical circuitry of the heart. That condition, ventricular fibrillation, causes cardiac arrest in seconds and death in minutes, unless the heart is defibrillated with an even larger shock.
The exact current needed to cause fibrillation depends on technical factors like the current's shape and frequency, as well as the heart's condition, said James Eason, a biomedical engineering professor at Washington and Lee University. But because fibrillation is so dangerous, scientists can conduct only limited human trials. They must estimate the threshold of fibrillation from animal trials and computer models.
Still, the broad parameters for fibrillation are known, and the first Taser from Mr. Cover had a large safety margin. In 1975 the Consumer Product Safety Commission concluded that weapon, which was 11 percent as powerful as the M26, probably would not harm healthy humans.
Then, in March 1976, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms claimed it had jurisdiction over the weapons because gunpowder propelled their barbs. The firearms bureau essentially outlawed them for civilian use; no federal safety standard was ever created.
But the original Tasers were bulky and often ineffective. For almost two decades, they remained a niche product used by a few police departments.
That began to change after 1993, when Mr. Smith and his brother Thomas created a company to market electric weapons to civilians. Patrick Smith, who had just graduated from the University of Chicago business school, saw enormous potential for an alternative to firearms.
"I just figured I'm going to go to out to Arizona, and I'm going to scratch and sniff and dig, and figure there's going to be gold in those hills," Mr. Smith said in an interview.
In January 1995, the Smiths introduced their first electric gun, which was powered by compressed nitrogen. As a result, the weapon was not regulated by the firearms bureau and could be sold to civilians.
For the next several years, the company struggled, as concerns over the gun's power kept sales slow. By 1999, the company, now known as Taser International, was near bankruptcy, with only $50,000 in the bank and $2.7 million in debt.
"It was pretty humiliating," he said. "We had completely wiped out my parents financially."
Testing
Hoping to stay afloat, the company introduced the Advanced Taser M26 in December 1999. The weapon closely resembled a handgun, a feature many police officers liked, and was very powerful.
According to Taser, the gun produced 26 watts of power, four times the power of the earlier model. A field test in 2001 by the Canadian police showed that the M26 was even stronger, with an output of 39 watts.
(Stun gun power is usually gauged in watts, a measure of electrical energy, even though the biological effects of electricity are more closely related to current strength, measured in amperes. Electrical engineers often compare the flow of electricity to a river: amperes are like the river's speed, while watts are the amount of water flowing by each second. As watts increase, amperes rise, but more slowly.)
Taser's sales rose as officers learned about the new gun. At meetings with police officers, company representatives encouraged them to receive a half-second shock to feel the weapon's power for themselves. "These guys would leave just absolutely evangelical about the product because we would just drop them all," Mr. Smith said.
In its marketing, the company touted the safety of the M26, saying it had been extensively tested.
But Taser had performed only two animal studies before introducing the M26.
In 1996, Taser hired Robert Stratbucker, a Nebraska doctor and farmer, to test the weapon. Dr. Stratbucker, who is now Taser's part-time medical director, shocked a pig 48 times with shocks as large as those from the M26. The pig suffered no heart damage. Three years later, the company hired Dr. Stratbucker and Dr. Wayne McDaniel, an electrical engineer, for an animal test at the University of Missouri. The scientists shocked five anesthetized dogs about 200 times with the M26. The dogs did not suffer cardiac arrest, although one animal had changes in its heartbeat, according to a report.
Taser has repeatedly said the studies proved that the M26 was safe. But the biomedical engineers who reviewed the gun's safety for The Times said Taser should have conducted far more research.
"I don't think there has been a definitive study saying that yes it can contribute to death or no it cannot," said Dr. Raymond Ideker, an electrophysiologist and a professor in the cardiology division at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Taser must test more animals and vary the shocks they receive to find the gun's safety margin, Dr. Ideker said.
In addition, while Taser claims that its Missouri study proves that the gun is safe for people who have used cocaine, it never tested animals dosed with cocaine. Because cocaine substantially increases heart attack risk, and Tasers are used on people who have taken cocaine, that omission is a serious flaw, said Dr. Wikswo of Vanderbilt.
The company should also examine risks other than fibrillation, some scientists say.
Dr. Terrence Allen, a former medical examiner in Los Angeles who examined cases in the late 1980's when people died after being shocked with earlier-model Tasers, said he was sure the weapons could be lethal. Taser is misrepresenting the medical evidence, said Dr. Allen, who has consulted for people who have sued the company.
Dr. Mark W. Kroll, a Taser director and the chief technology officer of St. Jude Medical, one of the largest pacemaker manufacturers, said Taser had adequately tested its weapons and they were safe. External pacemakers deliver much larger charges and do not cause fibrillation, he said.
Dr. Ideker countered that pacemakers and Tasers could not be easily compared, because the Taser's shock is very short and powerful, while a pacemaker delivers its charge over a much longer period.
Although Taser has performed only rudimentary studies of the M26, it has more closely studied the X26, the gun it introduced last year. In a 2003 study at the University of Missouri, Taser found that a shock roughly 20 times that of the X26 caused a healthy, anesthetized 85-pound pig to fibrillate.
Mr. Smith cites the 2003 Missouri study as proof that all Tasers have a safety margin of 20-to-1 or more. But the new gun puts out a charge only one-fourth as large as the older model, a fact Taser does not generally advertise.
The study said nothing about the M26, or about hearts stressed by disease, drugs or physical activity. "I think another test is warranted," Dr. Ideker said.
Taser did not test the older gun, which is associated with nearly all the deaths, because "we believed that the M26's safety record and prior testing speaks for itself," Mr. Smith said. "Could it be done? Absolutely. There's time and expense involved."
The X26 has become Taser's biggest seller, based mainly on the company's claims that it is even stronger than the M26 despite its small size and lower power. The company says the new gun enables electrical current to enter the body more efficiently.
No independent agency has tested the guns side by side, and in Taser's patent on the M26, Mr. Smith himself argued that weaker guns were often ineffective because they do not deliver enough current to incapacitate suspects. But neither deaths nor concerns about effectiveness have dampened police support and investor enthusiasm for Taser International. Stock analysts predict Taser will have $15 million in profits on sales of $60 million in 2004. Investors have bid up the company's shares 60-fold since last February, giving Taser a value of $1.2 billion.
The Smith brothers and their father, Phillips, have sold $46 million in Taser shares since November, according to federal filings. They still own $130 million worth of shares. Other Taser executives and directors have sold $14 million in stock. Mr. Kerik, the former New York police commissioner and a director, has sold $900,000 in stock. Mr. Kroll of St. Jude Medical has sold $1.7 million.
"It's been great," Patrick Smith said of the company's recent success. But making money is not his main goal, he said. "If we could get a Taser on every officer's belt,'' he said, " it would save hundreds of lives or thousands of lives a year."
Deaths and Questions
Meanwhile, the number of Taser-associated deaths is rising. In June alone, at least six people died, the most ever in one month: Eric B. Christmas, James A. Cobb, Jacob J. Lair, Anthony C. Oliver, Jerry W. Pickens and Mr. Lieberman.
The circumstances of the deaths vary widely. Among the six, Mr. Pickens was the only one hit with the X26.
Mr. Cobb fought for several minutes after being shocked, which suggests that fibrillation could not have caused his death. Some of the other men collapsed immediately, according to news reports and witnesses. Some of the men were fighting with the police when officers shot them. Others simply refused to obey orders.
Mr. Pickens was one. On June 4, in Bridge City, La., the police were summoned to help calm him after an argument with his 18-year-old son, Taylor Pickens. Jerry Pickens confronted the police in the family's front yard.
"My dad, he had been drinking, and he was kind of hostile toward the police,'' Taylor said. "He kept trying to go back inside the house, and they said, 'If you're going to go back into the house we're going to Taser you.' " Mr. Pickens who was unarmed, began to walk inside, Taylor said.
"They counted down three, and then they shot him in the back," Taylor said. "My dad stiffened up, and fell back." Mr. Pickens hit his head on a cement walkway and began foaming at the mouth, Taylor said.
Sharon Landis, Taylor's mother and Mr. Pickens's wife, said officers did not need to shock her husband. "They could have pepper-sprayed him, they could have grabbed him," she said. "He's 55 years old, and these are big burly cops."
Mr. Pickens was pronounced brain-dead that day and removed from life support three days later, Ms. Landis said.
Toxicologic tests on Mr. Pickens are being conducted, said Gayle Day of the Jefferson Parish coroner's office. A spokesman for the sheriff's office said he could not comment on a continuing investigation. Mr. Smith said he could not comment on Mr. Pickens's death.
Three weeks later, Kris Lieberman died in Pennsylvania. The officers who shocked him were the only witnesses to his death, which the Pennsylvania State Police are investigating. But Mr. Lieberman's parents said the state police told them that their son was shocked twice and collapsed afterward. [Stan Coopersmith, chief of the Bushkill Township Police, whose officers responded to the call, said he could not comment on the incident until the state police finish their investigation.] But Taser said that the police chief had told the company that Mr. Lieberman fought briefly after the shocks and that an automatic defibrillator used by the officers indicated Mr. Lieberman was not fibrillating when he collapsed.
"I would suspect the autopsy will find a cause of death that does not include the Taser," Mr. Smith said.
Mr. Lieberman's parents say that he was troubled but that he did not use drugs. Police officers searched Mr. Lieberman's home after the shooting and did not find drugs, his parents say. Toxicologic tests are pending, the Northampton County Coroner said.
Mr. Lieberman's father, Richard, a plain-spoken farmer, said he had not decided whether to hire a lawyer. He simply wants to know if the gun caused his son's death. "If he was the problem, we have to accept it," Mr. Lieberman said. "If they were the problem, they have to accept it."
Eric Dash contributed reporting from New York for this article.
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New Name, but Same Initials, for G.A.O.
July 18, 2004
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/18/politics/18gao.html
WASHINGTON, July 17 - The G.A.O., the agency that conducts investigations and audits for Congress, is still the G.A.O. But from now on, the initials will stand for the Government Accountability Office, not the General Accounting Office, the name since the agency was created in 1921.
President Bush signed a law changing the name on July 7. Congress approved the bipartisan legislation last month at the request of David M. Walker, the comptroller general.
"Our past name did not accurately reflect who we are and what we do," said Mr. Walker, who is head of the agency. "We've never been in the accounting business. We mostly do audits and investigations, offer policy analysis and render legal opinions."
Mr. Walker said the new name might help attract lawyers, investigators, economists and other professionals who were not really interested in being accountants.
In addition to the name change, the new law will exempt the agency from the executive branch pay scales. Starting as early as next year, the 3,200 G.A.O. employees will not get annual automatic across-the-board pay increases but will have their pay adjusted "based on skill, knowledge and performance," Mr. Walker said.
The agency plans to use the old stationery and business cards as long as they last, Mr. Walker said.
"After all," he said, "we are in the economy and efficiency business."
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WASHINGTON MEMO
New Reports Again Question Whether Iraq Sought Uranium in Niger
July 18, 2004
By RICHARD W. STEVENSON and DAVID JOHNSTON
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/18/international/middleeast/18URAN.html?pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, July 17 - Were those infamous 16 words correct after all?
It has been a year and a half since President Bush's 2003 State of the Union address, in which he suggested in a single sentence that Iraq might have been trying to acquire uranium in Africa for its nuclear weapons program. And it has been a year since the White House and the C.I.A. acknowledged that the evidence behind that assertion was flawed, opening Mr. Bush to a torrent of criticism about the credibility and reliability of the intelligence he used to justify toppling Saddam Hussein.
But now two new reports have reopened the question of whether Mr. Bush was indeed correct when, on Jan. 28, 2003, he told the nation and the world, "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
One of the reports was released on Wednesday by a British commission reviewing the intelligence used by Prime Minister Tony Blair in making the case for war. The report stood by the British intelligence assessments that were the foundation for Mr. Bush's statement. Though it did not explain in any detail how or why it judged the intelligence to be sound, the report concluded that the assertions by Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair about Iraq's attempts to acquire uranium were "well founded."
The other report came from the Senate Intelligence Committee. It generally found extensive problems with the prewar intelligence assessments about Iraq's weapons programs and in particular documented a long chain of problems in the way the intelligence agencies dealt with suspicions about Iraq's interest in acquiring uranium.
But it also contained some information that tended to bolster the view that Iraq had tried to acquire uranium from Niger and possibly one or two other African nations. It cited a statement by a French official to the State Department in late 2002 that France, which was resisting Mr. Bush's efforts to make an urgent case for war, "believed the reporting was true that Iraq had made a procurement attempt for uranium from Niger." Neither report, however, found evidence that Iraq had actually purchased any uranium from Niger.
The new reports also raised questions about one of the White House's chief critics over the issue, Joseph C. Wilson IV, a former ambassador sent to Niger in 2002 to investigate whether Iraq had tried to purchase uranium there. Among other things, the report pointed out that Mr. Wilson's official account to the C.I.A. noted that a former prime minister of Niger had told him that he had been approached in 1999 about meeting with an Iraqi delegation interested in "expanding commercial relations" between Niger and Iraq. The former prime minister told Mr. Wilson that he interpreted the approach to mean the Iraqis were interested in acquiring a form of uranium.
The White House response to the reports has been muted. "I think those reports speak for themselves on that issue," said Scott McClellan, Mr. Bush's spokesman.
Administration officials said they were not crowing about the reports for a variety of reasons. For one thing, they said, both reports were highly critical of most of the prewar intelligence developed by both Britain and the United States, and to embrace one aspect of the reports would make it more difficult to dispute other findings.
In addition, they said, the internal finger-pointing over who had been to blame for the inclusion of the 16 words in the State of the Union address had left so much bad feeling, especially among the White House, the C.I.A. and the State Department, that there was little appetite for reopening the subject.
Still, White House officials were quietly pleased to be able to claim even limited vindication. And some commentators and allies of the administration used the reports to question whether Mr. Bush's credibility had been unfairly impugned by the entire affair. Referring to Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair, The Wall Street Journal's editorial page on Thursday said, "It now appears that both leaders have been far more scrupulous in discussing this and related issues than much of the media in either of their countries, which would embarrass the journalistic profession, if that were possible."
If there is some measure of vindication for the administration in the new reports - something that Mr. Bush's critics do not concede - it still left the White House to deal with the many aftershocks that continue to emanate from the episode.
Mr. Bush's re-election prospects rest to some degree on whether he is perceived to have led the nation into the war on the basis of flawed or false intelligence. And the White House remains to some degree at risk from a federal criminal investigation into whether administration officials leaked to a newspaper columnist the fact that Mr. Wilson's wife is a covert C.I.A. officer.
The reports did not affect the criminal inquiry into whether anyone at the White House violated a law that makes it a crime to disclose the name of an undercover officer.
But Mr. Wilson has been left on the defensive by the Senate Intelligence Committee's report, which found that, contrary to what he has said, his wife, Valerie Plame, appeared to have had a role in the decision to send him to Niger.
In a letter this week to the chairman and the vice chairman of the intelligence committee, Mr. Wilson disputed the assertion that the plan to send him to Niger was suggested by his wife. Mr. Wilson said the comments she made about his background in a letter to her boss a week before he visited the C.I.A. to discuss the trip were intended to establish his bona fides and did not constitute a recommendation. Mr. Wilson also cited news accounts last year quoting unidentified intelligence officials as saying that Ms. Plame had not proposed Mr. Wilson for the trip. And he took exception to criticism by the committee's chairman, Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas, and other Republicans, who said he had gone on a media blitz to convince the world that Mr. Bush had lied.
There may be more revelations to come. The British and American reports contained still-classified information about Iraq's dealings with Niger. Beyond that, Patrick Fitzgerald, the federal prosecutor examining the leak of Ms. Plame's identity, is expected to announce in a matter of weeks whether he will prosecute anyone.
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9/11 Panel Calls for Major Changes
Final Report to Urge Counterterrorism Center
By Dan Eggen and Steve Coll
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, July 18, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A58120-2004Jul17?language=printer
The final report of the commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks recommends a major restructuring of the nation's intelligence community and includes broad criticism of the White House, Congress and other parts of the U.S. government for failing to detect, thwart and better respond to the deadly hijackings, according to panel members and other officials.
The book-length report -- being readied for public release on Thursday -- has been endorsed by all 10 of the bipartisan panel's members. It features many of the findings that emerged from public hearings and staff investigations, including the conclusion that al Qaeda and Iraq did not form a close working relationship, commission officials said.
But the final report goes beyond the detailed findings of the commission's staff, scolding Congress for poor oversight of the nation's counterterrorism efforts and urging specific and dramatic reforms that include creation of a powerful national counterterrorism center, according to administration officials and those involved in drafting the document. The new center would have far greater authority than the Terrorist Threat Integration Center opened by the CIA last year, officials said.
The report also recommends a Cabinet-level office and director to oversee the CIA, the FBI and other intelligence agencies, as the New York Times reported yesterday, but one official familiar with the report said that was only part of a broader reorganization aimed at shaking up the intelligence community. The five Republicans and five Democrats on the commission say they have jointly agreed not to discuss details of their recommendations before the report is released.
The proposals follow two reports by the House and Senate intelligence committees that faulted the government's intelligence gathering, particularly at the CIA, and come amid a flurry of legislative proposals to remake the intelligence community.
The report caps a remarkable 20-month investigation in which the independent commission -- created amid acrimony by Congress and initially opposed by President Bush -- gained unprecedented access to closely held presidential briefings, transcripts of interrogations of high-level al Qaeda leaders and tens of thousands of pages of other classified material. The panel also privately interviewed Bush, Vice President Cheney and their predecessors, Bill Clinton and Al Gore. Deadline to Publish
Through 17 detailed statements assembled by its staff and released this year, the commission has already dramatically altered the public understanding of how 19 al Qaeda hijackers were able to carry off the deadliest terrorist attack in U.S. history. The commission revealed, for example, previously unknown conflicts among al Qaeda's leaders and the hijackers, and told of a plot originally intended to involve 10 aircraft in an assault on the East and West coasts.
The panel has been racing over the past three weeks to finalize the report so that it could be released before a July 26 statutory deadline, the same day the Democratic Party's national convention opens. Commission officials feared that issuing the report that day could have opened the panel to political attacks. Nearly 600 pages long, the findings will be available through bookstores, the Internet and the Government Printing Office.
Commissioners interviewed last week said the entire panel was involved in drafting and editing the findings, and reached agreement on how to address some of the most politically sensitive topics. As late as yesterday, officials said, the report was still being edited and the panel continued wrestling with White House lawyers over classification issues.
"The staff statements were genuinely the work of the staff," said Vice Chairman Lee H. Hamilton (D), a former congressman from Indiana. "The report that we will issue next week is a commission product and has been very carefully examined by the commissioners, line by line. . . . There are certainly topics in the report that were not touched on in the staff statements."
Several commissioners said the resulting report was not compromised by the desire of Hamilton, Chairman Thomas H. Kean (R) and others on the panel to reach unanimity.
"We have not pulled any punches," said commissioner Timothy J. Roemer (D), a former Indiana congressman. "We will have dynamic structural changes and a dramatic moving of the boxes to better reflect moving from a Cold War to a hot jihadist threat, but it's also important to keep your eye on tradecraft and nuts and bolts."
Led by co-chairmen who have attempted to steer the panel away from partisan debate, and relying on a staff assembled without direct involvement by the two major political parties, the commission's published statements so far have struck a centrist, judicious tone. In many respects, the panel's work has been closer to the fact-finding, conspiracy-debunking Warren Commission of the mid-1960s, which investigated the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, than to the reform-oriented Church Commission, which exposed assassination plots and CIA abuses during the mid-1970s.
The commission staff has already absolved Saudi Arabia's government of direct support for al Qaeda and debunked widespread reports that Osama bin Laden inherited $300 million. (He received a $1 million annual allowance for about two decades, the commission found.) Panel members also have knocked down questions raised by last year's congressional investigation into Sept. 11 intelligence failures involving possible help for the hijackers by the Saudi Embassy in Washington.
On the politically charged election-year argument over whether the Clinton or Bush administration had the more aggressive approach to battling al Qaeda, the commission has produced evidence on both sides. Scores of previously classified documents and e-mails the commission has already disclosed show, for example, that national security adviser Condoleezza Rice was correct when she argued in public hearings this spring that unlike Clinton, Bush adopted a policy early in 2001 that explicitly sought to eliminate al Qaeda.
Yet the commission has released documents showing that the practical steps Bush planned to take during the early years of his presidency imitated much of Clinton's unsuccessful strategy of negotiating with the Taliban, even though the threat of a massive al Qaeda terrorist attack seemed to be rising. Drawing Connections
Some of the commission's most politically sensitive judgments this week will address conspiracy-tinted questions echoing in the current presidential campaign, such as whether al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's Iraq had a significant relationship, and whether the White House made special arrangements to fly bin Laden relatives out of the United States in September 2001, as alleged in Michael Moore's new documentary film, "Fahrenheit 9/11."
The commission made headlines on June 16 by reporting that its investigators had found "no credible evidence that Iraq and al Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States," and that although there were meetings between Iraqi officials and bin Laden's group during the 1990s, the contacts "do not appear to have resulted in a collaborative relationship." Bush and Cheney cited evidence of contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda as a justification for the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003.
The final report will not alter the staff's general conclusion, commissioners said. But it is likely to lay out again specific evidence of the past contacts, allowing partisans to reargue their positions.
In June, commission investigators detailed new evidence about bin Laden's past relationship with Hussein. The staff cited statements by two senior bin Laden associates apparently in U.S. custody who "adamantly denied" that there were "any ties" between al Qaeda and Iraq. The panel also reported that bin Laden at one point "sponsored" Islamic radical guerrillas in Iraq who were fighting to overthrow Hussein and replace his secular government with a religious one.
At the same time, investigators reported that when bin Laden lived in exile in Sudan between 1991 and 1996, the Sudanese government -- seeking to preserve its relationship with Hussein -- successfully pushed bin Laden to end aid to the anti-Hussein guerrillas and later arranged meetings between Iraqi and al Qaeda officials. Some of the commission staff's language about these contacts in the June statement was more tentative than the political argument that followed their disclosure. The investigators reported that, on three occasions, a senior Iraqi intelligence officer "reportedly" visited Sudan and eventually met with bin Laden in 1994. But after bin Laden asked for help with weapons and military training, Iraq's government "apparently" did not respond.
Commissioner John F. Lehman (R), a former Navy secretary who has cited possible evidence of Iraq-al Qaeda ties, said the report would include "more information" on Iraq. He also said the report overall will include "less editorializing and more fact" than the staff statements.
"Some people might have stated things more starkly or attempted to draw more editorial judgments," Lehman said, referring to the report in general. "What did not happen is that the conclusions got watered down or we tried to fudge the evidence. This is not a watered-down report. . . . Everybody endorses it, and it wasn't because it was turned into homogenous fudge."
Commission investigators have looked in depth at what they earlier labeled the bin Laden flight, a charter plane on which relatives of the al Qaeda leader departed the United States after the attacks, apparently because they feared for their security. As of two months ago, the commission staff had found "no evidence" to contradict the FBI's conclusion that none of the Saudis on the flight had involvement in the attacks or with bin Laden's other terrorist ambitions.
In their initial inquiry, commission staffers were unable to learn who at the White House helped to arrange the bin Laden flight. Eventually, however, the request was passed to counterterrorism coordinator Richard A. Clarke. "Each of the flights we have studied was investigated by the FBI and dealt with in a professional manner" before it was allowed to fly, and none of the planes was permitted to take off before U.S. airspace was reopened to commercial aviation, the commission staff concluded.
The flight with bin Laden relatives departed on Sept. 20 with 26 passengers, including three private security guards. The FBI interviewed 22 of the people on board, asking many of them detailed questions, commission investigators said. FBI agents checked "a variety of databases" for watch lists and other information, found no matches and ultimately concluded that the passengers were of no interest to investigators. Warnings Missed
Such politically charged mysteries have heightened the commission's profile, but they lie on the periphery of its mandate, which was to investigate why the Sept. 11 attacks occurred, whether they could have been prevented and what reforms would best strengthen the country against similar strikes in the future.
Both Kean and Hamilton have said the evidence suggests the plot could conceivably have been thwarted, but the commission has not cast judgment on whether stopping the hijackers was truly probable or merely theoretical. Regardless, commission investigators have already laid out a mass of detailed evidence suggesting that there were many more specific opportunities to break up the hijacker cell than previously understood.
These included at least two, and possibly as many as eight, instances in which hijackers presented passports that had been manipulated fraudulently; several statements on hijackers' visa applications that could have been proved false; and poor communication among U.S. computers preventing plotters from being tagged as suspicious when they crossed borders. The panel also identified by name as many as 10 hijacker candidates who were dropped from the plot, including accused Sept. 11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui. Commission investigators have disclosed new facts, details and documents about the United States' often-secret struggles with al Qaeda dating back more than a decade. But the greatest amount of new detail disclosed by the commission -- consistent with its mandate -- involves the run-up to the attacks during 2001, the way the strikes unfolded on Sept. 11 and the shortcomings in the response of emergency personnel and U.S. air defenses.
Among other things, the final report will revisit the controversy ignited by Clarke, who charged in a best-selling book and at intensely watched commission hearings that Bush and his national security team had been slow, distracted and cautious about the bin Laden threat during the first months of 2001. Without adopting Clarke's argument, the commission staff has documented previously unknown meetings, memos, chronologies and messages from this period, many of which support Clarke's position or quote from classified warnings he issued inside the Bush White House.
Clarke's e-mails and memos culminated in a dramatic note to Rice in early September, in which Clarke poured out his frustrations and, in eerily prescient language that forecast the commission's work, urged Bush's policymakers to "imagine a day after a terrorist attack, with hundreds of Americans dead at home and abroad, and ask themselves what they could have done earlier."
The report will expand on the commission's earlier findings that al Qaeda's contacts with Iran were far more advanced than previously believed, and that the two may have developed a relationship of convenience that included cooperation in attacks such as the Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia. Time magazine reported that the commission has found that eight to 10 of the Sept. 11 hijackers may have passed through Iran before joining the hijacking plot.
Staff writer Mike Allen contributed to this report.
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9/11 Panel's Report to Offer New Evidence of Iran-Qaeda Ties
July 18, 2004
By PHILIP SHENON
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/18/national/18panel.html
The final report of the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks will offer new evidence of cooperative ties between Iran and Al Qaeda, including information drawn from intelligence reports suggesting that Iran provided several of the hijackers with safe passage in the year before the attacks, government officials said yesterday.
The officials emphasized that the commission had no evidence to suggest that Iranian officials knew of the Sept. 11 plot. But they said the evidence raised new questions about why the Bush administration focused on the possibility of Iraqi ties to Osama bin Laden's terror network after Sept. 11, 2001, when there may have been far more extensive evidence of an Iranian connection.
The officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the embargo placed by the commission on discussing the report until its release, said the panel had recently obtained intelligence showing that Iran had ordered guards at its border stations not to stamp the passports of Qaeda members from Saudi Arabia who were moving through Iran after training at terrorist camps in Afghanistan. The existence of the new intelligence was first reported on Time magazine's Web site.
The officials said the bipartisan commission had uncovered evidence that as many as 10 of the Sept. 11 hijackers traveled through Iran in late 2000 and early 2001 and would have benefited from the Iranian policy, allowing them to enter the United States without an Iranian passport stamp, which could have made them subject to special scrutiny.
The United States has no diplomatic relations with Iran and has long accused the Iranian intelligence services of cooperating with terrorist networks, including Al Qaeda; President Bush has described Iran, Iraq and North Korea as an "axis of evil."
Officials said the assistance that Iran was reported to have provided to the hijackers did not suggest that Iran knew about the Sept. 11 plot, if only because most of the hijackers themselves were not believed to have known the details until after the attacks were under way.
In an interim report last month, the commission's staff said it appeared that there had been no "collaborative relationship" between Iraq and the Qaeda network, which appeared to undermine one of the Bush administration's justifications for last year' s invasion of Iraq.
But the interim report, which officials said would be largely reproduced in the commission's final report, did cite new evidence of ties between Al Qaeda and Iran.
The report last month said that in the 1990's, "bin Laden's representatives and Iranian officials had discussed putting aside Shia-Sunni divisions to cooperate against the common enemy," and that a small group of Qaeda members "subsequently traveled to Iran and Hezbollah camps in Lebanon for training in explosives, intelligence and security."
Iran's intelligence minister, Ali Yunesi, was quoted by state television yesterday as saying that the country's intelligence ministry had dismantled branches of Al Qaeda there, Reuters reported.
In the last two years, hundreds of suspected Qaeda members have been arrested and repatriated, Iranian officials say.
American government officials said that the commission's final report, due out Thursday after a 19-month investigation, would offer other new information about the history of Qaeda's plotting against the United States, and that the commission planned to release a copy of a 1998 C.I.A. briefing paper to President Bill Clinton warning of possible hijacking plots by the terror network.
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EDITORIAL OBSERVER
Decoding the Senate Intelligence Committee Investigation on Iraq
July 18, 2004
By ANDREW ROSENTHAL
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/18/opinion/18SUN3.html
The Senate Intelligence Committee's report on American intelligence failures in Iraq has produced a rare and curious thing - agreement between left and right. For opposite reasons, both are pushing the absurd notion that the report told us that President Bush was not to blame for giving Americans false information about Iraq.
The left has denounced the report as a whitewash that unfairly clears Mr. Bush of charges that he or his aides prodded the Central Intelligence Agency into hyping the Iraqi weapons programs, and purposefully misrepresented the threat from Saddam Hussein. The right agrees with the conclusion, and calls it a vindication of the president.
In fact, the sadly incomplete report does nothing of the kind. It takes the public up to the question of Mr. Bush's involvement and then ducks, announcing that an examination of the president's role is due after the election. Thanks to that compromise, the Republicans did not block it, and Democrats could justify endorsing it as an unfinished work.
The 511-page report, which was released by the committee last week after about 20 percent was censored by the administration, does not tell us what the C.I.A. and other agencies told Mr. Bush before he concluded that Iraq had dangerous weapons and that Saddam Hussein had to go. It focuses on something called a "National Intelligence Estimate," which came out in October 2002, months and months after the administration had already set its face toward war. The estimate was requested by Congress, and it was supposed to summarize the views of the C.I.A., along with those of the Defense Department's intelligence experts and other agencies, like the State Department and Department of Energy, that might have important information to offer.
Three versions of the report on Iraq were prepared, all of them concluding that Saddam Hussein was a major threat. But the first, long, classified one was peppered with reservations. A declassified version that was given to Congress erased most of the doubts. The even shorter public version had no caveats at all.
What we need to know now is how the report came up so positive. The Senate committee said its staff "did not find any evidence that administration officials attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to change their judgments related to Iraq's weapons of mass destruction." Republican members in particular have repeatedly assured the public that no one reported any direct arm-twisting. But that is a lot less meaningful than it sounds.
The people helping to prepare the report worked for officials like Vice President Dick Cheney; Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld; George Tenet, the director of central intelligence; and to a lesser degree Secretary of State Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser. By the time they began working on the intelligence estimate, most of their bosses had already advised the president that Saddam Hussein needed to go, and some had also taken a public stand.
On Aug. 26, for instance, Mr. Cheney told the V.F.W. National Convention that Iraq was in league with Al Qaeda and was working on a nuclear weapon. "Simply stated," he added, "there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt that he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies and against us. And there is no doubt that his aggressive regional ambitions will lead him into future confrontations with his neighbors."
Simply stated, there was plenty of doubt about all of these things and most of them were not true. In fact, members of the intelligence community were voicing doubts at the time that Mr. Cheney spoke. We do not know for certain whether these dissenting voices were heard by Mr. Cheney or Mr. Bush. But certainly, Mr. Tenet, Mr. Rumsfeld, Mr. Powell and Ms. Rice had access to them.
So while the Senate report has told us that no government employee complained of direct pressure from the White House to give the intelligence estimate a positive spin, it has not told us how so much negative assessment got left out or how top Bush officials came to make public statements that contradicted information that was readily available within the administration. The Department of Energy categorically refuted the claim that the Iraqis were working on nuclear weapons in April 2001, 16 months before Mr. Cheney's V.F.W. speech, according to the Senate report. The C.I.A. knew it, the Defense Department knew it, the State Department knew it. But these dissenting views did not make it into the intelligence estimate.
So it's not exactly true, as Mr. Bush said on Wednesday, that "the United States Congress, including members of both political parties, looked at the same intelligence" that he had. And we have still not seen the intelligence reports Mr. Bush got. We do not even know what Mr. Bush was told about the intelligence estimate. The C.I.A. gave him his own, one-page summary, which the White House will not show to the Senate.
One of Mr. Bush's central charges against Saddam Hussein was his supposed link with Al Qaeda, which Mr. Bush still mentions even though the Senate report said there was no evidence of a link. On this point, the report said, the intelligence community's negative view was widely disseminated among top officials.
Mr. Cheney likes to refer to a meeting between the hijacker Mohamed Atta and an Iraqi official that supposedly took place in Prague in April 2001. But the C.I.A. does not believe it happened. In a memo recently released by Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, Mr. Tenet said the agency did not have "any credible information that the April 2001 meeting occurred."
In today's political climate, it took some courage for the Republican chairman of the Intelligence Committee, Senator Pat Roberts, to do any investigating at all. But he was ultimately overwhelmed by the politics of Iraq.
The British report on the intelligence debacle, also released last week, made it plain that the push for war was political, not based on new urgency about a threat from Iraq. Even with fears justifiably heightened after the 9/11 attacks, it said, "there was no recent intelligence that would itself have given rise to a conclusion that Iraq was of more immediate concern than the activities of some other countries."
So how did the Bush administration wind up passing out so much disinformation? Americans are going to have to wait for the Senate's judgment on this crucial question until after the election.
-------- propaganda wars
PM admits graves claim 'untrue'
Sunday July 18, 2004
The UK Observer
Peter Beaumont, foreign affairs editor
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/iraq/story/0,12956,1263901,00.html
Downing Street has admitted to The Observer that repeated claims by Tony Blair that '400,000 bodies had been found in Iraqi mass graves' is untrue, and only about 5,000 corpses have so far been uncovered.
The claims by Blair in November and December of last year, were given widespread credence, quoted by MPs and widely published, including in the introduction to a US government pamphlet on Iraq's mass graves.
In that publication - Iraq's Legacy of Terror: Mass Graves produced by USAID, the US government aid distribution agency, Blair is quoted from 20 November last year: 'We've already discovered, just so far, the remains of 400,000 people in mass graves.'
On 14 December Blair repeated the claim in a statement issued by Downing Street in response to the arrest of Saddam Hussein and posted on the Labour party website that: 'The remains of 400,000 human beings [have] already [been] found in mass graves.'
The admission that the figure has been hugely inflated follows a week in which Blair accepted responsibility for charges in the Butler report over the way in which Downing Street pushed intelligence reports 'to the outer limits' in the case for the threat posed by Iraq.
Downing Street's admission comes amid growing questions over precisely how many perished under Saddam's three decades of terror, and the location of the bodies of the dead.
The Baathist regime was responsible for massive human rights abuses and murder on a large scale - not least in well-documented campaigns including the gassing of Halabja, the al-Anfal campaign against Kurdish villages and the brutal repression of the Shia uprising - but serious questions are now emerging about the scale of Saddam Hussein's murders.
It comes amid inflation from an estimate by Human Rights Watch in May 2003 of 290,000 'missing' to the latest claims by the Iraqi Prime Minister, Iyad Allawi, that one million are missing.
At the heart of the questions are the numbers so far identified in Iraq's graves. Of 270 suspected grave sites identified in the last year, 55 have now been examined, revealing, according to the best estimates that The Observer has been able to obtain, around 5,000 bodies. Forensic examination of grave sites has been hampered by lack of security in Iraq, amid widespread complaints by human rights organisations that until recently the graves have not been secured and protected.
While some sites have contained hundreds of bodies - including a series around the town of Hilla and another near the Saudi border - others have contained no more than a dozen.
And while few have any doubts that Saddam's regime was responsible for serious crimes against humanity, the exact scale of those crimes has become increasingly politicised in both Washington and London as it has become clearer that the case against Iraq for retention of weapons of mass destruction has faded.
The USAID website, which quotes Blair's 400,000 assertion, states: 'If these numbers prove accurate, they represent a crime against humanity surpassed only by the Rwandan genocide of 1994, Pol Pot's Cambodian killing fields in the 1970s, and the Nazi Holocaust of World War II.'
It is an issue that Human Rights Watch was acutely aware of when it compiled its own pre-invasion research - admitting that it had to reduce estimates for the al-Anfal campaign produced by Kurds by over a third, as they believed the numbers they had been given were inflated.
Hania Mufti, one of the researchers that produced that estimate, said: 'Our estimates were based on estimates. The eventual figure was based in part on circumstantial information gathered over the years.'
A further difficulty, according to Inforce, a group of British forensic experts in mass grave sites based at Bournemouth University who visited Iraq last year, was in the constant over-estimation of site sizes by Iraqis they met. 'Witnesses were often likely to have unrealistic ideas of the numbers of people in grave areas that they knew about,' said Jonathan Forrest.
'Local people would tell us of 10,000s of people buried at single grave sites and when we would get there they would be in multiple hundreds.'
A Downing Street spokesman said: 'While experts may disagree on the exact figures, human rights groups, governments and politicians across the world have no doubt that Saddam killed hundreds of thousands of his own people and their remains are buried in sites throughout Iraq.'
-------- us politics
President Is Still Mum on Agenda For Second Term
By Dan Balz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, July 18, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A58274-2004Jul17?language=printer
As he campaigned around the country last week, President Bush asked voters to give him another four years to make the nation "safer and stronger and better." But with the election less than four months away, one of the biggest mysteries surrounding the president's campaign is what he would actually do if he wins a second term.
Bush's failure to detail a second-term agenda -- beyond his pledge to keep waging an aggressive war on terrorism -- represents a stark contrast to his previous campaigns, in which he set out a handful of priorities almost from the opening day and rarely deviated from them.
Throughout the year, Bush has focused on Iraq and terrorism and on drawing attention to improved economic statistics, but has barely begun to make the case about second-term priorities. Whether there is room for a bold domestic agenda, given the fiscal strains his first term has created, and whether Bush has fresh ideas on issues such as health care, education and the economy are questions yet to be answered.
Bush's advisers, in a series of interviews in recent days, were quick to rebut those questions. They asserted that there will be a vigorous new agenda and challenged those who have suggested that a second-term blueprint could be little more than a warmed-over version of what Bush ran on in 2000 but has failed to enact.
They said Bush plans to use the period around the time of the Republican National Convention in late August to put forward the main elements of a new agenda in an effort to draw a clear contrast with Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) and seize control of the debate during the final two months of the campaign.
"After their [the Democrats] convention is over and we're into the August phase and into our convention, we will begin aggressively talking about the president's vision for the next four years," White House communications director Dan Bartlett said.
Said another adviser: "We are going to have a window after the Democratic convention and at our convention where people are going to say, what are you going to do the next four years? We will robustly seize that opportunity."
The details remain closely held. Presidential advisers said elements of the plan have been agreed to, with debate still underway on others. Fighting terrorism remains paramount to the president, and on domestic issues there is a consensus outside the administration that Bush is likely to renew his call for changes in Social Security.
Outside analysts are in far less agreement on whether, beyond calling for making his tax cuts permanent, Bush will push for significant tax law revisions or simplification. Bush's education focus may shift to higher education, while his health care agenda is likely to focus on some combination of medical liability reform, efforts to curb rising costs with the help of information technology and programs to reduce the number of Americans without health insurance.
Bush began this campaign year sketching out several new initiatives, including the manned exploration of the moon and eventually Mars and immigration reform. Neither, however, captured sustained attention or support. Another major proposal, a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, was soundly defeated in the Senate last week.
Waiting until his convention to offer a campaign agenda represents a major strategic shift for Bush. Some administration allies worry that the time is late to introduce a new agenda and expect voters to digest it and give the president a mandate to implement it. And Bush's political team declined to say whether they will use their advertising dollars this fall to push that agenda, or continue to attack Kerry.
But former House speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) said he agrees with the White House decision to wait, and predicted an ambitious package when it is unveiled. "I am told by people who have heard him talk privately that it is very powerful, that he's deeply, passionately committed and in many ways wants to stake his place in history in achieving substantial change in the country, not just as the president who led the war on terror," Gingrich said.
One Bush adviser said, "The general feeling is we've got to have the same ambition and clarity we're bringing to the international agenda to some important domestic policy issues. . . . I don't think it's accurate to say we're making a turn. It's accurate to say we're filling out a message."
Four years ago, Bush ran on an agenda that included big tax cuts, education reform, a faith-based initiative, military modernization, missile defense and Social Security reform -- all of it unveiled long before the GOP convention that summer.
But White House senior adviser Karl Rove has told Republican allies that, in the 2000 campaign, Bush suffered from having little new to say in September and October, and that the 2004 campaign plan was drawn up to avoid that mistake.
In 2000, say his advisers, Bush had a prominent political name but little definition as a potential president. Setting out a substantive agenda that defined his claim to compassionate conservatism was an important strategic goal. "The definitional phase of a campaign is the springtime, and the biggest mistake Al Gore made was to allow us to define ourselves," a senior adviser said, adding, "We weren't going to make the mistake we thought Al Gore made."
Which is why, instead of offering his own agenda, Bush has poured tens of millions dollars into television ads attacking Kerry, a strategy they believe was successful in casting Kerry as a flip-flopper, although Kerry and Democratic strategists say it accomplished far less than Bush had hoped.
But Bush advisers said even if they had tried to present a second-term agenda, news from Iraq would have overwhelmed it, and they point to the president's job training initiatives, which have received little attention, as evidence. They also said the president has had to struggle to change public perceptions that the economic recovery has not reached down to help average Americans.
"I think there's a general feeling that we're getting those things right," one Bush adviser said. "But that's a platform on which to build. We have to get those things right, and we have to go from there."
The longer Bush has waited to lay out his agenda, the more that has triggered discussion among policy analysts about what Bush should propose. Will he attempt to run again as a compassionate conservative? Will he claim the mantle of reform by tackling such major issues as the tax code and health care? Or will he frame his agenda under the rubric of an ownership society, designed to appeal to younger voters, by pushing not only Social Security accounts but also other tax-based savings programs for health, education and retirement?
The broadest consensus among analysts is that the president will resurrect his call to alter Social Security by allowing individuals to create personal savings accounts with a portion of their payroll taxes. Early in his presidency, Bush appointed a commission that returned with a series of policy options. But the aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001, and political fears among Republicans on Capitol Hill effectively dashed any chance for action.
Some outside analysts said the federal budget's imbalance will complicate Bush's desire to change Social Security, particularly if he continues to push to make his tax cuts permanent.
"If the administration is reelected . . . it will face a choice between making the tax cuts permanent and pushing Social Security reform," said Peter R. Orszag of the Brookings Institution. He noted that making the tax cuts permanent and fixing the alternative minimum tax would cost about $1.5 trillion, almost exactly the transition costs of setting up personal accounts in Social Security.
Stewart M. Butler of the Heritage Foundation made a similar point about the impact on the budget of making the tax cuts permanent. "There's got to be a real strategy to get entitlements under control," he said.
There is far less consensus on what else Bush should offer for a second term. On health care, Bush has a smorgasbord from which to choose. With Sen. John Edwards (N.C.), a former trial lawyer, on the Democratic ticket, medical liability reform will likely climb higher in the president's list of priorities.
Beyond that, Bush's outside allies expect him to focus on restraining costs through information technology initiatives, a project favored by Gingrich, and by focusing on the cost of prescription drugs. Some Republicans expect Bush to focus more of his attention on the problem of the uninsured, a major initiative of Kerry's.
Bush allies doubt that he will attempt to alter Medicare. Having enacted a prescription drug benefit, several analysts said, makes the chances of revision less likely. "It's too divisive, and Bush wants to say he's fixed Medicare," said Michael Tanner of the Cato Institute. "And they've given away the ice cream, so it's tough to go back and say eat your spinach."
On education, Bush succeeded in enacting his signature issue from 2000, the No Child Left Behind Act, and though that remains controversial, the next frontier appears to be higher education. Kerry has made proposals in this area, and one domestic policy expert close to the White House said he expects Bush to fill out in more detail his ideas for preparing high school graduates for college and making college more affordable.
Bush advisers discount the idea that they have waited too long to unveil a second-term agenda. They note that President Bill Clinton did not unveil his theme of a "bridge to the 21st century" until his convention in 1996. But they say they recognize that victory depends on Bush's ability to convince voters that he has an agenda superior to Kerry's.
"Incumbents who win always run prospectively rather than retrospectively," said Matthew Dowd, senior adviser at Bush's campaign committee. "There are things you have to deal with retrospectively, but in the end it's going to be a prospective election."
-------- ACTIVISTS
Minn. GOP Asks Activists to Report on Neighbors' Politics
By Brian Faler
The Washington Post
Sunday, July 18, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A58309-2004Jul17.html
All politics is local. But this year, it is getting downright neighborly.
Take Minnesota. The state Republican Party has developed a Web site that allows its activists to tap into a database of voters whose political allegiances and concerns it would like to know. But it is not just any group of voters -- they are the activists' neighbors.
The project, dubbed WebVoter, gives GOP activists the names and addresses of 25 people who live, in most cases, within a couple of blocks from them. The party has asked 60,000 supporters from across the state to figure out what issues animate their neighbors and where they stand in the political spectrum, and report that information back to the party -- with or, possibly, without their neighbors' permission.
Those who seem persuadable will receive campaign literature from Republican candidates -- including President Bush -- with whom the party plans to share its data. Those deemed incorrigible Democrats will be struck from the list.
"We don't want to waste our time or money on people who are not going to vote with us regardless of what we do," said Larry Colson, a Minnesota entrepreneur who helped develop the site. "We would like to be able to hone the message to people who are already with us and then people who are on the fence -- those are the people that we'd like to target."
The Minnesota GOP, like many state parties, already collects voter information. It uses public information that Minnesotans provide when they register to vote, including their names, addresses and phone numbers. The party cross-references that data with information gleaned from other public and private sources.
Colson, who is also the Bush campaign's "e-campaign chairman" for Minnesota, declined to say what other information the state party uses. But other state parties and campaigns typically tap demographic and consumer data taken from census reports or direct-marketing companies. The goal is to create detailed profiles of voters that will help the party decide whom it should woo -- and how.
Minnesota and 22 other states do not require those registering to vote to identify their party affiliation. But through its efforts, Colson said, the party believes it has determined the political leanings of about 60 percent of the state's households. Some of the remainder -- he would not say how much -- has landed in the party's new database, a list that includes "tens of thousands" of names.
The site and the party's reliance on neighborly connections, Colson said, are ways of filling those gaps. "You're more likely to tell your neighbor what your party preference is when they ask than you are to some stranger on the phone," he said.
The project, which was first reported by the Minneapolis Star Tribune, could affect the November election in this battleground state. Democrat Al Gore won in 2000 by a little more than 2 percent of the vote -- about 60,000 ballots.
The Bush campaign launched a similar effort on its Web site. Those who sign up to be campaign volunteers -- and who live in a state the campaign is targeting -- can access a list of their neighbors the campaign would like to reach. The site provides their names, addresses, phone numbers, maps of where each lives and a script with a number of questions -- including whether they are registered to vote, are opposed to abortion rights and support the president.
The script also directs activists to identify themselves as Bush volunteers -- to prevent any questions as to where the respondents' information will end up, the campaign said.
Colson said the Minnesota GOP has also asked its activists to identify themselves as such. But he said it is still possible that some will report on neighbors' views without their permission. "We don't really have a script, so to speak, other than 'get to know your neighbors -- talk to them.' So we've only given them rough guidelines," Colson said.
"But it's not as if we're asking for Social Security number and make and model and serial number of car. We're asking for party preference," he said. "Party preference is not something that is such a personal piece of data."
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