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NUCLEAR
China turns nuclear test facility into tourist attraction
Israel accuses Iran of resuming suspect nuclear activities
Inter-Korean talks called off after North Korean protest
Shutdown at Illinois Nuclear Reactor Merits Special Inspection
Classified E-Mail Left Nuclear Lab
Government Judicial Body Affirms Role of Citizens' Groups
Washington State Will Sue to Halt Nuclear Shipments to Hanford
MILITARY
3 From U.S. in Afghan Court, Accused of Running a Jail
When Elections Threaten Democracy
Lockheed Wins NASA Contract
MI official: Iran may provide Hezbollah with chemical weapons
Military skills key to European influence in U.S.
Europe Fears Islamic Converts May Give Cover for Extremism
U.S. Faces a Crossroads on Iran Policy
Iraq Says Cleric Can Reopen Newspaper
Nine Killed in Truck Bombing Near Baghdad Police Station
Iraq Gives Order to Reopen Paper G.I.'s Had Closed
Israeli Leaders Seek to Keep Gaza Withdrawal on Track
Arafat Scrambles to Defuse Leadership Crisis
Former U.S. Officials Oppose Israel Attack on Iran
Pakistan Army Hunts Militants in Mountain Forests
Philippines Completes Pullout From Iraq
Head of Russian chiefs of staff fired
NASA Denies Funding for Key Satellite
We can't prove Iran-Sept 11 link: CIA
CIA Chief Faults 9/11 Panel
Tiny Agency's Iraq Analysis Is Better Than Big Rivals'
White House Mum on Cabinet Intel Post
UN Vote on Israeli Barrier Put Off One More Day
Grief, Outrage for Families of Dead GIs
Looking for an 'added edge'
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
UN official: Arab world ignores disabled citizens
Secrecy quashes whistle-blower case
The Ghost Prisoners
POLITICS
Sept. 11 Commission Plans a Lobbying Campaign
The Man Behind The Curtain
Clinton reopens book on Iraqi bid to buy uranium in Africa
Iraq War Could Harm War On Terrorism
Clinton reopens book on Iraqi bid to buy uranium in Africa
Bush: U.S. Looking Into Whether Iran Involved In 9 / 11
Lack of Iran Contacts Said Harming U.S. Interests
Proposal to Have U.N. Monitor Elections Ends in Partisan Clash
ENERGY
Feds Award $25 Million in Biomass Energy Research Grants
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- china
China turns nuclear test facility into tourist attraction
BEIJING (AFP)
Jul 19, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040719122756.z8jv63a8.html
China has turned a formerly top secret nuclear test facility located in the country's remote northwest into a tourist attraction, state media reported Monday.
"Nuclear City" -- a research and production base near Xihai town in Qinghai province -- is receiving large numbers of sightseers as China prepares to mark the 40th anniversary of its first atomic blast in October, Xinhua news agency said.
The base was built in 1958 and was home to more than 30,000 scientists, technicians and soldiers at the height of China's nuclear development program, according to the agency.
The Chinese government closed it down and turned it over for civilian use in 1987 "as part of its efforts to promote international nuclear disarmament," Xinhua said.
-------- israel
Israel accuses Iran of resuming suspect nuclear activities
JERUSALEM (AFP)
Jul 19, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040719180154.htgpmxxq.html
Israel on Monday accused its archfoe Iran of resuming suspect nuclear activities linked to the production of enriched uranium which can be used to build atomic bombs.
A military intelligence officer also told a parliamentary committee he could not rule out the possibility that the Lebanese fundamentalist Shiite movement Hezbollah could acquire non-conventional weapons from Iran, military radio reported.
The officer said Iran's activities -- which he did not specify -- contravened commitments by Tehran to the UN nuclear watchdog the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Iran has announced it would resume the assembly of centrifuges -- used to enrich uranium in the most sensitive part of the fuel cycle -- but said it was committed to an accord to allow tougher IAEA inspections, make a full declaration of its activities and suspend enrichment itself.
The IAEA is probing allegations that the country is using power generation as a cover for a secret weapons drive but Tehran insists its programme is solely aimed at meeting the future energy needs of a burgeoning population and freeing up its oil and gas resources for export.
Israel's military intelligence chief General Aharon Zeevi Farkash said earlier this month he believed Iran could build a nuclear weapon by 2007.
Unlike Israel, which is widely thought to possess up to 200 nuclear warheads, Iran has signed up to the IAEA's nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT).
-------- korea
Inter-Korean talks called off after North Korean protest
SEOUL (AFP)
Jul 19, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040719024905.t9a7dgtk.html
Inter-Korean military talks were called off Monday after North Korea protested an incident in which the South Korean navy said it had fired warning shots at a North Korean vessel.
The meeting was to examine progress on the dismantlement of loudspeakers and other propaganda apparatus installed for the past 50 years along the world's last Cold War frontier.
"The talks will not take place as planned because North Korea has not responded to our proposal," a ministry official told AFP.
Rear Admiral Park Jung-Hwa, South Korea's chief delegate to inter-Korean military talks, has expressed regret in a letter to his North Korean counterpart, the official said.
Last week South Korea's navy said a patrol boat fired warnings shots at a North Korean vessel which intruded into South Korean waters near Yeonpyeong Island off the west coast in the Yellow Sea.
North Korea's navy denied the charge and accused the South's navy of spreading misinformation.
Following the landmark accord agreed last month, the two sides began dismantling loudspeakers and other propaganda materials along the heavily fortified border from June 15.
Under part of the agreement marking improved ties between the two Cold War enemies, South and North Korean navies also agreed to open radio contact in the Yellow Sea to prevent accidental clashes.
South Korean military authorities originally said that the North Korean navy vessels failed to communicate with South Korean ships at the time of the incident.
The defense ministry accused North Korea of breaching the inter-Korean accord on establishing radio contact.
Belatedly, however, the defense ministry admitted that the North Koreans had established radio contact three times during the incident.
North Korea has never accepted the sea border drawn at the end of the Korean War in 1953, calling for a new maritime border.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- illinois
Shutdown at Illinois Nuclear Reactor Merits Special Inspection
July 19, 2004
LISLE, Illinois, (ENS)
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/jul2004/2004-07-19-09.asp#anchor3
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has begun a special inspection into the circumstances surrounding an automatic reactor shutdown at the Clinton Nuclear Power Plant last week and the unexpected response of plant equipment to the shutdown. The plant, located in Clinton, in central Illinois 30 miles northeast of Springfield, is operated by Exelon Nuclear Generation Company.
Residents of Clinton live with the 1022 MWe nuclear power plant, one of 11 nuclear reactors in the state. They keep a wary eye on the behemoth.
On Tuesday, lightning tripped the main power transformer, triggering an automatic reactor shutdown.
The main transformer connects the power from the plant generator to the electric grid, and the transformer trip led to a disturbance on the electric grid.
All plant safety systems responded normally during the shutdown, although several components did not perform as expected, the Commission said.
But a further problem occurred on Wednesday, when the level of water cooling the reactor core unexpectedly dropped about two feet. After the drop, the level of reactor coolant remained at 14 feet above the top of the reactor," the NRC said, and "was sufficient to cool the reactor core effectively and not pose a risk to public health and safety. It was then promptly restored to its normal level."
The NRC sent a special inspection team to the plant "to better understand the cause of the reactor shutdown and the equipment malfunctions and to ensure that problems associated with the incident are addressed by the plant operators," the agency said. The inspection team includes two inspectors from the Region III office in Lisle, and the resident inspector assigned to the Clinton plant.
"While safety was never in question in these incidents, we want to learn as much as possible to ensure that the issues are fully understood," said NRC Regional Administator James Caldwell. "If there are lessons to be learned from this examination we want to share them across the spectrum of reactor operators."
The report of the inspection will be available to the public about 30 days after the close of the special inspection.
In May 2003, Exelon applied to the NRC for an Early Site Permit to build a second reactor at Clinton. The move is opposed by some central Illinois citizens who live nearby, members of an activist organization called No New Nukes.
They expressed to the NRC how concerned they are about nuclear waste storage, transport, and disposal issues, soil, groundwater, and air quality issues.
The group worries about the safety of the new reactor's design. They wrote to the NRC's New Reactor Licensing Project Office on May 20, 2003, "members of No New Nukes are also raising serious questions here about the NRC's design of an Early Site Approval process that does not require Exelon to report what kind of a nuclear reactor it plans to build."
And if another reactor is built, No New Nukes worries, two reactors will be releasing cooling water into Clinton Lake further raising the temperature of that body of water.
DeWitt County and the town of Clinton rely on the business brought into the area by the recreational opportunities at Clinton Lake, so they are asking the NRC to safeguard the temperature of the lake water and ensure that fish stock in Clinton Lake remain healthy.
The Clinton residents wonder how they might be compensated if there is a security breach at the nuclear plant, or at a future plant, that requires Clinton Lake to be closed.
And last but not least, the anti-nuclear organization said in a statement, "Each reactor has the potential to have a catastrophic accident severe enough to destroy for thousands of years all land within 250 miles of the reactor. Industry observers admit that a core meltdown accident has a 50 percent probability of occurring in any decade."
The members of No New Nukes say the U.S. can more cheaply meet energy needs "by promoting energy efficiency and renewable energy sources than by building nuclear reactors."
-------- new mexico
Classified E-Mail Left Nuclear Lab
Mon Jul 19, 2004
By Ralph Vartabedian,
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=2026&ncid=2026&e=3&u=/latimests/20040719/ts_latimes/classifiedemailleftnuclearlab
Los Alamos National Laboratory officials have discovered in recent weeks that secret information at the nuclear weapons facility was repeatedly transmitted over an unclassified e-mail system.
Officials at the New Mexico lab confirmed Sunday that the incidents were reported to Energy Department headquarters in Washington, and said that they were taking measures to improve security and "prevent significant risks to national security."
The breakdown marks yet another case of lax internal security at the lab, which is run by the University of California. In one other instance, at least two computer disks containing sensitive weapons information were discovered missing July 7 from the facility.
Top Energy Department officials arrived at the lab Sunday to begin an investigation of the problems, which had prompted an indefinite suspension Friday of all lab activities. Among other items, the officials are planning to examine a report that 19 electronic storage devices with classified data are also missing, according to a lab memo dated Thursday.
Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham (news - web sites) asserted last week that lab employees were engaged in "widespread disregard of security procedures." The unusually tough language reflects Abraham's inability to stop scandals at the remote facility.
The latest security crisis comes after more than a decade of turmoil at the lab and general management failures that have also included financial fraud, violations of nuclear safety and the illegal firing of employees who blew the whistle on potential problems.
The improper use of e-mail "goes to the heart of why we are suspending activities here," said James Fallin, director of public affairs at the lab. "It is a lack of attention to detail. It is exactly why lab director [Pete] Nanos has said we are going to stop everything."
Fallin said he could not discuss specifics about the e-mails, particularly their content.
"Without discussing specifics, all matters or incidents associated with unclassified e-mails and classified information have been properly reported to NNSA [the National Nuclear Security Administration] and have been properly mitigated to prevent significant risks to national security," Fallin said.
Because U.S. defense facilities are subject to almost daily cyber security attacks, the government presumes that hackers can access information that is not carefully guarded.
The lab has different e-mail systems that are used based on the sensitivity of the information being transmitted.
In the case of the most highly classified weapons information, scientists use a "red" system that is physically disconnected from outside networks, including the Internet. Less sensitive information is routed to a "yellow" system, and the least sensitive information uses a "green" system that is connected to the outside networks.
The new problem involving e-mail was disclosed by the Project on Government Oversight, a public policy organization based in Washington that has been investigating security problems at nuclear facilities for several years. The group said it had obtained information that 17 classified e-mails were sent over the Internet, although exactly what was in those e-mails is not known.
"The worst thing I could think of is that we have a problem with one of our weapons systems," said Peter Stockton, an investigator for the group who previously worked on laboratory security for the Energy Department during the Clinton administration.
Speculation has grown that the flurry of security breakdowns may involve a problem with U.S. warheads, although Los Alamos officials strongly disputed recent allegations by a former scientist at the lab who said there were defects in one bomb design.
"The lab is absolutely certain about the reliability of the warheads," Fallin said.
Concern over lax security at Los Alamos was raised most recently by the disclosure by the lab's director this month that two disks containing classified nuclear weapons information were lost. The loss of the disks was discovered during preparations for an experiment in the weapons physics division.
The incident recalls the case of Wen Ho Lee (news - web sites), a Los Alamos weapons scientist who created a personal library of secret nuclear weapons information at his home.
An investigation that began in 1996 disclosed that Lee had classified tapes describing miniature nuclear warheads. Although Lee was indicted on 59 felony counts, the case unraveled and he ultimately pleaded guilty to a single count of mishandling classified data.
After the Lee case, Los Alamos was again embarrassed when it lost two disk drives that were later discovered behind an office copying machine.
Nanos has charged that current security breaches reflect the careless attitudes of what he described as "cowboys" who refuse to follow procedures.
Whether those individuals are renegades trying to embarrass Nanos or careless geniuses who can't keep their e-mail straight is one of the questions that officials want to investigate.
Among the items high on the lab's agenda this week are the 19 other missing storage devices. The July 15 memo indicated that the devices, classified removable electronic media, or CREM, were among 34 devices in a package, according to the memo. Officials were planning to conduct a "wall-to-wall" search.
In May, Abraham unveiled a major effort to improve security involving electronic data at weapons labs, including Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the other U.S. design center for nuclear weapons.
The effort includes eliminating all removable computer storage media, including tape and disk drives, that contain highly sensitive weapons information. Such a step has been advocated by outside experts for several years. Abraham's program would also include eliminating all physical keys for doors and locks, replacing them with electronic systems.
"We are all too familiar with reports of poor performance ... of sleeping on the job and repeatedly losing keys," he said. "They are unacceptable and will not be tolerated."
-------- washington
Government Judicial Body Affirms Role of Citizens' Groups in Licensing Hearing of Nuclear Plant
JULY 19, 2004
Public Citizen Newsroom: 202-588-7742
http://www.commondreams.org/news2004/0719-10.htm
WASHINGTON - July 19 - Today's ruling by a federal judicial board - affirming the participatory role of two public interest organizations in the upcoming licensing hearing for a proposed nuclear fuel plant in southeastern New Mexico - is a step in the right direction toward protecting the public interest, co-petitioners Public Citizen and the Nuclear Information and Resource Service (NIRS) said.
The board accepted all but one of the groups' complaints (called "contentions") about the application of Louisiana Energy Services (LES), the multinational company seeking to build a uranium enrichment facility near Eunice, N.M. The plant would process uranium fuel for sale to operators of commercial nuclear power reactors. The groups said that the company didn't adequately address the environmental impacts of the plant, the disposal of the radioactive waste it would produce and other factors. Public Citizen and NIRS represent their members living near the site of the proposed facility.
"We applaud the board's ruling, which recognizes the validity of our complaints as well as our right to participate in this licensing process on behalf of our members in New Mexico," said Wenonah Hauter, director of Public Citizen's Critical Mass Energy and Environment Program, which petitioned jointly with NIRS to intervene in the licensing hearing. "This is an important step to ensure that all parties' concerns are heard before the government considers granting LES a permit for this plant."
The ruling came from a three-judge Atomic Safety and Licensing Board (ASLB) appointed by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), the federal agency responsible for licensing and regulating the domestic nuclear industry. The board will hear, in a courtroom-style proceeding, disputes arising from LES's license application and other relevant documents. The ASLB also admitted contentions from New Mexico's attorney general and the state's Environment Department.
"We are elated that the people will get a voice in this hearing," said Michael Mariotte, executive director of NIRS. "The substance of our contentions is strong; we believe it will be very difficult for LES to make a case before an impartial board that it should be allowed to operate this unnecessary nuclear facility."
The board confirmed that the citizens' groups will be able to formally participate in the licensing hearing by presenting their disputes regarding such issues as the need for the proposed plant, its possible impact on local water resources, LES's uranium waste storage and disposal plan, and the company's financial plan for dealing with the hazardous radioactive material produced by the facility during and after its period of operation.
The ASLB accepted the following contentions:
LES's application does not contain a complete or adequate assessment of the potential environmental impacts of the proposed project on ground and surface water, contrary to regulatory requirements.
The application does not contain a complete or adequate assessment of the potential environmental impacts of the proposed facility upon local water supplies, contrary to regulatory requirements. Further, to introduce a new industrial facility with significant water needs in an area with a projected water shortage runs counter to the federal responsibility to act "as a trustee of the environment for succeeding generations," according to the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).
LES does not have a sound, reliable or plausible strategy for disposal of the large amounts of radioactive and hazardous depleted uranium hexafluoride (DUF6) waste that the plant would produce. Moreover, LES's application seriously underestimates the costs and the feasibility of managing and disposing of the DUF6. The application fails to discuss the impacts of construction and operation of facilities that will be required to manage the waste that would be produced by the plant.
LES has presented insufficient estimates of the costs of decommissioning the plant at the end of its useful life.
LES's application does not adequately describe or weigh the environmental, social and economic impacts and costs of operating the facility, and LES inadequately considers the need for the facility.
The application does not contain a complete or adequate assessment of the potential environmental impacts of accidents involving natural gas transmission pipelines. The NRC's licensing process is a formal legal procedure administered by the ASLB. Contentions must involve genuine disputes over factual issues - instances where LES might be in violation of federal regulations or where LES's license application is incomplete or misleading. Contentions must be backed up by affidavits and testimony from expert witnesses - people who are acknowledged leaders in their fields.
This is LES's third attempt to secure a site for its proposed nuclear plant. The company withdrew its application to build a similar plant in Louisiana after nearly a decade of intense citizen opposition and unfavorable rulings by an ASLB. LES made another attempt to locate the plant in Tennessee, but was again expelled by local opponents before it had a chance to submit an application to the NRC. Citizens were concerned about the company's misleading statements and lack of a clear plan for the disposal of its waste.
To read today's ruling, click here.
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Washington State Will Sue to Halt Nuclear Shipments to Hanford
July 19, 2004
OLYMPIA, Washington, (ENS)
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/jul2004/2004-07-19-09.asp#anchor2
The state of Washington intends to sue the Department of Energy (DOE) to halt further shipments of waste to the Hanford Nuclear Reservation because they claim the federal agency has not fully complied with federal environmental laws.
This week, attorneys for the state will ask a federal judge for permission to expand the state's original lawsuit, Washington v. Abraham, to include low-level and mixed low-level radioactive waste. The original lawsuit, filed in 2003, involves only shipments of transuranic waste.
Governor Gary Locke and Attorney General Christine Gregoire said Friday that the state intends to challenge the adequacy of the DOE's environmental analysis, including the recently released Hanford Solid Waste Environmental Impact Statement (EIS).
The state believes the EIS does not comply with the requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).
"Even if the EIS does comply with NEPA, the federal government should be barred from importing to Hanford until it is compliant with all cleanup law," Locke said.
The state will argue that the Energy Department has never provided a full accounting of the basis for its selection of Hanford as the disposal site for huge amounts of waste from around the country, and has done an inadequate analysis of the environmental risk posed by the massive groundwater contamination at Hanford.
"DOE has failed to prove that shipping more waste to Hanford won't make the nation's most contaminated site even worse," Gregoire said. "We expect DOE to fully comply with environmental safeguards and honor their Tri-Party clean-up commitments before any more waste is added to an already troubled situation."
The Tri-Party Agreement is a comprehensive cleanup and compliance agreement signed in 1989 by the Energy Department, the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency, and the State of Washington Department of Ecology.
It governs cleanup on the 586 square mile Hanford Site is located along the Columbia River in southeastern Washington State. A plutonium production complex with nine nuclear reactors and associated processing facilities, Hanford played a pivotal role in the nation's defense for more than 40 years, beginning in the 1940s. Today, Hanford is engaged in the world's largest environmental cleanup project.
At the Hanford Site are more than 50 million gallons of high-level liquid waste in 177 underground storage tanks, 2,300 tons of spent nuclear fuel, 12 tons of plutonium in various forms, about 25 million cubic feet of buried or stored solid waste, and about 270 billion gallons of groundwater contaminated above drinking water standards, spread out over about 80 square miles, more than 1,700 waste sites, and about 500 contaminated facilities.
In the lawsuit, the state will contest DOE's decision that some ground water at Hanford is "irreversibly and irretrievably committed."
"The federal government cannot be allowed to walk away from cleaning up the ground water at Hanford," Gregoire said.
The state will seek an injunction halting further waste shipments of low-level and mixed low-level waste until DOE adequately addresses the environmental effects of shipping and storing more radioactive waste at Hanford.
Under DOE's plan, 62,000 cubic meters of off-site radioactive waste, 20,000 cubic meters of off-site mixed low-level waste, and 15,500 cubic meters of transuranic waste would be shipped to Hanford.
But the EIS that Energy Department's plan is based on allows for as much as 219,663 cubic meters of low-level waste and 140,435 cubic meters of mixed low-level waste to be brought to Hanford.
To stabilize the high level nuclear waste that is already at Hanford, vitrification facilities are being constructed that will encapsulate it in glass. The Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant (WTP) will be the world's largest radiochemical treatment facility. Scheduled for full operation in 2011, the WTP design work is currently 66 percent complete, while construction is 27 percent complete.
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
3 From U.S. in Afghan Court, Accused of Running a Jail
July 19, 2004
By CARLOTTA GALL
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/19/international/asia/19afgh.html?pagewanted=all
KABUL, Afghanistan, July 18 - The three Americans who were arrested by the Afghan police on July 5 on suspicion of operating an illegal jail in Kabul appeared in court here on Sunday and, at a preliminary hearing, were also charged with robbing, beating and torturing their detainees.
The three men, wearing plain clothes and United States Army combat boots, said they were Jack Idema, a former member of the American special forces; Edward Caraballo, a journalist; and Brent Bennett, who gave no profession. Mr. Idema said he intended to call high-level Afghan officials, generals, corps commanders and ambassadors in his defense and said he had been working with Afghan and American forces, contentions that Afghan and American officials have denied.
"We were working directly with them and for them,'' Mr. Idema said, referring to the officials he said he wanted to call as witnesses.
Although the hearing was just a preliminary proceeding to explain the charges to the defendants, including four Afghans arrested with the three Americans, Mr. Idema spoke for two hours.
Since his arrival several months ago, he contended, he had captured a high-level Taliban security official and handed him over to American forces at Bagram Air Base. He also said he had uncovered a plot by supporters of Al Qaeda, the Taliban and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a warlord who is being sought on criminal charges, to assassinate the Afghan education minister, Yunus Qanooni, and the defense minister, Marshal Muhammad Qasim Fahim, and to blow up fuel tankers in the American and NATO military headquarters. The plots, he said, were intended to precipitate civil war in Afghanistan.
He said that he worked for a secret counterterrorist unit directly responsible to the Pentagon and that the United States Embassy would not know of his activities. He said he fought beside anti-Taliban forces in 2001 and returned to Afghanistan this year.
He denied mistreating prisoners and said he only held suspects in his house until he could deliver them to American or Afghan forces.
Mr. Caraballo, wearing a black T-shirt, said he had come to follow Mr. Idema's unit around, with the aim of writing a journalistic account. Mr. Bennett, who was younger and wore an American military khaki T-shirt, looked anxious and did not speak to the court. Nor did the Afghan defendants.
Mr. Idema, who answered questions from the judge and prosecutor for the whole group, said the four Afghans arrested with him included two interpreters, a housecleaner and gardener and a man who had come to him for a job as a guard.
Mr. Idema and the others were arrested in a raid on a private house in a central district of Kabul after the American military issued a media advisory that a man calling himself Jonathan K. Idema was suspected of representing himself as an American government and/or military official. "Idema does not represent the American government, and we do not employ him," the notice said.
Mr. Idema said in an aside that his real name was Jack, and that Jonathan was his father's name.
American officials have said that Mr. Idema and his group were posing as a United States Special Forces counterterrorist unit to wage their own war against terror, or to win favor in American government or military circles by catching terrorism suspects.
The police found eight Afghans being held prisoner in Mr. Idema's house. The prisoners had been there for about 12 days, the police said.
In front of three judges and three prosecutors, sitting on sofas in the small room, Judge Abdul Baset Bakhtiari asked the Americans if they wanted to defend themselves and how long they would need to prepare their defense. He handed out a list of the charges, saying the Americans would have time to translate it to English and read it. The trial was set for Wednesday.
Mr. Idema said Mr. Qanooni, and his brother, Haji Ibrahim, who is Mr. Qanooni's chief of security, were among his possible witnesses. Mr. Idema said that he and his unit had uncovered a Taliban plot to assassinate Mr. Qanooni, and that Mr. Ibrahim had been present when they carried out a raid and arrested an important suspect.
Mr. Qanooni declined to comment on Mr. Idema or any assassination plot, and said he followed the government's view of the case. Mr. Ibrahim, speaking through an aide, denied that he was present at the raid or any arrests. "His words are nothing but air," he said of Mr. Idema.
Jawed Ludin, a spokesman for the president, said that the government's preliminary investigation had shown that the three Americans were acting outside the law. "For example they imprisoned some people, which is against the law, and also our investigation has shown that these men had no connection with officials inside or outside of Afghanistan," he said.
"We are forging a government here, and only the highest government authority is entitled to solve ministers' problems or to decide what to do," Judge Bakhtiari told Mr. Idema. "Afghanistan is not a forest that any animal can behave how it wants."
Violence continued in Afghanistan on Sunday. A 45-year-old woman was killed in a rocket attack on the east side of Kabul, near the United States Embassy compound. Neighbors said the woman, who was hit by shrapnel while in her house, died en route to the hospital.
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OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
When Elections Threaten Democracy
July 19, 2004
By ANSAR RAHEL
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/19/opinion/19RAHE.html
KABUL, Afghanistan - A caller on the BBC radio service bragged about how he walked up to an election registration center here and, without showing any identification, received a voter card. He claimed to have immediately shuttled to another registration site where he was swiftly awarded another card, again without question. A local newspaper article told of people selling their voter registration cards - not card - to political parties for $150 a piece. When I visit one of these sites, an old man shoves me aside and asks me where the free food is. After a confusing exchange, I decipher the miscommunication: he believes his voter registration card is a coupon for free wheat. "Voting," he asks, visibly irritated. "For what? What's an election?"
Around the corner, a group of local lawyers and judges listens to international "experts" who have hastily called a meeting at the Ministry of Justice to emphasize that they will have to translate from the English into Dari and Pashto, edit, submit for compliance with Islamic law, submit for compliance with Afghan laws, provide policy feedback and then get passed - through executive decree by President Hamid Karzai - more than 20 new laws before the presidential elections in October.
These experts, earnestly wanting to help, are the first to concede that "political pressures" have handcuffed them into meeting this deadline for passing minor and insignificant new laws like the commercial code (which includes regulations on corporations, arbitration, antitrust, contracts, partnerships and the like), bar association laws, International Criminal Court implementation and court organization rules. Looking dumbfounded, a judge whispers, "Can we at least see a translated copy of the laws first?"
Around another corner, the Afghan Independent Reform Commission is busy planning for the arrival of Afghanistan's new Parliament, for which elections have now been postponed until next spring. Part of their task: hire, train, educate and lay the entire civil service foundation for Parliament. This despite the complete absence of supporting regulations for the elections law, which will presumably give in detail the provincial- and district-level voting rules. These regulations have yet to be drafted, much less passed.
Moreover, the territorial boundaries for the district-level elections have yet to be ascertained. Having open hearings in order to avoid gerrymandering is a mere afterthought at this point. And the few months postponement in the elections won't be much help - measuring voting boundaries during winter is virtually impossible, as most of the country becomes inaccessible. Thus, the delay only increases already heightened suspicions against unchecked presidential powers.
One street over, a newly formed political party registers voters. "So," asks one member, "is it or is it not against the new Constitution to force potential voters into submitting photo identification when signing their names in order to register a political party?" (The Constitution states that elections will be secret; thus the photo requirement for registering presidential candidates has become a disputed legal issue, to the point that the Afghan government has decided to review the entire elections law.) I, unfortunately, cannot provide an apposite legal precedent, as there is none. More offending to the principles of law, I can't even point to any public discussion on the issue because the Constitution is so new that no one's had the time to even start debating its most important provisions.
Legal precedent aside, the political party law and the new Constitution do delineate, appropriately in my view, certain prohibitions on political parties. For example, they can not be "affiliated with military organizations" or "receive funds from foreign sources." But the Office of Political Party Registration has absolutely no legal guidelines, or objective and definitive criteria, by which to evaluate what constitutes military affiliation or foreign financing. Only a few months remain before the presidential elections, and no one really knows if any party is violating the Constitution.
Everywhere in Afghanistan, democratic principles that need to incubate are being wholly ignored or bypassed. Thus while most of the debate on whether to hold elections "on time" has centered on security concerns, there are more compelling reasons to move slowly: the lack of prerequisite laws, a public that is completely uninformed about the fundamental nature and responsibilities of democracy, the absence of civic education, improper monitoring and registration techniques, an utter lack of democratic processes, and the fact that the government is ill equipped to hold elections. Most Afghans don't even know what democracy means.
Elections are a process that builds credibility and provides legitimacy to a government. It is utterly unrealistic to expect Afghanistan to build the necessary democratic pillars in a few months time when it took modern democracies decades to do so. Certainly, elections should not wait until the circumstances are perfect, but they should be delayed at least until the country develops a minimal capacity to handle them. The international community should step up its aid over the coming few years to help promote this undertaking; Afghanistan's nation-building and democratic-development institutions have very small staffs, but the people are very willing to work.
Imposing impractical deadlines on Afghans, particularly as they may be seen as favoring a particular candidate, imperils the democratic development that promotes good citizenship in an organized society. Elections must be delayed until the people can vote with some understanding of and experience with their new laws and processes and principles that, when understood, compel them to vote in the first place.
Ansar Rahel, a lawyer, returned to his native Afghanistan from the United States in 2002.
-------- business
Lockheed Wins NASA Contract
$22 Million Order Covers Agency's Desktop Services
By Roseanne Gerin
The Washington Post
Monday, July 19, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A60555-2004Jul18.html
Lockheed Martin Corp. of Bethesda won a three-year, $22 million order to manage desktop services for NASA headquarters in Washington.
The NASA order is part of the agency's Outsourced Desktop Initiative (ODIN) contract, a nine-year contract that is to expire in June 2007. It would generate more than $1 billion for Lockheed Martin over the course of the contract's duration and makes up 10 percent of the company's information technology business, said Dan Norton, a Lockheed vice president who is in charge of its NASA and Jet Propulsion Laboratory business.
The defense giant's IT division in Seabrook will provide desktop computers, fax machines and printers as well as related services such as installing and maintaining the personal computers and updating software and applications as needed. The company also will manage the networks, servers and e-mail.
The space agency's headquarters also will be able to order other services and commercial products such as software, hardware, additional memory and dedicated support services through catalog sales at additional charges.
A number of other federal agencies also are eligible to purchase and manage their IT assets through NASA's ODIN contract.
The ODIN contract "is the foundation of our entire enterprise solutions business," Norton said. "As other federal government clients come out with procurement requirements, we can repeat this contract model to give them world-class service."
Lockheed Martin was not an original holder of the contract but inherited the ODIN work through its acquisitions of the federal government business of Affiliated Computer Services Inc. of Dallas in November 2003 and OAO Corp. of Greenbelt in December 2001.
But Lockheed Martin's IT division won the $22 million delivery order for NASA's Washington headquarters on its own. With this additional order, the company now provides ODIN contract services throughout the space agency.
The other companies that hold ODIN contracts and compete for desktop services are Computer Sciences Corp. of El Segundo, Calif., DigitalNet Holdings Inc. of Herndon, Northrop Grumman Information Technology of Herndon and Science Applications International Corp. of San Diego.
Lockheed Martin also provides similar services for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a NASA aerospace research facility managed by the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif., under a 10-year desktop and network services contract.
Lockheed Martin will continue its ODIN contract work for the next three years at four NASA science and research centers: Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif.; Dryden Flight Research Center in Edwards, Calif.; Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, and Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va.
In addition to desktop services, Lockheed Martin holds network, communications and infrastructure support contracts for other NASA facilities, including Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Johnson Space Center in Houston; Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral; Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.; and Stennis Space Center in Mississippi.
Lockheed Martin's IT division employs 11,000 of the parent company's 130,000 workers worldwide. The parent company had $31.8 billion of revenue in its fiscal year ended March 31.
Roseanne Gerin is a staff writer with Washington Technology. For more details on contracts like these, go to www.washingtontechnology.com.
-------- chemical weapons
MI official: Iran may provide Hezbollah with chemical weapons
Haaretz Correspondents, and The Associated Press
By Gideon Alon and Uri Ash,
July 19, 2004
http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/spages/453411.html
Israel must take into consideration the possibility that Iran might provide chemical weapons to Hezbollah, Military Intelligence research chief Brigadier-General Yossi Kuperwasser said Monday. "The possibility certainly exists," Kuperwasser said in response to a question National Union MK Uri Ariel posed in a Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee meeting. "This must be taken into consideration."
Kuperwasser also said Syria and Iran support terror organizations and encourage them to carry out terror attacks. He said Syria, Iran and Hezbollah even hand out "bonuses" to people who carry out attacks.
Earlier Monday, Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz said he anticipates being able to cut down on the amount of Israel Defense Forces assigned to patrol and guard areas near the fence, but that the IDF has not yet been able to do so.
Mofaz also said he supports making the police and Border Police responsible for evacuating settlements in the Gaza Strip and West Bank, saying IDF soldiers would supervise the evacuation.
Hezbollah accuses Israel of killing official in Beirut The IDF raised its alert level along the northern border with Lebanon on Monday after Hezbollah blamed Israel for assassinating an official in the militant group earlier in the day.
The accusation came despite a statement by an underground group of extremist Sunni Muslims in which they claimed responsibility for the assassination of Ghaleb Awali, 40.
Awali was killed Monday when a car bomb exploded in the southern Beirut suburb of Harat Hreik, a Hezbollah spokesman said.
"We have executed one of the symbols of treachery, the Shiite Jaleb Awali," said the statement by Jund al-Sham (Soldiers of Damascus).
However, the head of the Hezbollah press office, Sheikh Hassan Izzeddin, blamed the Mossad intelligence service for the killing.
The IDF Northern Command said Hezbollah could take advantage of the assassination and use it as a pretext to harm Israel, which the group has been trying to do for some time.
Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah threatened "to cut off the hands of whoever killed" Awali, who belonged to a group that has supported the Palestinians.
"He is a saint of Jerusalem, of the Al-Aqsa Mosque, in the struggle against the Zionist project," Nasrallah said at Awali's funeral.
Al-Manar TV, affiliated with Hezbollah, showed charred remains of a car and said it blew up when "one of the strugglers in the resistance" started the engine to leave his home.
Witnesses said the wreckage of a Mercedes car lay in the road, its glass shattered. Blood stained the road beside it.
A Lebanese security official said the blast went off at 9:05 A.M. local time in the predominantly Shi'ite Muslim neighborhood of Harat Hreik, a Hezbollah stronghold.
Hezbollah said in a statement that Awali died instantly, though a Lebanese security official said he was rushed to a nearby Hezbollah-run hospital where he died soon after.
-------- europe
Military skills key to European influence in U.S.
July 18, 2004
By Louis R. Golino
SPECIAL TO THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20040717-111104-4142r.htm
A new report from a British think tank says that to enhance their influence in Washington and the world, European governments need to improve their military capabilities and develop their own distinctive approach to warfare.
That approach should build on core European military strengths related to postwar stabilization after a military conflict. These approaches include nation-building, peacekeeping and counter-insurgency warfare.
The United States also has much to learn from its European allies about these approaches, the report said, especially as both Europe and the United States work to stabilize, rebuild and establish democratic regimes in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Moreover, the report suggests that Britain and France, Europe's leading military powers, lead by example in developing a European way of war and a common European approach to relations with the United States, based on partnership and autonomy.
The report highlights the need for Europeans to retain the ability to work alongside U.S. military forces, which are becoming increasingly sophisticated technologically, because Europeans are not expected to undertake major military operations at the higher end of the conflict spectrum without the United States.
The report further suggests that Europe develop military forces that complement those of the United States and reflect the changing nature of warfare. Toward that end, it says Europeans need better combat skills and equipment.
It also recommends that the United States enhance capabilities related to the post-conflict period, or winning the peace, specifically by increasing the number of troops that are trained for peacekeeping and nation-building. European forces have more extensive experience than American forces in those tasks as a result of European colonialism and their recent nation-building efforts in the Balkans and elsewhere.
EU military operations
Last year, the European Union mounted its first military operations by working with NATO to enforce the peace in Macedonia, leading police missions in Bosnia and Macedonia, and undertaking its first independent, long-range military deployment, which was in the Congo.
At the end of this year, the EU will take over command of a large peacekeeping mission in Bosnia from NATO through an arrangement known as Berlin Plus, under which the EU can use NATO military assets. NATO, however, will retain a presence in this region after the handover.
NATO leaders agreed at a summit in Istanbul last month to train Iraqi security forces and to expand the alliance's peacekeeping force in Afghanistan.
EU leaders agreed on a constitutional treaty last month that aims, among other goals, to enhance the bloc's global profile by creating an EU president and foreign minister. They also agreed to create an EU diplomatic corps and an EU defense agency that will work to strengthen European military capabilities with better procurement decisions and increased resources for military research and development.
Moreover, EU leaders appointed Portuguese Prime Minister Jose Manuel Barroso as the next president of the European Commission and reappointed Javier Solana as EU foreign policy chief. Mr. Solana is expected to become the first foreign minister of the EU.
"A European Way of War," published by the Center for European Reform (CER), a London-based research institute that focuses on European integration, was prepared by six prominent defense analysts from both sides of the Atlantic. They include Michael O'Hanlon, an American defense expert at the Brookings Institution, and five Europeans. The Europeans include Charles Grant, director of the CER; Steven Everts, director of the CER's transatlantic program; and Daniel Keohane, a fellow at the CER.
The other European authors are Lawrence Freedman, one of Britain's best-known authorities on defense policy and a professor of war studies at King's College of Oxford University, and Francois Heisbourg, a prominent French defense expert who is director of the Paris-based Foundation for Strategic Research and chairman of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London.
America as benchmark
These authors explain that U.S. military forces are widely viewed as the inevitable benchmark for assessing Europe's progress in enhancing its military power.
For example, military experts often note that Europeans collectively spend about two-thirds as much as the United States on defense but have only about one-tenth of the U.S. capacity for force projection and only half of the latter forces can be deployed rapidly.
Such comparisons unfairly slight European military contributions, these experts said, because Europe has different strategic priorities from the United States and does not need, nor could it afford, to emulate the overwhelming U.S. military prowess.
The authors said that vast increases in defense spending, which in any case would be extremely unpopular among European citizens, are not necessary to enhance European military capabilities because the required capabilities can be developed by using existing funds more efficiently and by better allocating current resources instead of directing the bulk of them toward maintaining conscript armies.
Defense experts say that in addition to certain key capabilities that are lacking, such as improved communications and logistics, Europe needs additional professional military forces. Mr. Grant added that in some issues, such as air-to-ground cruise missiles and air-to-air missiles, European equipment is superior to that of the United States.
The British model
The British military provides a more suitable model for continental European militaries than does the U.S. military, said Mr. Freedman of Oxford. The British model, he said, is based primarily on the importance of separating insurgents from local populations and working closely with the locals.
Mr. Freedman called U.S. military doctrine "dysfunctional" because of the reluctance of U.S. military commanders to engage in the unconventional warfare associated with counterinsurgency and peace enforcement operations. U.S. concern about force protection, he said, "often leads to overreaction by [American] soldiers that pushes insurgents and locals together."
In recent months, British military commanders in Iraq reportedly have said that their American counterparts have used overly aggressive tactics against insurgents in Iraq, especially in Fallujah, which they say has heightened Iraqi concerns about the U.S. military presence.
Mr. Freedman also suggested that a new war sequence has emerged as a result of Iraq and other recent conflicts, in which actual war-fighting ends relatively quickly because no enemy can match U.S. military power, but the post-conflict period can become almost indefinite.
As a result, he added: "The key question is not whether the Europeans can adapt to American military doctrine but whether the Americans can adapt to the European way of war."
Division of labor
According to the conventional wisdom among defense experts, Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution explained, there is a division of labor in trans-Atlantic military operations in which the U.S. "cooks dinner" while Europeans "do the dishes."
That analogy is a reference to how the United States dominates military campaigns because of its overwhelming military forces, but Europeans are often left to carry the largest peacekeeping burden because of their strengths in that task. As Mr. O'Hanlon said, "European soldiers are arguably better at peacekeeping than U.S. forces."
He rejected the notion that there is or should be a neat trans-Atlantic military division of labor, however, explaining that each side of the Atlantic needs both combat and peace enforcement capabilities.
Mr. O'Hanlon also said the distinction between the combat and post-combat phases of military conflict is eroding because post-conflict stabilization can require high-intensity combat operations, as happened recently in Iraq. As he said: "Iraq has demonstrated that the U.S. needs to be good - and indeed get better - at post-conflict stabilization.
He also suggested that European militaries use Britain as a model by developing "somewhat smaller professional forces that are well-provisioned logistically, even on a remote battlefield."
U.S. concerns
Ever since the EU began the drive to develop its own military forces in 1999, U.S. officials and commentators have raised two main concerns: that an independent European military might become a competitor to NATO and that the Europeans would duplicate what was done through NATO to enhance their military capabilities.
As Mr. Everts and Mr. Keohane explained in "A European Way of War," however, such concerns are largely misplaced: "The reality is the EU will not have its own army for decades to come - if ever, nor will NATO's status as Europe's pre-eminent defense organization change any time soon.
"For most European defense ministries," they wrote, "NATO will continue to be the principal multinational military organization. That is not only because NATO is a military organization - which the EU is not - but also because of NATO's large and experienced military headquarters."
They also pointed out that NATO, rather than the EU, is currently providing the main impetus for reform of European military forces - primarily through the NATO Response Force and the NATO command in Norfolk - that promote trans-Atlantic military transformation.
European countries are developing military forces designed to enable them to keep up with the U.S. "revolution in military affairs," which uses digital technology to improve the battlefield assessments of military commanders.
Moreover, EU officials frequently explain that European military forces are available for both NATO and EU missions and are intended for use when the United States decides not to participate. Most European countries belong to both organizations.
EU vs. NATO
In the past couple of decades, EU integration was dominated by efforts to create the euro and establish a single market, said Charles Grant, the CER director. "In the coming decades, it will be cooperation on justice and home affairs, and also on foreign and defense policy, that drives European integration."
"Justice and home affairs" refers to police and judicial cooperation and efforts to protect the EU's homeland security. EU countries have stepped up their efforts in those tasks since the March 11 terrorist attacks in Madrid, such as by appointing a terrorism policy czar, although they still have a long way to go to develop an effective antiterrorism strategy, according to the CER report.
Mr. Grant also discussed the differences between the EU and NATO, noting that, unlike NATO and other international organizations, the EU can draw on a unique combination of hard and soft power, or on "the military and civilian instruments for managing crises."
As he explained, the lesson of recent interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq is that hard power is sufficient to overthrow a regime, but stabilizing and rebuilding a country requires the use of soft power. Moreover, the main strengths of the EU, which until recently has been a civilian power, lie in the domain of soft power.
Mr. Grant also said that, although Europeans are criticized for being overly bureaucratic and for emphasizing institutions over capabilities, the NATO bureaucracy is substantially larger than the nascent EU military bureaucracy. NATO has a headquarters staff in Brussels of almost 20,000, but the embryonic EU defense agency has fewer than 300 staff.
Relations with Washington
The CER report concludes that the key issue in the European defense policy debate is what relationship to pursue with Washington. As Mr. Freedman of Oxford explained, Europe has two main approaches to relations with the U.S. - the French and British perspectives:
France believes that Europe should enhance its ability to act independently in the military realm to build Europe as a counterweight to the United States. Britain, in contrast, said Mr. Freedman, believes that by enhancing its military capabilities and pursuing a partnership with the United States, Europe stands a better chance of Washington's taking its views into account.
As Mr. Grant has argued elsewhere, the French are too quick to oppose the United States, but the British tend to support the United States reflexively. Moreover, as the report's authors noted, these internal European divisions substantially reduced European influence on recent world events.
Mr. Grant suggested that Europe, therefore, needs to reconcile the French and British approaches to the United States in order to develop coherent and unified foreign and defense policies. Toward that end, he favors "a stronger Europe that is usually supportive of U.S. policies but a Europe which can act autonomously, and which, on matters of vital importance, is capable of opposing the U.S."
Both the new president of the European Commission, Mr. Barroso of Portugal, and the EU foreign policy chief, Mr. Solana of Spain, are considered pro-American leaders.
--------
Europe Fears Islamic Converts May Give Cover for Extremism
July 19, 2004
By CRAIG S. SMITH
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/19/international/europe/19CONV.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
ST.-PIERRE-EN-FAUCIGNY, France - The Courtailler brothers grew up in this medieval Alpine town, children of a butcher who went broke, who divorced his wife and moved to a job in a meatpacking plant far away. Two of the three brothers, David and Jérôme, educated in Catholic schools, foundered in drugs until they found religion: Islam.
Within five years of David's initial conversion at a mosque in the British seaside resort of Brighton in 1996, the brothers embraced many of the leading lights of Europe's Islamic terror network. David, 28, is now in jail, and in late June, Jérôme, 29, turned himself in to the police in the Netherlands, days after he was convicted by a court there of belonging to an international terrorist group.
The Courtaillers are part of a growing group of people who found a home in Islam and then veered into extremism, raising concerns among antiterrorism officials on both sides of the Atlantic that the new recruits could provide foreign-born Islamic militants with invisibility and cover, by escaping the scrutiny often reserved for young men of Arab descent.
A handful of Westerners have already been arrested on terrorism charges. Their experiences, the authorities fear, could foreshadow a deepening problem.
"Converts will be used for striking more and more by jihadist circles," said Jean-Luc Marret, a terrorism expert at the Strategic Research Foundation, in Paris. "They have been used in the past for proselytism, logistics or support, and they are operationally useful now."
Islam is Europe's fastest-growing religion, and many experts say that while there are no reliable statistics, they believe that the number of converts has grown since Sept. 11, 2001, in many ways because of the campaign against terrorism.
Antoine Sfeir, a French scholar who is writing a book on the trend, said a small number of converts, many of them disaffected and often troubled young people, saw the current wave of Islamic terrorism as "a kind of combat against the rich, powerful, by the poor men of the planet."
Only a small fraction of Western Islamic converts sympathize with terrorism, and even fewer become engaged in terrorist activity. A few dozen militant converts have been identified so far. A report by France's domestic intelligence agency, published by Le Figaro, estimated last year that there were 30,000 to 50,000 converts in France.
However small the number of them drawn to terrorism, the police are focusing on this subset as a serious and growing threat.
"The conversion to Islam of fragile individuals undoubtedly leads to the risk of diversion to terrorism," the intelligence agency's report said, adding that radical groups have recruited converts because they could cross borders easily or serve as front men for renting accommodations or providing other logistical support.
A Transnational Trend
The trend is not only happening in Europe.
Jack Roche, a British-born Australian taxi driver, converted to Islam, trained in Afghanistan and returned to Australia, where he was recently sentenced to nine years in prison for trying to blow up the Israeli Embassy in Canberra. While planning the attack and videotaping the embassy, he was questioned by a guard, whom he told that he was interested in the district's architecture.
"Is that what it is?" the guard, clearly believing him, casually replied in a conversation recorded on the video and later presented at Mr. Roche's trial. "I didn't think you were going to bomb the joint or anything."
In the United States, Jose Padilla, held by the government on suspicion of plotting terrorist attacks, converted to Islam in 1992 while in a Florida jail.
Both David and Jérôme Courtailler, the French brothers, moved freely through Europe without attracting the kind of attention focused on Arab men, even after the French authorities were notified when David was spotted leaving Afghanistan.
In an interview, one French anti-terrorism official said many recent converts were women, further complicating the standard profile.
Militant converts come to Islam in several ways, most notably through contact with militant Muslims while serving time in Europe's prisons, where the Islamic population has skyrocketed. Richard C. Reid, the so-called shoe bomber from Britain, converted to Islam in prison. France's prison population is more than 50 percent Muslim.
Another door to Islam is the Tablighi Jamaat, a missionary group that started in India 75 years ago to promote Islam in the face of Hindu domination. It is the world's largest network of Islamic proselytizers.
The Tablighi Jamaat send converts to study in countries like Saudi Arabia or Pakistan, where they often meet militant radicals. Several well-known Western converts are Tablighi Jamaat alumni, including John Walker Lindh, the American caught fighting with the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2002, and Hervé Loiseau, a young French man who froze to death while fleeing the American attack on Tora Bora in Afghanistan in late 2001.
Other people convert because of family influence - particularly in France, where intermarriage between Christians and Muslims is increasingly common - or simple peer pressure in predominantly Muslim neighborhoods.
While there has been a convert presence in Islamic terror since Al Qaeda's first generation emerged from the 1980's war against Soviet troops in Afghanistan, recruitment efforts have been redoubled since the American invasion there, the authorities say. Seasoned Qaeda members have begun recruiting a new generation of militants through European mosques and from among local militant Islamic groups, the police say.
Jérôme Courtailler was among that group, together with the Frenchmen Johann Bonté and Jean-Marc Grandvisir. The three men were arrested in 2001 in connection with a plot to blow up the American Embassy in Paris, a plot begun before the Sept. 11 attacks but scheduled to be carried out after it.
Mr. Bonté converted to Islam while staying with his brother-in-law, Djamel Beghal, an Algerian-born Frenchman and confessed Qaeda member, in Leicester, England, in 1999. Jérôme Courtailler also converted to Islam in Leicester under Mr. Beghal's influence. Mr. Beghal is believed to have been the ringleader of the American Embassy bombing plan, the French authorities say.
The Path to Jihad
The road from convert to jihadist can be remarkably short, terrorism experts say, because someone new to Islam does not have the cultural bearings or religious grounding to resist radical interpretations of Islam, and many come with a romanticized notion of an Islamic conflict with the West.
"The problem is that the less you know about Islam when you come into it, the easier it is for someone to present you with the `forgotten obligation' of jihad," said Steven Simon, a terrorism expert at the Rand Corporation.
David Courtailler went to Brighton in 1996 to break free of his drug habit and found support among conservative Muslims. "For David, Islam ordered his life," said his lawyer, Philibert Lepy.
American investigators said he was soon keeping company with Muslim radicals and stayed for a time at an apartment used by Zacarias Moussaoui, who is now being prosecuted in Alexandria, Va., in connection with the Sept. 11 attacks.
In court testimony, David Courtailler said friends had offered him a trip to Afghanistan to study the Koran. He accepted and was given nearly $2,000 in cash, an Islamabad phone number and a plane ticket to Pakistan. Within days of his arrival he was taken by car over the Khyber Pass to Al Qaeda's notorious Khalden training camp near the Afghan city of Khost.
Mr. Courtailler has testified that he asked for training in bomb making, but that his request was denied because his Arabic was not good enough. His sojourn in Camp Khalden coincided with that of many other Qaeda militants, including Mr. Reid and Mr. Moussaoui, as well as Ahmed Ressam, who was convicted of taking part in a plot in 1999 to bomb Los Angeles International Airport.
When Mr. Courtailler returned to Europe in August 1998, an American intelligence service notified the French that he and three other Qaeda-trained men were on their way. Despite that information, Mr. Courtailler was able to pass through borders undetected, European police officials say, almost certainly in part because of his ethnicity.
According to French antiterrorism officials, a man in London named Omar Deghayes, now at the American military's detention center in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, gave Mr. Courtailler phone numbers for militants in Spain and Morocco, including one arrested in connection with the Madrid train bombings in March and another now serving a 19-year sentence for his role in suicide bombings last year in Casablanca.
Mr. Courtailler stayed with that second man in Tangier, Morocco. It was not until he returned to France several months later and was arrested for stealing a pair of shoes in Caen in Normandy that French antiterrorism authorities became aware again of his whereabouts. He was charged with having terrorist associations and released on the French equivalent of bail seven months later.
He soon disappeared, traveling again to Britain, where he spent time in Leicester, where Mr. Beghal lived, investigators said. While he was there, his brother, Jérôme, joined him and converted to Islam.
A Web of Conspirators
Investigators now believe that while in Britain in 2000, David Courtailler provided help to a terrorist cell planning a huge bomb attack. His name was on a fake French driver's license found later along with a large quantity of explosives in a Birmingham apartment.
Jérôme Courtailler moved to Rotterdam, where Dutch intelligence agents intercepted his phone calls with various terrorism suspects, including a Tunisian soccer player named Nizar Trabelsi, who was to be the suicide bomber in the American Embassy plot, according to court documents. Jérôme is also believed to have known Mr. Moussaoui and to have met Mr. Reid when he was in the Netherlands buying the shoes that were eventually turned into bombs.
Jérôme Courtailler was arrested days after the Sept. 11 attacks in connection with the Paris plot. Dozens of fake passports were found in his Dutch apartment, together with videos of Chechnya, the attack on the American Embassy in Kenya and Osama bin Laden, and instructions on how to make a bomb.
Investigators say they believe that he was the source of the fake Belgian passports used by the suicide bombers who killed the Northern Alliance leader Ahmed Shah Massoud in Afghanistan on Sept. 9, 2001.
In 2002, a Dutch judge dismissed the charges against Jérôme Courtailler, who was accused of belonging to an international criminal organization, because the evidence consisted mostly of information from illegally obtained wiretaps. For the next two years he lived near St.-Pierre-en-Faucigny under the watchful eye of France's intelligence services.
The Dutch prosecutor in the case appealed the dismissal, and Jérôme Courtailler was convicted and sentenced to six years in prison. He gave himself up in Rotterdam on June 24.
David Courtailler, meanwhile, was also recently convicted of consorting with terrorists with an intent to carry out violent acts. He is now serving what remains of his four-year sentence, having already served more than a year awaiting trial and having had two years of the sentence suspended. Barring new charges, he will be free in about six months.
-------- iran
U.S. Faces a Crossroads on Iran Policy
By Robin Wright
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, July 19, 2004; Page A09
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A60286-2004Jul18?language=printer
The Bush administration is under mounting pressure to take action to deal with Iran -- and end the drift that has characterized U.S. policy for more than three years.
The final report of the commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, due Thursday, may further intensify the policy debate, as it says Iran let eight of the 19 hijackers transit through Iran from neighboring Afghanistan -- a claim Tehran does not deny. The issue is whether it happened with Iran's compliance or because of porous borders.
Acting CIA Director John E. McLaughlin said yesterday that the United States has known for "some time" about the al Qaeda passage through Iran, although he said there is "no evidence" of a connection between Iran and the Sept. 11 attacks.
In response, Iran's Foreign Ministry said yesterday that preventing illegal passage was difficult because of the long frontier, adding that it has since tried to tighten control. "Even more people may [illegally] cross the border between Mexico and the United States," spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi told reporters in Tehran.
The dispute -- and uncertainty -- over al Qaeda's use of Iran comes as the White House is being pulled in distinctly different directions on Tehran.
Since May, Congress has been moving -- with little notice -- toward a joint resolution calling for punitive action against Iran if it does not fully reveal details of its nuclear arms program. In language similar to the prewar resolution on Iraq, a recent House resolution authorized the use of "all appropriate means" to deter, dissuade and prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weaponry -- terminology often used to approve preemptive military force. Reflecting the growing anxiety on Capitol Hill about Iran, it passed 376 to 3.
In contrast, two of the most prominent foreign policy groups in Washington are calling for the United States to end a quarter-century of hostile relations and begin new diplomatic overtures to Iran, despite disagreements on a vast range of issues. Because the "solidly entrenched" government provides the only "authoritative" interlocutors, Washington should "deal with the current regime rather than wait for it to fall," says a Council on Foreign Relations report released today.
The disparate range of proposals underscores the near void in U.S. policy toward Iran -- in stark contrast to the two other countries in what President Bush calls the "axis of evil." The administration launched a war to oust Saddam Hussein in Iraq and is now engaged in delicate talks over nuclear issues with North Korea. But six months before its first term ends, the administration has still not formally signed off on a strategy for Iran since a review of U.S. policy was begun in 2001, U.S. officials say.
Pressed to define U.S. policy on Iran, one frustrated senior U.S. official cracked, "Oh, do we have one?"
Bush administration policy has generally been piecemeal and reactive to broader or tangential issues, rather than to Iran itself, U.S. officials say. "What we have is a summation of various pieces -- one piece on nuclear weapons, one on human rights, another on terrorism, other pieces on drugs, Iraq and Afghanistan," a senior State Department official said.
White House officials point to a three-paragraph presidential statement two years ago this month as the core policy. It notes local and national elections when voters supported reformers; it then calls on Tehran to "listen to their hopes."
"As Iran's people move towards a future defined by greater freedom, greater tolerance, they will have no better friend than the United States," the statement reads. But it offers no policy specifics or prescriptions. It instead reached out beyond Tehran in hopes that Iranians would be able to change their government or its positions.
Since then, the Bush administration has warned Tehran about meddling in Iraq and lashed out at the Islamic republic for not fulfilling its promise to provide all information to the U.N. watchdog agency on its nuclear energy program, which Washington suspects is being diverted to build a nuclear weapon.
"The Iranians need to feel the pressure from the world that any nuclear weapons program will be uniformly condemned," Bush told newspaper editors in April. "The development of a nuclear weapon in Iran is intolerable."
But in a split reminiscent of the deep prewar divisions over Iraq, the administration has been at odds over how to accomplish its goals -- engagement, containment or confrontation. Once again, the State Department has been willing to explore areas of potential cooperation -- notably narcotics interdiction, Afghanistan and Iraq -- to see whether discussions under international auspices might lead to wider discussions.
In contrast, the Pentagon and Vice President Cheney's office have resisted making overtures, U.S. officials say. After the heady victory in Afghanistan and before Iraq, a few voices urged a toughened stance against Tehran next. Yet in one of many mixed signals, the White House also offered to send Sen. Elizabeth Dole (R-N.C.) and a member of the Bush family to Iran with humanitarian relief after an earthquake destroyed the ancient city of Bam and killed tens of thousands in December. It was rebuffed.
Iran's even deeper political divisions -- a complex spectrum of reformers and hardliners -- have not helped Washington determine the most effective course to adopt. Further complicating U.S. policy, Tehran also appears to be in transition, as hardliners swept parliamentary elections this year and are poised to win the presidency next year.
"It's difficult in that landscape to take policy risks -- or even to develop policy," said the senior State Department official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
In the vacuum, Congress and top officials of former administrations are increasingly weighing in. The region's changing dynamics over the past two years, with new governments in Iraq and Afghanistan, provide the pretext for new cooperation since Washington and Tehran share an interest in fostering stability, some argue. But Iran's suspected nuclear program also spurs deeper fears of Tehran's intentions than at any time since the 1979 Iranian revolution unleashed Islamic extremism, foreign policy experts and congressional officials say.
Increasingly alarmed over Iran's failure to come clean on its arms programs, Congress is becoming tougher. Since House Resolution 398 passed on May 6, a similar Senate resolution calling for punitive action, mainly through broad new U.N. sanctions, is expected to be put to a vote -- and win overwhelming support -- when Congress returns after Labor Day, congressional sources say.
In an even more dramatic move, Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) plans to introduce an Iran liberation act this fall, modeled on the Iraq Liberation Act that mandated government change in Baghdad and provided more than $90 million to the Iraqi opposition. The goals would be the same for Iran, including regime change, congressional officials said.
By contrast, top foreign policy officials from the past six Republican and Democratic administrations are calling for diverse efforts at diplomatic rapprochement. The Council on Foreign Relations report calls for "systematic and pragmatic engagement" with Tehran, saying current U.S. policy and expectations that the government will be ousted are unrealistic.
"The United States should not defer a political dialogue with Iran until deep differences over its nuclear ambitions and involvement in regional conflicts have been resolved. Just as the United States has a constructive relationship with China (and earlier did so with the Soviet Union) while strongly opposing certain aspects of its internal and international policies, Washington should approach Iran with a readiness to explore areas of common interests while continuing to contest objectionable policy," it says.
Although acknowledging that a "grand bargain" covering all issues is also unrealistic now, the report urges Washington to offer a "direct dialogue" on regional stability; broaden cultural and economic links; and press for Iran to hand over al Qaeda detainees in exchange for the United States disbanding the Iraq-based Mujaheddin-e Khalq, the most militant Iran opposition force that is also on the U.S. terrorism list.
The council's bipartisan panel was chaired by Robert M. Gates, CIA director during the first Bush administration, and Carter administration national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski. A second policy paper, due in August, will be published by the Atlantic Council. Its co-chairs are first Bush administration national security adviser Brent Scowcroft, Nixon administration defense secretary James R. Schlesinger, and former chairman of the House International Relations Committee, Lee H. Hamilton, vice chairman of the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks.
Given the impending election, however, both congressional officials and foreign policy analysts say the Bush administration is unlikely to give formal shape to Iran policy, except to press for Tehran's full cooperation with the United Nations on its nuclear program.
-------- iraq
Iraq Says Cleric Can Reopen Newspaper
Airstrike Hits Fallujah; Car Bomb Kills Eight At Baghdad Police Post
By Doug Struck and Pamela Constable
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, July 19, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A58941-2004Jul18?language=printer
BAGHDAD, July 19 -- Iraq's interim prime minister issued a decree Sunday allowing a rebellious Shiite Muslim cleric to reopen a newspaper whose closure sparked a rebellion against U.S. forces, while U.S. planes struck Fallujah in an attack that shook a tenuous peace there.
In southwestern Baghdad, a car packed with explosives detonated early Monday near a police station, killing at least eight people and injuring as many as 25.
The al-Hawza newspaper was closed by U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer on March 28 in an attempt to squelch criticism from the cleric, Moqtada Sadr. The closure became a rallying cry for Sadr's forces, and ensuing fighting across Shiite areas took a bloody toll on U.S. forces.
Prime Minister Ayad Allawi's move was a clear rejection of Bremer's approach and an attempt to bring the powerful cleric and his followers into the political mainstream. Allawi said in a statement that the newspaper should resume publication "to open the way to all Iraqis' activities, including the trend this newspaper represents, to participate" in democracy.
A spokesman for Sadr, Ahmed Shaibani, said the announcement showed that "the decision to close the newspaper was wrong since the beginning. It was a black spot in the history of the U.S. civil administration in Iraq."
In closing al-Hawza, Bremer said that the newspaper, which featured the cleric's diatribes against the United States, was inciting violence against the U.S. occupation. Around the same time, Bremer also ordered the arrest of one of Sadr's top deputies in the Shiite holy city of Najaf. The two events sparked an uprising among Sadr's militia, the Mahdi Army, and made the cleric a symbol of resistance among Shiites who admired his rejection of the occupation.
Sadr, who had not been seen in public for nearly two months, attended Sunday evening prayers in Najaf.
As Allawi extended an olive branch to Sadr in Shiite areas, he also offered support to U.S. efforts to quell resistance in Fallujah, a city west of Baghdad that has been the focus of violence led by Sunni Muslim opponents of the occupation.
Allawi said U.S. officials sought his permission before carrying out a bombing after Marines and insurgents engaged in a gun battle early Sunday.
The U.S. military said in a statement that the airstrike hit a "known terrorist fighting position" that was occupied by 25 fighters for Abu Musab Zarqawi, a Jordanian whom U.S. officials consider the most-wanted insurgent in Iraq. Local reports said at least 12 Iraqis were killed in the strike. Neighbors in the area insisted that only the members of a family not involved in the resistance were killed.
Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage, during a brief visit to Baghdad, also said that the Iraqi government was consulted in advance of the bombing. In a news conference with Iraqi Foreign Affairs Minister Hoshyar Zebari, Armitage said Iraqi officials were "fully informed and agreed with the need for action."
Iraq is now a "sovereign government," Armitage said. "Our job is to support it to the absolute extent we can. The Iraqis are making the decisions. . . . We are not in the front seat with our hands on the steering wheel."
Armitage, who stopped in Baghdad at the end of a 10-day swing through South Asia and the Middle East, joined Zebari in criticizing the Philippine government for promising to withdraw its 51 soldiers from Iraq after kidnappers threatened to kill a Filipino hostage.
"In my view this sets a bad precedent," Zebari said. "It sent all the wrong signals. Terrorists should not be rewarded."
Philippine forces are scheduled to complete their withdrawal from the country Monday. There was no word Sunday on the fate of the hostage, Angelo de la Cruz, a truck driver. The release of another hostage, an Egyptian who is also a truck driver, was promised Saturday after his company agreed to quit doing business in Iraq. But his fate was also unknown Sunday.
At the appearance with Armitage, held in the newly reopened Foreign Ministry, Zebari said the Iraqi interim government plans to announce on Monday the appointment of more than 40 ambassadors, including assignments to most Arab states. He said that "all Arab countries want to strengthen their relations with Iraq" and that Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, which severed diplomatic relations with the government of President Saddam Hussein, have been sending "positive signals" about resuming those ties.
Meanwhile, members of the Iraqi National Guard, backed by U.S. troops, said Sunday that they arrested a leader of the resistance -- Hussein's cousin, the former head of his personal security force. Sufien Maher Nassiri was apprehended at his house in Tikrit with four other people.
According to an Iraqi military source, Nassiri was a commander of the Republican Guard intelligence section and had fled to Syria after the government fell. He returned to Iraq two months ago and was instrumental in ordering attacks against Americans in central Iraq, the source said.
The Iraqi justice minister, who survived an assassination attempt by a suicide bomber on Saturday, said he believed that former supporters of Hussein, and not foreigners, were behind many attacks, including the one on him. U.S. officials have said Zarqawi orchestrates many of the attacks. A group affiliated with the Jordanian claimed Sunday to have sent the suicide bomber who plowed into a convoy carrying the justice minister, Malik Douhan Hasan, killing five people.
But in an interview on al-Arabiya satellite television, Hasan said he was not convinced that Zarqawi was behind the attack. "I think Zarqawi is just a legend," he said. "I think Saddam's loyalists did these attacks."
In Hussein's home town of Tikrit, two car bombs exploded Sunday outside an Iraqi National Guard training station and at a police station. One policeman was killed.
Special correspondents Omar Fekeiki and Khalid Saffar contributed to this report.
--------
Nine Killed in Truck Bombing Near Baghdad Police Station
July 19, 2004
By SOMINI SENGUPTA and IAN FISHER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/19/international/middleeast/19CND-IRAQ.html?hp
BAGHDAD, July 19 - A tanker truck loaded with explosives blew up near a police station here this morning, punching a giant pit into a busy commercial area, blasting away entire rows of auto repair shops and tea stalls, and shattering window panes of apartment buildings nearby. The explosion killed at least 9 people and injured 60, according to initial reports from the Health Ministry this afternoon.
Also today, the Iraqi Defense Ministry said militants had killed one of its top officials, shooting him as he walked into his house in Baghdad.
The official, Essam al-Dijaili, the head of the military's supply department, was bringing dinner home Sunday evening when the attackers opened fire, killing him and his bodyguard, said Mishal al-Sarraf, an adviser to the defense minister, according to The Associated Press.
The assassination was the latest attack on senior Iraqi officials. Assailants killed a provincial governor last week, and tried unsuccessfully to assassinate the country's justice minister. Coupled with today's bombing, it continued a recent revival of attacks targeting Iraqi government institutions accused of collaborating with the United States-led occupation
The blast at the police station this morning was evidently the work of a suicide bomber, who drove what witnesses described as a white tanker truck, used in the past to transport water or fuel.
Inside Yarmouk Hospital, where four bags of body parts were wheeled in this morning in a tableau of manic grief, witnesses described an explosion of unusual force.
The ceiling of a bread shop collapsed on a young baker, Haider Jassim, who lay in the hospital with his head bandaged and blood spattered on his shirt, his pants and the mattress.
A police officer, Muthena Ali, 31, said he was standing at the station's door when the bomb went off. "All I could see was a big fog of dust," he said. Then he saw that his friend, Wissam Khudair, a fellow officer who had been standing beside him, had been hit in the stomach with a piece of flying metal, ripping his insides out. Mr. Kudhair was among the policemen killed.
Firaz Ghazi, 18, a police officer who lived in a nearby apartment building, was washing up for work when the force of the blast shattered a heavy windowpane in the ground-floor bathroom, puncturing his neck and arm with shards of glass, his relatives said. He was taken to the hospital. Over an hour later, his relatives were still sweeping glass out of their building.
The blast jarred children from their sleep. "We were all screaming and crying," said a 10-year-old girl named Amal Jehad, who also lives on the ground floor. It was left to her, she said, to calm her 7-year-old brother, Murtada. "My brother was shivering," she said. He was pale. I told him it's nothing, nothing. Calm down." As she talked, she held his chin in one hand. In the other, she held a pile of shrapnel she had collected this morning.
Down the street, Hayat Abad Ali, a retired archaeologist with a bandage around her head, lamented what had become the absurd terror of daily life. Ms. Ali, 59, was in her kitchen when the bomb went off. "It was very loud, as it was shaking the ground under our feet," she said. The windows shattered. A piece of shrapnel poked her in the head.
"It's like every day in Baghdad, a car bomb, with criminals driving," she said angrily. "We are spending the days without knowing our destiny."
The bombing came on the heels of several recent attacks on Iraqi police, soldiers and interim government officials. On Saturday, a brazen assassination attempt against the interim justice minister failed, but killed five of his bodyguards. Last week, a suicide car bomber killed 11 people at the gates of the heavily fortified Green Zone, shared these days by senior Iraqi government ministries and United States officials.
The blast today came just after 8 a.m., as police officers and shopkeepers were starting up their day's work. About 150 police officers had just lined up in two rows outside the station gates for their morning attendance count, several of the officers said later. Two witnesses said that just before the blast they saw a white tanker truck head toward the station.
Dia Nour al-Dinn, 35, said he was cooking in his restaurant and commented to a friend that the tanker seemed suspicious. "It was obvious he was trying to do something," he said. The bomb went off shortly after, shooting shards of glass into Mr. Dinn and his friend. An Iraqi soldier at the scene said the truck blew up in front of a car wash.
At the scene, more than two hours after the blast, a police officer was helped out of the station by two friends. The officer, Raad Saad, said a piece of a car steering wheel, possibly from the car bomb, had hit him in the leg.
Thameer Hassan Ali al-Ambaki, a police officer who cooks in the station, sat in his hospital bed, his head bandaged and dried blood smeared down his nose and face. On his right cheek and right arm were old scars, from a first bombing at the station eight months ago in which seven people were killed. Despite having now survived two bombings - and despite the fact that the Iraqi police are perhaps the most frequent target of insurgent attacks - he said he would not give up his job.
"We love our country," he said, smoking a cigarette in the hospital bed with his pistol still strapped to his side. "We have to face these hard days."
Meanwhile, the Philippines prepared to pull its last remaining troops out of Iraq, in response to a demand by insurgents who have threatened to kill a Filipino hostage.
The Iraqi prime minister, Iyad Allawi, arrived in Jordan to kick off his tour of neighboring countries, according to an Associated Press report.
--------
THE NEW GOVERNMENT
Iraq Gives Order to Reopen Paper G.I.'s Had Closed
July 19, 2004
By IAN FISHER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/19/international/middleeast/19IRAQ.html?pagewanted=all
BAGHDAD, Iraq, July 18 - Prime Minister Iyad Allawi on Sunday ordered the reopening of a radical Shiite newspaper closed by United States soldiers nearly four months ago. The closing was a catalyst for some of the worst anti-American mayhem of the occupation.
Dr. Allawi's decree concerning the newspaper, Al Hawza, was a pointedly conciliatory gesture to Moktada al-Sadr, the rebel Shiite cleric whose associates run the newspaper. The decree came on the same day as Dr. Allawi approved an American airstrike meant to pound another branch of insurgent fighters, in the city of Falluja, a center for attacks on American and Iraqi forces here.
Together, Dr. Allawi's two actions seemed early evidence of his stated strategy for taming the deadly insurgency by making concessions to fighters who cooperate and cracking down on those who do not. It is unclear, however, how much influence he has with the American military, though American officials said the airstrike in Falluja was carried out after Dr. Allawi had endorsed it.
At least 11 people were reported killed in the Falluja airstrike early on Sunday morning against what the American military said were forces allied with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Mr. Zarqawi, a Jordanian militant with reported ties to Al Qaeda, has claimed credit for much of the worst violence in Iraq, including three beheadings in recent weeks and two car bombs on Saturday. The militants in Falluja are largely members of Iraq's minority Sunni sect and foreign fighters.
Hours after the airstrike, Dr. Allawi announced in a statement that because he believed in freedom of the press he would allow the reopening of Mr. Sadr's newspaper. It had been padlocked March 28 by American soldiers acting on orders of L. Paul Bremer III, the former occupation chief, because he said it had incited anti-American attacks. The closing of the paper incited strong protests by thousands of Iraqis who accused the United States of hypocrisy for silencing dissent in the name of promoting democracy in Iraq. The protests widened into an armed Shiite uprising led by Mr. Sadr in several southern Shiite cities.
Since Dr. Allawi took power as head of a new interim government on June 28, he has said repeatedly that his most important task is to restore security and stability to Iraq, wracked by violence that has scared Iraqis, hampered reconstruction and cast a pall over the American effort.
But he has had to walk a fine line between toughness and compromise: many Iraqis, expressing outrage and humiliation at being occupied, supported attacks against American forces. Dr. Allawi has sought to find a balance by offering amnesty to fighters who did not commit serious crimes, even as he promised hard action against those who did not cooperate.
Mr. Sadr, a 31-year-old cleric who has a large following among poor and unemployed Shiites, and his aides have offered contradictory statements on Dr. Allawi's new government, but they seem to have settled on cautious and conditional acceptance. His spokesmen have said they could support the government if Dr. Allawi proves he is working on behalf of Iraqis and not under American orders.
On Sunday, a top aide to Mr. Sadr, Sheik Ahmed al-Shaibani, said it was not up to Dr. Allawi to decide when and if the newspaper resumed publication. But he acknowledged Dr. Allawi's gesture.
"It cannot be denied that it was a good step, but it came very late," he said in Najaf, the holy Shiite city south of Baghdad where Mr. Sadr lives. "What is required from the new government is to extend bridges of trust and cooperation between itself and the people."
It was unclear if Dr. Allawi timed his concession to a Shiite branch of the insurgency to soften any public-relations blow among Iraqis - many skeptical of Dr. Allawi's real power - from the airstrike against Sunni Muslim militants and foreign fighters in Falluja.
American military strikes against Iraqi targets have sometimes served to unite Shiite and Sunni insurgents. The strikes have also reinforced the perception that the United States, which has 140,000 soldiers here, is ultimately in charge.
At a joint news conference with the Iraqi foreign minister, Hoshyar Zebari, Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage, visiting Iraq for two days, sought to emphasize the role of the new government in approving the airstrike - and its power, presumably, to veto it.
"We're not in the front seat anymore with the hand on the steering wheel," Mr. Armitage told reporters. "We are a supporting partner to a sovereign government. They will make decisions."
The Iraqi government, he added, was "fully informed" about the attack on Falluja, the latest of several bombings against suspected safe houses for Mr. Zarqawi's militants, and he said it "agreed with us on the need to take action."
"The point is, we didn't just act on our own," Mr. Armitage said. "A sovereign nation had to agree."
A military statement said the strike in Falluja was carried out just after 2 a.m. against "a known terrorist fighting position." The strike, the statement said, "destroyed defensive fighting positions and trench lines near the remains of a house and a foreign fighter checkpoint." About 25 insurgents were near the site just before the bombing, the statement said.
News services quoted Iraqi doctors in Falluja as saying that several women and children were among the dead.
In his trip here, Mr. Armitage, the highest ranking American official to visit Iraq since the transfer of formal sovereignty, struck many of the same notes as the new American ambassador to Iraq, John D. Negroponte, did the day before, in his first public comments to reporters since arriving here. Both emphasized what they said was Iraq's real sovereignty and a role for America that is supportive in organizing elections, reconstructing the country and calming the violence.
Mr. Armitage met with Dr. Allawi and the Iraqi president, Sheik Ghazi Ajil al-Yawar, and discussed security issues and efforts intended to reduce Iraq's $120 billion foreign debt.
Mr. Armitage pledged continued American cooperation in security and reconstruction.
"We understand that Iraq's people need more electricity, more water, more jobs - and we are determined to find ways to help the government meet these needs," he said.
The strike in Falluja came at a time of escalating violence here after several weeks that had been relatively free of major attacks, and amid what appeared to be a substantial political victory for the insurgents. On Sunday, the Philippine government announced that it would complete the withdrawal of all 51 of its military personnel, the condition that kidnappers here had set for the release of a Filipino hostage, Angelo de la Cruz.
The insurgents had threatened to behead Mr. Cruz, a truck driver working for a Saudi company who was captured July 7, unless the Philippine government withdrew its contingent. Credit for the kidnapping was claimed by Mr. Zarqawi's group, which also took responsibility for beheading three other captives, including a Bulgarian truck driver last week.
On Sunday, Mr. Zebari, the Iraqi foreign minister, repeated his criticism of the Philippine withdrawal.
"This in my view and the view of the Iraqi government has set a bad precedent and sent all the wrong messages," he said in the news conference with Mr. Armitage. "Terrorism should not be rewarded."
Marek Belka, the new prime minister of Poland, one of America's crucial allies in Iraq, reinforced his nation's commitment to keeping troops in Iraq through 2005, though he said on Sunday that the numbers would drop substantially at the start of the year.
Though Poland has a close relationship with the United States, the deployment of troops to Iraq has been unpopular there. Last week, the government said it would reduce its troop level to 1,000 to 1,500 in January, from 2,400.
Mr. Zebari also said 43 new Iraqi ambassadors would be appointed on Monday, as the nation begins to rebuild diplomatic ties. On Monday, Dr. Allawi was expected to visit Jordan, the first stop in visits to other Arab countries, expected to include Egypt, Syria, the United Arab Emirates, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.
Also on Sunday, the American military said it had captured a former member of Saddam Hussein's elite Republic Guard who is suspected of planning and financing insurgent attacks. The military said it arrested the man, Sufian Maher Hassan, a former Iraqi general, on Friday in Tikrit, Mr. Hussein's hometown.
An Iraqi employee of The New York Times contributed reporting from Najaf for this article.
-------- israel / palestine
Israeli Leaders Seek to Keep Gaza Withdrawal on Track
By JOSEPH BERGER
July 19, 2004
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/19/international/middleeast/19mide.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
JERUSALEM, July 18 - With the Palestinian government in disarray, Israeli party leaders tried Sunday to prevent disarray within their own government so that a parliamentary majority can be formed to proceed with a withdrawal from the Gaza Strip.
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who has been running the government for several weeks without a parliamentary majority, met with Shimon Peres, the leader of the Labor Party, to discuss how Labor, which strongly favors the withdrawal of Jewish settlers from Gaza, might join Mr. Sharon's dominant Likud Party in a unity government.
But Mr. Sharon finds himself in the challenging position of a ballet master, trying to bring together many quarreling performers 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, those numbers may not be enough to achieve his goal. Perhaps half of the members of Mr. Sharon's own party strongly oppose the Gaza disengagement plan.
To win the support of some of the 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 feel uneasy about joining with groups that might press 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 meeting between Mr. Sharon and Mr. Peres was useful enough that talks between Labor and Likud teams got off the ground Sunday night near Tel Aviv.
Meanwhile, Yasir Arafat, the president of the Palestinian Authority, had to grapple with a prime minister who has said he wants to resign, and a popular revolt in Gaza against Mr. Arafat's appointment of a cousin as chief of security.
Mr. Arafat met with the prime minister, Ahmed Qurei, for four hours on Sunday at Mr. Arafat's West Bank compound in Ramallah. Afterward, a spokesman said Mr. Arafat again refused to accept Mr. Qurei's resignation.
There was a report that Mr. Qurei had told a journalist that he would reconsider his resignation if Mr. Arafat met certain demands. He did not elaborate, but when Mr. Qurei formed his government last fall Mr. Arafat rejected his original choice for interior minister, Nasr Yousef, and forced the appointment of Hakam Balawi instead. It may have been significant that Mr. Balawi left the Saturday cabinet meeting before any of the other ministers.
But Mr. Qurei, who has been unhappy during 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 - which would be the third in little more than a year.
While the discussions over a new Palestinian power structure continued, so did protests against the leadership of Mr. Arafat and some of his recent appointees. Early Sunday, masked gunmen belonging to an offshoot of Mr. Arafat's Fatah movement stormed a building housing offices of Moussa Arafat, the cousin appointed to be security chief, in the Gaza city of Khan Yunis. They set fire to two offices and several cars and took 10 rifles. The protesters said Moussa Arafat was unacceptable and symbolized the cronyism and corruption of the Palestinian Authority.
Later Sunday, in Rafah in southern Gaza, shooting broke out between militants of Al Aksa Martyrs Brigade and people from the headquarters of the Palestinian military intelligence service, led by Moussa Arafat. At least 12 people were wounded.
Also Sunday, a third official in Gaza quit to protest Moussa Arafat's appointment. Navy chief Gomma Ghali submitted his resignation, joining Maj. Gen. Amin Al-Hindi, an intelligence chief, and Rashid Abu Shbak, the head of preventive security, both of whom resigned Friday.
Moussa Arafat responded to the protests in a rare news conference, saying they would pass "like a summer cloud" and that he was ready to go to battle with any enemy, external or internal.
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 younger challengers like Muhammad 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, of the conflict between Mr. Arafat and Mr. Dahlan. "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 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, the Labor leader, said the political distress in both Israel and the Palestinian 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 after the meeting with Mr. Sharon.
Mr. Peres said he told Mr. Sharon his three conditions 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 the withdrawal in parts of the West Bank as well. He said Mr. Sharon did not reject his conditions, although 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 wanted such a law passed this month.
But Mr. Peres said Mr. Sharon seemed amenable to the idea of a Palestinian "partner' in the disengagement, although he did not believe it could be Yasir Arafat.
Mr. Peres, with an appreciation of his rival's predicament, said Mr. Sharon can cobble together a parliamentary majority of 61 seats without Labor, but not a majority that would support his withdrawal plan.
Khaled Abu Aker contributed reporting from Ramallah, West Bank, for this article, and Taghreed Elkhodary from Gaza City.
--------
Arafat Scrambles to Defuse Leadership Crisis
July 19, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-mideast.html?hp
GAZA (Reuters) - Backing down in the face of unprecedented unrest, Yasser Arafat scrambled Monday to defuse a Palestinian leadership crisis triggered by turmoil in Gaza over corruption in his government and security forces.
The Palestinian president tried to calm public anger in the Gaza Strip by naming a new security chief over the head of a cousin whose appointment fueled a weekend of violence spearheaded by gunmen demanding anti-corruption reforms.
But Prime Minister Ahmed Qurie kept up pressure on Arafat, saying his resignation -- tendered in frustration after what he called an explosion of ``chaos and lawlessness'' -- would stand for now.
Arafat, a former guerrilla leader, is facing the sharpest challenge to his rule since Palestinians received a measure of self-rule a decade ago, and some fear it could eventually boil over in civil war.
The confrontation is also widely seen as a power struggle between Arafat's Old Guard and younger rivals staking out turf before Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon carries out a plan to remove Jewish settlements from Gaza by the end of 2005.
Adding to tensions in the region, a bomb killed a senior member of Lebanese guerrilla group Hizbollah in the southern suburbs of Beirut Monday in an attack the group blamed on Israel. Israeli officials declined comment.
Under intense public pressure to overhaul his security apparatus, Arafat named Abdel-Razek al-Majaideh to the new post of overall director of security for the West Bank and Gaza, outranking Moussa Arafat, the cousin widely seen as a symbol of entrenched cronyism, officials said.
The reinstatement of Majaideh, a veteran commander who resigned earlier this month at Arafat's request, was greeted by supporters firing automatic weapons in the air.
Gunmen opposed to Moussa Arafat, appointed Gaza security chief Saturday, had battled security forces Sunday in clashes that left 18 people wounded. Under the new arrangement, Moussa Arafat will retain a senior security post in Gaza.
RESIGNATION FIRM -- FOR NOW
Compounding Arafat's woes was Qurie's decision Saturday to tender his resignation after brief abductions Friday of four French aid workers, a police chief and another official in Gaza. Arafat rejected Qurie's resignation Sunday.
After a cabinet meeting Monday, Qurie said his resignation would stand pending a written response from Arafat.
``However, most of the ministers in the cabinet are against this resignation,'' Qurie told reporters, signaling that he could still rescind it.
He made clear his final decision could depend on Arafat's willingness to cede security powers. ``It's about time to reform our security forces,'' he said.
A moderate with a history of close ties to Arafat, Qurie has failed to get Arafat to enact internationally demanded security reforms since he became prime minister last November.
Appealing for calm, Qurie said a cabinet committee would travel to the Gaza Strip to try to defuse tensions. ``What has happened in Gaza is dangerous. No one is winning in this battle,'' he said.
--------
Former U.S. Officials Oppose Israel Attack on Iran
July 19, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-iran-usa-israel.html
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - An Israeli military strike likely would not solve the problem of Iran's nuclear program and would harm U.S. national interests, two former senior U.S. officials said on Monday.
Growing concern about advances in Iran's nuclear capabilities has fanned speculation that Israel could act to wipe out key Iranian facilities, as it did against Iraq's Osirak reactor in 1981.
But former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski and former CIA Director Robert Gates, co-authors of a new study on Iran, said it was unlikely such a strike would be effective and it would damage U.S. interests.
They spoke at a news conference to discuss a new Council on Foreign Relations report which urges the United States to begin a selective engagement with Iran and argues the lack of sustained contacts hurts U.S. interests.
Unlike Osirak, which was a single reactor, Iran has a number of nuclear-related facilities dispersed around the country, making it harder to target key sites, Gates said.
Moreover, the Osirak reactor was relatively isolated, while Iran's facilities are in or near cities, increasing the chances of civilian casualities, he said.
To carry out such a strike, Israel would almost certainly have to fly over airspace controlled by the United States, meaning America could be judged complicit with the Israeli action, Brzezinski said.
He added that military action would harm prospects for political change in Iran by galvanizing nationalistic fervor and this could damage U.S. interests, especially in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Iran has admitted that for 18 years it has secretly been developing nuclear-related capabilities but it denies U.S. charges that these are part of nuclear arms program.
-------- pakistan / india
Pakistan Army Hunts Militants in Mountain Forests
July 19, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-security-pakistan-militants.html
WANA, Pakistan (Reuters) - Pakistan sent gunship and transport helicopters over forested mountains near the Afghan border Monday in its hunt for al Qaeda-linked foreign militants, officials and residents said.
The military reported three militants killed and six wounded in clashes starting Sunday morning around the Santoi and Mantoi valleys near Wana, the main town in the South Waziristan tribal area where foreign fighters have been most active.
``Most of the heights around these valleys have been secured by the security forces with full cooperation of the locals,'' the Pakistani military said in a statement.
A security official in the northwestern city of Peshawar said the military was hunting militants in the forbidding area of Boshghar, on the border between South and North Waziristan.
It is considered critical in the hunt for foreign militants and their local tribal supporters, who have refused previous government offers of amnesty.
But a tribal jirga, or council, handed over to the authorities 40 tribesmen wanted by the government on suspicion of helping foreign militants. No senior wanted figures were among them, said residents in Wana, where the handover took place.
The United States has put pressure on Pakistan to hunt down foreign militants in its tribal belt, believing that targets like al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahri may be hiding somewhere along the Afghan-Pakistan border.
A government source said at least one soldier was killed and six wounded Sunday when an army convoy was ambushed in South Waziristan, where hundreds of foreign fighters including Arabs, Uzbeks and Chechens are said to be hiding.
He said two civilians were also killed in the crossfire between soldiers and unidentified militants, but there was no official confirmation of casualties.
Residents in Wana said they saw gunship and transport helicopters flying back and forth to the west of the town.
The army also pounded suspected militant hideouts in the mountains with artillery, residents added.
Pakistan's army, which deployed into semi-autonomous tribal regions in the west of the country for the first time last year, has come under frequent attack by militants and their local allies.
Three civilians were killed and four were wounded in the crossfire during a shootout Friday when militants attacked a paramilitary fort with rockets and mortars in Khaisor, a village about 25 km (16 miles) northeast of Wana.
South Waziristan, about 400 km (250 miles) southwest of the capital Islamabad, has been the scene of fierce clashes between Pakistani troops and militants, in which more than 200 people were killed in major operations in March and June.
-------- philippines
Philippines Completes Pullout From Iraq
July 19, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Philippines-Iraq.html
MANILA, Philippines (AP) -- The Philippines said Monday that it has completed the withdrawal of its peacekeeping contingent from Iraq, meeting a demand by Iraqi insurgents threatening to behead a Filipino hostage but defying opposition from Washington.
The last members of the 51-strong force made an ``exit call'' on the new Polish commander at their base in Hillah, south of Baghdad, then waved as they left in six cars.
Iraqi police said the final contingent of troops drove over the border into Kuwait in a three-car convoy about 4:55 p.m.
Foreign Secretary Delia Albert said they would travel by road to Kuwait, a several-hour trip, then take a commercial flight home. They had been scheduled to leave Iraq on Aug. 20.
``Before the end of this day, all members of the Philippine humanitarian contingent will be out of Iraq,'' she said in a nationally televised statement.
Some of Manila's allies, including the United States and Australia, have sharply criticized the withdrawal decision, engineered to save the life of truck driver Angelo dela Cruz. They argue it encourages terrorists and endangers other coalition members in Iraq.
There was no immediate word on the fate of dela Cruz. Philippine diplomats in Iraq were waiting to hear from the kidnappers' emissaries, a Philippine official said.
``We have fulfilled our commitment, and so it's their turn to fulfill their promise. We are waiting,'' the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
The insurgents who snatched him on July 7 near Fallujah, killing his Iraqi security guard, have said they would free the 46-year-old father of eight once the last Filipino troops had left.
Army Brig. Gen. Jovito S. Palparan Jr., commander of the Philippine contingent, returned home Monday ahead of his troops, saying he was happy to be back. Some of the peacekeepers left for Kuwait last week.
``The men I left there are OK,'' he said before meeting with Albert and military chief Narciso Abaya to report details of the withdrawal.
A prominent pressure group for overseas workers, Migrante, welcomed the withdrawal, but also urged President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo to withdraw all support for the U.S.-led force, fearing that 4,000 Filipino contract workers in Iraq and more than 1.4 million others in the Middle East could be in danger.
``Additionally, we would like President Arroyo not to send troops again and categorically withdraw support to the U.S. coalition in Iraq because it is one reason that could make Filipinos targets of attacks,'' said Migrante's secretary-general, Maita Santiago.
Relatives of dela Cruz in the northern province of Pampanga were overjoyed and prayed after hearing of plans to complete the withdrawal Monday. They urged the kidnappers to free him.
``I'm happy that the troops are on their way back,'' said Feliciano de la Cruz Jr., the hostage's younger brother. ``I hope my brother follows them home.''
In the first sign of possible fallout from Arroyo's decision to withdraw troops from Iraq, a U.S. official told The Associated Press on Sunday that Washington was re-evaluating ties.
The official did not specifically say Washington could scale down military or economic assistance to Manila. Last week, U.S. officials said they remain committed to training and advising Filipino troops at Manila's request.
Troubled by communist insurgents and Muslim extremist terror threats, the Philippines has relied on Washington to provide training and weapons to its poorly armed military to battle al-Qaida-linked groups in the restive south.
Still reeling from a narrow victory in the May 10 presidential elections Arroyo has gambled cozy links with Washington to defuse a potentially explosive political situation had she refused to recall the troops from Iraq and de la Cruz -- who has developed into a national icon -- were beheaded, analysts said.
-------- russia / chechnya
Head of Russian chiefs of staff fired
MOSCOW (AFP)
Jul 19, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040719080150.vtcw3dsq.html
The long-serving head of Russia's general chiefs of staff who tried to defend the army against reforms that included major staff cutbacks has been sacked, the Kremlin said Monday.
Anatoly Kvashnin will be replaced by his first deputy Yury Baluyevsky, a Kremlin spokeswoman said by telephone.
Kvashnin has led the agency since 1997 and regularly fought with the defense ministry that is now headed by a close ally of President Vladimir Putin, Sergei Ivanov.
His office was made subordinate to the defense ministry last month amid Putin's efforts to bring the military under his control.
Putin has since moved on to reforms within the Federal Security Service (the former KGB) that he himself once headed, cutting down on the number of top officials, as he tries to streamline the way Russia's cash-strapped military and security services function.
The defense ministry and the general chiefs of staff -- whose imposing headquarters face each other across a road a stone's throw from the Kremlin -- had been battling over the past decade for control of military operations and army financing.
Under pressure from Putin, who named Ivanov as Russia's first civilian defense minister in March 2001, parliament approved measures that make the chiefs of staff subordinate to the defense ministry and force him to report directly to it.
Media reports said the general chief of staff will now only be in charge of drafting the planning stages of potential military operations.
Reports said Kvashnin's team has repeatedly stalled Ivanov's efforts to cut staff in what was to be a first step towards cutting thinning out the bloated Soviet-era force.
-------- space
NASA Denies Funding for Key Satellite
Decision on Orbiter Frustrates Scientists
By Guy Gugliotta
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, July 19, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A60421-2004Jul18?language=printer
NASA is allowing a highly successful satellite to fall out of Earth's orbit by refusing to fund it for as little as $28 million, dismaying the scientists and forecasters who use its unique abilities to study climate change and track hurricanes.
NASA officials said engineers did not order a planned firing of its rockets in early July to hold the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission satellite in orbit 241 miles above Earth. Without periodic assists from its thrusters, atmospheric drag will send the satellite's remains to a watery grave in six to nine months.
Engineers said the satellite, a joint venture with the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency, is working perfectly and could still be saved, but NASA officials said neither the Japanese nor other U.S. agencies were willing to contribute to the estimated $28 million to $36 million needed to keep the mission operating for as long as two more years.
The satellite is a unique space platform whose instruments have proved invaluable not only to researchers studying global change, but also to meteorologists who use its one-of-a-kind "rain radar" to probe deep into cloud cover to determine whether the makings of a cyclone lurk there.
In 2002, a NASA study determined that the potential lifesaving value of the satellite was great enough to justify keeping it aloft until it ran out of fuel and tumbled unguided back to Earth, possibly killing or injuring someone.
The decision instead to use a "controlled de-orbit" for the satellite, known by its initials TRMM, was announced quietly July 13 in an internal NASA memo, and came at a time when NASA's Earth observation budget is shrinking as the agency begins to focus on President Bush's plan for human exploration of the moon and Mars.
NASA officials said the agency decided to de-orbit TRMM because the money saved could be put to better use on a next-generation satellite scheduled for launch in 2011.
The Bush administration is already facing harsh public criticism for its decision to cancel space shuttle servicing of the Hubble Space Telescope, and congressional critics of the Bush initiative have publicly warned NASA not to rob Hubble or other valuable programs -- especially in earth science -- to fund the new undertaking.
But congressional sources said lawmakers do not necessarily see TRMM's problem as the harbinger of cuts to come: "TRMM would be a problem regardless, because it's an unanticipated expense," and not part of the NASA budget, said a knowledgeable Republican congressional staffer who declined to be identified. "NASA may even deserve credit for being willing to ante up" some of the money.
Or not. NASA has said little about TRMM's demise, but researchers all over the country and in Japan are questioning the decision. Data from TRMM on rainfall and storms are used by climate scientists and meteorologists all over the world.
"Unlike a lot of missions, it's worked great from the beginning -- something of a miracle in satellite meteorology, and we're still on the rising part of the curve," University of Washington atmospheric scientist and TRMM team member Robert Houze said in a telephone interview. "It seems almost unfathomable to me that you would not let it live out its full lifetime."
House Science Committee chief of staff David J. Goldston acknowledged in a telephone interview that his office had gotten "probably in the last week an inch-high pile of letters from researchers around the United States saying we're missing this great opportunity. We don't have a position yet, but we are looking into it."
TRMM was launched in Japan on Thanksgiving Day 1997 into an orbit that girdles the globe ranging from 35 degrees north of the equator -- the latitude of North Carolina -- to 35 degrees south (Santiago, Chile).
TRMM measures and analyzes rainfall, using microwave, infrared and lightning sensors supplied by the United States, and the Japanese-built rain radar. Together they provide the most detailed information on rainfall patterns ever created, from the part of the world that influences global climate more than any other.
"Having all these instruments on the same satellite can provide best estimates of rainfall over oceans and land, can measure the impacts of the El Niño ocean temperature changes and document the release of heat when water changes to rainfall," said Goddard Space Flight Center's Robert Adler, the NASA project scientist in charge of TRMM.
TRMM was supposed to last three years, but instead it lived long enough to become a victim of its own success. "It has been superb on all counts," said Ghassem Asrar, NASA's associate administrator for earth science. "The nominal life was 18 months, the goal was three years, and we just kept extending."
As the years crept by, scientists found they could use TRMM to improve the baseline accuracy of computer climate models and weather forecasts, or to give their local research a global context. And the longer TRMM operated, the more comprehensive the data became, because climate patterns take years to develop.
"But the biggest surprise, which I never anticipated, is this whole ability of the satellite to observe hurricanes in a way that no satellite can," Houze said. TRMM's radar can peer inside tropical storms to watch them evolve.
"A lot of times you'll just see a ball of white cloud, but TRMM can go to the core, see the eye wall start to develop: Is it intensifying? Is it getting better defined? Is it falling apart?" National Hurricane Center Director Max Mayfield said in a telephone interview from his Miami office. "It's been absolutely critical. Ask any of our hurricane forecasters."
Asrar said that engineers had planned a controlled de-orbit for TRMM "from the beginning," using onboard thrusters to steer the satellite into the ocean far from population centers. He said the satellite was sturdy enough for large pieces of it to survive reentry temperatures and potentially injure or kill people in the debris path.
As time passed, however, what seemed like a routine maneuver to end a successful mission loomed as the limiting factor for the mission itself. Operating systems were working perfectly, instruments were not wearing out, and the data were impeccable. The only thing being used up was the fuel needed to maintain orbit.
In 2002, Asrar asked Bryan O'Connor, NASA associate administrator for safety and mission assurance, to conduct a "disposal risk review." Did the benefits of using all the fuel to keep TRMM in orbit an additional five years outweigh the hazards of allowing the spacecraft to fall back to Earth without guidance?
In his reply on Sept. 4, 2002, O'Connor said the probability of a TRMM debris casualty would be one in every 5,000 reentries, twice as dangerous as NASA's standard of one in 10,000. NASA allows about six uncontrolled reentries a year.
Despite the heightened danger, O'Connor concluded that "these risks appear to be reasonable when subjectively weighed against the potential public safety benefits of improved storm analysis and forecasting capabilities that appear to be realized by extending the TRMM mission."
But uncontrolled reentry was never seriously considered, Asrar said, and the O'Connor analysis was used to reaffirm what Asrar described as NASA's original view: "What if the one in 5,000 becomes a reality?" Asrar said. "Can anybody stand up and say it was worthwhile?" He said he asked for the O'Connor report simply to show that "we had done due diligence" in evaluating TRMM's potential hazard .
In 2003, engineers bought some more time by boosting TRMM from its initial orbit 210 miles above Earth to its current height. At the higher orbit, the satellite needed station-keeping burns only once a month, instead of once every three days.
But by mid-2004, NASA had to make another choice: bring TRMM down in a controlled de-orbit this year for a landing next year or deplete the fuel for one or two more years, then let the satellite "drift down" unguided for a couple of years, using the last of the fuel to control the final reentry.
NASA officials who declined to be quoted by name questioned whether Asrar ever seriously considered prolonging the mission further, and disputed his view that it would cost $28 million to $36 million to keep TRMM running for up to two more years.
Asrar explained that extending TRMM would require payment not only for the two data years, but also for the two or more "drift-down" years, when the satellite would not be sending reliable data, but would still have to be watched. Spending more money now would mean postponing the 2011 launch of a new satellite designed to improve on TRMM's performance, he said.
Asrar said it was "absolutely incorrect" that NASA decided to begin the de-orbit now to save money for the Bush initiative, noting that "we started looking at this issue two years ago," long before the moon-Mars plan arose.
Instead, he said, NASA asked Japan or another U.S. agency to partner another extension. Finding no takers, NASA ordered the de-orbit to begin. "This has been my decision all along," Asrar said. "I can take full credit or blame for it."
-------- spies
We can't prove Iran-Sept 11 link: CIA
July 19, 2004
Sydney Morning Herald
http://fairuse.1accesshost.com/news2/smh16.htm
About eight hijackers passed through Iran before the September 11 attacks on the United States, but Washington has no evidence that Tehran sanctioned the strikes, the acting director of the Central Intelligence Agency said.
"This is not surprising to us. I think the count is about eight of the hijackers were able to pass through Iran at some point," John McLaughlin told Fox News Sunday.
"We have ample evidence of people being able to move back and forth across that terrain," he said.
"However, I would stop there and say we have no evidence that there is some sort of official sanction by the government of Iran for this activity. We have no evidence that there is some sort of official connection between Iran and 9/11," he said.
His remarks were the first official confirmation of leaked accounts from the final report of the official inquiry into the 2001 attacks that killed 3,000 people, which is due to be released Thursday.
The inquiry's interim reports have already shot down White House claims of a link between Saddam Hussein's Iraq and al-Qaeda, highlighted gaps in US defences, and levied tough criticism at intelligence services.
Time and Newsweek magazines, in similar reports quoting congressional, commission and government sources, reported that Iran relaxed border controls and provided "clean" passports for the so-called "muscle hijackers" to transit Iran to and from Osama bin Laden's camps between October 2000 and February 2001.
The commission's report says Iran at one point proposed collaborating with al-Qaeda on attacks against America, but bin Laden declined, saying he did not want to alienate his supporters in Saudi Arabia, according to Time.
Newsweek said the Iranian finding in the commission's report is based largely on a December 2001 memo discovered buried in the files of the US National Security Agency.
The memo, according to Newsweek, says "Iranian border inspectors were instructed not to place stamps in the passports of al-Qaeda fighters from Saudi Arabia who were travelling from bin Laden's camps through Iran."
The United States has for years listed Iran as a state sponsor of terrorism, and has pressured Tehran over its nuclear program. The International Atomic Energy Agency is probing allegations the country is using power generation as a cover for a secret weapons drive.
Republican Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania told NBC that "we have to be very strong with Iran".
"Iran has been complicit in terrorism for a long time," he said.
"They're developing nuclear power now, potentially nuclear weapons, and we have to be insistent that there be international inspection."
Earlier, Iran acknowledged that suspected al-Qaeda members involved in the September 11 attacks may have passed through its territory, but insisted they would have done so "illegally".
"We have very long borders and it is impossible to totally control them," foreign ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi told reporters.
"It is natural that five or six people could have crossed our borders illegally without us seeing them," he insisted.
"The same thing happens on the border between the United States and Mexico."
Iran condemned the September 11 attacks, but has frequently been accused of harbouring and not cracking down on the group. And in February, Spain's top anti-terror judge Baltasar Garzon alleged that al-Qaeda had a "board of managers" operating in Iran.
But the regime was seen as being fiercely hostile to Afghanistan's Taliban and al-Qaeda, and has vehemently denied allegations that it is supporting them.
--------
CIA Chief Faults 9/11 Panel
Proposal Group to Urge the Creation of Cabinet-Level Intelligence Director
By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, July 19, 2004; Page A02
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A60223-2004Jul18.html
Acting CIA Director John E. McLaughlin yesterday questioned the need for a Cabinet-level intelligence czar, a new position that will be among the main recommendations of the presidential commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks when it releases its findings Thursday.
"The idea of a czar to oversee the entire intelligence community . . . doesn't relate particularly to the world I live in," McLaughlin said on "Fox News Sunday." Although he said "a good argument could be made for" a czar, McLaughlin said that "with some modest changes in the way the CIA is set up, the director of central intelligence could carry out that function well and appropriately."
In a speech last month, McLaughlin, a 32-year CIA veteran, noted that the idea of an intelligence czar "was first floated in 1955 and has come up several times since." His main objection, repeated yesterday with the caveat that the commission proposal needs to be studied, was that "it would be hard to do . . . without adding an additional layer of bureaucracy."
The proposal for a White House-based national intelligence director is only one step in a broader plan to centralize the U.S. intelligence community that is now spread over 15 agencies in six Cabinet departments plus the CIA, according to sources familiar with the report.
The commission would give the new intelligence czar budgetary control over all intelligence activities and put him in the Cabinet to be the president's closest adviser. That would be done to make up for the new czar not having his own agency, sources said.
McLaughlin has said that the CIA director, wearing the other hat given in 1947 as director of central intelligence (DCI), could perform the same budgetary functions plus hire and fire senior officials. McLaughlin also recommended last month that the DCI have a fixed term that bridges presidential administrations, thereby making the post a "nonpolitical" position.
The commission seeks to politically insulate the position and is expected to note that the United States appears more vulnerable to terrorist attacks during transitions from one administration to the next. The Sept. 11 attacks occurred as the Bush national security team was still reviewing Clinton administration policy and planning changes and its newly confirmed officials were just taking over in key departments.
In defending his and other agencies against the expected criticism from the commission of their performance before the Sept. 11 attacks, McLaughlin said, "The intelligence community of today is not the intelligence community of 9/11." He noted that the community-wide counterterrorism effort back then was "300 people spread-eagled across a dike." Today, he said, 100 people do nothing but prepare watch lists of potentially dangerous terrorists.
McLaughlin declined to discuss the controversy over former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV and the trip he took to Niger in February 2002 to investigate reports that Iraq was trying to reconstitute its nuclear weapons program with uranium from Africa. He said the leaking of the name of Wilson's wife and her employment at the agency was under federal investigation.
Wilson's public discussion of his trip focused worldwide attention on President Bush's use in his January 2003 State of the Union address of Iraq's alleged moves to buy uranium to justify the claim that Saddam Hussein was reconstituting his nuclear weapons program. The White House later acknowledged that the statement should not have been included in the speech.
In the recently released Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report, Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), chairman of the panel, and two other Republican members concluded that the plan to send Wilson to Niger "was suggested" by his wife, Valerie Plame, a CIA employee who specialized in weapons of mass destruction. Wilson and senior intelligence officials have repeatedly denied that Plame played a role in selecting him to go to Niger other than as a conduit to come to the agency to discuss the issue.
Roberts based his conclusion in part on a memo Plame sent to her boss describing Wilson's "good relations'' with Niger officials. The committee report also disclosed that a CIA reports officer had told the staff that Wilson's wife had "offered up [Wilson's] name."
Wilson said yesterday on CNN that the reports officer's statement "was taken out of context" and in a letter to the Senate committee he had asked that the reports officer be re-interviewed. As for his wife's note to her boss about his Niger contacts, Wilson said that "he was told that somebody in that chain of command asked Valerie to do my list of curriculum vitae."
On how his trip to Niger was initiated, Wilson said, the committee "got that particular point wrong."
--------
INTELLIGENCE
Tiny Agency's Iraq Analysis Is Better Than Big Rivals'
July 19, 2004
By DOUGLAS JEHL
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/19/politics/19INTE.html?pagewanted=all
WASHINGTON, July 18 - On Iraq and illicit weapons, the intelligence agency that got it least wrong, it now turns out, was one of the smallest - a State Department bureau with no spies, no satellites and a reputation for contrariness.
Almost alone among intelligence agencies, this one, the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, or I.N.R., does not report to either the White House or the Pentagon. Its approach is purely analytical, so that it owes no allegiance to particular agents, imagery or intercepts. It shuns the worst-case plans sometimes sought by military commanders.
"They are willing to take on the accepted analysis and take a second, harder look," said Alfred Cumming, a former staff director of the Senate Intelligence Committee who is now an intelligence and national security specialist at the Congressional Research Service, a branch of the Library of Congress.
With just 165 analysts, the bureau is about one-tenth the size of the Central Intelligence Agency's analytical arm. But its analysts tend to be older (most are in their 40's and 50's), more experienced and more likely to come from academic backgrounds than those at other agencies, and they are more often encouraged to devote their careers to the study of a particular issue or region.
"They have a reputation for having personnel who have skills in one specific area, as opposed to being utility infielders," said Senator Pat Roberts, Republican of Kansas and the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
That panel's otherwise scathing report on prewar intelligence on Iraq not only spared the Bureau of Intelligence and Research from most of its harsh criticisms, but also explicitly endorsed the dissent it had inserted into the National Intelligence Estimate of 2002, challenging as unsubstantiated the view of other agencies that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program.
In addition, where the 2002 assessment included a prediction by other agencies that Iraq could develop a nuclear weapon within a decade, the State Department bureau said pointedly that it was unwilling to "project a timeline for the completion of activities it does not now see happening."
The bureau was apparently still wrong, along with other intelligence agencies, in asserting that Iraq possessed chemical and biological weapons. But Congressional officials say that over all, its recent record on Iraq has been better than that of its larger rivals, including the C.I.A., with more than 1,500 analysts, and the Defense Intelligence Agency, with more than 3,000.
The example of the State Department bureau, Congressional officials say, is being closely studied as the White House and Congress debate what changes may help intelligence agencies avoid additional failures.
Among other recent successes, the bureau's admirers say, was a classified report in 2003 that criticized the Bush administration view that a victory in Iraq would help spread democracy across the Arab world. It also predicted correctly that Turkey might not permit American troops to cross its territory en route to Iraq and dismissed as "highly dubious" a British contention, now discredited, that Iraq was trying to procure uranium from Niger.
Not surprisingly, the praise that has been directed at the bureau, including a widely noticed column in May by David Ignatius in The Washington Post, has prompted some backbiting at other intelligence agencies from officials who argue that its successes are being exaggerated.
"Everyone has to get it right once in a while," a senior Defense Department official said with some sarcasm.
"It's not in my interest to trash a fellow member of the intelligence community," another senior intelligence official said of the bureau. "But those who think they get it completely right are not completely familiar with the record."
Not even the State Department bureau's admirers say that it alone represents the answer to the kinds of shortcomings discussed in the Senate report, which criticized as unreasonable and unfounded most of the conclusions reached by intelligence agencies on issues related to Iraq and its illicit weapons.
The bureau, with about 300 people in all, including support staff, is too small to shoulder the kind of analytical burden placed on the C.I.A. and the even larger analytical branch of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Its bureaucratic distance from spymasters at the C.I.A., the signals-intelligence mavens at the National Security Agency and the satellite gurus at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency means that it has little interaction with those who actually collect information around the world, intelligence officials say.
Any restructuring, the bureau's admirers say, should preserve debate and rivalry among the intelligence agencies' analytical branches, which in addition to the State Department agency and the C.I.A.'s Directorate of Intelligence include most of the Defense Intelligence Agency; an element of the geospatial agency, which interprets satellite imagery; the intelligence office in the Department of Energy; and analytical offices in the military services.
"The analysts at I.N.R. are a curmudgeonlike group who delight in being different and getting to the body of something and not caring what other people think," said Carl W. Ford Jr., a former career C.I.A. official who led the State Department bureau from 2001 until he retired in late 2003.
But still, Mr. Ford added in an interview, "It is important for all of us in the intelligence community to talk about where we went wrong."
In retrospect, Mr. Ford and current State Department officials say, the bureau should have extended its doubts about others' assessments of Iraq's nuclear program to the issue of chemical and biological weapons. They also credit experts at the Department of Energy, who also operate independently of the White House and the Pentagon, for taking the lead in challenging the C.I.A.'s view on a critical question related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program.
The C.I.A. and other agencies concluded that aluminum tubes shipped to Iraq were intended for use in centrifuges as part of that nuclear program; the Energy Department and the bureau strongly disagreed. But senior State Department officials say they believed that a combination of experience and independence gave their analysts the confidence to challenge the judgments of the C.I.A., the dominant agency within the community.
"We're not flogging the fruits of anybody's collection system," a senior State Department official said. "For us it's information, not looking to advance N.S.A.'s budget or C.I.A.'s saying, `Golly, gee whiz, look what we've got.' "
Altogether, the team of State Department analysts most directly involved in assessing Iraq's political structure, economy, conventional military forces and supposed illicit weapons numbered no more than 10 people, said State Department officials, but many had more than a decade of experience in the subjects on which they were focusing.
Those officials refused to identify the analyst whose dissent on Iraq's nuclear program proved particularly prescient, but said the official had worked on the subject for more than 12 years under a supervisor who had twice as many years of expertise.
As an example of the kind of analyst the State Department bureau embraces, the State Department officials pointed to Thomas Fingar, who was Mr. Ford's principal deputy and is awaiting Senate confirmation to lead the bureau as assistant secretary of state for intelligence and research. Mr. Fingar has spent 19 years at the bureau, having been recruited from Stanford University, where he had spent the previous decade as a political scientist.
In recounting where their bureau got it right on the question of Iraq, State Department officials acknowledge that the success was hollow, in large part because Secretary of State Colin L. Powell ultimately sided with the C.I.A. and not with his own intelligence shop.
In February 2003, Mr. Powell spent several days at C.I.A. headquarters reviewing intelligence in preparation for his Feb. 5 speech to the United Nations Security Council, in which he laid out the administration's case for a possible war against Iraq. Mr. Powell did not invite any officials from the bureau to accompany him as part of the review, and his speech endorsed the very view on Iraq's nuclear weapons from which the bureau had dissented so strongly.
"After reviewing all of the intelligence provided by the Intelligence Community," the Senate committee wrote in its report, the panel "believes that the judgment in the National Intelligence Estimate, that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear program, was not supported by the intelligence."
"The committee agrees with the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research alternative view that the available intelligence `does not add up to a compelling case for reconstitution.' "
----------
White House Mum on Cabinet Intel Post
July 19, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Sept-11-Commission.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The White House said Monday that acting CIA Director John McLaughlin was expressing his personal opinion, and not necessarily the view of the administration, when he said there is no need for a new national intelligence chief.
A bipartisan commission investigating the 2001 hijackings, which will release its final report this week, is expected to recommend the creation of a Cabinet-level position to oversee the nation's 15 intelligence agencies and control their budgets.
Without commenting on establishing an intelligence chief, President Bush said, ``Some of the reforms are necessary: more human intelligence, better ability to listen or to see things, and better coordination amongst the variety of intelligence-gathering services.''
He said he would comment further after seeing the commission's recommendations. Bush also declined to say when he will announce a new CIA chief. ``Still thinking about it ... still taking a good, hard look,'' Bush said.
White House spokesman Scott McClellan declined to say whether the president favored creating a new intelligence post.
McLaughlin said ``a good argument can be made'' for such a post. But, he added on ``Fox News Sunday,'' ``It doesn't relate particularly to the world I live in. I see the director of central intelligence as someone who is able to do that and is empowered to do so under the National Security Act of 1947'' that created the CIA.
``With some modest changes in the way the CIA is set up, the director of central intelligence could carry out that function well and appropriately,'' McLaughlin said.
Asked about this Monday, McClellan said, ``I think he was expressing his views.''
McLaughlin also said his agency has disrupted plots to mount attacks by air, sea and other methods in the United States, adding: ``It's important to remember here that for these people, an attack in the United States is the brass ring.''
McLaughlin took over at the CIA when Director George Tenet left on July 11.
The new post would represent the most drastic step in structuring the intelligence agencies since the CIA was created after World War II.
Former CIA Director James Woolsey, appearing Monday on NBC's ``Today'' show, said he supports the idea.
When the position of director of central intelligence was created, he said, the country did not have several governmental agencies involved in that endeavor.
``I think a Cabinet-level official would be a wise idea,'' Woolsey said. ``I wish people would stop calling him a czar. ... With all these other agencies, I think some coordination at the Cabinet level is probably a good idea.''
Two members of the Senate Intelligence Committee -- Sens. Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga. and Dick Durbin, D-Ill. -- said they would be open to considering the recommendation for a new intelligence chief.
``When you take a look at how important intelligence must be for our future, you realize that the current situation is untenable,'' Durbin said on CNN's ``Late Edition.'' Chambliss cautioned against simply creating more bureaucracy.
The CIA director now has loose authority over the 15 U.S. intelligence agencies. But the commission in a preliminary report found that the director did not hold enough power because the Pentagon controls more than 80 percent of the intelligence budget. As a result, CIA requests to other agencies are often ignored.
The commission's final report, expected to be released Thursday, will highlight intelligence failures by the CIA and the FBI that enabled the Sept. 11 attacks to occur.
But McLaughlin was quick to point out that intelligence agencies have improved intelligence-gathering and operations since the attacks. ``The intelligence community of that day was for counterterrorism, 300 people spread-eagled across a dike. We now have a hundred people who do nothing but watch-listing alone,'' he said.
Potential attacks disrupted since then were in the early stages of planning, he said. And while al-Qaida has been weakened, the threat to America remains. ``We can be successful 1,000 times and these people have to be lucky only once,'' McLaughlin said.
McLaughlin, a 30-year veteran of the agency, said he is not actively campaigning to become permanent CIA chief, but will serve as long as the president wants him to. Some key senators have pressed President Bush to name a permanent replacement for Tenet soon. The White House, however, has refused to be pinned down on a timetable.
-------- un
UN Vote on Israeli Barrier Put Off One More Day
July 19, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-mideast-barrier-un.html
UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Arab diplomats on Monday delayed for a second time a U.N. vote on a resolution demanding that Israel tear down its West Bank barrier, in hopes of winning support from the 25-nation European Union.
While the measure already has enough votes to win passage in the 191-nation General Assembly, the EU is seen by many at the United Nations as a moral compass, able to bring along with it as many as 25 other nations, U.N. diplomats said.
Under the resolution drafted by Palestinian U.N. observer Nasser al-Kidwa, the assembly would pressure Israel to comply with a recent World Court ruling that the barrier was illegal and should be dismantled.
A vote initially had been set for last Friday and would have capped a day-long emergency session of the General Assembly convened at the request of Arab and nonaligned nations.
But voting was postponed until Monday, and then to Tuesday, to give Arab and European Union diplomats more time to try to reach a deal on changes sought by the EU to win its support.
Diplomats said support from the EU and other nations that often vote with the Europeans would bolster a case for sanctions against Israel should it fulfill a vow to ignore the court ruling.
``We had conversations with Mr. al-Kidwa and other Arab diplomats over the weekend. For the EU, we thought it would be very welcome to have another day,'' said one EU diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Negotiations were taking place on two levels: between EU and Arab diplomats and also among EU states themselves, as the European bloc had yet to agree on a common stand among its own members, European diplomats acknowledged.
U.S. Ambassador John Danforth has said repeatedly that Washington opposes the resolution because it was ``unbalanced'' and would further undermine the already moribund Middle East peace process.
AGREES TO ACT
The assembly agreed to take up the measure after the World Court ruled July 9 that the barrier was illegal because it cuts deep into West Bank land dotted with Israeli settlements since the 1967 Middle East War.
The court, formally known as the International Court of Justice and based in The Hague, is the top U.N. legal body.
Palestinians see the 370-mile project, which sweeps deep into West Bank land to shield Israeli settlements, as a land grab that would thwart their dream of statehood.
Israel argues the combination of razor-tipped fencing and concrete is needed to keep out suicide bombers and insists it is only temporary.
The Palestinian draft would affirm ``the illegality of any territorial acquisition resulting from the threat or use of force'' and would demand that Israel dismantle the barrier and pay reparations for any damages caused by its construction.
But while the Palestinian draft would ``accept'' the World Court ruling, some European states including Britain insist it only ``take note'' of the opinion while others want it to ``welcome'' the judgment.
European states are also divided over whether the text should express concern about a section of the court ruling suggesting that under the U.N. Charter, a state had the right to defend itself only against an attack from another state, and not, for example, from a suicide bomber.
Diplomats said most EU states, however, were united in wanting the text to recognize Israeli security concerns and refer to the obligations of both sides under the road map to peace set out by the quartet of Middle East mediators -- the United States, European Union, United Nations and Russia.
-------- us
Grief, Outrage for Families of Dead GIs
by Jay Shaft
July 20, 2004
The NewStandard
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/shaft.php?articleid=3061
Many families of U.S. service members killed in Iraq say the pain of having lost a loved one does not grow easier to deal with as time passes. Some say it only worsens. More and more, the families of men and women killed in Iraq are speaking publicly against the war.
Relentless Grief
Jane Bright of West Hills, Calif., lost her son, Sergeant Evan Ashcraft, a year ago on July 24, 2003, and she says that even after a year, dealing with the loss has not grown easier.
"There is no amount of time that could go by and I wouldn't feel the pain of losing my son," she said. "I live with this every day, I wake up and know my wonderful, loving son is not coming back.
"My grief is not something I could just 'get over'," Bright continued. "I get so mad when people tell me to 'get over it.' How dare they tell me that?" she exclaimed. "I lost a son - it's my right to publicly mourn, and everyone needs to see it."
Philadelphia resident Celeste Zappala's son, Sergeant Sherwood Baker, age 30, died in Iraq on April 27, 2004, leaving behind a wife, Debra, and a son, J.D.
Like all the parents interviewed for this story - each of whom has spoken out publicly against the war since, and in some cases prior to, the death of a son - Zappala said "moving on" seems impossible. "The pain of my son's death does not get any better - it just gets worse as time goes on," she said. "Every day brings a new agony. The rest of our friends and relatives are trying to move on, and I just can't get to that point."
Factors such as concern that their loved ones died for no tangible purpose, as well as the mystery surrounding the circumstances of some of the deaths, weave a common theme among family members taking a stand against the U.S.'s continuing operations in Iraq.
"It was just so unnecessary, and that hurts me," Zappala said. "He died doing his assigned job, but he never had any idea of how to really do it. He just did his duty because they told him it was what he had to do. The government has completely failed to prepare our troops, or give them the proper equipment or ensure their safety.
"They still haven't told me how he really died," she added.
Bill Mitchell of Atascadero, Calif., lost his son, 25 year-old Staff Sergeant Michael W. Mitchell, on April 4, 2004 when fighting broke out in Sadr City. Michael was scheduled to return home in five days.
Mitchell says he experienced early, short-lived success with the coping process. "Right after my son died it was the anger that really kept me going," Mitchell said. "But the anger wore off and I had to say to myself, 'My son is still dead no matter what I do. I have to move on with my life and get over this.' You know what? I really haven't moved on that much. Now I have bad days and good days, instead of all bad days. But the pain still keeps coming up and it's even worse now after I have a day where I thought I almost forgot about it."
The seemingly constant stream of bad news coming out of Iraq keeps Mitchell's grief fresh. "I have a new pain every time some other family loses a child, and I feel their pain mixed with mine. Ah! It gets so agonizing, it's just so bad and just seems like there is no relief."
Cindy Sheehan lost her son, Specialist Casey Austin Sheehan, 24, the same spring day Michael Mitchell died. Their bodies returned home on the same flight to Dover Air Force Base. The Sheehans live in Vacaville, Calif.
"Casey was [killed in action] after he had been over there for two short weeks," Sheehan said. "He had no idea how soon he would be coming home. He was killed instantly and he didn't suffer, but we are suffering enough for everybody.
"It's been three months and I don't really know how I'm feeling. I have panic attacks every day," Sheehan continued. "I returned to work and I have to act like everything is all right, that I'm doing okay. It's very exhausting and stressful, the daily mourning of your children. Then when you have to pretend all day that you're fine, that's really hard. I have two or three panic attacks a day, I cry every day, I just break down all the time.
"I miss my son so much, I just keep crying, I don't know if I'll ever stop," Sheehan said. "I think it doesn't get any better - it gets worse. The reality sets in that you're never gonna see him, and it just keeps getting worse. I still feel like he could walk in the door at any time. It's just hard to accept the fact that he's never coming home. I mean, he's already come home, but he'll never really come back to us the way we want him to."
Sue Niederer's son, Lieutenant Seth Dvorin, died on February 7, 2004. He was 24 years old. Niederer reported that familiar kind of difficulty recovering from her loss. Seth had married his wife, Kelly Harris, just prior to leaving for Iraq last summer.
"Time isn't making this go away or making it easier to cope with," she said. "Months have gone by. You tell me if I sound like I am getting over his death. I don't think so! Not as long as our government sends our children to be sacrificed."
Niederer, who lives in Pennington, N.J., is insistent that Seth's death served no purpose. "I'll say it again. As many times as I have to just so people understand. My son died for absolutely nothing! Absolutely nothing! Am I still angry? You bet I am! Am I still hurting worse than ever? You better believe it!"
Unprepared for the Mission
Celeste Zappala blames her own lack of healing on her assessment that the military failed to adequately prepare her son Sherwood's unit for the policing role it was ordered to carry out.
"How can you get over your son's death when you know he died because he didn't have the proper training?" Zappala asked. "He was never trained for the job of an MP; he was not a policeman. How can I accept his death when it was so unnecessary and such a waste of a good life? He is gone now," she said vehemently, "because they neglected his needs."
Sue Niederer also believes her son Seth's unit was unprepared for the mission it was assigned. "My son died because he didn't have the right equipment for himself or his men," she said. "When he was home on leave he was on the phone to his commander at Fort Drum. He was demanding [global positioning system technology] and computers to protect the safety of his men. Did he get them? You figure it out!"
Neiderer said Seth, a platoon leader, died from an improvised explosive device while at the front of his unit trying to keep his men safe. Seth was the first to die in his platoon of just eighteen. Two others have died since, and three have been severely wounded. "His camaraderie made him go back to Iraq and ended up getting him killed. And the men he was trying desperately to keep safe are dead and his courage couldn't even stop it."
The Pentagon has acknowledged that many units now serving in Iraq are under-equipped, but says it is producing and shipping safety-related materials at the fastest pace possible. Such assurances are little consolation to the families of men and women who have already died overseas, in some cases because the military failed to issue them appropriate equipment.
Speaking Out, Making a Difference
Jane Bright defiantly insists on her prerogative to speak out against the war as a way of dealing with her pain. "Bush wants us to just move on like nothing happened," Bright said. "No," she replied defiantly. "I won't be quiet until everyone knows how bad it hurts. I won't be able to 'get over it' as long as more of our children are dying in Iraq."
Sue Niederer expressed concern that the complicity of other soldiers' families is prolonging the healing process for those whose loved ones have already died. "How can the people stand for this to happen?" she asked. "Do they want their child to die like mine? What is it going to take to stop this? I can't start healing and getting over my pain as long as there are more of our loved ones dying. It makes my son's death pointless."
Celeste Zappala said the killing "must be stopped, before we lose our entire future." She added, "What about all the others who have died since then and will keep on dying? I want to see it stop for all the families and the soldiers most of all.
"How sad," Zappala continued. "How sad that we are still letting this go on. Our voices must make an impression on the people. They have to hear us because we are the ones suffering the most."
Niederer's defiance is palpable. "Face me, President Bush," she taunted as if the president might be listening in. "You are a coward! Come on, look me in the eye and tell me my son's death was worth it! Tell me this war was right and necessary and I'll deck you! You send our children to die and then have the nerve to say they made the ultimate sacrifice for their country. You don't even have the courage to face me or any of the other families! How cowardly! How cowardly!"
Each of the families echoed very similar sentiments and heart-rending grief. They have chosen to speak out because they want the public to know about and intimately understand their pain. They believe that only by having a story to connect with the grief will it hammer home the ongoing loss of life. Only by knowing about the families' pain, they suggest, can people really know the true cost of the war.
While more and more families grieve, units of National Guard, Reserves, and active duty are being called up and notified of the dates they will be sent off to Iraq. The military has even told some troops they are expected to ship out next February or later, confirming most analysts' predictions that the Pentagon and Bush administration have plans to keep troops deployed well into 2006.
Compounding families' losses is their suspicion that their fellow Americans would prefer to ignore the costs of war, if the alternative means facing even part of the pain others cannot avoid. "Is anyone really paying attention?" Cindy Sheehan asked during the interview. "Is this really making a difference? I just don't see it having much impact watching all the people keep going on like nothing is happening. Is this really going to make a difference?"
----
Looking for an 'added edge'
July 19, 2004
By Tom Rachman
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20040718-095535-2021r.htm
ABOARD THE USS HARRY S. TRUMAN - Amid the stench of burning exhaust, fighter jets catapult off the flight deck over the shimmering Mediterranean as part of the first test of a new strategy aimed at exploiting the U.S. Navy's fierce power while cranking up its speed.
The Harry S. Truman heads one of seven Navy carrier battle groups in the "Summer Pulse '04" exercise being conducted from the Pacific to the Atlantic to the Persian Gulf. A goal is to show allies and enemies alike that American maritime might can be tough and nimble in many theaters at once.
"Heretofore, we had always been on a pretty rigid and pretty stiff schedule," said the carrier's commander, Capt. Michael R. Groothousen, speaking softly recently amid shouted commands on the bridge. "Terrorists love predictability, so if you can be unpredictable, that gives us an added edge."
Under the old system, lengthy maintenance and sailor preparation meant fewer ships were available to the Navy at any one time. But the war on terrorism shifted thinking in the U.S. military command.
Last year, the Navy announced a new strategy called the Fleet Response Plan. Summer Pulse '04, which lasts until August, is the Navy's first chance to demonstrate the plan, with joint exercises involving allied nations, advanced training, logistical practice and port visits.
"This Fleet Response Plan is pretty new, and even I don't understand everything," said Lt. j.g.Dana Chapin of Cabool, Mo., who flies Sea Hawk helicopters for anti-submarine operations, search and rescue, and Special Forces support.
"A lot of the families don't necessarily understand it," she said. "The Navy is used to going just six months, and then you're home for a long time. Now you've got to be ready to go maybe for a couple of months at a time, and come home for a couple of months, and maybe go again. So you have to be a little bit more flexible."
The captain said sailors may find the new system "a little more hectic in their lifestyle."
But Capt. Groothousen cited benefits, including "great training opportunities" and visiting more foreign ports. "That's part of the reason that many of the young men and women join the Navy - to see the world," he said.
In the past, a carrier typically deployed overseas for six months, then was at home for 18 months while sailors went back to school in the Navy and the ship was repaired and overhauled. A carrier was combat-capable for only about six months during a two-year cycle, so generally only two of the 11 stateside carriers could be deployed at a given time.
Under the new plan, as many as eight of the Navy's 12 carriers can be readied for sea duty on short notice in case of a crisis. The Navy wants to be able to deploy six carrier strike groups within 30 days, and have two more ready within three months.
Petty Officer 3rd Class Donald Gentry of Baltimore, who works in the Harry S. Truman's medical department, has heard all the Fleet Response Plan briefings, he's read the memos and he knows that major change is afoot. But he also knew what he was getting into when he joined the Navy.
"When you sign the contract, you know it's a 24/7 job. And this is what they're paying you for, so you pretty much have to be there for them," he said. "We can be ready at a moment's notice, and hopefully people will be able to sleep better at night knowing that this is what we're being trained for."
The carriers taking part in Summer Pulse '04 are the Harry S.Truman, USS George Washington and USS Enterprise, based in Norfolk; USS John C. Stennis and USS Ronald Reagan from San Diego; USS Kitty Hawk at Yokosuka, Japan; and USS John F. Kennedy from Mayport, Fla.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- human rights
UN official: Arab world ignores disabled citizens
Few governments make serious efforts to comply with rules set forth in 1993
Abundance of conflict, and permanently handicapped victims, has led Iraq, Palestinian territories to be more progressive than most
By Cilina Nasser
Daily Star staff
Monday, July 19, 2004
http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=10&categ_id=2&article_id=6380
BEIRUT: Governments in the Arab world exclude disabled persons from national development plans, denying over 30 million people their human rights and preventing them from actively contributing to their societies, according to a UN official for disabled persons.
"Nothing concerning disabled persons is on the agendas of Arab governments," said Special Rapporteur on Disability of the UN Commission for Social Development Sheikha Hissa Khalifa Ahmed Al-Thani.
In an interview with The Daily Star, Sheikha Hissa said she was aware of the discrimination, exclusion and marginalization of disabled people, but said nowhere is this felt quite as sharply as in Arab countries.
"Programs, which are the most practical way to give a clear picture of how governments deal with any group in the society, including women, youths or the elderly, have nothing for disabled persons," she said.
Sheikha Hissa said the issue of disabilities is absent from Arab governments' development plans and disability issues are even omitted when statistics are conducted.
Upon her appointment to her post last year, Sheikha Hissa began contacting Arab officials, urging them to implement the Standard Rules on the Equalization of Opportunities for Persons with Disabilities.
The Standard Rules - which were unanimously adopted in the United Nations in 1993 - identify obstacles hindering people with disabilities from fully participating in their societies in order to help governments improve the conditions for the disabled. The rules, which are not legally binding, are guidelines for governments to achieve equal participation in society for persons with disabilities.
But to implement such rules, Sheikha Hissa said top officials must be informed about the rights and needs of persons with disabilities.
On one of the visits she made to an Arab country, which she did not name, Sheikha Hissa said she noticed that high-ranking officials who were in charge of laying out plans in their countries had no idea about issues related to disabled persons.
Others, she said, were implementing some aspects of the Standard Rules but did not know that they were actually doing so.
"This is because there is little awareness regarding disabled persons even among officials who make plans," said Sheikha Hissa, who was appointed to her post by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan for the period 2003-2005.
"That's why raising awareness should not only target people in non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and low-ranking employees, who implement programs drawn up by the government," she said. "Raising awareness should also target high-ranking officials ... decision-makers, such as ministers, members of parliament ... Those who lay out plans and programs, because they are the ones who can make a change."
-------- justice
Secrecy quashes whistle-blower case
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
Monday, July 19, 2004
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/182461_translated.html
The Justice Department appears to be hiding behind national security fears in an attempt to dodge a wrongful dismissal suit.
Former FBI linguist Sibel Edmonds claims she was fired in retaliation for blowing the whistle on security breaches she says hampered translation of documents and communications related to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
She says she reported shoddy wiretap translations and that an interpreter with a relative at a foreign embassy might have compromised national security.
She filed suit to get her job back, but recently a federal judge tossed out her case, not on its merits but on the grounds that hearing her claims might expose government secrets and damage national security. That keeps under wraps the inspector general's report that investigated Edmonds' allegations.
U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton, a Bush appointee, said he couldn't explain himself further because the explanation itself might expose sensitive secrets. He did say that he'd accepted Attorney General John Ashcroft's explanation that the suit could "expose intelligence-gathering methods and disrupt diplomatic relations with foreign governments." The Boston Globe reported that Ashcroft ordered material in the case retroactively classified.
Edmonds must feel a bit like Alice at the tea party, where justice is not being served, and where a secret is a secret but why it's a secret or who says it's a secret is a secret, and we can't tell you why because it's a secret.
-------- prisons / prisoners
The Ghost Prisoners
Exposing our secret interrogation centers-around and outside our laws
villagevoice.com
by Nat Hentoff
July 19th, 2004
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0429/hentoff.php
More than 3,000 suspected terrorists have been arrested in many countries. Many others have met a different fate. Put it this way, they're no longer a problem to the United States and our friends and allies. - President George W. Bush, State of the Union address, February 4, 2003
These are people who were captured in different places in the world-in Pakistan, Morocco, Thailand, Indonesia-handed over to the U.S., and never heard from since. In some cases, we know that they're being held and being questioned; in other cases, we simply have no idea what may have become of them. - Reed Brody, Human Rights Watch, National Public Radio, June 19, 2004
It's essential [for Bush to bolster his position with a national address affirming that] the U.S. will not tolerate abuse of helpless people [even if they] happen to be our mortal enemies. - Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, The Wall Street Journal, June 23, 2004
Battered by national and international outrage at photographs of the naked, contorted bodies of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, the Bush administration selectively released hundreds of classified documents on June 22, purporting to show that the previously leaked Justice Department and Defense Department memoranda justifying torture were just "scholarly" ruminations never to be actually implemented on human beings.
The next day, deep into a front-page New York Times story on this bumbling three-card-monte ploy by the Bush team, there was this key paragraph:
"None of the documents released Tuesday sheds any light on the legal thinking behind the detention of a small number of high-level Qaeda operatives who have been detained by the Central Intelligence Agency at secret locations around the world and who have been subjected to coercive interrogations without access to lawyers or human rights groups."
A major error by the Times limits these ghost prisoners to "a small number." I too was at fault in a previous column, "Disappearing Prisoners" (July 7-13), because, when writing it, I had not yet seen a 43-page, painstakingly annotated report, "Ending Secret Detentions," by an invaluable organization, Human Rights First (formerly named the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights).
The group's previous extensively detailed analyses of the Bush administration's shadow Constitution that is bypassing the Bill of Rights and the separation of powers have been vital to my research for these columns and for my book The War on the Bill of Rights and the Gathering Resistance (Seven Stories Press).
The headline on Human Rights First's press release about this new report, which is now reverberating in news media around the world, is "U.S. Holding Prisoners in More Than Two Dozen Secret Detention Facilities Worldwide." It adds that "at least half of these operate in total secrecy." These offshore prisons are "beyond the reach of adequate supervision, accountability, or law [and the Geneva Conventions]. . . . Human Rights First calls on the Administration to give the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) immediate access to all those it is holding in custody in the 'war on terror.' "
On June 18, National Public Radio's Nina Totenberg reported, on National Public Radio (a persistently useful source on these abuses of international law): "The Red Cross, according to knowledgeable sources, has repeatedly warned administration officials that they were not complying with international law in the treatment of prisoners."
But Donald Rumsfeld, echoing the commander in chief's hollow homilies, said at the Pentagon on June 17: "I have high confidence that I have not seen anything that suggests that a senior civilian or military official of the United States of America has acted in a manner that's inconsistent with the president's request that everyone be treated humanely."
What about the more than 24 secret interrogation centers around the world? Agence France-Presse, having seen Human Rights First's report, noted on June 19: "The U.S. has refused to confirm or deny the report on secret detention cells"-not wanting, said an official in Afghanistan, to give "our enemy too much information." The news agency quoted-from Geneva-Erof Bosisio of the International Committee of the Red Cross:
"We are more and more concerned about the lot of the unknown number of people captured . . . and detained in secret places. We have asked for information on these people and access to them. Until now we have received no response from the Americans."
But on June 1, Republican senator John McCain, for many years imprisoned and tortured by the North Vietnamese, reminded the president and the defense secretary: "It is critical to realize that the Red Cross and the Geneva Conventions do not endanger American soldiers, they protect them. Our soldiers enter battle with the knowledge that should they be taken prisoner, there are laws intended to protect them and impartial international observers to inquire after them."
By hiding what may very well be intensely coercive interrogations-torture?-of these ghost prisoners, the Bush administration is giving added license to forces that capture American soldiers and also have no regard for international law.
In addition to hundreds held in Afghanistan and at Guantánamo Bay, Human Rights First emphasizes, "thousands [are] held in more than a dozen locations in Iraq, some officially undisclosed, and an unknown number in Pakistan, Jordan, Diego Garcia, and on U.S. warships at sea."
Where are the members of the House and Senate intelligence committees who have insisted on implementing the Supreme Court's ruling that anyone held in our custody be given due process-the right to defend themselves publicly?
-------- POLITICS
-------- investigations
Sept. 11 Commission Plans a Lobbying Campaign
July 19, 2004
By PHILIP SHENON
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/19/politics/19panels.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, July 18 - Members of the independent Sept. 11 commission say they will mount an aggressive nationwide lobbying campaign to pressure the White House and Congress to overhaul the nation's intelligence agencies, an effort they say will begin this week with release of a unanimous final report criticizing virtually every element of the way the government collects and shares intelligence.
The lobbying effort would be a break with tradition, since blue-ribbon federal commissions often disband almost as soon as they have completed a final report, the members returning home from Washington and leaving the report to speak for itself.
Members of the Sept. 11 commission say they have decided that given the gravity of terrorist threats that the nation continues to face, they cannot allow their recommendations to be ignored, especially since President Bush has already said he is willing to consider a shakeup of intelligence agencies and Congress is already considering several proposals that mirror the commission's expected recommendations.
"I believe we have the perfect storm," said Timothy J. Roemer, a Democratic member of the commission and a former House member from Indiana.
He noted that the Sept. 11 report would be made public only two weeks after the release of a blistering Senate Intelligence Committee report that found that the Central Intelligence Agency and other intelligence agencies had systematically overstated the threat posed by Iraq before last year's invasion.
The bipartisan Senate report brought new calls for an overhaul of the C.I.A., which is also expected to be a central target of criticism by the Sept. 11 commission. Mr. Roemer said the commission's report, which is expected to be made public on Thursday, would add to the momentum for change.
"We've said many times that the Congress and the executive branch will have to make serious changes, and I expect that the 9/11 commissioners will be part of that process," Mr. Roemer said in explaining the panel's lobbying plans. "Now, for us, the hard work begins."
In interviews, commissioners said they were preparing a series of appearances on Capitol Hill through the summer and fall. That effort will be matched outside Washington with speaking engagements, television and radio appearances and promotional efforts linked to a private mass-market authorized version of the report that is expected to reach stores around the country within hours of its release in Washington.
While the White House has said it is receptive to the panel's findings, it is not clear that the Bush administration will welcome a lobbying campaign by the commission to promote its report in the midst of the presidential campaign.
The report is expected to document intelligence and law enforcement failures that occurred in the Bush and Clinton administrations. Republican campaign strategists have long said they fear that Democrats will seize on the report to question why Mr. Bush and his deputies did not respond more aggressively in the spring and summer of 2001 to intelligence warnings of an imminent, possibly catastrophic terrorist attack.
John F. Lehman, a Republican commissioner who was Navy secretary in the Reagan administration, said the commission was eager to keep its report and its subsequent lobbying efforts above presidential politics.
"I think there is now broad acceptance across the political spectrum of the need for fundamental change," Mr. Lehman said. "This report cannot be interpreted as any attack on the Bush administration. These are problems that are very longstanding."
He said that President Bush would almost certainly want to respond to criticism of his performance by pointing to any evidence in the report suggesting that the Clinton administration had also done too little to deal with terrorist threats.
"The Bush campaign will be making the case that there were eight years of dramatic evidence that this threat was aimed at the United States," Mr. Lehman said. "The thrust of our report is not to try to place blame relative to one administration or the other, but just to state the facts. We can't help how people interpret that."
Commission members have said they are barred from discussing details of the report, citing an agreement not to divulge its contents until it is made public.
But government officials who have read or been briefed on the recommendations, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the report would call for a major restructuring of intelligence agencies and the creation of a cabinet-level national intelligence director to oversee the government's 15 intelligence agencies. Bills recently introduced in both the House and the Senate would create such a post. The bills are expected to draw fierce opposition from intelligence agencies concerned about ceding some of their power.
The acting director of central intelligence, John McLaughlin, said in an interview on Sunday on Fox News that it might be better to increase the oversight powers of his job rather than create a new post and "add an additional layer of bureaucracy" to the intelligence community.
While refusing to divulge details of the report, Mr. Lehman said the commission would call for "reforms that are going to be very extensive."
"It's not going to be tinkering around the edges," he said of the legislative package the panel would recommend. "It's going to be very substantial and systemic. And it's not just the intelligence community. The intelligence community will be an important part of it. But there are other things: domestic security and airport security and first responders."
Given the subject of the 19-month investigation, the report by the Sept. 11 commission, known formally as the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, was always going to have a large readership.
But the commission has made special efforts to guarantee that, signing a deal with a private publisher, W. W. Norton, for an authorized version of the report, which is expected to total more than 500 pages.
Under the agreement, no money is to be paid to the commission, and Norton has agreed in return to publish 500,000 copies and to make them available at stores throughout the country almost immediately after the report is made public. Publishing industry executives say that the $10 retail price is relatively low for a book of its size.
"The American people will have access to this report," said Al Felzenberg, the commission's chief spokesman. "If it's not in stores the minute that it's released in Washington, it will certainly be there very soon, within hours, not days."
He said the commission had also gone to unusual lengths to ensure that the full report would be instantly available on the commission's Web site (www.9-11commission.gov) on the day of its release.
Mr. Felzenberg said the panel's members had already begun considering a series of speaking engagements outside Washington this summer and fall in which they would explain why the commission's recommendations needed to be adopted quickly.
"We need to take this out of the Beltway, to take it into the country," he said. "We certainly hope that the recommendations become policy and that we act with all deliberate speed in making that happen. That means that the commissioners will continue to speak out. There have already been a lot of invitations for them to speak at prominent forums around the country."
--------
The Man Behind The Curtain
tompaine.com
John Prados
July 19, 2004
http://www.tompaine.com/articles/the_man_behind_the_curtain.php
What exactly can we deduce from the Senate Intelligence Committee Report about President Bush's role in pushing faulty Iraq intelligence? Because the Senate isn't taking up the question of how the intelligence was used, many are saying the report neither indicts or exonerates the president. Not exactly, says Prados, an analyst at the NSA. He points to several facts that show the intelligence used to sell the war was an afterthought for the White House.
John Prados is a senior analyst with the National Security Archive. His current books are Hoodwinked: The Documents That Reveal How Bush Sold Us a War (the New Press), and Inside the Pentagon Papers (University Press of Kansas).
Sen. Pat Roberts, the Kansas Republican who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee that last week issued a massive report on its investigation into the prewar intelligence on Iraq, told us on July 14 that, if President George W. Bush had been given accurate intelligence information on Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction, "I don't think the president would have said that military action is justified right now." A week ago, in releasing the Senate's investigative report, Roberts replied, "I don't know," when asked if Congress would have approved the Iraq war had it had the knowledge of the intelligence reporting that we have today. The latest sally is an attempt to excuse President Bush as the victim of CIA phony threat-mongering. But the implication that President Bush, absent the Iraqi weapons, would not have gone after Saddam is false. The record of the months before the war and other data shows Bush's intent quite clearly. The Senate Intelligence Committee report adds even more to that record.
An Intention To Oust Saddam
There are those who would date the intention to get Saddam to the late 1990s, to the neocons' letter campaign and the Iraq Liberation Support Act passed in 1998, and we have the word of former treasury secretary Paul O'Neill that President Bush was thinking along these lines from his first days in office. There is independent evidence that the bulk of Bush's get-acquainted session with the Joint Chiefs of Staff actually involved a discussion of Iraq options. But even giving President Bush the benefit of the doubt over the degree to which he backed Colin Powell's early pursuit of "smart sanctions" for Iraq, the president had his National Security Council considering an Iraq "liberation" strategy by the summer of 2001 and the NSC Deputies Committee met on that subject five times before the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Bush signed an order directing the U.S. military to begin planning against Iraq on Sept. 17, 2001. The orders were a codicil to the national security directive to attack Afghanistan and Osama bin Laden. The responsible "joint command" of the U.S. military, Central Command (CENTCOM), designated the Third Army as headquarters for a coalition land force two months later. Two Army colonels, Mike Fitzgerald and Kevin Benson, led the planning groups at CENTCOM and Third Army respectively. The very next day, November 21, President Bush was asking defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld to tell him what the options were on Iraq. General R. Tommy Franks of CENTCOM presented his initial invasion concept to Rumsfeld on December 4. The rough concept would be presented to Bush just days after Christmas. All of this long predated any of the intelligence manipulations regarding Iraqi weapons.
Then consider the Bush administration's diplomatic stage-setting. Secretary of State Colin Powell told Congress in the second week of February 2002 that the United States was considering a variety of possibilities for regime change in Iraq. In March, Vice President Richard Cheney made a tour of the Middle East and Persian Gulf states along with Great Britain, attempting to line up allies for an invasion. That Cheney got a cold shoulder in everywhere except in London, and that this development did nothing to turn aside the Bush administration initiative says volumes about the intentions of the American president. To fast forward for a moment, the British government has conducted its own official inquiry into Iraq prewar intelligence, and the result, the so-called Butler Report-like that of the Senate intelligence committee in this country-has recently been declassified and released. The Butler Report shows that when President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair met at the Bush Ranch in Crawford Texas on April 6 and 7, 2002, the option on the table was already "sustaining the pressure on the Iraqi regime" and that much of the discussion concerned the need for "effective presentational activity." Bush himself told a television interviewer, "I made up my mind that Saddam needs to go."
Interpreting The NIE On Iraq
This brings us to the first fresh bit of the intelligence story. It turns out that the now-notorious CIA White Paper, with its distortions and exaggerations, was originally commissioned in May 2002 by orders to the CIA from the NSC Deputies Committee (the white paper never actually reached the public eye until October). This ball was hit out of the White House court; it was not the product of executive action taken as the result Bush's sudden receipt of alarming intelligence. On June 19, General Franks briefed the president on the newest version of the war plan, and Bush signed a directive to the Joint Chiefs of Staff to prepare to carry out war against Iraq eleven days later. Again, this was not on the basis of U.S. intelligence.
Some of the best evidence that the Iraq war was purposeful and not the result of an intelligence failure is what did not happen. The usual schema for conceptualizing the making of decisions is that a president has some idea for policy, he asks U.S. intelligence for an estimate in order to understand the necessity-or the difficulties inherent in his idea-and he decides after reviewing the intelligence input. In the case of Iraq, the Senate Intelligence Committee now documents, the Bush administration never asked for a National Intelligence Estimate at all, not regarding Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, not even on the capabilities of Iraqi conventional forces to resist a U.S. invasion! Excepting sudden contingencies (Dominican Republic in 1965, Grenada in 1983, Panama in 1989), this is the first time in modern history that the United States has engaged in a war without the president first seeking a formal intelligence evaluation. The only reason a National Intelligence Estimate was done on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction was because it was requested by Congress, then facing Bush's demand for a resolution authorizing him to use force against Iraq. An NIE done in response to Congressional request is, again, an extreme rarity in the U.S. intelligence business.
The Iraq NIE did contain numerous alarming allegations regarding weapons of mass destruction, and the Senate report makes clear that most of them were poorly substantiated, based on a train of assumptions, sometimes in the face of contradictory evidence, and, on occasion, even made up. But the CIA was doing its job, as far as the president was concerned. The purpose of the estimate was to convince Congress to vote for war-not to inform the Bush administration about the Iraqi threat.
There is a lengthy story to be told as to how, over the summer and fall of 2002, President George W. Bush used his public appearances to create the specter of an Iraqi threat, and how Bush contrived that his senior officials assist in that endeavor. Much as Richard Cheney, or Rumsfeld, or Wolfowitz or Rice, or any of the others, were in the public eye, it was President Bush, not anyone else, who was the man behind the curtain. Keep your eye on him. Now he wants to evade accountability by pleading it was the CIA's fault.
-------- propaganda wars
Clinton reopens book on Iraqi bid to buy uranium in Africa
Michael White, political editor
Monday July 19, 2004
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1264122,00.html
Tony Blair's ally and former US president Bill Clinton yesterday reopened the sensitive issue of Saddam Hussein's attempts to buy uranium in Africa.
Speaking on BBC1's Breakfast with Frost, Mr Clinton, who is promoting his memoirs, said there was "no evidence" the CIA had ever told George Bush about the claim.
Though it has not been stated in the four official inquiries into British intelligence, London's source for its claims about Iraqi efforts to buy uranium - widely repeated in the US until discredited - almost certainly came from French intelligence.
France has much influence in Niger, the west African state in which Iraq allegedly tried to buy the so-called "yellow cake".
A convention between intelligence services allows a provider of data shared with an ally to control further dissemination. British sources say that Paris, in this instance, refused further dissemination, even when the US basis for a similar claim proved to come from crudely forged documents.
The Butler report said "there was some evidence that by 2002 an agreement for a sale had been reached", and that statements in the UK government's dossier and by the prime minister to the commons about Iraqi attempts to buy such ore "were well-founded".
Mr Clinton told Sir David Frost: "Let me just say one other thing. Now this doesn't apply to the UK, it applies to America. There is no evidence that the CIA told the president or the White House that Saddam Hussein had gotten uranium yellow cake from Niger, or was close to having a nuclear weapon, a representation that was made.
"Now the intelligence in the UK may have told Prime Minister Blair but the evidence is to the contrary in America. And there is no evidence that the CIA ever said that Saddam Hussein was tied to al-Qaida and could have had anything to do with September 11 directly or indirectly," he said.
The implication of his remarks was that untrustworthy sources had briefed the White House and other agencies.
The moral, he said, was not to blame the CIA or other agencies for things they had not done or got wrong.
----
Iraq War Could Harm War On Terrorism
If Bush Has Plans For Another Preemptive War, He Should Forget It
July 16, 2004
http://www.thelouisvillechannel.com/helenthomas/3539227/detail.html
WASHINGTON -- If President Bush has any grand plan for another preemptive war, he had better forget it.
Bush has crash landed on the fallacy of the invasion of Iraq. It will take time for the self-described "war president" to make a recovery.
It brings to mind an old saying: "Some day they will give a war and nobody will come."
The Senate Intelligence Committee recently delivered a thorough trashing to the U.S. intelligence that nourished administration hawks in their rush to invade Iraq.
The senators unanimously -- Republicans and Democrats -- rejected the reasons Bush had given to justify his attack.
The panel summed up the American intelligence about Iraq's links with al Qaida and Iraq's weapons programs as "false, overstated, and deeply flawed."
If nothing else, that condemnation should rid Bush of any ideas he may have for other ill-advised preemptive wars in the Middle East or for "preventive wars," as they are euphemistically called.
The bad news is that Bush shows no indication that he has learned the lesson.
Earlier this week, Bush told a campaign rally in Marquette, Mich., that "America must remember the lessons of Sept. 11. We must confront serious dangers before they materialize."
This is another indication that he still endorses preemptive war. The president's comment also stands as further evidence of the administration's dishonest -- and continuing -- propaganda program aimed at merging the war on terrorism with the war on Iraq.
Days after the Senate committee's report, a British inquiry also found its government intelligence "seriously flawed" in drumming up excuses for the war.
Although the U.K. inquiry absolved Prime Minister Tony Blair of "deliberate distortion" or "culpable negligence," Blair said he assumed "full personal responsibility" for the fact that no weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq, despite his frightening warnings of imminent danger.
Faced with the grim reality that their original public rationales for war have been demolished, Bush and Blair have resorted to a vague feel-good generalization that "the world is better off" without Saddam Hussein in power.
While Blair did a mea culpa, we have yet to hear a similar refrain from Bush.
If it matters at this stage of the game, unprovoked attacks against other nations are illegal under international law and the United Nations charter, which American leaders helped draft after World War II.
Meanwhile, Bush's vaunted "coalition of the willing" -- never much to begin with -- is facing vaporization.
A small troop contingent from the Philippines is pulling out of Iraq at the end of the month to save the life of a Filipino captive held by Iraqi insurgents.
Four countries have already left: Spain, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua and Honduras. Planning to depart soon: Norway, Thailand and New Zealand.
These allies trickle out as the White House and the Pentagon struggle with credibility problems created by their sorry record in truth telling about the war. One wonders if the administration can ever recover the trust it needs to rally the necessary public support for the war against terrorism.
There are two other institutions that should indulge in serious self-examination.
One is the American news media, which -- generally speaking -- accepted the administration's jingoistic march to war without skepticism.
The other is Congress, which gave Bush a blank check to invade without deeply probing the reasons.
The lawmakers should be asked if they still would have voted to go to war, knowing what they know now.
Although popular support for the Iraq war is waning, both Sens. John Kerry of Massachusetts and John Edwards of North Carolina -- the presumed Democratic Party standard bearers in the Nov. 2 election -- are playing it politically safe -- too safe.
Incredibly, both continue to defend their pro-war votes in the Senate, instead of saying that they, like the American public, were misled by the Bush administration.
Challengers are expected to make a difference. On the question of the Iraq war, Kerry has passed up a chance to offer voters a choice.
(Helen Thomas can be reached at the e-mail address hthomas@hearstdc.com).
----
Clinton reopens book on Iraqi bid to buy uranium in Africa
Michael White,
Monday July 19, 2004
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1264122,00.html
Tony Blair's ally and former US president Bill Clinton yesterday reopened the sensitive issue of Saddam Hussein's attempts to buy uranium in Africa.
Speaking on BBC1's Breakfast with Frost, Mr Clinton, who is promoting his memoirs, said there was "no evidence" the CIA had ever told George Bush about the claim.
Though it has not been stated in the four official inquiries into British intelligence, London's source for its claims about Iraqi efforts to buy uranium - widely repeated in the US until discredited - almost certainly came from French intelligence.
France has much influence in Niger, the west African state in which Iraq allegedly tried to buy the so-called "yellow cake".
A convention between intelligence services allows a provider of data shared with an ally to control further dissemination. British sources say that Paris, in this instance, refused further dissemination, even when the US basis for a similar claim proved to come from crudely forged documents.
The Butler report said "there was some evidence that by 2002 an agreement for a sale had been reached", and that statements in the UK government's dossier and by the prime minister to the commons about Iraqi attempts to buy such ore "were well-founded".
Mr Clinton told Sir David Frost: "Let me just say one other thing. Now this doesn't apply to the UK, it applies to America. There is no evidence that the CIA told the president or the White House that Saddam Hussein had gotten uranium yellow cake from Niger, or was close to having a nuclear weapon, a representation that was made.
"Now the intelligence in the UK may have told Prime Minister Blair but the evidence is to the contrary in America. And there is no evidence that the CIA ever said that Saddam Hussein was tied to al-Qaida and could have had anything to do with September 11 directly or indirectly," he said.
The implication of his remarks was that untrustworthy sources had briefed the White House and other agencies.
The moral, he said, was not to blame the CIA or other agencies for things they had not done or got wrong.
----
Bush: U.S. Looking Into Whether Iran Involved In 9 / 11
July 19, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/politics/politics-security-iran-qaeda.html
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Bush said on Monday the United States was trying to determine whether Iran was involved in the Sept. 11 plot and accused the government of harboring al Qaeda leaders.
``We want to know all of the facts,'' Bush said when asked about reports that at least eight of the 19 hijackers passed through Iran before attacking the United States.
The commission investigating the attacks will detail these and other al Qaeda links to Iran in its final report this week, raising new questions about why Bush turned his focus to Iraq soon after Sept. 11, 2001. The commission has found more al Qaeda contacts with Iran than with Iraq, officials said.
White House spokesman Scott McClellan said there was ``no evidence that there was any official involvement between Iran and the Sept. 11 attacks.''
The U.S. intelligence community has been harshly criticized for overstating the Iraqi threat before the war, leading to calls for its overhaul and for the creation of a Cabinet-level intelligence czar. McClellan said Bush was willing to consider this step, although acting CIA director John McLaughlin on Sunday questioned whether it was necessary.
Bush noted McLaughlin had said ``there was no direct connection between Iran and the attacks of Sept. 11.''
But Bush said the case was not closed. ``We will continue to look and see if the Iranians were involved... As to direct connections with Sept. 11, we're digging into the facts to determine if there was one,'' he said.
'HARBORING AL QAEDA'
Bush said Iran, which he branded part of an ``axis of evil'' along with Iraq and North Korea, was ``harboring al Qaeda leadership.'' He urged Tehran to have them ``turned over to their respective countries'' of origin.
``If the Iranians would like to have better relations with the United States there are some things they must do,'' including halting the country's alleged nuclear weapons program and support for terrorism, Bush said.
Former CIA director Robert Gates, who co-authored a Council on Foreign Relations report on Iran, said al Qaeda ``probably has either, if not used Iran as base, then used it for safe passage and various other things.''
Former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, who worked with Gates, said reports of the passage through Iran of al Qaeda operatives prior to Sept. 11, 2001 is ``not direct evidence that they are complicit in 9/11.''
The New York Times reported on Sunday that the Iranian government had ordered its border guards not to stamp the passports of Saudi al Qaeda members moving through Iran after training in Afghanistan.
An Iranian stamp could have made the al Qaeda members subject to additional scrutiny upon entering the United States, U.S. officials said.
Iran acknowledged some of the Sept. 11 attackers may have passed through illegally, but said it had since tightened border controls. It said any attempts to tie the country to al Qaeda, the militant network which carried out the attacks, were part of U.S. election-year ``news propaganda.''
--------
Lack of Iran Contacts Said Harming U.S. Interests
July 19, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-iran-usa-report.html
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The lack of sustained engagement with Iran over the last 25 years is harming U.S. interests at a time when America is engaged to an unprecedented extent in the Middle East and Central Asia, according to a panel of experts and former U.S. officials.
In a report published on Monday by the Council on Foreign Relations, a think tank, the panel warned that ``overcoming the absence of any U.S.-Iranian contacts may be the only alternative to ... force'' to assuage U.S. concerns about Iran's behavior.
It recommended that Washington change its approach to a ``selective'' engagement with Iran that includes incentives, like the prospect of U.S. commercial ties, as well as penalties, in an effort to resolve a growing nuclear problem and stabilize the Middle East,
The findings were released during a U.S. election campaign that is focused on President Bush's foreign policy leadership and amid rising American fears that Iran is galloping ahead in a quest to build a nuclear bomb.
Throughout its tenure, Bush's administration has been divided over whether to reach out to Iran after a quarter-century of hostility or to toughen its approach.
Democratic presidential challenger John Kerry has signaled an interest in greater engagement with Tehran.
The task force, chaired by former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski and former CIA Director Robert Gates, concluded that ``the current lack of sustained engagement with Iran harms U.S. interests in a critical region of the world and that direct dialogue with Tehran on specific areas of mutual concern should be pursued.''
DIALOGUE URGED
A U.S.-Iran political dialogue should not be deferred until differences over Iran's nuclear ambitions and its involvement in regional conflicts have been resolved, the report said.
``Rather, the process of selective political engagement itself represents a potentially effective path for addressing those differences'' as was seen in U.S. engagement with China and the former Soviet Union.
Lying ``at the heart of the arc of the crisis in the Middle East,'' Iran has such intricate ties to Iraq and Afghanistan -- sites of major U.S. military operations -- that it is a ``critical actor'' in both countries' postwar evolution, the report added.
The report called Iran's nuclear ambitions ``one of the most urgent issues'' facing the United States.
Task force members were divided on whether Tehran is fully committed to developing a nuclear weapon.
But they agreed that, even while cooperating with U.N. nuclear monitors, Iran will continue ``attempting to conceal the scope of its nuclear program in order to keep its options open as long as possible.''
Iran hid its nuclear activities for 18 years until they were exposed by an Iranian opposition group in 2002 and then inspected by the U.N. nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Tehran denies U.S. charges it is using a civilian nuclear program to conceal a covert bid for nuclear arms.
Some U.S. estimates say Iran could have a nuclear bomb by 2006 if no steps are taken to slow the program.
The panel rejected a ``grand bargain'' that would seek to settle comprehensively all U.S.-Iran conflicts, including U.S. allegations that Iran backs terrorism, undermines Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts and stirs problems in Iraq.
The United States and Iran have not had diplomatic ties since the 1979 Islamic revolution when student fundamentalists held 52 American hostages for 444 days.
-------- us politics
Proposal to Have U.N. Monitor Elections Ends in Partisan Clash
By Dan Morgan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, July 19, 2004; Page A15
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A60143-2004Jul18.html
House Republicans view a recent move by 11 Democrats to have United Nations observers monitor U.S. elections as a politically motivated stunt, and last week they moved to nip the idea in the bud.
But after an unusually rancorous skirmish that brought proceedings on the House floor to a standstill late Thursday, the issue may have received more publicity than even Democrats hoped for.
It pitted Rep. Steve Buyer (R-Ind.), author of an amendment to the 2005 foreign aid bill aimed at blocking U.N. involvement in U.S. elections, against Rep. Corrine Brown (D-Fla.), who had harsh words for Buyer.
Buyer had been describing a July 1 letter from Democrats to U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, requesting that he send observers to "monitor" this fall's elections, as "rather foolish, nonsense and silly."
"Imagine on Election Day you get up, you have your breakfast, you grab your coffee and your Danish, and you are going to go to the voting booth," Buyer said. "When you show up, you are curious because you see a white van out there that says the U.N. beside it and little blue helmets. The United Nations has arrived; we are going to ensure the integrity of the American electoral process. . . . I don't think so."
When Brown's turn came, she tore into Buyer.
"I come from Florida where you and others participated in what I call the United States coup d'état," she said. "We need to make sure that it does not happen again. Over and over again, after the election, when you stole the election, you came back here and said get over it."
An irate Buyer then halted the debate and demanded that Brown's words be "taken down," a step that can lead to a formal House reprimand.
After a 20-minute conference with the House parliamentarian, Acting Speaker Doug Ose (R-Calif.) issued a ruling: "Members should not accuse other members of committing a crime, such as stealing an election. By accusing an identifiable member of stealing an election, the gentlewoman's words are not in order."
Brown appealed the ruling, Buyer attempted to table the appeal and Brown then demanded a recorded vote. Proceedings continued on hold for more than a half-hour, as members returned to the chamber from functions around town.
The straight party-line vote of 219 to 187 upheld the ruling that Brown was out of order. By 243 to 161, the House then approved Buyer's amendment barring any U.S. funds from being used by the United Nations to monitor elections here. Thirty-three Democrats joined a solid block of 210 Republicans in that vote.
-------- ENERGY
-------- alternative energy
Feds Award $25 Million in Biomass Energy Research Grants
July 19, 2004
WASHINGTON, DC, (ENS)
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/jul2004/2004-07-19-09.asp#anchor7
Some of the largest corporations in the country have won grants from the federal government to research energy production from biomass such as forest thinnings.
Weyerhaeuser Company of Vanceboro, North Carolina was awarded $1.07 million for the advancement of high temperature black liquor gasification technology. Black liquor is the spent liquid left after the chemical process of turning wood into pulp for papermaking.
Rohm and Haas Company of Spring House, Pennsylvania, a specialty materials company with annual sales revenue of US$6.4 billion, was granted $2 million to develop new sustainable chemistry for adhesives, elastomers and foams.
These are two of the 22 projects that will receive $25.48 million in federal funds as part of the Biomass Research and Development Initiative, according to Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham and Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman.
Including the cost sharing of the private sector partners, the officials said Friday, the total value of the projects is nearly $38 million.
The joint grant program is part of the Bush administration's effort to increase America's energy independence through the development of additional renewable energy resources from the agricultural and agroforestry sectors.
Increased demand for production and processing of biomass will support traditional U.S. commodities such as corn, as well as create new cash crops for America's farmers and foresters said Abraham and Veneman.
"A new bioindustry will also encourage better use of agricultural and forestry residues, such as woody biomass. New processing facilities resulting from this increased demand will help stimulate rural communities and economies," they said.
In December 2003, President George W. Bush signed the Healthy Forest Restoration Act, which was aimed at reducing forest fire risks by making productive use of thinnings from forest lands. The brush and small diameter trees taken from public forests could be converted into multiple forms of fuel, the officials said.
"Our agencies have been working together over the last few years to promote our nation's biomass resources, which we believe will enhance our energy security, provide for a cleaner environment, and help to revitalize America's rural economy," said Energy Secretary Abraham.
"The projects announced today will move us closer to our goal of establishing biorefineries that produce power, fuels, chemicals and other valuable products," he said.
Some of the grants went to non-corporate organizations. In 2002, the Imperial Young Farmers and Ranchers of Imperial, Nebraska won a $40,000 grant to conduct a feasibility study for developing a biomass ethanol and electric facility that utilizes waste crops such as corn stover and wheat straw.
On Friday, the Imperial Young Farmers and Ranchers was granted $2 million for a project entitled, "Biomass Opportunity for Imperial Nebraska Region: What is the Value?" No description of this project was given, but the value is clear - it is $2 million at the very least.
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