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NUCLEAR
U.N.: Uranium Mine Poses Security Threat
Nuke ammo transport worries county
DOE Issues Records of Decision to Build and Operate
Bacteria link to Gulf war illness discounted
Study concludes antibiotics don't relieve so-called Gulf War syndrome
UN nuclear inspectors return to Iraq in coming days: ElBaradei
U.N. Weapons Inspectors Bound for Iraq
Iraq Requests Return of UN Weapons Inspectors
Israel Ready to Strike Iran
US lawmakers urge greater effort in talks on North Korea's nuclear program
Russia has scrapped 101 nuclear submarines
The UN, Al-Tuwaitha, and Nukes
Three Fuel Pieces Missing at Humboldt Bay Nuclear Power Plant
Nuclear-waste games
Atomic board rules on LES contentions
Probe begins into security lapses at top US nuclear weapons lab
Malfunction Prompts Ohio Nuke Plant Alert
Officials push for nuke waste removal
DOE, Oliver Springs working together
Canvassers stump to clean Hanford
DOE to halt waste shipments
What are the environmental threats to Native Americans and their lands?
MILITARY
A Bounty of Food Relief Sits Unused In Zimbabwe
Rights Group Says Sudan's Government Aided Militias
Rights Group Says Sudan Aids Abuses
Malaysia to buy Chinese missiles for technology transfer
Romania selling off last of its Soviet-era MiG-29s
Source: FBI anthrax probe closes labs at Fort Detrick
Basic Training Doesn't Guard Against Insurance Pitch to G.I.'s
Taiwan set for military exercises, coinciding with Chinese, US drills
Taiwan Ready to Hold Rare Military Drill
Baghdad Blast Kills At Least 9
Iraqi Defense Aide Killed; 9 Die in Baghdad Bombing
Arafat Scrambles to Calm Rebellion
Palestinian Premier to Stay in Post for Now
Arafat Struggles to Pacify Gaza; Israeli Judge Is Killed
Iraqi Militants Release Hostage After Philippines Withdraws
U.S. Probes Possible Iran-9/11 Link
Bush, CIA at Odds on Iran
Marine Says He Was Held Captive in Iraq
Marine Who Was Missing for 3 Weeks Denies He Deserted in Iraq
FBI anthrax probe closes some Army labs
Arrested Rwanda Genocide Suspect to Stand Trial
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
High Court Asked to End Executions Of Minors
Dozens of Nations Weigh In on Death Penalty Case
In Boston, all eyes on convention
Governors Tell of War's Impact on Local Needs
Berger Time What goes on in the pants of a highly flappable official
U.N. Reports 50 Million Displaced People
Justice Dept. Seeks Decision on Sentencing
Interview: EU anti-terror chief De Vries
POLITICS
Clinton Aide Faces Inquiry for Taking Classified Documents
FBI Probes Berger for Document Removal
Parties Square Off In a Database Duel Voter Information Shapes Strategies
Senate Panel OKs Flag - Burning Amendment
ENERGY
DaimlerChrysler aims for mass-market, hydrogen-fueled cars in 10 years
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- africa
U.N.: Uranium Mine Poses Security Threat
July 20, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/science/AP-Uranium-Mine.html
KINSHASA, Congo (AP) -- Massive illicit digging at the uranium mine that fueled the Nagasaki and Hiroshima bombs threatens to put the mine's nuclear ore into terrorist hands, U.N. investigators warned on Tuesday.
The 15,000 miners now working east Congo's Shinkolobwe mine without authorization from the government risk contracting cancer and developing other health problems because of high radiation levels at the site, concluded investigators from the U.N. mission in Congo.
Privatizing the mine could bring illicit mining under control, suggested U.N. investigators, who launched their inquiry earlier this month after part of the mine caved in, killing seven miners.
U.N. authorities ``recommended that this mine be secured and put in the charge of a private operation for much more disciplined operations, with the aim of avoiding risks including the high rate of radioactivity ... and uranium trafficking with those who shouldn't get it in their hands,'' U.N. mission spokesman Alexandre Essome said in Lubumbashi, capital of Congo's mineral-rich Katanga province.
Uranium from the mine was used in the nuclear bombs the United States dropped on Japan in World War II.
Congo's colonial ruler, Belgium, stopped uranium mining at the site around the time of independence in 1960, and filled the main shaft with concrete.
But widespread mining has continued in the area, though most miners are digging for cobalt at the site -- not uranium.
President Joseph Kabila earlier this year ordered all mining there stopped, acting under pressure from the United States and others who feared terrorists might use the mine as a source of uranium.
But the presidential order has been widely ignored.
``We urge rigorous control by the Congolese government on those who buy and sell uranium coming from that mine,'' Essome said.
Geologists also concluded the uranium poses a health risk not only for the miners but for their women and children, some of whom live in the shaft, investigators said.
-------- depleted uranium
Nuke ammo transport worries county
JACK MABB,
07/20/2004,
Phoenix AZ Independent News
http://www.zwire.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=12402488&BRD=248&PAG=461&dept_id=462341&rfi=6
HUDSON-At any given time radioactive material in the form of depleted uranium from nuclear power plants and munitions may be traveling the rails and roadways of America.
And while local officials understand the need for security surrounding these shipments, a growing number of them also say the safety of local first responders, responding to a train or truck accident involving these shipments, must be considered.
Last week, Columbia County supervisors voiced their concerns on the subject following a request from the Ulster County Legislature.
"We need to protect our first responders at all cost. It isn't fair that they have no clue what they are dealing with," says Susan Zimet, a member of the Ulster County Legislature. She sponsored a resolution in her county that calls on the federal Department of Transportation not to renew DOT-E9649, a regulation that allows the Military Management Command to transport explosives and radioactive material with only an "explosive" placard affixed to the container. In the event of an accident that released the material, first responders coming to the scene would have no knowledge of the potential radioactive danger.
The regulation expired June 30 of this year. And Ms. Zimet says the DOT has listened to those opposed to continuation of the regulation and has not yet renewed it. In May, the Ulster County Legislature unanimously approved the resolution calling for the DOT to require identification of radioactive cargoes. The Columbia County Board of Supervisors adopted a similar resolution at its meeting last week.
While Columbia County seems far removed from weapons production and nuclear power plants, the threads that link this county with other vulnerable communities are the two CSX rail lines that pass through eight towns here.
Ms. Zimet says Ulster's emergency management director tried to find out the routes and times the material is shipped but ran into a brick wall of silence.
She says federal officials were "not forthcoming on information of the route or manner the material was transported over." Ms. Zimet says at one point some radioactive material was produced in the Albany suburb of Colonie, which leads here to believe "that material passed though our counties at some time."
Opponents of the regulation describe DU as "extremely toxic material," with the danger increased when it is shipped as part of munitions. One group, Nukewatch, in Luck, Wis., says an accident with these weapons could have the effect of igniting what the federal government has described as "dirty bomb," a device the government has said terrorist organizations might try to build and detonate.
County Fire Coordinator James Van Deusen says it is a good idea to mark the containers to give first responders a fighting chance. "If they get there and then discover what it is I think they will be out of luck," he says. He adds that while firefighters are taught to check the scene for their own safety first, the drive to help may overwhelm that learned prudence.
"Know what you're getting into-we teach it all the time. But in the heat of a call sometimes it's how fast can you get there," he says.
While train transport is relatively safe, the Department of Transportation reports that there are 2,000 derailments and 7,300 train accidents annually.
The Military Management Command has said that because of the risk of terrorism, a cask ruptured on purpose is essentially a dirty bomb, and the government needs to keep security on the shipments tight. Ms. Zimet understands the argument, but she wonders why in lieu of a placard on the cars or trailer identifying radioactive materials local emergency management offices couldn't be notified of nuclear materials transportation routes and times.
"I believe that they believe they need to keep this a secret, but that doesn't mean we stop worrying about our first responders," she says.
Mr. Van Deusen agrees that prior notification could work well as long as that notice is well ahead of the transport.
----
DOE Issues Records of Decision to Build and Operate DUF6 Conversion Plants in Portsmouth, Ohio and Paducah, Ky.; Groundbreaking Events Planned for Next Week
7/20/2004
US Newswire
http://releases.usnewswire.com/GetRelease.asp?id=169-07202004
To: National Desk, Energy Reporter
Contact:
Joe Davis, 202-586-4940;
Laura Schachter, 859-219-4010,
both of the U.S. Department of Energy
WASHINGTON -- The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) today issued two Records of Decision (RODs) for construction and operation of Depleted Uranium Hexafluoride (DUF6) Conversion Plants at DOE's Kentucky and Ohio gaseous diffusion plants.
"These two facilities will play a key role in helping cleanup the waste from decades of weapons production activities," said Deputy Secretary of Energy Kyle McSlarrow. McSlarrow and members of the Ohio and Kentucky congressional delegations will headline plant groundbreaking events next week in Paducah (Tuesday, July 27; 11 a.m.) and Portsmouth (Wednesday, July 28; 10 a.m.).
The conversion plants will convert depleted uranium hexafluoride to more stable chemical forms that will reduce risk at these sites and bring us closer to completing the cleanup mission. Currently, DUF6 is stored on-site at Paducah, Ky.; Portsmouth, Ohio.; and Oak Ridge, Tenn. The Oak Ridge DUF6 inventory is currently being moved to the Portsmouth facility for conversion.
A facility will be constructed at each of the gaseous diffusion plants to convert DUF6 to uranium oxide, the most stable form of uranium, and to permit recycling of aqueous hydrogen fluoride (HF) produced as a conversion co-product.
The two RODs were issued based on two Final Environmental Impact Statements (EIS) released in June. The Portsmouth EIS considered the environmental impacts of three alternative locations at the Ohio site. Based on the low environmental impact at any one of the three alternative locations at Portsmouth, DOE selected the preferred alternative location at the west-central portion of the site.
The Paducah EIS considered three alternative locations at the Kentucky site. This EIS indicated low impacts and no major differences in impacts that would make one location clearly environmentally preferable. Consequently, DOE selected the preferred alternative location, located in the south-central portion of the DOE site.
The facilities will operate using the conversion technology of Uranium Disposition Services LLC (UDS), the contractor selected to construct and initially operate the facilities for the first five years. The Portsmouth facility will operate for about 18 years and planned operations at the Paducah facility are expected to take about 25 years.
The two draft site-specific conversion facility EISs were reviewed by stakeholders during a 67-day comment period that ended in February, 2004. More than 200 comments were received and addressed in the Final EIS published in the Federal Register on June 18, 2004.
Copies of the ROD are available on the DUF6 Management Information Network Website: http://web.ead.anl.gov/uranium/ and DOE's NEPA website at http://www.eh.doe.gov/nepa/documents.html. The documents are also available at the Environmental Information Centers at 3930 U.S. Rt. 23, Piketon, Ohio 45661, and 115 Memorial Drive, Barclay Center, Paducah, Ky. 42001.
Attention News Media:
The Department of Energy will host groundbreaking ceremonies to mark the start of construction for both the Paducah and Portsmouth facilities. Media wishing to attend these groundbreaking events must contact Laura Schachter in the Department of Energy's Lexington, Ky. Office, Public Affairs, to register, at 859-219-4010.
http://www.usnewswire.com/
----
Bacteria link to Gulf war illness discounted
July 20, 2004
AP
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20040719-112731-8936r.htm
PHILADELPHIA - A year on powerful antibiotics did nothing to relieve the chronic health problems reported by Gulf war veterans, demolishing the theory that the so-called Gulf war syndrome is caused by a bacterial infection, researchers say.
The bacterial-infection theory "is off the table at this point," said Joseph F. Collins, a researcher with the Veterans Affairs Maryland Health Care System and one of the study's authors. "It's disappointing, but the results are definitive: This is not the smoking gun."
The study was done by the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Researchers have found that veterans of the Persian Gulf war in 1991 are more likely to suffer from a range of chronic symptoms, including memory and thinking problems, debilitating fatigue, severe muscle and joint pain, depression, anxiety, insomnia, headaches and rashes. However, the cause has proved elusive.
Theories include stress, bacterial infection, chemical or biological weapons, pollutants from burning oil fields, depleted-uranium munitions, and vaccinations for anthrax and other potential biological weapons.
The VA researchers studied 491 Gulf war veterans who complained of symptoms and were found to have a bacterium called mycoplasma in their bloodstream that was suspected to be the culprit. The veterans randomly were assigned to take either the broad-spectrum antibiotic doxycycline or a placebo daily for a year. Neither the patients nor their doctors knew who was getting what.
The antibiotics at best did nothing, and at worst may have caused harm, the researchers concluded. The side effects included nausea and sun sensitivity. Also, scientists have long warned that indiscriminate use of antibiotics can promote the development of drug-resistant strains of bacteria.
The positive news is that the study narrows the search for the culprit, said Stephen L. Robinson, executive director of the National Gulf War Resource Center in Silver Spring.
"This confirms information that has already been out there," he said. "We know that we can stop looking at this and we can focus research on other areas that might prove fruitful."
Mr. Collins said it will be a long time, if ever, before the cause of the Gulf war syndrome is identified.
"It may be that there were multiple exposures at low doses to multiple toxins that made people sick," Mr. Collins said. "And that's a very difficult thing to tease out."
He added: "The veterans are frustrated and they want answers. They want to know why they have this. But I'm not optimistic that medical research will ever be able to reach a point in establishing a cause."
----
Study concludes antibiotics don't relieve so-called Gulf War syndrome
07-20-2004
(AP)
http://www.kaaltv.com/article/view/72455/
PHILADELPHIA _ Researchers say a year on powerful antibiotics did nothing to relieve the chronic health problems reported by Gulf War veterans.
The experts conclude that the treatment demolishes the theory that so-called Gulf War syndrome is caused by a bacterial infection.
The study was done by the Department of Veterans Affairs and was published today in the Annals of Internal Medicine.
Researchers have found that veterans of the Persian Gulf war in 1990 and 1991 are more likely to suffer from a range of chronic symptoms.
They include memory and thinking problems, debilitating fatigue, severe muscle and joint pain, depression, anxiety, insomnia, headaches and rashes.
Theories about causes include stress, chemical or biological weapons, pollutants from burning oil fields, depleted-uranium munitions, and vaccinations for anthrax and other potential biological weapons.
-------- iraq / inspections
UN nuclear inspectors return to Iraq in coming days: ElBaradei
CAIRO (AFP)
Jul 20, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040720141545.r817kzxk.html
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors will return to Iraq in the coming days, the head of the UN nuclear watchdog, Mohamed ElBaradei, said here Tuesday.
"The IAEA will send a team of inspectors to Iraq in the coming days following an official request from Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari," ElBaradei told journalists on his arrival here.
"The return of inspectors to Iraq is an absolute necessity, not to search for weapons of mass destruction (WMD), but to draft the final report on the absence of WMDs in Iraq," he said.
UN inspectors left Iraq just before the US-led invasion of the country in March 2003. The IAEA had indicated it had found no evidence to back up US charges the regime of Saddam Hussein had a nuclear weapons program.
----
U.N. Weapons Inspectors Bound for Iraq
July 20, 2004
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iraq-Weapons-Inspectors.html
CAIRO, Egypt (AP) -- Iraq's new government has asked U.N. inspectors to return to the country, the head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog said Tuesday.
``The return of U.N. inspectors to Iraq is an urgent necessity; not to search for weapons of mass destruction but to write the final report about the nonexistence of (such) weapons ... in Iraq, which will enable the lifting of sanctions,'' Mohamed ElBaradei, director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, told reporters in Cairo.
He said the invitation was issued by Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari.
The inspectors will be sent in the next few days, ElBaradei said.
The inspectors, who will continue their work to ensure that Iraq adheres with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, will return as soon as safety arrangements have been made, agency spokeswoman Melissa Fleming said from the IAEA headquarters in Vienna, Austria.
The inspectors would go to Tuwaitha nuclear complex, 12 miles south of Baghdad, U.N. officials said Wednesday. The will conduct ``an inventory verification on the nuclear material remaining in Iraq,'' Fleming added.
Besides safeguards inspectors, the agency also had weapons inspectors in Iraq who searched for nuclear weapons under a mandate from the U.N. Security Council. Those inspectors left just before the beginning of the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003.
The U.N. Security Council is to decide when the weapons inspectors can return. The agency repeatedly has said it wants to send them back to finish their job.
In Washington, State Department spokesman said the inspection in Iraq is unrelated to the one which occurred during the months preceding the Iraq war.
He said the new inspection is part of a regular IAEA program that involves all countries which have had safeguard agreements with the agency.
``One shouldn't confuse these inspections with the UNMOVIC, the prewar special regime that applied to Iraq,'' Boucher said.
He added that there has been some media misinterpretation of ElBaradei's announcement.
--------
Iraq Requests Return of UN Weapons Inspectors
July 20, 2004
REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-iraq-inspectors.html
CAIRO (Reuters) - Iraq has asked the United Nation's nuclear watchdog agency to send weapons inspectors back to the country they left before last year's U.S.-led invasion, the agency's head, Mohamed ElBaradei, said on Tuesday.
ElBaradei said the inspectors would return ``in the coming days'' to finish the mission they started before the war to establish whether ousted President Saddam Hussein possessed banned weapons.
Two U.N. agencies were searching for banned weapons in Iraq before last year's invasion. ElBaradei's International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) handled nuclear inspections, while the UNMOVIC agency was charged with looking for chemical, biological and ballistic arsenals.
``We received an official request from (Iraqi Foreign Minister) Hoshiyar Zebari for the return of international inspectors in the coming days,'' ElBaradei told reporters after arriving at Cairo airport.
He did not specify whether the request was directed at both agencies or the IAEA alone. He also did give a definite date for the return.
ElBaradei said on June 28 that the U.N. inspectors were ready to begin talks with the new Iraqi government to arrange a return. The United States formally transferred sovereignty to an interim Iraqi government on the same day.
-------- israel
Israel Ready to Strike Iran
By Leslie Wetzel
Talon News
July 20, 2004
http://www.mensnewsdaily.com/archive/newswire/news2004/0704/072004-iran.htm
Israel has conducted military exercises for a preemptive strike against several of Iran's nuclear power facilities and is ready to attack if Russia supplies Iran with rods for enriching uranium, Israeli officials told reporters.
Israel has for a long time assumed the right of preemption. Preemption refers to the right to attack, and even make war with Arab states that are developing nuclear weapons.
The London Sunday Times, which first published the story, was told by an Israeli defense source in Tel Aviv that Israel "will on no account permit Iranian reactors -- especially the one being built in Bushehr with Russian help -- to go critical."
The source was also quoted as saying that any strike on Iran's reactors would probably be carried out by long-range jets, flying over Turkey, with simultaneous operations by commandos on the ground. NewsMax.com states that other sources suggest that Israel will deploy one of its submarines to the Persian Gulf and fire cruise missiles at key targets.
WorldNetDaily reports that Russia is expected to deliver the enriching rods, currently being stored at a Russian port, late next year after a dispute over financial terms is resolved.
The source says that they are confident that they would be able "to demolish the Ayatollah's nuclear aspirations in one go."
The source explained that any strike could be accompanied by an attack on other Iranian targets, including a facility at Natanz, where the Iranians have attempted to enrich uranium, and a plant at Arak, which International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors suspect of nuclear activity, according to WorldNetDaily.
The Sunday Times also quoted a senior U.S. official warning of a preemptive Israeli strike if Russia continues cooperating with the Iranians. He said Washington was unlikely to block Israeli attacks against Iran.
The Sunday Times quoted a classified document on the Iranian threat which was presented to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon earlier this year. The document, entitled "The strategic Future of Israel," was first reported by Joseph Farah's G2 Bulletin, a premium, online intelligence newsletter published by WorldNetDaily.
G2 quoted the report, which was drafted by four of Israel's senior defense experts, as saying, "All enemy targets should be selected with the view that their destruction would promptly force the enemy to cease all nuclear, biological, and chemical exchanges with Israel."
The report also called on Israel to develop a multilayered ballistic missile defense system and described Iran as a "suicide nation," recommending "targeted killings" of members of the country's elite, including its leading nuclear scientists.
Israel has maintained the blockage of Iran's nuclear program at the top of its "to do" list, according to NewsMax.com.
Even before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, there were scattered reports that Israel was preparing to strike Iranian targets.
According to NewsMax.com, "There have been mutterings that time is short and Israel will do to Iran what it did to Iraq in 1981."
Israeli bombers struck Iraq's Osirak nuclear power plant in 1981, destroying Iraq's ability to make nuclear bombs. Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin came under heavy criticism at the time from the world community, but was recognized as a hero to his own people.
The U.S. maintains that Iran has pursued a nuclear weapon for the past 18 years. In recent years, the Iranian government has been only giving "lip service" to the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) according to NewsMax.com.
The oil-rich country of Iran developing a peaceful atomic energy program, solely for domestic energy needs does not ring true for the Israelis.
Israel has also become frustrated with the U.N.'s inability to get Iran to comply with the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty they signed, obligating Iran to random inspections supervised by the IAEA. The treaty allows Iran to produce nuclear material as long as it can plausibly claim the production is for "peaceful purposes."
Experts warn that Iran can build the infrastructure needed to make nuclear weapons, telling inspectors they need the material for "energy and nuclear medicine research," and then kick out the inspectors, renounce the treaty and quickly assemble a nuclear arsenal, as the North Koreans did. North Korea is now said to have ten nuclear warheads.
According to the Iranian deal with Moscow, waste produced at the Bushehr plant containing plutonium that could be used in bomb-making would be shipped back to Russia for storage, but the material must first be cooled, providing Iran with what Washington fears could be up to two years in which to extract the plutonium.
The London Sunday Times quoted Israeli sources as saying that a quarter ton of plutonium could be produced each year if Bushehr is fully functional, enough for 20 bombs.
The Sunday Times also reports Israeli sources fear a preemptive strike against Iranian nuclear facilities could provoke "a ferocious response," which could involve Lebanese-based rocket attacks on northern Israel or terrorist attacks against Jewish and Israeli targets abroad.
-------- korea
US lawmakers urge greater effort in talks on North Korea's nuclear program
WASHINGTON (AFP)
Jul 20, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040720214158.dac68c8x.html
Washington and Pyongyang both must do more to lower tensions over North Korea's nuclear program, two top US lawmakers told North Korea's UN envoy on his first-ever visit Tuesday to the US Congress.
US Senator Joseph Biden admonished North Korean UN ambassador Gil Yon Park that the country's efforts to obtain nuclear weapons destabilized the Korean peninsula, but is self-defeating politically and economically.
"The North's nuclear program is a giant albatross around your neck, in my view. It's a waste of resources (and) strains relations with your neighbors," said Biden, top Democrat on the US Foreign Relations Committee, adding that nuclear weapons afforded North Korea a "false sense of security."
"We seek permanent verifiable elimination of all of North Korea's weapons," Biden said at the forum organized by the New York-based Korea Society, which was also attended by Pyongyang's deputy UN representative Song Ryol Han.
Both sides stand to gain from North Korea's disarming he said. "This is not a zero sum game."
Biden's colleague in the House of Representatives, Republican Representative Curt Weldon said that "there's no more important issue that confronts the world" than that of building down tensions between North Korea and the West and convincing Pyongyang of the need to disarm.
Both lawmakers urged Washington and Seoul to work harder to achieve significant progress when a fourth round of six-way nuclear talks with the United States, the two Koreas, China, Japan and Russia is held in September.
A third round of six-way talks in Beijing last month ended without major progress, but Biden said conditions now appear right for a breakthrough.
"This administration is now ready, Congress is ready, for absolute serious negotiations," Biden said.
"There are a great number of us in this country who play some small part in the political establishment who see getting the relationship right with North Korea as absolutely critical for our mutual security."
For his part, Park reiterated North Korea's position that it might be willing to consider freezing its nuclear program if Washington agrees to reward the Communist regime for the freeze, saying that substantial differences between the two countries remain.
Several members of South Korea's National Assembly also spoke at the event.
North Korea has demanded energy aid and a US security guarantee and also wants Washington to lift sanctions and remove the Stalinist state from its list of states sponsoring terrorism.
The North Korean nuclear stand-off erupted in October 2002, when the United States said Pyongyang had acknowledged it was developing nuclear weapons, violating a 1994 international agreement.
-------- russia
Russia has scrapped 101 nuclear submarines
Jul 20 2004
(Interfax)
http://www.interfax.ru/e/B/0/28.html?id_issue=10686608
MOSCOW. July 20 - Russia has scrapped 101 of its nuclear submarines, a representative of the Federal Atomic Energy Agency (the former Atomic Energy Ministry) told Interfax.
"It is planned to scrap 17 submarines this year, and nuclear fuel has been unloaded from 12 of them," the source said.
According to the Federal Atomic Energy Agency's data for December 2003, 193 submarines have been stricken from the navy.
"Currently, 24 atomic submarines are being worked on," the source said.
"It takes approximately two and a half years to scrap a nuclear submarine's hull and 3 months to unload the fuel," he said.
Some 1.9 billion rubles will be allocated from the state budget to scrap nuclear submarines. In addition, foreign investments in this program in 2004 are expected to reach 2.1 billion rubles.
Atomic Energy Agency experts say the scrapping process involves a number of highly complicated operations that are potentially dangerous in terms of radiation, chemicals and toxicity. Considerable funds are needed to ensure the safe disposal of these submarines and rehabilitate the radioactive equipment used in the scrapping. According to expert evaluations, the cost of primary work in this area is estimated at $4 billion.
-------- u.n.
[This is included so you can respond - http://www.frontpagemag.com/contact/contact.asp .]
The UN, Al-Tuwaitha, and Nukes
By Douglas Hanson
The American Thinker frontpagemag.com
July 20, 2004
http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=14295
The UN's nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), was very upset last week that the US had shipped about 1.8 tons of low-enriched uranium and other radioactive material out of Iraq for disposition in the US. One would think that the IAEA would have appreciated our work in assisting them in the implementation of the provisions of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in this particularly volatile region of the world. But one would be wrong.
The actions, or more appropriately, the inactions of the IAEA regarding Iraq since the end of Gulf War I, betray the agency's true agenda. Rather than inspect, report, and implement restrictions in accordance with the provisions in the treaty, the agency has in effect become an enabler of rogue nations who are attempting, or who have already succeeded in developing or acquiring special nuclear material and equipment. In other words, the IAEA is simply a reflection of its parent organization, which routinely delays and obfuscates the efforts of the US and the UK in controlling banned substances and delivery systems.
Time after time, the agency has either intentionally or naively bought into the lies and deceptions contrived by nations of the Axis of Evil during IAEA visits and inspections. In most cases, the IAEA avoids confrontation like the plague in order to maintain access to the facilities. If they are booted out, as was the case with North Korea, their impotence is on display for all to see. In other cases, the agency joins in the deception, thereby allowing these rogue states to level the nuclear playing field with the West and Russia. Their reaction to the shipment of nuclear material out of Saddam's nuclear research center at Al-Tuwaitha is a perfect example of this tactic.
The nuclear research center of Al-Tuwaitha is a 23,000 acre site located about 20 kilometers south-southeast of Baghdad. Most reports of the transfer of the low-enriched uranium out of the country correctly refer to the source location of the uranium as at Tuwaitha Site C. But there is much more material stored at this huge site, and there are more facilities at Tuwaitha that have contributed significantly to the overall capabilities of the research center. These key facilities are, of course, generally ignored in major press reports.
Site C is a relatively small site as compared to the rest of the reservation, but the amount of material stored there is not insignificant. In addition to the nearly two tons of low-enriched uranium secured by the US, Site C was home to an additional 500 tons of yellowcake uranium,
There are also three key facilities on the Al-Tuwaitha reservation that are rarely mentioned in media accounts of the transfer. First, there is the French reactor at Site B, better known as Osirak, which was destroyed by the Israelis in 1981 in Operation Opera. The second facility is the Russian built reactor at Site A, destroyed by the US in Gulf War I in 1991. The third facility is a fuel fabrication plant at Site D, also destroyed in 1991. All three facilities have never been rebuilt. All spent fuel or fresh fuel was sent back to the country of origin after Gulf War I.
Now, the IAEA complains that the Department of Energy (DOE) shipped the radioactive materials to the US without UN permission. The agency's rationale is that there was
some concern about the legality of the U.S. transfer because the nuclear material belonged to Iraq and was under the control and supervision of the IAEA.
The material at Tuwaitha is also characterized as being "under IAEA seal and control." The article states that only two tons of yellowcake remained at Al-Tuwaitha after Gulf War I. This is simply incorrect, according to my own sources. Either the AP, the IAEA, or both, are misrepresenting the facts.
All of this begs the question: why did the IAEA allow Iraq to retain such massive amounts of nuclear material, when its three nuclear facilities had been destroyed over 12 years ago, and have never been repaired? In fact, the Russian reactor is so hot, it would take years to clean up the facility; it's a total write off. Iraq had no legitimate reason to have possessed the yellowcake.
And speaking of the storage and accountability of the radioactive material, who maintained those seals, anyway? Let's see the paperwork.
And why didn't the UN ship the yellowcake and the low-enriched uranium out of the country 12 years ago? Wouldn't the UN be interested in denying Saddam the nuclear raw materials, in case he decided to conduct enrichment by calutron at facilities such as Tarmiya and al-Fajar?
It appears the IAEA is not really interested in non-proliferation at all; otherwise this material would have long ago been safeguarded in another country. Thankfully, this overdue evacuation of a dangerous stockpile has finally been started by the DOE, even if much more remains to be done.
Department of Energy officials estimated that the two tons of low-enriched uranium shipped to the US, given further refinement, is enough to produce one nuclear bomb. The number of bombs that could be made from the over 500 tons of yellowcake is frightening, and, had the coalition not attacked Iraq, Saddam's nuclear bomb stockpile may have become reality. The IAEA would have us believe that the massive amount of yellowcake on-site and the depleted uranium find were just due to the Iraqis pursuing enrichment techniques in order to provide fuel for two destroyed reactors. This is what the UN views as nuclear research for "peaceful purposes." Simply put, Saddam had retained a nuclear weapons regeneration capability in the same way he did for biological and chemical weapons production.
The IAEA chief, Mohamed El-Baradei is distraught at the secretive nature of the US transfer of nuclear materials out of Iraq. He also continues to opine about the US confronting Tehran about its 18 year effort to conceal its nuclear weapon activities. Most analysts say the mullahs will produce a bomb in short order. El-Baradei said that he didn't want to take the Iran issue before the UN Security Council because
You are running the risk that the Security Council might not act and therefore the situation would exacerbate. And you run the risk that Iran might opt out of the NPT (nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty) and you have another North Korea.
In other words, the chief of the UN nuclear watchdog agency doesn't want to notify the member nations of the UN Security Council of the Iranian breach of treaty provisions, because the council might then institute economic sanctions, and then Iran might opt out of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and then expel UN inspectors, and then some big US city is blown to smithereens -- well, you get the idea.
The UN and its so-called nuclear watchdog agency have proven again that they are not about preventing the proliferation of WMD, but in reality, unwittingly or intentionally, assist rogue nations' nuclear weapons programs. Their track record over the last decade includes abject failure in North Korea, allowing a sadistic dictator to keep nuclear materials to fuel non-operational reactors, and now they are afraid to truthfully report the critical situation in Iran to the Security Council.
Keep in mind that John Kerry wants to entrust our national security to these same people.
All I have to say is, thank God for the Coalition and George W. Bush.
Critics of President Bush, who carped about the so-called fabricated intelligence about Iraq seeking uranium from Africa (Niger), would be wise to wait for a full analysis of the source of the materials that were flown to the US, and the materials that remain at Tuwaitha.
Douglas Hanson was the Chief of Staff of the Ministry of Science and Technology for the Coalition Provisional Authority during the Summer of 2003. As then, the Iraqi-controlled ministry today has oversight of Al-Tuwaitha and its 3000 scientists and engineers of the now-disbanded Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- california
Three Fuel Pieces Missing at Humboldt Bay Nuclear Power Plant
July 20, 2004
SAN FRANCISCO, California, (ENS)
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/jul2004/2004-07-20-09.asp#anchor6
Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) cannot account for three pieces of spent nuclear fuel used 34 years ago at the Humboldt Bay Power Plant, near Eureka in Northern California.
While saying the location of the spent fuel pieces has "no impact on the health and safety of the public," the company is scrambling to find them. The amount of fuel in question consists of three, half-inch diameter by 18 inch long segments, weighing a total of about four pounds, which were cut from a single, seven foot fuel rod in 1968.
The Humboldt Bay Power Plant is no longer in operation. Since late 2003, PG&E plant personnel have been in the process of conducting a search of the plant's records, and verifying and characterizing the contents of the used fuel pool, in preparation for the upcoming decommissioning of the plant and movement of the used fuel pool contents to dry cask storage.
Plant records indicate that these segments may have been shipped offsite in 1969, as part of a larger shipment of used fuel sent for reprocessing. However, recently reviewed documents indicate the fuel may have remained stored underwater since 1968, in the plant's used fuel pool, where other used nuclear fuel is stored.
Plant employees are now in the process of retrieving and examining additional records, as well as searching the contents of the used fuel pool, to determine which document is accurate.
"The fuel rod segments remain in the used fuel pool, or were shipped offsite to an appropriate, controlled facility - either for analysis or reprocessing," said Greg Rueger, senior vice president for generation and chief nuclear officer for the utility. "However, we must ensure we have accurate records, and that entails a meticulous search of the pool itself, to confirm the location of these three used fuel segments."
In the late 1960s up to the mid-1970s, nuclear power plants were permitted to ship used nuclear fuel offsite for reprocessing to be used again. The fuel in question would have gone to the Nuclear Fuel Services reprocessing facility, located in West Valley, New York. The Humboldt power plant, which opened in 1963, ceased operations in 1976. No fuel has been shipped offsite since 1974.
The investigation could take several more weeks to complete, largely because of the difficulty associated with physically searching the used fuel pool.
Inspectors from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission have been onsite during the week of July 12 and are aware of the status of these inspections. In addition, PG&E is continuing its review of plant records as well as interviewing plant personnel who were onsite during the 1968-1969 period to find further evidence that may expedite location of the three fuel rod segments.
-------- nevada
Nuclear-waste games
Setback for Nevada's NIMBYism is progress for rest of America
Tuesday, July 20, 2004
http://www.dispatch.com/editorials-story.php?story=dispatch/2004/07/20/20040720-A8-00.html
This nation desperately needs safe ways to dispose of radioactive waste, so any development that brings containment of such material one day closer is worth cheering.
A recent court decision removing most of the hurdles to building a repository in Nevada drew applause from opponents as well as supporters, which would be amusing if the subject weren't so serious. The two key groups fighting to stop the federal government from building a nuclearwaste vault within Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, won one small battle of the many they waged.
A three-judge panel of the U.S. Circuit Court of appeals for the District of Columbia on July 9 rejected virtually all the arguments brought against the Yucca project. Significantly, the judges turned away Nevada's not-in-my-backyard claims that the government can't put something in a state that doesn't want it. Clearly, the right and duty of Congress and the president to ensure national security and protect public health must override parochial interests. The court also refused even to consider Nevada's gripe that the process for selecting the site was illegal.
But Nevada and its partners in the lawsuit, environmental groups intent on shutting down the nation's nuclearenergy industry, scored a single point when the court agreed that container designers, in planning to protect Americans from radiation for 10,000 years, did not follow the guidance of a report from the National Academy of Sciences. It said any design should ensure residents would be protected when the waste could be most dangerous, and that could occur much later than 10,000 years out.
This ruling is disappointing, but the court also ordered that the safety matter remain on hold until seven days after any appeal is decided. Thus, Energy Department officials said the ruling would not stall the project.
Either side in the case can ask for a review of all the circuit court's judges and can appeal to the Supreme Court.
The sciences academy's opinion is critical only because Congress mandated that the Environmental Protection Agency base its radiation standards on the academy's recommendations.
The scientists, however, can provide no specific plan for ensuring safety of nuclear debris beyond 10,000 years. And the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, charged with the ridiculous task of coming up with such standards in a country only slightly older than 200 years, correctly points out that no computer models or other tools can project reliability of containers and other factors beyond 10,000 years.
Considering the poor record of so many other projections government agencies make, Americans also might wonder at the accuracy of a 10,000-year forecast, but that's not the issue.
As attorneys work on appeals, the EPA may try to devise a means of meeting a stricter standard; that would be an exercise in futility.
If the 10,000-year rule doesn't win on appeal, Congress can solve the problem easily by passing a law declaring that 10,000 or whatever number of years is adequate for safety. If civilization continues to prosper, technology is on track to deal with any nuclear-containment problems that might crop up down the pike.
The Yucca Mountain repository already is six years behind its planned opening date. For every day of delay, high-level radioactive waste piles up in temporary storage at 131 power plants and government sites in 39 states. This situation presents potential health and security hazards.
As the litigation crawls on, each court victory for the government is a welcome affirmation of federal agencies' responsibility to act in the public's best interests.
-------- new mexico
Atomic board rules on LES contentions
Louisiana Energy Services is a partnership of several energy companies.
By Ruth Friedberg Campbell
Odessa American
Tuesday, 20 July 2004
http://www.oaoa.com/news/nw072004b.htm
The Atomic Safety and Licensing Board granted standing Monday to all parties that sought it in the quest to build a uranium enrichment facility near Eunice, N.M.
The panel also made decisions on which contentions, or concerns, would be pursued in future hearings.
A discovery conference was scheduled for "on or before" July 29. A prehearing conference call is scheduled for 11 a.m. (Mountain Time) Aug. 3. The New Mexico Attorney General's Office, the New Mexico Environment Department and the Nuclear Resource and Information Service and Public Citizen all filed with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to have standing in a hearing on the plant.
Louisiana Energy Services wants to build the $1.2 billion plant, to be called the National Enrichment Facility. It would provide more than 200 permanent jobs and 400 to 800 short-term construction jobs.
LES is a partnership of several nuclear energy companies including Urenco, Westinghouse, and U.S. energy companies Duke Power, Entergy and Exelon.
What's Admissible:
- The Atomic Safety and Licensing Board ruled admissible a New Mexico Environment Department contention report on radiation protection. "Specifically, the application is deficient in providing the technical bases for monitoring and assessing effluent discharge and in estimating occupational and public radiation doses," the order said. A contention that LES's environmental report does not "adequately describe or weigh the environmental, social and economic impacts and costs of operating" the National Enrichment Facility.
- A contention that LES's environmental report does not adequately address impacts of accidents involving natural gas transmission facilities.
- A contention by the New Mexico Attorney General's Office about disposal security. This was consolidated with similar concerns from the Nuclear Resource and Information Service and Public Citizen.
- A contention from the New Mexico Attorney General's Office that LES's cost estimates for disposing of depleted uranium are "suspect." The challenge is limited to cost estimates based on its contract with Urenco and those developed for a similar proposed facility in Louisiana, which was never built.
- A contention from concerned parties that LES did not include a "complete or adequate assessment" of potential impacts of the proposed project on ground and surface water was admitted.
What's Not Admissible:
- A contention from the New Mexico Environment Department that LES would store depleted uranium in the form of uranium hexaflouoride throughout the estimated 30-year life of the facility. However, the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board referred its ruling to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
- The New Mexico Environment Department and attorney general's office are also concerned that LES will not have enough money to decommission the plant. This was also ruled inadmissible by the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board.
- Also ruled inadmissible was the Attorney General's office contention that LES's facility would not be economically viable because the majority owners, which are foreign companies, could "simply abandon their investment."
- The concern that the storage of large amounts of depleted uranium in steel cylinders outdoors would pose a "distinct environmental risk" to New Mexico was also deemed inadmissible. However, this ruling was referred to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
- The Attorney General's concern about LES's plans to dispose of nuclear waste from the facility was also ruled inadmissible by the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board.
----
Probe begins into security lapses at top US nuclear weapons lab
LOS ANGELES (AFP)
Jul 20, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040719234918.1rbkwpcw.html
US government officials toured a key nuclear weapons facility Monday at the start of a major probe into a string of security breaches at the top secret Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Deputy US Energy Secretary Kyle McSlarrow and other officials toured the top secret laboratory in New Mexico at the start of a comprehensive review of security problems that shut down all work at the key installation.
The delegation that included members of the US House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee met staffers and received in-depth briefings on the lapses that could have led to the spilling of US nuclear secrets, officials said.
"They spent several hours touring the area involving the recent incident of the unsafe electronic media," plant spokesman Jim Danneskiold told AFP.
The visit came after all secret operations and virtually all other work were idled at the plant where the atomic bomb was born in 1945 after a several security violations that officials have branded as "unacceptable."
The unprecedented step was taken after classified computer storage discs possibly containing nuclear secrets were reported missing July 7 and after classified information was sent out in unclassified e-mails that hackers could have gained access to, officials said.
Theories of how the storage discs disappeared ranged from innocent misplacement of the disks to nuclear technology theft.
"All employees are now involved in security and safety re-education that includes looking at their work area, work controls and others aspects of security," Danneskiold said.
"Managers have been told they need to meet face to face with their employees and make sure that their training is up to date before they can re-start work and report any potential safety and security weaknesses."
The spokesman said the breach of the site's complex secure e-mail protocols had been reported to the National Nuclear Security Administration, which is in charge of reassessing security at the troubled Los Alamos plant, "to prevent any significant risk to national security."
Peter Nanos, the director of Los Alamos National Laboratory where US nuclear weapons are designed and tested, Thursday ordered a halt to secret work at the plant and then stopped virtually all operations a day later.
Around 7,800 people are employed at the site by the University of California, which runs Los Alamos, while up to 13,000 people can be present at the laboratory during the busy summer months, according to Danneskiold.
But while operations have been halted, he insisted that the stand-down posed no danger to national security as key weapons personnel were still carrying out their duties while reviewing security.
"Key deliverables for weapons certifications that Washington requires are continuing on one hand, while on the other staff make sure that they review their safety and security thoroughly," he said.
-------- ohio
Malfunction Prompts Ohio Nuke Plant Alert
July 20, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Perry-Nuclear-Plant.html
NORTH PERRY, Ohio (AP) -- A malfunctioning instrument falsely indicated elevated radiation at the Perry nuclear power plant early Tuesday, prompting operators to declare an alert for more than five hours.
The plant continued to operate without interruption and no radiation was released, FirstEnergy Nuclear Operating Co., a unit of FirstEnergy Corp. of Akron, said in a news release.
The emergency alert was declared at 3:44 a.m. and called off at 9:01 a.m. The alert is the second lowest in seriousness of four emergency classifications ranked by federal regulators.
The company said that while a monitoring system indicated an elevated radiation level, other monitors showed normal readings, and the faulty one will be repaired. The plant is located alongside Lake Erie about 25 miles northeast of Cleveland.
On the Net:
FirstEnergy: http://www.firstenergycorp.com
-------- south carolina
Officials push for nuke waste removal
By CHARLES SEABROOK
Cox News Service
Tuesday, July 20, 2004
http://www.news-journal.com/news/content/shared/news/stories/0720_nuclearwaste.html;COXnetJSessionID=BDjCku1uM1wXYcXRcAMwxEozHCrP3WtrtN4VPRB7Fm3cd1MRVy9I!270045868?urac=n&urvf=10907738909080.8003087959805815
JACKSON, S.C. - Government officials said on Monday that rusting steel tanks holding millions of gallons of highly radioactive wastes at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina are prone to leaks and present a threat to groundwater if the wastes are not removed in a timely manner.
The officials said, however, that a federal court ruling in an environmental lawsuit is seriously hampering the Department of Energy's efforts to clean up the wastes left from decades of the nation's nuclear-bomb production.
"The longer these wastes are left in these tanks, the longer the increased risk to the people of South Carolina," said Jill Sigal, DOE principal deputy assistant secretary.
The U.S. government built the Savannah River Site under extreme secrecy in the 1950s on nearly 200,000 acres of piney woods, swamps and farmland along the state's border with Georgia. Five nuclear reactors and massive support facilities churned out thousands of tons of plutonium and tritium for nuclear bombs.
Dozens of aging, leaking underground storage tanks, each covered with a dome as big as that atop the nation's Capitol, now hold 36 million gallons of radioactive wastes. Unlined pits on the site contain millions of gallons of other hazardous wastes.
Environmentalists say the massive contamination threatens to pollute underground aquifers and surface streams that provide drinking water for hundreds of thousands of people in Georgia and South Carolina.
Billions of dollars already have been spent on overall SRS cleanup, and the government estimates it will take another $35 billion or more to complete the task.
Sigal said that the DOE's plan for disposing of the wastes in the 49 underground tanks is "environmentally sound."
Sigal was among several DOE officials and congressional aides who came to SRS from Washington on Monday to brief reporters during a "media day" to address concerns about the cleanup plan.
Environmentalists and some politicians have condemned the DOE cleanup plan because it would leave some highly radioactive sludge in the tanks.
The agency wants to immobilize the vast majority of the waste by mixing it with molten glass and then allowing it to solidify. The glass logs then would be shipped to a permanent repository in Nevada.
But the DOE plans to leave a portion of the highly radioactive sludge processed from the waste in the tanks, which would be filled with concrete. In a controversial move, the agency proposed last year reclassifying that material as low-level waste, effectively allowing the material to remain at SRS.
The environmental group said that reclassification would be a violation of a 1982 law requiring the waste to be removed to Nevada.
SRS managers said once the tanks are covered with concrete, they would present no threat to groundwater. Having to remove all of the wastes from the tanks, they said, would cost billions of dollars more and delay overall clean-up of SRS by more than 20 years.
However, environmental groups are unconvinced of the safety of the DOE clean-up plan. Last year, the Natural Resources Defense Council sued the government in Idaho, challenging the reclassification of the sludge as low-level waste. A federal judge ruled that the DOE would violate federal law if it reclassified the waste and failed to move it.
Charles Hansen, an assistant waste disposition manager with the DOE, said Monday that before the lawsuit, two tanks already had been closed and the remaining sludge buried in concrete. He said the lawsuit has "created a lot of uncertainty" at the plant "and leaves us with the risk of a longer period of time" to close the remaining 49 waste-filled tanks.
To get around the federal court ruling, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), on behalf of DOE, introduced a bill earlier this year to keep the sludge at SRS. A Senate committee then made it part of the 2005 Defense Department Authorization spending bill.
An effort to remove Graham's language from the bill last month was narrowly defeated in the Senate.
Congress is expected to vote on the bill this fall.
Charles Seabrook writes for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. E-mail: cseabrook@ajc.com
-------- tennessee
DOE, Oliver Springs working together
TO WHAT EXTENT: Training and equipment part of effort suggested by federal agency.
By: Paul Parson paul.parson@oakridger.com
Oak Ridger Staff
July 20, 2004
http://www.oakridger.com/stories/072004/new_20040720008.shtml
While it apparently hasn't always been the case, the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge chief has required that the town of Oliver Springs receive direct notification of a general emergency on the federal government's Oak Ridge Reservation.
DOE also plans to assist the municipality in getting training for emergency response personnel and obtaining radiological detection equipment.
The federal agency's assistance stems from concerns voiced by Oliver Springs Mayor Ed Kelley as well as a meeting between him and DOE officials.
At issue is what the mayor classifies as a communication failure pertaining to a recent accident in addition to the shipment of nuclear waste known as depleted uranium hexafluoride though his town.
The mayor met earlier this month with Gerald Boyd, manager of DOE's Oak Ridge Operations office, and Steve McCracken, the federal agency's local cleanup chief. Boyd followed up that meeting with a letter he sent out on Friday.
According to Boyd, a review of DOE's notification procedures and of a multi-jurisdictional emergency plan for the Oak Ridge Reservation showed that direct notification is not provided to the town in the event of a general emergency.
"Direct notification to Oliver Springs would enhance the town's ability to take whatever actions they deem appropriate as well as communicate with town residents in a timely manner," Boyd's letter noted.
Kelly previously told The Oak Ridger that it took him several hours to get information during a weekend accident near the Oak Ridge K-25 site.
Regarding the waste shipments that leave K-25 and ultimately end up at the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant, Boyd said DOE conducted training sessions in Kentucky and Ohio where around 450 first responders, law enforcement personnel and other officials were educated on various aspects of the material and its transportation. Boyd indicated the Tennessee Emergency Management Agency elected to conduct its own training for state responders, and DOE instructional materials were provided to them for this purpose.
"If there are emergency response personnel in Oliver Springs who have not received first responder training, we will work with the appropriate organizations to provide this opportunity," Boyd's letter stated.
Depleted uranium hexafluoride is a byproduct of an operation where uranium was ultimately processed into nuclear reactor fuel and weapons-grade material. When Oak Ridge officials objected to the material being shipped through the city, Kelley said DOE began transporting the waste from K-25 through Oliver Springs - where the trucks hit Highway 61 to Clinton and end up on Interstate 75 to Ohio.
Previously, Kelley voiced concern when one of the transport trucks was involved in a minor traffic accident, though the driver was not at fault. In addition, another driver was recently cited for following too closely.
As for additional help for Oliver Springs, there is a program in place that makes radiological detection equipment, which is surplus to DOE needs, available to first responder organizations. Boyd said the town should qualify for equipment under the program.
The DOE chief also suggested that Kelley contact the Tennessee Emergency Management Agency to see if the town might be eligible for any other emergency response-related assistance.
-------- washington
Canvassers stump to clean Hanford
By Shannon Barney
July 20, 2004
Western Front Online
http://www.westernfrontonline.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2004/07/20/40fd7d7d09488
The Washington Public Interest Research Group met in Bellingham this past week for a grassroots campaign to educate people about Initiative 297, which would require that the U.S. Department of Energy clean up contamination at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation before more nuclear waste is added.
The initiative also would end the use of Hanford as a dumpsite for the nation's low-level radioactive waste and prevent radioactive waste from being dumped in unlined soil ditches, according to information distributed by this past week by WashPIRG.
Approximately 12 representatives from WashPIRG went door-to-door throughout Bellingham to apprise residents of I-297. Some staff members camped at Larrabee State Park for the week while campaigning.
"We are out here to educate people about the subject," WashPIRG staff member Elaine Law said. "It is really really important that people know what they are voting on."
Hanford, located in southeastern Washington, is the most contaminated place in the Western Hemisphere, according to the Washington Department of Ecology's Web site.
Some of the most hazardous radioactive waste products from Hanford already have reached the groundwater and will eventually reach the Columbia River, according to the department Web site.
Hanford is a systematic problem, said Chris Wells, assistant director at WashPIRG. Residents use the Columbia River for drinking water, recreation, irrigation and feeding grounds for animals -- it affects everyone in the area in some way, he said.
If the government allows the Department of Energy to bring in more toxic waste to Hanford, it likely could go through the Strait of Juan de Fuca and Bellingham residents should be aware that high level toxics will be passing by them, WashPIRG staff member Erik Goheen said.
This January, I-297 had more than the 280,000 signatures needed to support it, according to a Jan. 3 article in The Seattle Times, and the initiative now will appear on the November ballot.
WashPIRG representatives encourage the residents they talk with to come to their own conclusions about the contamination issues at Hanford, Law said.
For more than 40 years, the United States produced plutonium for nuclear weapons at Hanford, creating radioactive and chemical hazardous wastes. In 1944, workers began to store the most hazardous of these wastes in the underground tanks at places such as Hanford, according to Washington State Department of Ecology Web site. A major concern at Hanford is that workers have dumped highly radioactive waste in unlined ditches, WashPIRG field manager Chris Trinies said.
"We aren't even allowed to throw away pizza boxes in unlined ditches," WashPIRG staff member Bob Reckard said.
Nearly 54 million gallons of highly radioactive waste -- nearly 60 percent of the nation's total -- is stored in 177 waste-storage tanks underground. Almost 1 million gallons have leaked from various tanks throughout the years -- enough waste to fill nearly 20 backyard swimming pools, according to the department's Web site.
A proposal from the federal Department of Energy would bring in another 70,000 truckloads of waste -- doubling what is already stored, according to information distributed by WashPIRG.
The Hanford Reservation covers 560 square miles of desert and runs along 51 miles of the Columbia River.
-------- us nuc waste
DOE to halt waste shipments
Tuesday, July 20th, 2004
By Annette Cary,
Tri-City Herald staff writer
http://www.tri-cityherald.com/tch/local/story/5321750p-5259689c.html
The federal government has agreed to temporarily halt some shipments of low- level waste bound for burial at Hanford if it can reach agreement with Washington state on a schedule for a court decision.
Monday evening the state sent documents to federal district court suing the Department of Energy over its June 23 record of decision calling for Hanford to become a regional disposal site for up to 62,000 cubic meters of low-level waste and up to 20,000 cubic meters of low-level waste mixed with hazardous chemicals.
Attorney General Christine Gregoire is asking for a federal court ruling to prevent the shipment of wastes covered by the record of decision while the case is being heard. About $2 billion of work annually is done at Hanford to clean up contamination caused by the production of plutonium for the nation's nuclear weapons during World War II and the Cold War.
The state contends that the decision to ship the solid waste to Hanford was based on a flawed and incomplete environmental analysis. It's amending a 2003 lawsuit against DOE to add complaints about low-level waste to previous complaints about transuranic waste, or waste that's typically contaminated with plutonium.
Monday morning, attorneys for the federal government and the state held a status conference by telephone with Judge Alan McDonald in federal court in Yakima.
The federal government and the state agreed to try to work out a schedule of court activities, said DOE spokeswoman Colleen Clark, of the Richland Operations office, after the conference. The news media were barred from the proceedings.
"If we reach an agreement on the schedule, then we would not ship waste during the schedule period," Clark said.
The schedule likely would extend until McDonald rules on the state's request to temporarily halt certain waste shipments while the case is decided.
DOE believes its environmental study was thorough. The record of decision limits DOE waste that would be sent to Hanford to about 25 percent of the maximum that it could have sent to Washington.
Whether DOE would temporarily stop sending all low-level and mixed low-level waste to Hanford is unclear. Hanford accepted almost 800 cubic meters of low-level waste in fiscal year 2003 from other DOE facilities, such as the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory and the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York.
The record of decision expands the DOE facilities that would send low-level waste to Hanford for permanent disposal. The waste, which includes contaminated building rubble without high concentrations of plutonium, would be buried in lined trenches in central Hanford.
Whether DOE might stop sending all low-level waste or just the low-level waste from additional DOE sites is among the topics expected to be negotiated as the court schedule is developed over the next few days.
The record of decision also opened Hanford for disposal of regional mixed low-level waste, which it had not accepted in recent years. Shortly after the record of decision was issued, 109 drums of mixed low-level waste produced at the Rocky Flats, Colo., nuclear site were accepted at Hanford.
Federal court already has ordered DOE to temporarily stop sending transuranic waste to Hanford.
----
What are the environmental threats to Native Americans and their lands?
Tuesday, July 20, 2004
From the editors of E/The Environmental Magazine
http://www.enn.com/news/2004-07-20/s_25800.asp
Dear EarthTalk: What are the special environmental threats to Native Americans and their lands? - Amber Wilkie, Jackson Hole, Wyoming
Like other minority and economically disadvantaged groups in the United States, Native Americans struggle disproportionately with environmental problems. Native lands in particular are impacted by the mining, forestry, and oil and gas drilling industries and in recent years have been increasingly targeted for nuclear waste storage.
According to David Conrad, executive director of the National Tribal Environmental Council, "Some of the biggest pollution sources that affect Native American lands are from federal facilities, usually defense-related, and located on or near tribal lands."
The Web site Environmental Health and Safety Online (EHSO) says, "Basic necessities such as safe drinking water and sewage treatment are often in short supply on reservations."
And many of the 565 recognized tribes throughout the United States are located in remote areas without municipal landfills. Waste, from both legal and illegal dumping by residents and nonresidents alike, can accumulate to levels that pose direct health hazards while polluting waterways and contaminating fish, a staple of many Indian diets.
For example, the abnormally high cancer rates among the Pacific Northwest's Columbia River Basin tribes can be attributed to the widespread contamination of area salmon and trout. In 2002, researchers from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) found 92 pollutants - including heavy metals, PCBs, banned pesticides such as DDT, and chemicals produced during chlorine bleaching of paper pulp - in the area's fish. With tribal members in these areas eating fish at rates greater than six times the national average, they are at especially great risk from such contaminants.
The issue largely boils down to economics. Since 1993, the EPA's General Assistance Program has helped many tribes nationwide, through grants, to deal with solid waste, groundwater and soil contamination, air quality, and other problems. And some tribes have used their newfound wealth from gaming and casinos and other industries to pay for their own environmental protection programs.
But wealthy tribes are the exception, rather than the rule.
"Most tribes are running much smaller scale gaming operations, and a good deal of the revenue generated is still going back to the initial investors," said Charlene Dunn, tribal coordinator with the EPA's Office of Solid Waste and Emergency Response. "In any case, that doesn't allow us to abrogate our responsibilities to tribal governments. [The EPA] is still responsible for providing them with adequate environmental protection."
-------- MILITARY
-------- africa
A Bounty of Food Relief Sits Unused In Zimbabwe
Claim of Bumper Crop Ties Aid Groups' Hands
By Craig Timberg
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, July 20, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A62894-2004Jul19?language=printer
BULAWAYO, Zimbabwe -- Giant bags of cornmeal, labeled "USA" for the country that donated them, sit stacked 40 high in a U.N. warehouse on the outskirts of this city. Together with the cooking oil, beans and high-protein meal for porridge also stored here, there is enough to feed hundreds of thousands of people.
But there is no plan to do so.
President Robert Mugabe, the only ruler Zimbabwe has had in the 24 years since the end of white rule, has announced that a bumper harvest will produce more than enough food for the country this year, for the first time since 2000.
That means officials of the U.N. World Food Program, which like other aid groups operates only at government request, have little choice but to ignore the evidence around them -- the brown and withered fields, the beggars on the street and the hungry faces in townships less than a mile from the warehouse, one of several the United Nations maintains in Zimbabwe.
So the World Food Program and other international aid groups here are in retreat. They are cutting staff, dismantling their distribution networks and wondering who, if anyone, will help Zimbabweans who have relied on U.N. feeding centers over the past three years. At the peak in 2003, the U.N. facilities fed more than 6.5 million people, more than half the nation's population of 12 million.
"We have to accept the government's forecasts of a bumper harvest," said Mike Huggins, a spokesman for U.N. feeding programs in southern Africa. "We only hope that people with no source of income will be able to access some of that surplus."
Few independent observers here believe there will be a surplus. In June, U.N. special envoy James Morris warned that as many as 5 million people in the country may need food aid in the coming year.
Mugabe's government has restricted information, shut down newspapers and criticized people who disagree with its pronouncements. In May, it suspended the crop estimate program conducted annually by the government in concert with U.N. officials.
Mugabe has attacked aid groups as a threat to his party and made clear his willingness to expel them if they defy his wishes. A cabinet minister last month told provincial governors they should not hesitate to tell groups that fail to coordinate their activities with the government "to pack their bags and go," according to the government-run Chronicle newspaper in Bulawayo.
As aid groups scale back their operations, Zimbabweans are left increasingly vulnerable.
In Bulawayo, the nation's second-largest city, some residents eke out a living smuggling in goods from South Africa or Botswana to sell on street corners or in flea markets. Others stay with their parents, grandparents or cousins, one of whom might have a steady job.
In the townships and rural areas, where poverty is more severe, people are skipping meals to protect their stocks of cornmeal, which figures show have more than quintupled in price since April. Overall, the annual inflation rate is nearly 400 percent, according to government figures.
Cornmeal is central to life throughout the country. It is typically boiled into sadza, a stiff, sticky mush that often is eaten by hand. Prosperous Zimbabweans have sadza as a side dish with chicken or beef. But many poorer residents eat it at nearly every meal, often with no other food.
The corn harvest, once so bountiful that Zimbabwe exported food, has fallen sharply since 2000, the year Mugabe began violent land seizures of thousands of commercial farms owned by whites. Most of the white farmers have since fled the country, and the farms have been run by the government or doled out, generally to government cronies with little expertise in agriculture.
U.N. figures show Zimbabwe produced 2.1 million metric tons of corn in 2000, but less than 500,000 in 2002.
Yields improved to 800,000 last year, and some Zimbabweans say that better rains are making for a bigger harvest this year. Corn cobs almost fill the storage bins at some farms outside Bulawayo. But many other farms throughout the country appear overgrown and untended, the fields all but reclaimed by nature.
Official government estimates are that this year's corn harvest will be nearly triple the size of last year's, which would make it the best since 1996, when the country was still considered the breadbasket of southern Africa.
Mugabe told Britain's Sky News in May that those days were returning and the need for food aid had ended. "We are not hungry. It should go to hungrier people, hungrier countries than ourselves," Mugabe said. "Why foist this food upon us? We don't want to be choked. We have enough."
Controlling the food supply has long been used as a political tactic by Mugabe's party, according to observers and human rights activists, who say that as elections approach, the governing party rewards supporters with 50-kilogram, or about 110-pound, bags of cornmeal and withholds them from opponents.
Independent news reports indicate that Mugabe's camp is buying cornmeal from neighboring countries and storing it in warehouses ahead of national parliamentary elections in March.
As the election season nears, the Christian aid group World Vision also finds itself caught in the nation's political dynamics. World Vision announced two weeks ago that it was ending its general feeding program in Zimbabwe, which at its height delivered food to 1.5 million people a month.
"The government has made it clear to all agencies . . . that they do not expect a food aid operation," said Rudo Kwaramba, the top World Vision official in the country. "One has to be wise, if I may use that term, in the prevailing socioeconomic-political environment in Zimbabwe. You try the best that you can to maintain your operations."
Instead of feeding centers open to all hungry people, the United Nations and World Vision have shifted their focus to targeted programs at schools, orphanages and medical clinics.
The government has not yet sought to curtail those efforts, and if they continue, much of the food in the Bulawayo warehouse may be distributed over the course of coming months.
One recent morning at the Deli Primary School in Umguza, a rural area about 45 miles northwest of Bulawayo, students lined up with empty bowls in their hands. Awaiting them were steaming pots of an enriched corn and soy porridge, courtesy of the United Nations.
It was nearly 11 a.m., and for most of these children, it was their first meal of the day. They sat on brown grass, not far from dried cow dung left by cattle sharing the school's field, and scooped food into their mouths in the traditional way, with two fingers.
Through such targeted programs, the United Nations still hopes to provide food to 550,000 Zimbabweans next year.
But unless the government changes its mind, the United Nations does not intend to restart the general feeding centers that once fed 10 times that number.
"The government will want to be the one giving out food," said John Makumbe, a political science professor at the University of Zimbabwe in the capital, Harare. "You have your party card, you get your food. You don't get your party card . . . you don't get your food."
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Rights Group Says Sudan's Government Aided Militias
By Colum Lynch
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, July 20, 2004; Page A12
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A63010-2004Jul19.html
UNITED NATIONS, July 19 -- Human Rights Watch, the New York-based advocacy group, on Monday published excerpts of documents that it says implicate the Sudanese government in recruiting, equipping and guaranteeing impunity for the Arab militias accused of killing tens of thousands of Africans and driving more than 1 million from their homes in the Darfur region of Sudan.
The rights organization said the confidential government documents called on local Sudanese officials in February and March to recruit fighters for the militia known as the Janjaweed, to give them "provisions and ammunition," and to tolerate "minor" abuses of civilians. One document written by a local official in North Darfur asked security officials to permit the followers of a well-known Janjaweed leader, Sheik Musa Hilal, "to proceed" with their activities and to "secure their vital needs."
Human Rights Watch said another document outlined plans by the Sudanese government to resettle Arab nomads in land occupied by local rebels and villagers.
"These documents show that the government in Khartoum has been supportive of the militias as a matter of policy," said Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch. "We don't believe this is the moment when patience should be exercised, this is the moment when pressure should be exercised."
Khartoum has denied that it supports the militia. It maintains that it is committed to ending their reign of terror, noting a decision to send police to Darfur to restore security. A Sudanese court Monday sentenced 10 Janjaweed fighters to six years in prison and to the amputation of one leg and one arm.
The Bush administration, meanwhile, is struggling to determine which diplomatic responses at the United Nations will be most effective in ending the violence.
U.S. diplomats here, responding to mounting international resistance, are considering abandoning their plan to seek immediate U.N. sanctions against the militias, according to U.S. and U.N. diplomats.
That plan, included in a draft resolution presented to Security Council members earlier this month, has been criticized by both critics and supporters of the Khartoum government. The critics argue that the sanctions are too weak to deter those responsible for atrocities in Darfur, while backers of the government say the provisions would undermine the U.N. effort to secure Khartoum's cooperation in resolving the crisis.
John C. Danforth, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said the United States would continue to hold out the threat of sanctions "down the road" against the Arab militias and its backers in the Sudanese government. But he said the ultimate goal of U.S. policy in Darfur is to ensure that Darfur's victims "are cared for."
That, he said, requires a more aggressive international relief effort and "maximum cooperation on the part of the government of Sudan to facilitate the delivery of food, medicines" and other relief supplies.
On Wednesday, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan's special envoy, Jan Pronk of the Netherlands, will brief the Security Council on his recent visit to Khartoum. He has been struggling to implement a July 3 accord between the United Nations and the Sudanese government aimed at guaranteeing access for international relief workers.
A statement issued Monday by the United Nations' emergency relief coordinator said that while access had "improved" in Darfur, "air raids and attacks by the Janjaweed and Government-aligned militias" against civilians continued.
U.S. and U.N. diplomats said the U.S.-sponsored resolution, which is still being redrafted, would demand that Sudan increase access for relief workers, provide greater security for civilians in Darfur and arrest leaders of the militia. It probably will also include some implicit reference to the possibility of future sanctions against the government and the militias.
"What we're doing is to try to work with other countries to determine what sort of resolution would get the most support," Danforth said. "In any event, the resolution would be designed to put pressure on the government to fully cooperate with the relief effort."
The United States is facing growing international opposition to the possibility of sanctions. The Organization of the Islamic Conference, a group of more than 50 Islamic governments, told the 15-nation council that "we should not rush" into imposing sanctions, and should allow more time to test Khartoum's commitment to crack down on the militias, according to Abdallah Baali, Algeria's U.N. ambassador.
The African Union and the Arab League, meanwhile, have also called on the Security Council to show restraint. "Sanctions are not the solution," Arab League Secretary General Amr Moussa said Monday.
"Most people are saying, 'Let's give them a chance and let's see whether they comply with their commitments,' " added Heraldo Muñoz, Chile's U.N. ambassador.
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Rights Group Says Sudan Aids Abuses
July 20, 2004
By WARREN HOGE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/20/international/africa/20suda.html?pagewanted=all
UNITED NATIONS, July 19 - An international human rights group said Monday that it had Sudanese government records showing that the authorities in Sudan are recruiting, arming and protecting the Arab militias attacking black Africans in the Darfur region in a campaign that United Nations officials have called ethnic cleansing.
Officials in Khartoum, Sudan's capital, have denied reports of complicity with fighters held responsible for the deaths of 30,000 people and the displacement of more than a million. They have answered the international outcry over the crisis with vows to disarm the militias and curb the violence.
"What these documents show is there is a need to go past the fiction maintained by Khartoum that there is a serious distinction between the Sudanese government and the Janjaweed militia that the government has sponsored," said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch.
In a news conference at the United Nations, Mr. Roth deplored the delay in obtaining a Security Council resolution placing sanctions on Sudan's leaders, and he said the time had come to cease trusting Khartoum's claims that it will head off the problem and its pleas for time to do so.
"The Khartoum government is trying to have it both ways maintaining a façade of cooperation with the international community but in fact doing relatively little to rein in the ongoing atrocities in Darfur," Mr. Roth said.
Both Secretary General Kofi Annan and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell went to Darfur this month to pressure Sudanese officials, but a United States-sponsored draft resolution has run into delays on the Security Council from countries interested in giving Sudan time to comply with its promises to act.
Mr. Roth displayed the Arabic documents and English translations of them and said they had been authenticated by Sudanese sources that the human rights group had found reliable in the past.
One, dated days after the Feb. 9 public declaration by the Sudanese president, Omar Hassan Ahmed al-Bashir, to "end all military operations in Darfur," ordered provincial officials instead to increase recruitment and support fighters.
Another, a month later, called for additional "provisions and ammunition." A third laid out plans for resettling lands from which black villagers had been evicted or eliminated.
Mr. Roth said his group had also turned up evidence that instead of disarming Janjaweed warriors, the government was incorporating them into the new police and security forces it was creating in the name of combating the militias.
Mr. Roth ridiculed the draft Security Council resolution, which does not call for sanctions against Sudanese leaders, only restrictions on travel and money of Janjaweed officials. "Freezing bank accounts and restricting travel for people who don't have bank accounts and don't travel won't do any good," he said.
Sudanese Militiamen Are Sentenced
KHARTOUM, Sudan, July 19 (Reuters) - A Sudanese court sentenced 10 Arab militiamen to amputation and six years in jail on Sunday in the first conviction of Janjaweed fighters for looting and killing in the Darfur region, according to a court document obtained here.
The ruling said the militiamen were convicted under articles pertaining to waging war, killing, armed looting and the possession of weapons without a license.
-------- arms
Malaysia to buy Chinese missiles for technology transfer
KUALA LUMPUR (AFP)
Jul 20, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040720115308.mjyqr50c.html
Malaysia has agreed in principle to purchase medium-range missiles from China, which in return will transfer technology on very short-range air defence to the country, Deputy Prime Minister Najib Razak said Tuesday.
The procurement of the surface-to-air missiles was part of the armed forces modernisation program and would be made under the Ninth Malaysia Plan from 2006-2009, he was quoted as saying by Bernama news agency.
"Details of the procurement and offset programme will be finalised later should Malaysia give its full commitment," he said after the signing of a memorandum of understanding on the purchase. The cost of the weapons were not revealed.
Under the pact between China National Precision Machinery Import and Export Corp. and two local companies, CNPMIEC would transfer technology on production of the FN-6 shoulder-launched missiles to Malaysia if it purchases its medium-range KS-1A missiles, Bernama said.
This includes provisions for special test facilities, tools, manufacturing process document, training and technical support.
CNPMIEC president Wang Bingyan said China had also offered to conclude the KS-1A transaction on flexible payment terms, including counter-trade, barter and deferred payments.
Malaysia has procured very short-range air defence systems from Russia, Pakistan and Britain under the Eight Malaysian Plan from 2001-2005, Bernama said.
The government has in the past two years embarked on a major arms procurement spree, ranging from Russian Sukhoi fighter jets and British missile systems to French submarines and Polish attack tanks.
Malaysia has denied its weapons build-up could spark an arms race in the region, saying the purchases are simply designed to upgrade its defences and that it has no aggressive intentions.
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Romania selling off last of its Soviet-era MiG-29s
BUCHAREST (AFP)
Jul 20, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040720131147.xmgtfmaa.html
The Romanian military is putting the last 18 of its Soviet-era MiG-29 fighter planes up for sale, the air force chief of staff said Tuesday.
Gheorghe Catrina said the defence ministry had decided that it would be more profitable to sell off the warplanes, which went out of service two years ago, than to try to modernise them.
He did not specify a price for the aircraft, which were bought during the 1980s.
Catrina said Romania, which has around 100 recently modernised MiG-21 jets, was considering purchasing a new generation.
"We are in the process of evaluating the best offers in order to be able to buy 48 aircraft between 2008 and 2012 to replace the MiG-21s, which we will replace gradually," he added.
The chief of staff said Romania also intended to buy four Hercules C-130 heavy-duty and nine medium-haul transport aircraft as well as 12 helicopters and six ground-to-air missile systems.
Romania is among the seven countries that joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in March, bringing the alliance's membership to 26 states.
-------- biological weapons
Source: FBI anthrax probe closes labs at Fort Detrick
7/20/2004
Associated Press
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2004-07-20-anthrax-probe_x.htm
FREDERICK, Md. (AP) - FBI agents combed laboratory suites at Fort Detrick - home to the Army's biological warfare defense program - on Tuesday, and a source said they were again looking for evidence in the 2001 anthrax attacks.
The labs at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases have been closed since Friday, Fort Detrick spokesman Charles Dasey said.
A law-enforcement source, speaking on condition of anonymity, told The Associated Press the activity is related to the anthrax mailings that killed five people and sickened 17 in autumn 2001.
FBI agents have frequently visited Fort Detrick since the unsolved attacks, amid speculation that the deadly spores or the person who sent them may be connected to Fort Detrick.
Dasey said he didn't know which labs were involved, what sort of research had been conducted there or how long they would be closed.
Debra Weierman, spokeswoman for the FBI's Washington field office, said the lab probe was part of "an ongoing criminal investigation." She said could not discuss details of the activity.
Much of the speculation about a Fort Detrick connection has centered on Stephen Hatfill, a former government scientist and bioweapons expert who once worked at the infectious disease institute at Fort Detrick. The FBI has labeled Hatfill a "person of interest" in the case.
Hatfill has denied any role in the attacks. He has filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Washington contending the government invaded his privacy and ruined his reputation by leaking information to the media implicating him in the attacks. His lawsuit seeks to clear his name and recover unspecified monetary damages.
His lawyer, Victor Glasberg, had no comment Tuesday.
-------- business
Basic Training Doesn't Guard Against Insurance Pitch to G.I.'s
July 20, 2004
By DIANA B. HENRIQUES
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/20/business/20military.html?pagewanted=all&position=
Nicholas Stachler was 19 years old when he reported for basic training with the Army at Fort Benning, Ga., before shipping out for 11 months to Iraq.
A gentle, trusting man, he had only weeks earlier graduated from high school with a handful of trophies in hockey and soccer, middling grades and hardly a clue about how to handle his money. He had held only casual jobs baby-sitting and mowing lawns and had never opened a checking account. The bus trip to boot camp, from the foothills of the Appalachians in southern Ohio to the kudzu-covered fields of western Georgia, took him farther from home than he had ever been.
About six weeks into his training - six weeks of combat drills and drummed-in lessons in Army ways - he tasted one of the less-honorable traditions of military life: a compulsory classroom briefing on personal finance that was a life insurance sales pitch in disguise.
As he remembers the class and as base investigative records show, two insurance agents quick-stepped him and his classmates through a stack of paperwork, pointing out where they should sign their names, where they should scribble their initials. They were given no time to read the documents and no copies to keep.
Specialist Stachler says he thought he had arranged to have $100 a month deducted from his pay for some sort of Army-endorsed savings plan or mutual fund. When he returned from Iraq, he found that he had not been saving the money at all. He had been paying $100 a month in premiums for an insurance policy that promised him some cash value far down the road and a death benefit that was almost certainly less than $44,000, a small amount compared with the $250,000 in life insurance he had through a military-sponsored plan that cost him $16.25 a month.
"I asked him what this money was coming out of his paycheck for, and he didn't even know," said his mother, Pamela M. Stachler of Athens, Ohio.
Specialist Stachler's experience is not uncommon. A six-month examination by The New York Times, drawing on military and court records and interviews with dozens of industry executives and servicemen and women, has found that several financial services companies or their agents are using questionable tactics on military bases to sell insurance and investments that may not fit the needs of people in uniform.
Insurance agents have made misleading pitches to "captive" audiences like the ones at Fort Benning. They have posed as counselors on veterans benefits and independent financial advisers. And they have solicited soldiers in their barracks or while they were on duty, violations of Defense Department regulations.
The Pentagon has been aware of practices like these since the Vietnam War; investigations have even cited specific companies and agents. But because of industry lobbying, Congressional pressure, weak enforcement and the Pentagon's ineffective oversight, almost no action has been taken to sanction those responsible or to better protect those who are vulnerable, The Times has found.
And the problem has only intensified since the beginning of the Iraq war, say military employees who monitor insurance agents. With the death toll rising in Iraq, interest in insurance among the troops has surged, making the war a selling opportunity for many agents, they said.
The military market includes hundreds of thousands of men and women, many of them young and financially unsophisticated, all of them trained to trust leadership, obey orders and show loyalty to comrades.
To reach the buyers, many companies have used their military connections to lend credibility to their sales efforts, recruiting heavily from among retired or former military people for their corporate boards and sales forces. The advisory board at one company, First Command Financial Planning in Fort Worth, includes Gen. Anthony C. Zinni, the retired commander in chief of the United States Central Command.
Many financial experts say the products sold are often ill-suited for the military people who buy them. Like Specialist Stachler, almost all service members purchase low-cost insurance through the military, and, like him, 94 percent carry the maximum coverage of $250,000, the Defense Department says. But agents are nevertheless selling these men and women policies that have steep premiums for relatively small amounts of coverage.
A young marine at Camp Pendleton, Calif., for example, was sold a 20-year insurance policy last fall that gave him a death benefit of just under $28,000, plus some cash value far in the future, in exchange for $6,600 in premiums paid in the first seven years. That was more than 14 times what the same death benefit would have cost him under his military-sponsored plan.
Another product heavily promoted to military people is a type of mutual fund in which 50 percent of the first-year contributions are consumed as fees, a deal considered so expensive that such funds all but disappeared from the civilian market almost 20 years ago.
The insurance industry's leadership says rogue agents are to blame for the problems. The companies say that they have never knowingly tolerated these agents and that they dismiss the ones who are caught. A vast majority of their military customers, the companies say, are satisfied and loyal.
The industry's leaders also argue that existing Defense Department rules covering financial sales on military bases, if properly enforced, would be more than adequate to protect service members from the occasional episodes of abuse without cutting them off from legitimate information about insurance and investments.
Industry executives defend their products as appropriate and say they employ veterans as agents and advisers because they better understand the financial and personal pressures of military life. But many military leaders worry that the approach exploits, for private profit, the obedience, trust and loyalty that they work to instill in troops.
If a soldier or a sailor winds up feeling cheated or misled, the blame is as likely to go to the military as to the offending sales agents and companies, said John M. Molino, who, as the deputy under secretary of defense for military community and family policy, is responsible for Pentagon policy on these issues. That can damage morale, inhibit recruitment and discourage re-enlistment, he said.
"When we allow a person on an installation," Mr. Molino said, "there is at least the implication that we have sanctioned your presence."
But barring sales agents from bases is not the solution, said Frank Keating, the former governor of Oklahoma, who is president of the American Council of Life Insurers, a lobbying group.
"Anything that is unethical or inappropriate should not exist, period," Mr. Keating said. But "someone who is mature enough to fight and quite possibly die for their country," he added, "should be freely able to decide how much and what kind of life insurance they should have."
That argument does not satisfy people like Capt. James A. Shaw, commander of the Second Battalion's 325th Airborne Infantry Regiment at Fort Bragg, N.C. In his experience, he said, the training that produces competent soldiers may make them vulnerable to a disguised pitch from a friendly agent in the classroom who is a veteran.
"It's an environment where you do what you're told," Captain Shaw said. "They are learning stuff that will save their lives in combat. Those classes are the law."
When the topic switches from weapons maintenance to personal finance, he said, "there's no real reason to suspect otherwise."
Strangers in the Barracks
Specialist Stachler and four other soldiers who were in the room remember well the day in late summer 2002 when they unwittingly bought an insurance policy at Fort Benning from two men they had never seen before.
The sales pitch, they said, came during a compulsory "briefing" on personal finance held in a classroom on the first floor of the soldiers' sprawling three-story barracks in a wooded corner of the Sand Hill training area. About 200 recruits were present. The two men seemed to be on friendly terms with several of the sergeants, according to the soldiers, each of whom was interviewed in person or by phone.
The visiting insurance agents talked to the recruits about savings and investment.
"There was not a word about life insurance," said one soldier, Specialist Brandon Conger, a tall, intense 20-year-old from Butler, Mo., a small town near Kansas City.
But there was plenty of paperwork to fill out. Specialist Stachler said it was the agents who did that. "We had to sign things," he said, including the critical "allotment form," which authorizes the Army to deduct money from a soldier's paycheck, in this case to be paid to the insurance company.
What they said they experienced that day violated several provisions of Defense Department Directive 1344.7, which prohibits agents from soliciting "recruits, trainees and transient personnel in a 'mass' or 'captive' audience" on bases, soliciting on-duty personnel, using deceptive methods or possessing the allotment forms.
And what the soldiers signed up for was not what they had thought.
One soldier, Specialist Michael Fresenburg, 20, who recently became engaged to his high school sweetheart back home in Columbia, Mo., said he thought he had agreed to participate in "a sort of savings fund."
"I understood that there would be two accounts," he said, "one I could draw from at any time, and the other I couldn't touch for seven years."
The accounts were in fact a complex form of insurance, one that indeed allowed the soldiers to contribute to a savings fund at competitive interest rates. But there was a catch: they could participate only if they bought an expensive 20-year life insurance policy, one with premiums that would eat up all of their monthly payments in the first year and three-fourths of their payments over the next six years.
Insurance experts say the policies are intended for knowledgeable long-term investors who have savings to spare. They are almost never suitable for modest-income people as young and financially inexperienced as Specialist Stachler and his fellow soldiers.
"A young, single person with no dependents and no debts probably doesn't need life insurance at all," said Prof. James M. Carson, an insurance expert at Florida State University. Service members with families probably do need insurance and might want more than the $250,000 offered through the military's low-cost plan but cash-accumulation policies like these, he said, are an expensive way to obtain that additional coverage.
Moreover, the penalties for early withdrawals and the slow-growing cash value in most of the policies make them a terrible vehicle for short-term savings and a poor method for long-term investment, Professor Carson said. "If they just put their money into a money market fund," he said, "they would be out-earning the rate of return on most cash-value life insurance policies like these." The companies that sell the policies say they help military people save while providing some supplemental insurance coverage. But whether this was the right type of life insurance for the five men, now at Fort Bragg, is almost moot: none of them realized they were buying life insurance. The only paperwork they received, they say, is a one-page statement on the status of their accumulation fund; it says nothing about any insurance benefits.
In Ohio, Ms. Stachler, a 48-year-old employee of the United States Forest Service and a single mother, paid such close attention to her son's finances while he was in Iraq that she once noticed bills for a modest shopping spree at the post exchange at Baghdad International Airport and teased him about it in their next phone call. She is adamant that no life insurance policy arrived in the mail for her son at his home in Ohio, his address of record.
"From the day he left Athens, Ohio, for the military, anything that came in with his name on it, I opened," she said. "There was no policy."
Specialist Stachler canceled the policy when he discovered what it was. Of the $1,800 deducted from his paychecks while he was at war, his mother said, he received $500 back. The rest had been eaten up by the premiums he did not know he was paying. "I was really bummed," he said.
Specialist Conger and Specialist Fresenburg emerged from Iraq still holding onto the grimy, dog-eared business cards they had collected at Fort Benning. Both cards bear the name of an insurance agency in Columbus, Ga., the city nearest the base. On one card, someone had penciled in the name Ron Thurman.
Ron Thurman is identified in Fort Benning records as one of several local representatives of the American Amicable Life Insurance Company of Waco, Tex., a prominent player in the military insurance market.
Now living in Bamberg, Germany, Mr. Thurman did not respond to a registered letter or to numerous telephone messages left at his office over the last month. But in a letter he sent to legal officers at Fort Benning, he said he had thought that the briefings had been approved by the sergeants in charge, although he acknowledged that agents are not allowed to solicit the trainees at Sand Hill at Fort Benning. "We promise this wouldn't happen again," he wrote. "We are very sorry."
The authorities at Fort Benning first learned about the improper briefings early last year; a young private told them when he came to them for help in canceling his policy. After an investigation, they barred Mr. Thurman from the base last October, along with another man from the same nearby agency. A third man affiliated with the agency received a warning letter, said Lt. Col. Ralph J. Tremaglio III, the deputy staff judge advocate at Fort Benning.
Colonel Tremaglio said his office received a call from the agency's owner in December. "He said he had been contacted by the vice president of American Amicable about Mr. Thurman," the colonel said. According to his file, the caller wanted to confirm that Mr. Thurman was barred only from Fort Benning, not from all military bases.
American Amicable disputes that. In a written statement, it said it did not learn about the Fort Benning incident until a few months ago, when a reporter asked about it. "The situation is currently under investigation," the company said, and it "will respond with the appropriate actions once the facts are known."
It also insisted that the policies sold at Fort Benning had been mailed to the soldiers' homes. It would not say how much coverage the $100-a-month policies offered, but the average death benefit it has paid in the Iraq conflict is less than $44,000. When three marines who bought similar policies last year were killed recently, the company paid out $87,155, or about $29,000 a marine.
The Agents Wore Stripes
Second Lt. Craig Cunningham, a feisty West Point graduate serving at Fort Bliss in El Paso, remembers a reception for officers in training that he attended at the base officers club last fall.
"There were 100 lieutenants or so, a pretty big group," Lieutenant Cunningham said. "They had a bar and a reception area, with finger food on one side. Everyone's mingling."
At one point the chitchat stopped as someone made a pitch encouraging the group to join the officers club and a nonprofit military fraternal organization, the Association of the United States Army.
Conversation resumed. Sometime later someone called for another halt, "to talk about First Command," Lieutenant Cunningham said.
"There were several agents there, mingling and handing out business cards," he said. He recalled that the agents were retired military officers.
The companies selling financial services in the military market try to recruit former military people to be their agents, people who can fit smoothly into receptions like the one at Fort Bliss.
"They're buying access," said Robert R. Sparks, a lawyer in Covington, Ky., who has handled cases for military consumers. "That's all they're getting. But that's all they need, because their customers are used to going along with authority."
Few companies have more fervently embraced this form of salesmanship, called affinity marketing, than First Command, a 46-year-old financial services company originally known by the gawky name USPA and IRA. The company said all of the 300,000 families that it serves are headed by former or active-duty commissioned officers or higher-ranking noncommissioned officers; it does not serve lower-ranking service people. And almost all of its 1,007 agents have served in the military or "have military connections." None, it says, have been cited for rule violations.
First Command's paid advisory board, trumpeted on its Web site, includes several retired military luminaries, among them General Zinni, who calls himself an enthusiastic customer. "I even advised my son, who is a marine, to join" the company, he said in a recent interview. He said he was comfortable with the use the company had made of his affiliation. "It just lets their clients know that this is the type of people they have on their board," he said.
The board also includes several other prominent military retirees, including the former Coast Guard Commandant Robert E. Kramek; Gen. Lloyd W. Newton, the Air Force pilot known as Fig Newton who flew with the Thunderbirds flying team; and Vice Adm. John R. Ryan, a former superintendent of the Naval Academy.
What First Command does "is affinity marketing, but I don't think there's anything wrong with that," said Lamar C. Smith, the chief executive, a former Air Force captain who was a pilot in the Vietnam War. As veterans, he said, his agents "speak the language" of the military and know, perhaps better than civilians, how life on a base can put pressure on a family's finances. Families move often and on short notice, Mr. Smith said, making it difficult for a spouse to hold a job; debt levels are higher than in civilian life. But where First Command sees a sales force attuned to the needs of its market niche, some of its critics see agents whose ties to senior officers and retired brass can unduly influence the financial decisions of junior officers.
"They go after these young, young lieutenants with an agent who is, say, a retired colonel," said Sandra Benintende, a military spouse at Fort Knox, Ky., who worked briefly for a First Command office. She recalled that one young customer waiting for a meeting with his agent once asked her, "Should I call him 'Sir'?"
The company says it relies only on word-of-mouth referrals to cultivate customers. Interviews with a score of young officers and their spouses, however, produced an equal number of anecdotes about other ways that First Command sought out prospects.
One remembered a "sailor of the year" reception that the company sponsored in Norfolk, Va., at which agents passed out business cards. Families at Fort Knox know that First Command provides a free "happy hour" buffet on Fridays at a bar near the base, Mrs. Benintende said.
From their first meeting with a company agent, clients are encouraged to provide the names of other prospects and to invite friends and co-workers to the free dinners. The presence of senior officers among the satisfied customers at such events was cited by many young military people as something that persuaded them to sign up with First Command.
And there is no doubt that First Command has tens of thousands of satisfied customers. Among them are Lt. Col. Rande and Karen Read of Weatherford, Tex., west of Fort Worth. Retired from the Air Force, Colonel Read is a pilot for American Airlines; Mrs. Read is a former Air Force nurse.
Mr. Read's first agent, he recalled, was a former Air Force captain a few years older than him. "I was taking a shotgun approach, continually dabbling," he said. With coaching from his agent, he said, he started a regular savings and investment plan in 1982.
But the free dinners and hand-holding make a sales effort like this expensive and time-consuming. Only financial products that generate high front-end commissions can compensate agents for the amount of work required, financial experts said.
'Teachers' Who Sell
Insurance agents who want to sell policies on base at Camp Pendleton, north of San Diego, must first pass a written test on their mastery of military rules. One question asks: "When may an insurance agent give classes for the sole purpose of informing service members of their V.A. benefits?"
The correct answer is "Never."
That prohibition did not stop several agents for Pioneer American Insurance Company, a sister company of American Amicable, from arranging "veterans benefits" classes last summer for marines at Camp Pendleton's training school, camp lawyers said. Posing as instructors, the agents had actually come to sell insurance, the lawyers said.
The ruse may have gone undetected by the camp authorities had not a retired master gunnery sergeant called the school last August to complain about a policy that his 23-year-old son, one of the trainees, had just purchased. (The Marines declined to disclose the names of the sergeant or his son.) An investigation was begun and passed to Capt. Jonathan Strasburg, who is head of research and civil law in the staff judge advocate's office at Camp Pendleton.
At one point an undercover investigator was assigned to attend a "veterans benefits" briefing. The investigator reported that the agents would talk about benefits "anytime anyone in authority was in the room," Captain Strasburg said.
"But when the troop handler would leave the room," he said, "the V.A. talk would stop, almost mid-sentence, and they would roll into their investment pitch."
In his report, Captain Strasburg wrote that the officer in charge did not realize that the volunteer instructors were insurance agents and, in any case, was unfamiliar with the rules that barred agents from holding such classes, a chronic problem on bases, military lawyers say.
In affidavits, many of the marines that Captain Strasburg interviewed said the agents had instructed them to sign and initial stacks of unread documents, including both the allotment forms that set up payroll deductions and the company's "Statement of Understanding" forms. These certify that each marine had requested the sales appointment, was off duty at the time and had understood the details of the insurance being purchased.
The policy that the retired sergeant's son and presumably other trainees bought provided a death benefit of just under $28,000 for 20 years in exchange for premiums that totaled $6,600 over the first seven years, including $1,200 in the first year. After the 20th year, the policy would expire with some cash value, most of which would have accumulated in its final years. Under the military's program, the same amount of coverage would cost just $468, the Strasburg report said.
Like the Pentagon's code, the camp's rules forbid soliciting business from new recruits or trainees. The reason is simple, Captain Strasburg said, these young marines "are taught to question nothing."
Captain Strasburg ultimately identified 345 marines who had bought insurance through the improper briefings. Of the dozens he interviewed, he said in his report, all "felt they were obligated to sign up."
"They all believed the plan was endorsed by the Marine Corps," he concluded.
The Marines found no indication that Pioneer American had known about these improper activities, and the company agreed to offer refunds. It also dismissed the agents, the company said, under a "zero tolerance" policy it had put in place in October 2000.
The earlier improper briefings at Fort Benning had a different aftermath. Barred from the base last October, Mr. Thurman began working for American Amicable on military bases in Europe almost immediately. According to Millie Waters, a public affairs officer in Europe, the company requested a permit for Mr. Thurman on Nov. 6; the permit was approved on Dec. 11.
Army authorities in Europe knew he had been barred from Fort Benning, Ms. Waters said, but they issued the permit, because the exclusion had been limited to Fort Benning and because an American Amicable executive in Europe had vouched for him.
But company executives in Texas said they had not known about the action against Mr. Thurman when he moved to Germany and would not have approved his transfer if they had. The company said it cut its ties to Mr. Thurman in June and is investigating how his transfer was approved.
Since October 2000, the company has made a considerable effort to make sure that its agents "understand the moral issues involved in insurance sales," the company said in its statement.
"The examples cited here of personnel who have violated the company's trust do not reflect a lack of commitment" by the company, it said. Over all, it considers its compliance record to be very good, given that it has more than 300 agents working as independent contractors around the world.
Locked In and Losing
When Capt. Jennifer Jusseaume was a junior at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs in 1998, she took advantage of lenient loan terms that financial companies have traditionally offered to third-year students at the military academies. She borrowed $19,000, at 1.5 percent interest.
She knew she would use some of the money to pay off her credit card debt. But while she was deciding what to do with the rest, her commanding officer arranged a financial briefing for his cadets in their squadron's common area. The briefing was given by the commander's investment adviser, a retired officer who was an agent with First Command.
"It was about investing," said Captain Jusseaume, now 25 and married to Capt. Brian Jusseaume, who returned from duty in the Persian Gulf in time for the arrival of their first child this month. "If you were interested, you signed your name." She did, ultimately investing in two mutual funds that First Command sells as an agent for several large mutual fund families.
Both funds, the Fidelity Destiny Fund II and the Pioneer Independence Fund, consumed half of the first year's investment in sales charges, a drag on her future returns from which she will never recover.
The type of mutual fund that First Command sells to virtually all its customers is traditionally called a contractual plan. Under this plan, fund shares are purchased in monthly installments over 15 or 20 years.
The plans have been around since the 1930's but all but vanished from the civilian market in the early 1980's after decades of sales abuses and regulatory crackdowns. Their biggest drawback, fund experts say, is the impact that the loss of 50 percent of the first year's investment has on future earnings. Even a faithful investor never recovers from that burden, regardless of how well the fund does over time. And investors who do not go the distance - historically a high percentage - wind up paying a substantial percentage of their total investment in sales charges.
The Securities and Exchange Commission urged Congress in 1966 to abolish contractual plans. Instead, bowing to industry pressure, Congress only modified the rules governing them. It now allowed investors to withdraw from new plans within 45 days with a full refund and within 18 months with an 85 percent refund.
The amendments made contractual plans less attractive. Indeed, they have become so obscure that the Investment Company Institute, the fund industry's trade group, has not kept statistics on them since 1985.
In contrast to the enormous variety of mutual funds available in today's market, only a handful are still sold as contractual plans; First Command offers five, managed by Fidelity, AIM/Invesco, Pioneer and Franklin Templeton.
First Command and the fund companies that sell the plans fully disclose those first-year fees. In their defense, they say that contractual plans help discipline investors by keeping them from making costly shifts in and out of the market. And, they say, the plans compensate agents for the labor-intensive work of turning young military couples into savers and investors.
Among First Command's satisfied customers are First Sgt. Mike Boardman and his wife, Terry. Sergeant Boardman, who has been in the Army for 20 years, is a big, powerfully built man with firm opinions, a forceful personality and a fierce devotion to his troops. "I led 61 men into Iraq and led 61 out," he said. "I consider myself a good soldier. But I don't know anything about mutual funds and I don't want to know. I don't want to have to read the business pages. I barely have time to read the sports pages."
In an interview arranged by First Command, Sergeant Boardman said the upfront fees had curbed any temptation to stop making the monthly contributions. "Also, I felt I'd paid them to do a job for me over time," he said, "and I'm going to make them do that job."
Mr. Smith, the chief executive of First Command and himself a longtime investor in contractual plans, argues that the choice for most young officers is not between a contractual plan and a low-cost, more flexible mutual fund. "The choice," he said, "is between saving money through investments in a contractual plan or spending it and winding up with nothing."
But less happy customers say that the front-end fees have sapped the earning power of their hard-earned investments and locked them into disappointing or inconsistently managed funds.
Lt. Cmdr. Dale Folsom, now the senior controller for the Coast Guard's search and rescue center in New Orleans, began his career as an enlisted man. In less than a dozen years he rose to the rank of chief petty officer and, in 1993, graduated from the Coast Guard's officer candidate school in Yorktown, Va.
Two years later, Commander Folsom signed up with First Command and was steered out of his simple portfolio of savings bonds into the Fidelity Destiny II Fund, a contractual plan.
"I was a little surprised that, in addition to the 50 percent load and annual management fees, there is also a monthly 'sales and creation charge' and custodian fees," he said. After fees ate up half of his $300 monthly investment in the first year of the plan, the smaller continuing fees reduced it to $293.97.
"I just wish I had realized that what they were selling at such a high price was discipline and I already had that," Commander Folsom said.
Several longtime executives of the mutual fund industry said they were amazed that these archaic plans are still a staple of the military market. "Would I ever recommend that an investor buy contractual plans? No, I would not," said John C. Bogle, the founder of the Vanguard Group, the mutual fund management company, and an advocate of low-cost mutual fund investing.
But Commander Folsom said his disgust with First Command is based not just on his experience with contractual plans, but also on the advice the company gave to a young, single Coast Guard officer he knows.
The young man, who is in his mid-20s and confesses to having haphazard financial habits, takes home slightly more than $3,900 a month, thanks to a $600-a-month raise last year. But precisely $600 is being deducted automatically from his paycheck under the financial plan designed for him last fall by First Command. He is putting $300 a month into contractual plans, although after the upfront fees are paid, only half of that is actually being invested on his behalf. Another $150 is going into a money market fund at First Command Bank, the company's online savings institution. And $142.69 is being deducted for $250,000 in life insurance, duplicating the $250,000 in coverage he is already buying through the military for $16.25 a month, one-eighth as much. (The higher-priced First Command policy has some slow-growing cash value and a clause that guarantees that he can get coverage when he leaves the service.)
But the punch line for Commander Folsom is that the money the young man is steering toward First Command could be helping to pay off his ever deepening debt. The young man, who agreed to be interviewed on the condition of anonymity, confirmed that his debts total almost $51,000. Of that, almost $16,000 is credit card debt, of which more than $5,700 is incurring interest charges of 25 percent.
First Command said it could not comment on a client's affairs but defended the advice reflected in the man's plan, noting that it is important for young officers to save and invest even as they pay their debts.
Gerald Cannizzaro, a financial planner in suburban Washington and a member of the National Association of Personal Financial Advisors, was one of several financial planners who were stunned at the advice the young officer was getting.
"If you were talking to a bunch of N.A.P.F.A. people, they'd be in a coma by now," Mr. Cannizzaro said. "This is so bad. Why is he investing money when he has all that credit card debt? It makes no sense except to generate commissions for someone."
High upfront fees are not the only disadvantage of many products sold in the military market, financial experts say.
About half the people who buy cash-value insurance policies drop them within the first seven years, academic experts say, barely the break-even point for most policyholders. The dropout rate is higher for military policies than for those in the civilian market, industry analysts said. As for contractual plans like those Captain Jusseaume owns, studies show, roughly half the investors who have bought them dropped out early.
First Command says its dropout rates are much lower, for insurance and investments. Its analysis shows that one of every four plans it has sold since 1980, more than 156,000 plans, were dropped before completion, and that one out of 10 was dropped after customers had paid into them for at least five years.
The figures, critics said, raise doubts about whether the high front-end fees actually accomplish what First Command says they will: instilling discipline and providing the personal attention that helps inexperienced investors stay the course. But the young Coast Guard officer seemed content with the advice he was getting from his First Command agent, a retired military officer.
Captain Jusseaume, the Air Force officer, expressed some regret about her reliance on First Command's advice. "Looking back on it," she said, "I know I could have done something better with the money."
So why had she decided, as a cadet, to rely on First Command? "Our commander made it clear that he was with First Command and he had been very happy," she said. "I was really swayed by that."
Inaction at the Pentagon
Lt. Wayne V. Hildreth, retired, of Jacksonville, Fla., conducted one of the Navy's most extensive investigations of the improper sale of financial products on military bases. The experience, he says, taught him two troubling lessons.
First, he learned that the problems extended far beyond one company or one branch of the military. Second, he learned that the Pentagon was capable of ignoring the problems, even for decades.
His discouraging education came in 1997. He was looking into complaints about agents of Academy Life Insurance Company, at the time a prominent player in the military market. Among other things, the agents were accused of improperly using their relationship with the Non-Commissioned Officers Association, a military fraternal group, to sell policies.
The Pentagon, he discovered, already knew about many of the problems he was investigating. It had known at least since the Vietnam War, in fact, thanks to the reporting of Richard C. Barnard in The Army Times in 1974. When Lieutenant Hildreth first encountered the newspaper's work months into his 1997 investigation, he said, it nearly broke his heart.
"The sales methods and practices described in this article mirror those sales methods and practices I have uncovered," he wrote in his report. It was evident, he went on, that Defense Department officials knew of the practices involving Academy Life "yet appear to have done nothing."
His report, submitted in 1997, appealed for Pentagon-level action to address the structural problems he had identified. The Pentagon's response was to order more studies and, a year later, to bar Academy Life temporarily from the military market. The company denied any wrongdoing. It was the first and only department-level action against an insurer.
That response was not nearly strong enough, Lieutenant Hildreth said. "The fact that you are still finding these incidents on base today proves that," he said in a recent interview.
The first Pentagon study ordered was by its inspector general, who looked at life insurance sales on 11 military bases around the country selected at random. The final report, released with little fanfare in March 1999 and eliciting little Congressional interest, found improper practices at all 11 bases.
It detailed them: "misleading sales presentations, presentations by unauthorized personnel, presentations to captive audiences, soliciting during duty hours and soliciting in the barracks."
The report recommended stricter penalties and better communication with state insurance regulators. It also urged that a task force be set up to consider either enforcing existing rules more vigorously or banning agents from military bases entirely.
The Pentagon then ordered another study, this one by Brig. Gen. Thomas R. Cuthbert, retired, a Harvard-educated lawyer and the former chief judge of the Army's Court of Criminal Appeals.
His 70-page report, delivered in May 2000, was an indictment of the status quo at the Defense Department. Its policies, he wrote, "have been routinely violated" for 30 years. His recommendation echoed the inspector general's: "Either devote substantial additional resources to the regulation of insurance sales on military installations or flatly prohibit the on-base solicitation of life insurance products."
The report also detailed how agents from several specific companies, including American Amicable, Pioneer American and First Command, had been the targets of complaints at individual bases over the years. The study drew a flurry of media attention and a fierce reaction in the insurance industry. The Pentagon responded by setting up the Insurance Solicitation Oversight Working Group to examine the issue further.
The group's draft report, an undated copy of which was obtained by The New York Times, noted that the group had been told that banning agents from military bases "was not an option." Instead it recommended better personal finance training for the troops and stricter enforcement of the rules. It also urged that the Pentagon work more closely with state insurance commissioners.
Last summer the Pentagon signaled that it was ready to propose concrete steps to address the problems documented in its own studies. This set off a fresh round of industry opposition. So far, no proposal has been announced, although Mr. Molino, the Defense Department official responsible for the policy, said he hoped to act this summer.
Long before General Cuthbert issued his report, Lieutenant Hildreth had retired from the Navy, disillusioned about the Pentagon's willingness to address the problems he had uncovered in 1997.
"I sensed that nobody was going to do anything," he said in an interview this spring. "I lost confidence in a system that I had once had a lot of confidence in."
Next: The search for an explanation leads to Washington.
-------- china
Taiwan set for military exercises, coinciding with Chinese, US drills
TAINAN, Taiwan (AFP)
Jul 20, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040720102458.8d5lg7ia.html
Taiwan is to practice its first air force freeway landings in 26 years, to be followed by upscale wargames, coinciding with Chinese military maneuvers simulating an invasion of the island, officials and newspapers said Tuesday.
Workers hired by the military used cranes to remove hundreds of make-shift concrete blocs separating traffic lanes on a freeway in Tainan, southern Taiwan, making way for the landings of two French-made Mirage 2000-5 fighters.
The two fighter jets will land, refuel and load ammunition on the road early Wednesday.
The exercise is designed to "review the air force's capability in using freeways for emergency landings and logistic support in case of war," defense ministry spokesman Huang Suey-sheng told reporters.
Just prior to the drill, suspected Chinese hackers launched an offensive against the website of Taiwan's Military News Agency on Monday, the defense ministry said.
The hackers replaced the agency's homepage with a slogan that said 'Reunification with Taiwan in 2021', it said.
Following the drill, Taiwan's defense ministry is to stage the third stage of "Han Kuang 20," the biggest annual military drills, in the southern county of Pingtung on August 25, where Taiwanese armed forces would flex their muscle, the Chinese-language China Times said.
"The air force for the first time will fire AIM-120 air-to-air missiles the United States delivered to Taiwan last year," it said, without citing its sources.
Taiwan purchased 120 medium-range AIM-120 missiles after China acquired Russian-made air-to-air AA-12 missiles in June 2002. The AIM-120s, with a range of 50 kilometers (30 miles), are used to arm Taiwan's fleet of F-16 fighters.
The defense ministry declined to comment on the report.
The China Times said the scheduled wargames on Dongshan Island by the People's Liberation Army -- an island in southeastern China's Fujian province, just 150 nautical miles west of Taiwan's Penghu Island -- has been postponed to August, enabling it to coincide with Taiwan's Han Kuang exercise.
Making the drills more sensitive will be a string of wargames to be staged in the Pacific by the United States and its allies, the paper said.
Cable television station TVBS said a Taiwanese naval fleet will "practice" off eastern Taiwan Wednesday while the US carrier USS Kitty Hawk cruised to waters off the island.
Taiwan's defense ministry rejected the reports, alleging "they have no connection."
In its commentary on July 5, the China Daily warned the United States has forged a "de-facto military alliance" with Taiwan which is encouraging reckless moves towards independence by the island's leaders.
The Hong Kong-based Ta Kung Pao newspaper reported that China has said it would use the joint sea, land and air drills to demonstrate its ability to dominate air space over Taiwan, an essential element in any invasion.
Previous state media reports have said practically all the advanced weaponry China possesses would be used in the exercise, including Sukhoi Su-27 fighter jets purchased from Russia.
Nuclear-powered submarines, warships, the latest model missile destroyers and a guided missile brigade would also reportedly be involved.
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Taiwan Ready to Hold Rare Military Drill
July 20, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Taiwan-China-War-Games.html
TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP) -- Taiwan's military will close part of a popular freeway Wednesday so jet fighters can practice using it as an emergency runway -- a rare drill to prepare pilots for the possible bombing of air bases by China, officials said.
The island hasn't held such an exercise in 26 years, and it comes as China conducts war games that Beijing's state-controlled media have said are practice for a long-threatened attack on Taiwan.
The rivals who separated amid civil war in 1949 usually hold large-scale military exercises at this time of year when the weather is good in the Taiwan Strait, the 100-mile-wide body of water that separates the two sides.
The drills are partly about posturing, with China trying to warn the Taiwanese against seeking a permanent split, and Taiwan -- which has repeatedly rebuffed Beijing's demands to unify -- wanting to show that it's ready to fend off any invasion.
Using the highway as a runway is part of Taiwan's series of annual war games, called the Hankuang, or Chinese Glory, said Defense Ministry spokesman Huang Shey-sheng.
One popular battle scenario has China destroying Taiwan's air strips with short-range missiles and bombers. To deal with such a loss, the Taiwanese have designated several sections of highway as emergency runways.
An five mile section of the freeway in southern Tainan County will be closed to traffic from 3 a.m. to 9 a.m. local time Wednesday as two French-made Mirage jets practice landing, refueling, reloading and taking off, officials said.
``We will practice using the freeway as a runway at the time of a war,'' Huang told reporters Tuesday at a weekly briefing.
Shu Hsiao-huang, an editor of the local magazine Defense International, said using the highways is a wise strategy. ``With the spare runways, China would have to use up more missiles and this would reduce our risks and increase their costs,'' Shu said.
Taiwan's navy also plans to stage an exercise Wednesday involving anti-submarine aircraft, French-made Lafayette frigates and other vessels, said a naval official, speaking on condition of anonymity.
The naval official did not give further details, but the United Evening News said the aircraft will practice bombing submarines.
Also on Tuesday, Taiwan's military urged the public not to worry about the large-scale military exercises China is holding this month on Dongshan Island, off China's southern coast. The military dismissed them as routine annual drills.
But China's state-controlled media have warned that one purpose of the drills was to discourage Taiwan from seeking formal independence. Some Taiwanese -- especially the younger generation -- oppose unification with China.
-------- iraq
Baghdad Blast Kills At Least 9
Police Post Is Target; Iraqi Defense Official Slain Near His Home
By Pamela Constable and Doug Struck
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, July 20, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A60757-2004Jul19?language=printer
BAGHDAD, July 19 -- A suicide truck bomb exploded outside a police station Monday morning, killing at least nine Iraqis and wounding more than 60, after gunmen assassinated a senior Iraqi defense official near his home Sunday night, as violence continued to mount after two weeks of relative calm.
Officials said Essam Qasim Dijaili, head of the supply department at the Defense Ministry, was killed along with his bodyguard by four gunmen in a speeding vehicle. Dijaili was shot as he walked from his car into his house, carrying dinner to his family.
"He was killed in cold blood by the evil hands of the followers of the former regime," said Mishal Sarraf, an adviser to the defense minister. The assassination came two days after a suicide bomber attacked a convoy carrying Justice Minister Malik Douhan Hasan. The official was unhurt, but five others were killed.
Meanwhile, an Egyptian truck driver held hostage by insurgents was freed unhurt Monday and was resting in the Egyptian Embassy, diplomats said. There was no word on the fate of another hostage, a driver from the Philippines whose government announced Monday it had met his kidnappers' demands and withdrawn its troops from Iraq.
Over the weekend, a Turkish oil-tanker driver was killed and a second was reportedly kidnapped when gunmen attacked their convoy near the city of Mosul in northern Iraq, officials said.
Monday's powerful truck bomb in southwest Baghdad, which gouged a huge crater in an alley behind al-Ilam police station, exploded as dozens of officers were arriving for work just after 8 a.m.
The dead and wounded included not only policemen but civilians who worked in a gritty warren of carwashes and mechanics' shops in the working-class neighborhood that surrounds the station. Some flimsy buildings collapsed in piles of charred rubble.
"This was a cowardly attack. These are laborers who come here. These terrorists just want to destabilize Iraq," said Hassan Kareem, an Iraqi National Guardsman who was struggling to restrain a rapidly growing crowd outside the station.
Insurgents have repeatedly targeted police stations and army recruiting offices in recent months, and the same station had come under a mortar attack on Sunday, when the owner of a nearby junkyard was killed. At dawn Monday, the area around the station was cordoned off in anticipation of another attack.
Numerous witnesses described seeing the tank truck lurch down the narrow lane at high speed and explode several hundred feet before it reached the station.
"It was like a military jeep or a water truck. It was moving fast and flashing its lights," said Raad Abbas, 30, a guard from the station, who was spattered with blood and comforting a wounded colleague at Yarmuk Hospital, where the victims were taken. "Then it just exploded, and there were pieces of hands and legs all over the street. No faces."
Some in the agitated crowd around the police station swore that the explosion was the result of a U.S. air attack. Several dozen shouted insults at the United States and President Bush, while others joined in with slogans praising former president Saddam Hussein -- a surprising reaction in an area inhabited largely by Shiite Muslims, a group that was persecuted by Hussein's government.
Iraqi National Guardsmen, angered by the outbursts, began shooting into the air to disperse the crowd, which melted away after one long volley. A U.S. Army unit arrived, and its commander said the explosion had not been caused by U.S. action.
"The only aircraft around here would be helicopters," said Lt. Col. Bill Salter. "A rocket or mortar wouldn't do that much damage. We believe it was a fuel truck" that left the crater, which was 20 feet long and 12 feet deep.
At Yarmuk Hospital, wounded men lay in a half-dozen wards, their heads bandaged, their faces and arms quickly stitched where they had been struck by flying glass and metal. Among them was Saddam Abdul Hussain, 24, a car washer, who wept silently and murmured that his head hurt.
"You're alive, praise God!" an older man cried out, rushing up and clenching Abdul Hussain's limp hand in a spasm of relief. A few moments later his mother arrived, muttering in protest: "Why do you have to work in that place? Why did you have to leave my sight?"
Police officers in uniforms flecked with blood crowded around other beds, venting their rage at the insurgents, the Iraqi authorities who they said had failed to protect the nascent police force, and the U.S. military presence that they felt had brought on all the trouble.
"We serve our people, the terrorists attack us, and there is no one to protect us," said Sgt. Jabar Qadm, 39, whose arm was bandaged. He said he wanted to leave the police force. "Why don't the Americans close the borders and keep these people out? If I am killed next time, what will my children do?"
But Mahmoud Meshkour, 30, who quit his job as a shoemaker last year to join the new force, said he intended to return to work. At 8 a.m. he was changing into his uniform when the bomb exploded. At midday, he lay in the hospital with stitches around his right eye, miraculously still able to see.
"I joined the police because I wanted to catch the terrorists. Now I want to kill them too," he said.
His wife and mother crouched next to the bed in black capes, begging him to leave the force. But Meshkour shook his head.
"I want to do my job," he insisted. "If we run away, who will protect our country?"
A senior police officer ran from ward to ward, checking pulses and intravenous drips. He complained bitterly at the shortage of medicine at the hospital and equipment at al-Ilam station, where he said there were only 14 bulletproof vests for 300 officers.
"We have been threatened and attacked so many times, but still we do not even have concrete barriers," said the officer, who gave his name as Capt. Amar. He dashed out of one ward looking for syringes, but returned empty-handed. "I just don't want to keep losing my men."
--------
ATTACKS
Iraqi Defense Aide Killed; 9 Die in Baghdad Bombing
July 20, 2004
By SOMINI SENGUPTA and IAN FISHER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/20/international/middleeast/20iraq.html?pagewanted=all
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Tuesday, July 20 - The interim governor of the southern city of Basra was fatally shot by unknown assailants Tuesday as he was heading to work. His assassination followed a confirmation by the government on Monday that a senior Defense Ministry official had been assassinated late Sunday night.
Deaths from suicide bombing continued as well. On Monday morning, a tanker truck loaded with explosives blew up near a police station, killing at least nine people, the Health Ministry said.
The explosion punched a giant pit into a busy commercial area, blasting away entire rows of auto repair shops and tea stalls and shattering the window panes of apartment buildings nearby. At least 62 people were wounded, according to reports from the Health Ministry on Monday afternoon.
The assassinations of the governor, Hazem al-Ainachi, and the defense official, Essam al-Dijaili, coupled with the bombing, stood out as part of a recent revival of attacks aimed at Iraqi government institutions accused of collaborating with the 140,000-troop American presence in Iraq. More and more, Iraqi soldiers and police officers are visible on the streets, and more and more, they are taking the heaviest hits.
The Basra governor's son, Esam, said two men had attacked his father. Two weeks ago, he added, all members of the local government council had been threatended by unknown insurgents.
A provincial governor was killed in an ambush last week, and a suicide bomber brazenly blew up a car, killing 11 people, at the gates of the heavily fortified Green Zone, shared these days by senior Iraqi government ministers and American officials. On Saturday, assailants tried unsuccessfully to assassinate the country's justice minister.
As the violence worsened, the remaining troops from a small Philippine deployment left the country on Monday for Kuwait, in the face of insurgents' threats to kill a Filipino hostage. An Egyptian driver, who worked for a Saudi company supplying fuel to American troops, was released in response to the withdrawal of the company from Iraq.
The Monday explosion, in a dense middle-class neighborhood on the south side of the city, was evidently the work of a suicide bomber, who drove what witnesses described as a white tanker truck, once used to transport either water or fuel.
Up the street, Hayat Abad Ali, a retired archaeologist with a bandage around her head, lamented what she said has become the absurd terror of daily life here. Ms. Ali, 59, was in her kitchen when the bomb went off. "It was very loud, as if 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 cried. "We are spending the days without knowing our destiny."
At Yarmuk Hospital, more than a dozen ambulances careered through the gates, the police fired in the air to chase away the crowds, and bags of body parts were ferried in to help identify the victims. Inside the hospital, 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, 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. Khudair was among the policemen killed.
In an apartment building a stone's throw from the blast site, Firaz Ghazi, 18, a police officer, was washing up for work when the explosion shattered a heavy windowpane in the ground-floor bathroom, puncturing his neck and arm with shards of glass, his relatives said. More than an hour later, they 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 fell 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." She held his chin in one hand. In the other, she held a pile of shrapnel she had collected this morning.
The blast came just after 8 a.m., as police officers and shopkeepers were starting 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.
At the scene, a police officer, his pistol still in its holster, 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 punched 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 are old scars, from a bombing at the station eight months ago in which seven people were killed. Despite having now survived two bombings - and knowing 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."
The Iraqi prime minister, Iyad Allawi, arrived in Jordan on Monday to kick off his tour of neighboring countries. Since taking power three weeks ago, Dr. Allawi has announced a tough new emergency law that grants him power to declare curfews, ban groups he considers seditious and order the detentions of people suspected of being security risks.
The police have conducted several high-profile sweeps, bringing in hundreds of people. The government has also suggested that some insurgents would be offered amnesty in exchange for laying down their weapons, but no formal proposal has been announced. Meanwhile, it seems, the insurgency has continued unabated.
-------- israel / palestine
Arafat Scrambles to Calm Rebellion
New Head of Security Named After Violent Reaction to Cousin's Appointment
By John Ward Anderson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, July 20, 2004; Page A10
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A60971-2004Jul19.html
JERUSALEM, July 16 -- Yasser Arafat continued shaking up his top security advisers on Monday in an effort to calm a growing street rebellion in the Gaza Strip over official corruption, but it was unclear whether the Palestinian leader's gestures would be enough to silence demands for reform.
Two days after appointing his cousin, Moussa Arafat, as head of general security in the Gaza Strip, Arafat placed him under the command of Brig. Gen. Abdel Razek Majaide, a generally well-regarded official who was named head of public security for all Palestinian territories.
Senior Palestinian officials were not able to say whether the move diminished Moussa Arafat's influence or powers, and it was not clear whether it would satisfy calls for sweeping change from members of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an armed wing of Arafat's Fatah political movement that has begun an aggressive campaign to purge corrupt officials from the senior ranks of the Palestinian Authority.
A statement by al-Aqsa in Gaza had called for the dismissal of Moussa Arafat, who has a reputation for loyalty to his cousin and for corruption and whose appointment on Saturday was denounced as cronyism. The group's statement warned other officials that they should "repent and return the stolen money back to the people."
"Nothing has changed," said Ziad Abu Amr, an independent, pro-reform Palestinian legislator from Gaza City. The need to curb corruption and implement reforms still has not been addressed, Abu Amr said, and even though Moussa Arafat now answers to a higher authority, apparently "his appointment still stands."
Moussa Arafat's posting as head of general security in Gaza -- one of the Palestinian Authority's three top security posts in the strip -- sparked protests. On Sunday, crowds sacked the Palestinian Authority's military intelligence headquarters in the southern Gaza town of Khan Yunis, and burned several offices. Later, about a dozen people were wounded in a gun battle between al-Aqsa militants and uniformed Palestinian security forces in the border town of Rafah.
The uprising by members of al-Aqsa who swear loyalty to Yasser Arafat was unprecedented. It seemed to reinforce demands made by the group in a recent report that called on Arafat, 74, to relinquish some of his powers, fire corrupt Palestinian Authority officials and implement reforms, particularly in security agencies. The series of events is seen as a bid by a younger generation of Palestinians -- who have been doing most of the fighting in the nearly four-year-long uprising against Israel -- to take a political seat alongside the old guard that surrounds Arafat and which is widely regarded as corrupt.
Matters came to a head with a series of kidnappings on Friday, including the abduction of the Palestinian Authority's police chief in Gaza, Ghazi Jabali, who was paraded through a refugee camp by militants and accused of stealing millions of dollars in public funds. He was released unharmed after a few hours, and Arafat fired him the next day.
The abductions, which militant groups said were intended to highlight corruption and the need for reform, caused Prime Minister Ahmed Qureia to resign, along with his cabinet, on Saturday, decrying the state of chaos in Gaza. Arafat, however, refused to accept the resignation.
On Monday, Qureia seemed to indicate that the crisis was passing and that he likely would remain as prime minister.
Speaking to reporters after a cabinet meeting, he said that "the state of chaos and lawlessness" in Gaza had prompted his resignation, but that most of his ministers were against it. The offer to resign still stood, however, because Arafat had not yet officially replied in writing, Qureia said.
In the Shati refugee camp adjacent to Gaza City on the Mediterranean, Israeli missiles twice hit a house, wounding a militant Palestinian leader and four other people, a spokesman for a Palestinian group told the Associated Press.
A spokesman for the Popular Resistance Committees, Abu Abir, said the airstrike was aimed at a house used by Abed Quka the group's leader in northern Gaza. He was wounded in the attack, but his condition was not known.
Correspondent Molly Moore in Gaza City and special correspondent Sufian Taha in Ramallah, in the West Bank, contributed to this report.
--------
Palestinian Premier to Stay in Post for Now
July 20, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-mideast.html
RAMALLAH, West Bank (Reuters) - The Palestinian cabinet failed on Tuesday to resolve a leadership crisis as Prime Minister Ahmed Qurie agreed to stay on for now but kept a threat to quit ``because he has no powers,'' officials said.
Qurie is frustrated over President Yasser Arafat's refusal to allow him to reform Palestinian institutions widely seen as corrupt and out of touch. International mediators regard reforms as crucial to reviving Palestinian-Israeli peace talks.
A senior Palestinian official said Qurie, who decided on Saturday to quit over unprecedented pro-reform unrest, told a crisis cabinet meeting on Tuesday he would remain in his post for now but would not formally withdraw his tendered resignation.
Palestinian Negotiations Minister Saeb Erekat said Qurie was still deadlocked with Arafat over the president's unwillingness to cede him powers to launch meaningful reforms, particularly to a murky jumble of security services ridden by cronyism.
``President Arafat insists on rejecting the resignation,'' Erekat told Reuters after a crisis cabinet meeting. ``Abu Ala (Qurie) insists on resigning. The crisis goes on.''
Another senior official said Qurie wanted out essentially because he had no powers to effect change, or even to resign.
``How can he continue to run a government without powers? He feels he has failed to carry out any of is duties because he has no powers,'' said the official, who requested anonymity. ``Our crisis is the state of chaos and it hasn't been resolved today.''
Qurie, in office since November, quickly departed after the cabinet adjourned, refusing to take questions from reporters.
ARAFAT RESISTS SECURITY REFORMS
Participants in the cabinet meeting said the main issue was Qurie's demand that Arafat ``empower'' the interior minister to overhaul overlapping security services that answer to the president. Arafat has balked at this in the past.
Arafat is facing the stiffest test of his leadership since Palestinians obtained limited self-rule from Israel in Gaza and the West Bank a decade ago. Some fear the strife could eventually escalate into civil war.
A power struggle has erupted between Arafat's old guard, who returned from exile abroad after the self-rule deal reached with Israel a decade ago, and a younger pro-reform generation in Fatah staking out turf before Israel implements a plan to evacuate Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip in 2005.
Arafat hastily shuffled security chiefs on Monday after a spate of violence by militants in his Fatah movement demanding moves to purge corruption.
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said the Palestinian Authority was in deep crisis and must act fast to overhaul its security apparatus, discredited by graft and internal feuding, if it hoped to stop increasing chaos in Gaza.
Annan urged Arafat to ``take the time to listen'' to Qurie and carry out the reforms international mediators have mandated as a condition for advancing a ``road map'' peace plan promising Palestinians a state in Israeli-occupied territories.
In the early hours of Tuesday, Israeli helicopters wounded two Palestinians in a missile strike on the home of Abu Youssef al-Quka, head of a militant umbrella group, the Popular Resistance Committees, in Gaza's Shati refugee camp.
Palestinian medics said the two wounded were treated for shrapnel injuries. It was not known whether Quka was hit.
--------
Arafat Struggles to Pacify Gaza; Israeli Judge Is Killed
July 20, 2004
By GREG MYRE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/20/international/middleeast/20mide.html?pagewanted=all
RAMALLAH, West Bank, July 19 - Yasir Arafat struggled Monday to resolve a political crisis and extinguish street unrest in the Gaza Strip as he faced perhaps the strongest internal challenge to his authority since establishing the Palestinian government a decade ago.
In Israel, a gunman killed a prominent Israeli judge, Adi Azar, as he was driving home on Monday evening in a suburb of Tel Aviv. In a highly unusual attack, the gunman shot the judge at close range and fled on a motorcycle. The police said they did not know if the gunman was an Israeli or a Palestinian.
Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades, which is linked to Mr. Arafat's Fatah movement, claimed responsibility, Reuters reported. But Israel's justice minister, Yosef Lapid, dismissed the claim and told Israeli radio he was "quite sure" that Palestinians were not involved. The attack was the first time a judge had been killed in Israel's 56-year history, Mr. Lapid said.
Mr. Azar, a District Court judge in Tel Aviv, was primarily involved with assigning cases to other judges.
Despite the deepening crisis in the Palestinian areas, Mr. Arafat's position as Palestinian leader did not appear to be in jeopardy. But he has been unable to restore order to the increasingly chaotic streets of Gaza, and he has not commented publicly in the past few days as the turmoil has swirled around him.
The Palestinian prime minister, Ahmed Qurei, told reporters that the resignation letter he presented to Mr. Arafat on Saturday still stood, and that Mr. Arafat had not provided a written response. Mr. Qurei, who has been in his post less than a year, said he was quitting to protest the lawlessness in Gaza and the disarray among the security forces, which are controlled by Mr. Arafat.
"The Palestinian citizen in the street is saying: 'Why are they fighting? Is there any authority?' " Mr. Qurei said. "Chaos will not achieve our aims; it cannot bring victory. The winner is our enemy."
Despite the resignation letter, Mr. Qurei led a cabinet session on Monday, and he said afterward that most ministers opposed his decision to quit. He also announced that a group of cabinet members would see Mr. Arafat to discuss the crisis.
A collapse of the Palestinian government would be another blow to Mr. Arafat. But it was not clear whether he was willing to cede some of his broad powers or introduce popular political reforms. On Monday, he tried to pacify militants and protesters in Gaza who responded with anger and violence after he appointed his cousin, Mousa Arafat, as the head of general security in Gaza on Saturday.
Palestinian militants on Sunday torched one building controlled by Mousa Arafat's forces, and gun battles left more than a dozen Palestinians wounded in the southern Gaza town of Rafah.
Yasir Arafat on Monday phoned Abel Razek Majaida, a senior security commander who had been shunted aside two days earlier, and told him he was being promoted and would in effect become Mousa Arafat's boss as the overall head of general security in Gaza and the West Bank.
But the move did not satisfy the Martyrs Brigades, which has been sharply critical of Mr. Arafat's recent moves despite past expressions of loyalty to the Palestinian leader. The appointment of Mr. Majaida "is another attempt to fool people and is a way of circumventing reforms and change on the part of the national administration," the Martyrs Brigades said in a statement sent to Agence France-Presse.
Israel has repeatedly called on Mr. Arafat to crack down on the Martyrs Brigades, a loosely organized faction that has carried out many attacks against Israel. He has refused, and the group is now proving a threat to his own security forces.
Some Palestinians have criticized the Palestinian Authority as being riddled with corruption and have said that some senior security commanders are among the worst offenders.
"All of them are thieves," said Samah Rifae, a resident of the Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza. Mr. Arafat, she said, "is just looking out for these thieves."
Many of the militants and protesters in Gaza are supporters of Muhammad Dahlan, who was once a security chief and who still commands loyalty among his former officers.
Mr. Dahlan, 42, has pushed hard to have a younger Palestinian generation included in the senior ranks of the Palestinian Authority and Fatah, which is still dominated by longtime associates of Mr. Arafat, 74.
Israel has avoided direct involvement in the internal Palestinian fighting. But Israeli officials say they would not be disappointed if Mr. Arafat was further weakened by the instability. Zeev Boim, Israel's deputy defense minister, told Israeli radio that he hoped "these developments will finally move Arafat to the sidelines, and so finally we will be able to talk to serious and responsible forces."
In other violence on Monday, Israeli helicopters fired missiles twice at a house in the Shati refugee camp in the Gaza Strip, wounding a leader with the militant Popular Resistance Committee, The Associated Press quoted the group's spokesman as saying. The Israeli military refused to comment.
In the northern West Bank, Israeli troops shot dead three Palestinian militants in two separate confrontations, the military said. An Israeli officer was shot and seriously wounded, the military added.
Also, Jordan's security forces shot and killed two armed Palestinians, wounded a third and arrested a fourth as the men tried to sneak across the border and into Israel, The Associated Press reported from Jordan's capital, Amman, citing government officials.
-------- philippines
Iraqi Militants Release Hostage After Philippines Withdraws
July 20, 2004
By JAMES GLANZ and CARLOS H. CONDE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/20/international/asia/20CND-HOST.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
BAGHDAD, Iraq, July 20 - Iraqi militants released a Filipino hostage today, ending a two-week crisis during which the Philippine government bowed to the insurgents' demand to withdraw its troops in a concession that strained its relationships with countries like the United States.
The hostage, Angelo dela Cruz, was driven in a gray Mercedes to the Filipino embassy after he was freed by the insurgents, who had threatened to behead him. He appeared dazed and uncertain when he emerged from the car, and was escorted into the building by people accompanying him.
Television footage shot inside the embassy showed Mr. dela Cruz seated with officials, and wiping away tears.
President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo spoke with Mr. dela Cruz, a truck driver who had been taken hostage on July 7 by Iraqi militants, on the phone this afternoon, shortly before confirming the release to the news media. "Wonderful moment!" the President exclaimed when she heard Mr. dela Cruz's voice. The conversation was later broadcast on nationwide television.
Mr. dela Cruz's wife, Arsenia, burst into tears upon hearing the news in neighboring Jordan, The Associated Press reported.
Mr. dela Cruz had been dropped off at the United Arab Emirates embassy in Baghdad before he was taken to the Filipino embassy. Rafael Seguis, the deputy foreign-affairs secretary, told Mrs. Arroyo on the telephone that the government of the United Arab Emirates had arranged to bring Mr. dela Cruz immediately to Abu Dhabi for a medical check-up.
Mr. dela Cruz's release followed the pullout on Monday of Filipino troops from Iraq, which had been the demand made by the insurgents in exchange for his freedom. Manila's decision to give in to the insurgents drew criticism from other countries, including Iraq and the United States, which called it a mistake that could encourage more such kidnappings targeting foreigners in Iraq.
"Praise God!" a beaming Mrs. Arroyo exclaimed on the phone when the driver said he was all right.
An Arabic Web site published a statement today attributed to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian militant with reported ties to Al Qaeda, threatening Japan with attacks unless it did the same as the Philippines and withdrew its troops from Iraq, Reuters reported.
The American military has struck targets in the Iraqi city of Falluja, west of Baghdad, where it says forces allied with Mr. Zarqawi operate.
Violence has continued to plague Iraqi cities after the handover of political power late last month by American-led occupation authorities to the new Iraqi government. Today, the American military said in a statement that a marine was killed in action in the Anbar province, where Falluja is located.
In other violence around the country today, a member of the regional council of Basra, Iraq's second biggest city, and two bodyguards were assassinated, a council spokesman said, according to Reuters.
A roadside bomb exploded near Baquba north of Baghdad, killing four Iraqi civilians in a minivan, a survivor of the attack and hospital officials said, and another bomb killed a 12-year-old girl on the outskirts of the city of Kerbala south of Baghdad, police said, according to the Reuters report.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility for those attacks but Mr. Zarqawi has claimed credit for much of the worst violence in Iraq, including beheadings and car bombs.
In the Philippines, in a press briefinginside the presidential palace, Mrs. Arroyo said she did not regret her decision to withdraw the Filipino troops. "I do not regret that decision," she said, adding: "Every life is important."
She called Mr. dela Cruz the "Filipino everyman, a symbol of the hardworking Filipino seeking hope and opportunity."
In Buenavista, Mr. dela Cruz's agricultural village in Pampanga province just north of Manila, the hostage's relatives, friends and neighbors were jubilant, dancing and yelling in the streets.
They had been holding daily prayer vigils at Mr. dela Cruz's hut. Residents in the province had tied yellow ribbons around trees and electricity poles. A "welcoming program" has been prepared for Mr. dela Cruz by the governor, and Mr. dela Cruz's children appeared on television, thanking the government profusely.
Mrs. Arroyo's move, according to analysts, had been calculated to pre-empt a backlash from Filipinos, who have identified with Mr. dela Cruz. About eight million Filipinos work abroad, supporting a sizable portion of the population back home. They send more than $7 billion back home annually, helping prop up a weak economy saddled by huge debts and a gaping budget deficit.
Mrs. Arroyo, whose victory in the recent election was mired in controversy and whose political and economic agenda in the next six years could prove unpopular, had been forced to accede to the insurgents' demand at the risk of facing adverse public opinion, these analysts had said. It was all about political survival, they had said.
"Tortured by the thought that she will be removed from power similar to the way that she rallied to remove President Joseph Estrada from office in 2001, Arroyo has demonstrated that she has difficulty making tough - albeit unpopular - leadership decisions because of a lingering fear that it could affect her political survivability," said a report last week by the United States firm Pacific Strategies and Assessments.
Mr. dela Cruz's release is expected to boost the popularity of Mrs. Arroyo, an American-educated economist and daughter of a former president, who is viewed here as elitist, even snobbish. There has been talk here that Mrs. Arroyo would present Mr. dela Cruz to the nation next Monday during her State of the Nation address at the Philippine Congress.
Foreign governments had criticized the Philippine government for its decision to pull out the 51 troops in Iraq. The United States embassy here has said that it is re-evaluating its relationship with the Philippines. Analysts have said that the withdrawal would have some short-term impact on this relationship, such as the "symbolic withholding" of some assistance to the Philippines.
The Philippines receives the biggest American military aid in Southeast Asia. The United States has spent millions of dollars helping Filipino troops fight terrorism, particularly in the southern part of the country, which is the hotbed of the Muslim insurgency here. A new round of military exercises between the two countries is scheduled to take place next week.
James Glanz reported from Baghdad for this article and Carlos H. Conde reported from Manila.
-------- spies
U.S. Probes Possible Iran-9/11 Link
Panel Report Is Expected to Accuse Nation of Aiding Hijackers
By Mike Allen and Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, July 20, 2004; Page A04
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A62009-2004Jul19.html
President Bush said yesterday that the United States is investigating possible connections between Iran and the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, renewing his periodic warnings to one of the two remaining members of his "axis of evil."
The president's remarks staked out a hard line against the theocracy three days before the commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks is scheduled to issue a report that is said to accuse Iran of abetting travel by at least eight of the hijackers.
"We will continue to look and see if the Iranians were involved," Bush said during a brief question-and-answer session in the Oval Office. "I have long expressed my concerns about Iran. After all, it's a totalitarian society where free people are not allowed to exercise their rights as human beings."
Bush's remarks were his toughest about Iran since April 21, when he told newspaper editors meeting in Washington that the development of a nuclear weapon by Iran "is intolerable" and that if the Iranians do not give up that quest "they will be dealt with, starting through the United Nations."
Bush's comments came as Sen. John F. Kerry's campaign escalated its attack on Bush's handling of terrorism. Former senator Max Cleland (D-Ga.) said on a Democratic National Committee conference call that lawmakers were "flat out lied to" about Iraq "by the president, by the vice president and by the secretary of defense."
The Bush-Cheney campaign, signaling the line the GOP plans to take next week during the Democratic National Convention, issued a policy memo accusing Kerry of attempting "an extreme makeover" to "reverse a record on intelligence and national security that would weaken our ability to fight and win the war on terror."
State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said the United States is "willing to sit down" and talk with the Iranians "if the president determines it's in our interest to do so and if we think there's the opportunity for progress."
White House officials said Bush was not hinting at any new intelligence or at any change in administration policy. Acting CIA Director John E. McLaughlin said on "Fox News Sunday" that the government "has no evidence that there is some sort of official connection between Iran and 9/11."
Bush repeated that yesterday but also said: "Of course, we want to know all the facts. . . . As to direct connections with September the 11th, we're digging into the facts to determine if there was one."
In an interim report last month, the Sept. 11 commission's investigators said intelligence "showed far greater potential for collaboration between Hezbollah and al Qaeda than many had previously thought." Iran is a primary sponsor of Hezbollah.
Commission Chairman Thomas H. Kean, a Republican former New Jersey governor, said in a television interview last month that "there were a lot more active contacts, frankly, with Iran and with Pakistan than there were with Iraq."
Bush reiterated his demands for steps Iran could take to have "better relations with the United States." He said that Iran continues to harbor al Qaeda leaders, and that the United States wants them turned over to their native countries.
The Sept. 11 commission finished final editing on the report yesterday and announced it would be released at 11:30 a.m. Thursday. The report, more than 500 pages long, will immediately be available on the commission's Web site, www.9-11commission.gov.
White House press secretary Scott McClellan stepped back from McLaughlin's statement on Fox that he opposed the commission's recommendation for a Cabinet-level intelligence official who would outrank the CIA director. McClellan said that Bush welcomes all ideas and that McLaughlin was expressing his own view.
Democratic commissioner Jamie S. Gorelick, a former U.S. deputy attorney general, said the panel was debating language in the report's executive summary as recently as yesterday morning. She and other commissioners said the bipartisan panel, made up of five Democrats and five Republicans, has spent much of the past three weeks in intense but respectful debate over the findings and recommendations.
The presidential campaigns held dueling teleconferences yesterday on homeland security counterterrorism. Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.) said that "America is no safer today than on September 11." Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) replied hours later that "this administration has not waited for any commission to reform our intelligence capabilities."
Staff writers John Mintz and Robin Wright contributed to this report.
--------
Bush, CIA at Odds on Iran
Los Angeles Times
By Edwin Chen and Greg Miller
Jul 20, 2004
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=2026&ncid=2026&e=1&u=/latimests/20040720/ts_latimes/bushciaatoddsoniran
WASHINGTON - President Bush said Monday that his administration was investigating possible links between Iran and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, a statement that distanced the president from acting CIA Director John McLaughlin, who had downplayed a possible connection a day earlier.
"As to direct connections with Sept. 11, we're digging into the facts to determine if there was one," Bush said of Iran.
In a second sign of a potential rift between the White House and the intelligence agency, White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan told reporters that McLaughlin was not speaking for the president when he said it was unnecessary to create a new, more powerful intelligence czar, despite faulty information before the Iraq war.
"The president is very much open to ideas that build upon the reforms that we're already implementing," McClellan said. "I think [McLaughlin] was expressing his view."
McClellan's comments indicated that the White House was receptive to the idea of fundamental reform in the intelligence community, rather than the "modest changes" McLaughlin had endorsed in an appearance on a Sunday talk show.
The White House-CIA differences emerged as the independent Sept. 11 commission prepared to release its final report Thursday on the 2001 terrorist attacks. The report is expected to contain recommendations that could touch off a contentious drive toward reforming the nation's intelligence-gathering bureaucracy.
The independent commission is widely expected to report that some of the Sept. 11 hijackers had traveled freely between Iran and Afghanistan during 2000 and 2001. Last month, the panel's chairman, former New Jersey Gov. Thomas H. Kean, said in a television interview that Al Qaeda had "a lot more active contacts, frankly, with Iran and with Pakistan than there were with Iraq."
Iran's emerging prominence in the Sept. 11 investigations looms as a potentially difficult issue for the White House, because it could raise new questions about why Bush led a war against Iraq but so far has taken a distinctly less bellicose stance toward Iran.
McClellan argued that the United States indeed had been "confronting" the threat from Iran, which Bush in 2002 listed, along with Iraq and North Korea, as part of an "axis of evil." He added, however, that Iraq was "a unique situation" because it had invaded its neighbors and had possessed and used weapons of mass destruction.
McClellan also said the White House was eager to learn what the Sept. 11 commission knew about any connections between the hijackers and Iran. "Apparently it's something that's evolved over time," he said.
The Iranian government has denied knowledge or involvement in the Sept. 11 plot.
McLaughlin had said Sunday that although "about eight" of the Sept. 11 hijackers may have passed through Iran before their mission, the CIA had "no evidence that there is some sort of official connection between Iran and 9/11."
Bush on Monday noted McLaughlin's comments, but said: "We will continue to look and see if the Iranians were involved."
The president also renewed his accusation that Iran's rulers were "harboring Al Qaeda leadership," and urged Tehran anew to dismantle its nuclear weapons program. The United States has asked Iran to turn over Al Qaeda members to their respective countries.
The president's spokesman dismissed weekend media reports that Bush may delay naming a new CIA director until after the Nov. 2 election as having "no basis in fact."
In brief remarks to reporters after meeting with Chilean President Ricardo Lagos, Bush said that he was "still taking a good, hard look" at potential successors to George J. Tenet as CIA director. Tenet left the agency July 11.
As for the reforming the intelligence-gathering apparatus, the president said he was looking forward to seeing the Sept. 11 commission's recommendations.
"They share the same desires I share, which is to make sure that the president and the Congress get the best possible intelligence," Bush said.
"Some of the reforms, I think, 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. "And so we'll look at all their recommendations, and I will comment upon that, having studied what they say."
The commission is expected to recommend the creation of a single Cabinet-level position overseeing the 15 agencies that make up the nation's intelligence-gathering community.
McLaughlin acknowledged on "Fox News Sunday" that "a good argument" could be made for such consolidation, but added that it was unnecessary because the CIA already had taken steps toward reform since Sept. 11 and because a restructuring would impose additional bureaucracy on the system.
White House officials have described McLaughlin as a capable leader, but have also indicated that they do not see him as a permanent replacement.
That may be in part because McLaughlin was in a senior position at the agency during a stretch that included the failure to prevent the Sept. 11 attacks and the erroneous assessments that Iraq had stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons and had restarted its nuclear weapons program.
But it also appears that the professorial McLaughlin, who came up through the analytical side of the CIA, doesn't have the sort of rapport with Bush that the backslapping, gregarious Tenet did.
An anecdote in a recent book by Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward describes McLaughlin giving a key briefing to Bush and other senior White House officials on the evidence against Iraq before the war. Bush was unimpressed by the presentation and complained that the evidence was weak, prompting Tenet to call the case against Iraq a "slam dunk."
McClellan said Monday that McLaughlin was "someone who is very capable and is doing a good job at the CIA."
Times staff writer Ronald Brownstein contributed to this report.
-------- us
Marine Says He Was Held Captive in Iraq
By Josh White
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, July 20, 2004; Page A03
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A62060-2004Jul19.html
Marine Cpl. Wassef Ali Hassoun yesterday made his first public statement since he disappeared from a military post in Iraq last month, declaring that he was captured by enemy fighters and is no deserter.
"I did not desert my post," Hassoun told reporters as he stood wearing a new Marine uniform with his name emblazoned on the right chest pocket. "I was captured and held against my will by anti-coalition forces for 19 days. This was a very difficult and challenging time for me."
Hassoun's brief comments outside the front gate to Marine Corps Base Quantico offered few hints as to what happened after he was declared missing from his base near Fallujah on June 19, but it was the first time Hassoun presented any version of the story.
His story has attracted international attention. The Marines initially classified Hassoun, 24, as having taken unauthorized leave, but switched his official status to "captured" when a videotape surfaced purporting to show a blindfolded Hassoun being threatened with a large knife. At one point, statements posted on two Islamist Web sites proclaimed that he had been beheaded.
Hassoun, who was born in Lebanon, showed up safe and unhurt at the U.S. Embassy in Beirut three weeks after he disappeared, triggering more questions. He was transferred to Germany for medical exams and arrived in Virginia on Thursday.
U.S. military officials have been skeptical of Hassoun's story but so far have given him the benefit of the doubt. They have put him through a standard repatriation process at Quantico while periodically debriefing him. Marine officials said yesterday that Hassoun has been working with repatriation specialists, and that they have been pleased with his cooperation.
A Naval Criminal Investigative Service probe into Hassoun's ordeal has yet to interview the Marine. Investigators are expected to debrief Hassoun after he leaves Quantico in coming days for his home base at Camp Lejeune, N.C., where Hassoun will stay while he works toward going back to active duty.
Officials said that Hassoun has not requested a lawyer and has not been assigned one, though he has worked with a Judge Advocate General lawyer as part of the repatriation process.
"I understand that there are many questions," Hassoun said, "and respectfully ask that the media respect my need to spend some private time with my family."
Hassoun was allowed to make the public statement after requesting the opportunity. He arrived at Quantico's main gate yesterday in a van filled with other Marines. An older brother, who lives in Utah, accompanied him and has been visiting the base since Friday. Lt. Col. David Lapan, a spokesman for the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Unit, said yesterday that the Marines are supporting Hassoun and his transition back to duty, but that they cannot endorse Hassoun's version of events.
"We're not in a position to make a judgment either way," Lapan said. "We're still gathering facts and information."
Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman, said Hassoun's successful repatriation is the highest priority. Whitman said that the circumstances of Hassoun's disappearance are still unclear, but that the investigation should explain it.
"Clearly, there are a lot of questions that we want to ask him about his time when he went missing from his unit to the time when he came back under U.S. control," Whitman said. "All of that will be sorted out in the days ahead."
The most difficult part of the probe is tracking down witnesses and evidence overseas. Investigators, for example, are trying to establish the genesis and legitimacy of the videotape showing Hassoun in enemy custody. After the early reports that Hassoun had been beheaded, an Islamic extremist group announced it had released him with the promise that he would not rejoin U.S. forces to fight. Hassoun then ended up in his native country, underweight but unhurt.
"I thank everyone who was looking for me and give thanks to God for everything," Hassoun said. "I would like to tell all the Marines as well as all those others serving in Iraq to keep their heads up and spirits high. Once a Marine, always a Marine. Semper Fi."
--------
THE MILITARY
Marine Who Was Missing for 3 Weeks Denies He Deserted in Iraq
July 20, 2004
By MICHAEL JANOFSKY
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/20/national/20mari.html?pagewanted=all
QUANTICO, Va., July 19 - The marine who vanished last month in Iraq and turned up three weeks later in Lebanon said Monday that he had been taken by enemy forces, emphatically denying that he had deserted.
Speaking publicly for the first time since his re-emergence, the marine, Cpl. Wassef Ali Hassoun, read a brief statement outside the base here, where military investigators have met with him and he has been undergoing repatriation, a routine process for any marine who has been captured or detained.
"I did not desert my post," Corporal Hassoun said at a news conference in which Marine officers and his older brother Mohamad, visiting from Utah, were in the audience. "I was captured and held against my will by anticoalition forces for 19 days. This was a very difficult and challenging time for me."
He began his remarks by saying, "In the name of God, I am glad to be home. And thank you all for your prayers and support."
After reading his statement, he and his brother returned to the base, taking no questions.
The details of how Corporal Hassoun, 24, disappeared on June 20 near Falluja and resurfaced at the American Embassy in Beirut on July 8 are the subject of a military investigation, the details of which officials accompanying him declined to discuss.
After his disappearance, contradictory reports from various sources left a murky picture of what might have happened, a range of possibilities that suggested he could have deserted, he could have been captured or he could have helped stage a hoax with the help of others.
Lt. Col. David Lapan, a spokesman for the Second Marine Expeditionary Force who spoke after Corporal Hassoun at the news conference, said the investigation would continue at Camp Lejeune, N.C., where the corporal's unit is based and where he would be sent in the next few days.
Colonel Lapan said Corporal Hassoun had requested the news conference, mostly to dispel the notion that he had deserted. "The reason that he came out today is because he asked to do so," the colonel said. "He was concerned with some of the information that's been out there, and he wanted the opportunity to provide, to the extent he could, what happened."
But he insisted that the Marine Corps had made no final assessment as to the truth of Corporal Hassoun's assertion, insisting that would be left to investigators.
"We're not in the position at this point to make a judgment either way," Colonel Lapan said. "We are still gathering facts and information. Until that process is complete, at this point we are supporting our young marine in bringing him back from a very harrowing ordeal and supporting his return to duty."
He added, "Any conclusions about what happened between the time that he disappeared and when he was returned to our control remains to be the focus of the repatriation process itself, and then any investigations that might go on."
Colonel Lapan said that Corporal Hassoun's words "were his own," and that they had been vetted only to make sure that he had not divulged classified information. "Not one word was changed," he said.
But he warned against reading too much into the military's allowing him to read a public statement and to rejoin his unit at Camp Lejeune. They were decisions made by Corporal Hassoun and the repatriation team, he said, and were intended as part of the process to return him to normal activities as much as possible while the investigation continues.
--------
FBI anthrax probe closes some Army labs
ASSOCIATED PRESS
By DAVE DISHNEAU
July 20, 2004
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/apus_story.asp?category=1110&slug=Anthrax%20Probe
FREDERICK, Md. -- FBI agents combed laboratory suites at Fort Detrick - home to the Army's biological warfare defense program - on Tuesday, and a source said they were again looking for evidence in the 2001 anthrax attacks.
The labs at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases have been closed since Friday, Fort Detrick spokesman Charles Dasey said.
A law-enforcement source, speaking on condition of anonymity, told The Associated Press the activity is related to the anthrax mailings that killed five people and sickened 17 in autumn 2001.
FBI agents have frequently visited Fort Detrick since the unsolved attacks, amid speculation that the deadly spores or the person who sent them may be connected to Fort Detrick.
Dasey said he didn't know which labs were involved, what sort of research had been conducted there or how long they would be closed.
Debra Weierman, spokeswoman for the FBI's Washington field office, said the lab probe was part of "an ongoing criminal investigation." She said could not discuss details of the activity.
Much of the speculation about a Fort Detrick connection has centered on Dr. Steven J. Hatfill, a former government scientist and bioweapons expert who once worked at the infectious disease institute at Fort Detrick. The FBI has labeled Hatfill a "person of interest" in the case.
Hatfill has denied any role in the attacks. He has filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Washington contending the government invaded his privacy and ruined his reputation by leaking information to the media implicating him in the attacks. His lawsuit seeks to clear his name and recover unspecified monetary damages.
His lawyer, Victor M. Glasberg, had no comment Tuesday.
(SUBS 7th graf 'Much of...' to correct spelling of name, Steven sted Stephen)
-------- war crimes
Arrested Rwanda Genocide Suspect to Stand Trial
July 20, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-rwanda-tribunal.html
DAR ES SALAAM, Tanzania (Reuters) - A key Rwanda genocide suspect has been handed over to U.N. prosecutors, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) said late on Monday.
Gaspard Kanyarukiga, 59, accused of a horrifying attack on a church in which 2,000 people died, was arrested in South Africa Saturday. Charges against him include genocide, complicity in genocide, and conspiracy to commit genocide.
Kanyarukiga was a businessman in Rwanda's capital Kigali during the 1994 genocide that saw 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus massacred by extremist Hutus in 100 days in the tiny central African state.
He is accused of transporting police and militia known as Interahamwe to attack a church in which Tutsis had taken refuge. The attackers poured fuel through the roof and set the church ablaze then killed about 2,000 Tutsis using grenades and guns.
Prosecutors say he held meetings with both religious and political leaders in which they conspired to kill Tutsi civilians.
The ICTR was established in 1995 to bring to justice the military and political masterminds behind the genocide.
The tribunal, based in Tanzania's northern town of Arusha, has arrested 69 people for genocide-related crimes. It has indicted 81, convicted 20 and acquitted three.
The court jailed former Rwandan finance minister, Emmanuel Ndindabahizi for life last week after he was found guilty of leading a campaign of extermination against civilian Tutsis in Kibuye in western Rwanda.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- death penalty
High Court Asked to End Executions Of Minors
By Alan Cooperman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, July 20, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A61418-2004Jul19?language=printer
A broad array of individuals and groups ranging from Jimmy Carter to Mikhail Gorbachev and the American Medical Association to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops urged the Supreme Court yesterday to declare that it is unconstitutional to execute people for crimes they committed before turning 18.
The United States is one of five countries that execute juvenile offenders, a practice that shocks European allies and violates "minimum standards of decency shared by virtually every nation in the world," nine eminent former U.S. diplomats told the court in one of 15 briefs filed yesterday. Virginia is one of seven states that execute juvenile offenders.
In 2002 the court, invoking the concept of "evolving standards of decency," abolished capital punishment for mentally retarded offenders. The briefs filed yesterday are part of a campaign by death-penalty opponents to persuade the court to apply similar reasoning in regard to juveniles.
The court is scheduled to hear oral arguments in the fall in the case of Christopher Simmons, now 27, who was sentenced to death for the 1993 drowning of Shirley Crook, 46.
Simmons was 17 when he and a 15-year-old accomplice broke into Crook's mobile home near Fenton, Mo., intending to burglarize it. Fearing that she had recognized them, they bound her with duct tape and electrical wire and kicked her off a bridge into a river.
Missouri's Supreme Court overturned Simmons's death sentence in August, ruling that the execution of juvenile offenders violates the Constitution's ban on cruel and unusual punishment. The state of Missouri appealed that ruling.
The U.S. Supreme Court agreed in January to hear the case, which could lead to a reversal of a 1989 decision in which the court upheld the death penalty for crimes committed by 16- and 17-year-olds. Since 1988, the court has barred execution of those 15 and younger.
Four justices -- Stephen G. Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, David H. Souter and John Paul Stevens -- have said that imposing the death penalty for offenses by 16- and 17-year-olds is "inconsistent with evolving standards of decency in a civilized society." But thus far, they have not attracted the fifth vote they need to overturn the practice, which is increasingly rare.
Since the Supreme Court allowed executions to resume in 1976, 22 people have been put to death for crimes committed as minors. Thirteen of them were in Texas. Virginia ranked second, with three, and Oklahoma ranked third, with two.
Meanwhile, the federal government, the U.S. military and 31 states, including Maryland, have abolished the death penalty for juveniles. The District of Columbia has banned capital punishment. Forty-three states have not executed a juvenile since 1976.
Virginia's death penalty laws received renewed scrutiny during the sniper prosecutions last year. When Attorney General John D. Ashcroft turned Lee Boyd Malvo, who was 17 during the October 2002 shootings, and fellow sniper John Allen Muhammad over to Virginia authorities, he said they deserved execution if they were convicted -- and Virginia offered the opportunity to execute Malvo.
Malvo was convicted but spared a death sentence. Muhammad, who was sentenced to death, is set to be tried in other shootings, and Virginia prosecutors have said they will wait until the court decides the Missouri case before they decide whether to proceed with a second trial for Malvo.
Prince William County Commonwealth's Attorney Paul B. Ebert, who has sent more killers to death row than any Virginia prosecutor, said age should be taken into account but should not be a "disqualifying factor" for capital punishment.
"I don't think we can . . . say that someone who is 17 years and 6 months old should be treated differently than someone who is 18," Ebert said. "A lot of these kids are a lot more mature than adults. . . . We have outstanding young athletes. We have outstanding young scholars, and unfortunately we have outstanding young murderers."
Lawyers for six states -- Virginia plus Alabama, Delaware, Oklahoma, Texas and Utah -- are supporting Missouri's contention that the death penalty is appropriate for some teenage killers.
A "bright-line rule categorically exempting 16- and 17-year-olds from the death penalty -- no matter how elaborate the plot, how sinister the killing, or how sophisticated the coverup -- would be arbitrary at best and downright perverse at worst," they said in a friend-of-the-court brief filed in April.
In the briefs filed yesterday, 48 nations, 18 Nobel Peace Prize winners, 28 U.S. religious groups and a host of medical, legal and child advocacy groups argued against executing juvenile offenders.
"Adolescents as a group, even at the age of 16 or 17, are more impulsive than adults. They underestimate risks and overvalue short-term benefits. They are more susceptible to stress, more emotionally volatile, and less capable of controlling their emotions than adults," said a brief submitted by the American Medical Association and other medical groups.
The retired diplomats, including former ambassadors Thomas R. Pickering, Stuart E. Eizenstat and Felix G. Rohatyn, wrote that in the last four years only five countries -- China, Congo, Iran, Pakistan and the United States -- have executed juvenile offenders.
"While I was ambassador, I don't think there was any issue, including even when we were bombing Iraq and Bosnia, that elicited as much anger and demonstrations as executions in the United States," Rohatyn, who served as ambassador to France from 1997 to 2000, said in an interview.
"From the elites down to the common man, this is viewed in Europe as a very basic failing of our society," he said.
Mark Chopko, general counsel to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and author of the brief by religious groups, said all major religions teach that "the young don't have the same moral culpability" as adults.
"There is a great consensus among religious organizations that executing juveniles should offend the sense of decency in any society," he said.
Staff writer Maria Glod contributed to this report.
--------
Dozens of Nations Weigh In on Death Penalty Case
July 20, 2004
By DAVID STOUT
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/20/politics/20scotus.html
WASHINGTON, July 19 - A death sentence imposed for a 1993 murder in Missouri rose to the level of an international issue on Monday as dozens of countries urged the Supreme Court to block the execution of murderers who kill before the age of 18.
Countries from the European Union along with Canada, Mexico and other nations filed friend of the court briefs in a Missouri death penalty case. So did former President Jimmy Carter, former Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev and others, including the American Bar Association, the American Medical Association and religious groups. The briefs condemned execution of juveniles as inhuman.
Their arguments, strongly opposed by the Missouri attorney general, seemed likely to focus worldwide attention on the Supreme Court when the case, Roper v. Simmons, No. 03-633, is argued in October.
In 1988, the Supreme Court struck down the death penalty for offenders 15 and younger. But in 1989, the court upheld capital punishment for offenders 16 and 17. This fall, the court will re-examine that 1989 ruling.
"The prohibition on the juvenile death penalty is widely recognized as a rule of customary international law," said a brief filed on behalf of Mr. Carter, Mr. Gorbachev and a dozen other Nobel Peace Prize winners.
In another brief, Thomas R. Pickering, a career diplomat, said: "Executing juvenile offenders violates minimum standards of decency now adopted by nearly every other nation in the world, including even autocratic regimes with poor human rights records. The United States position on the juvenile death penalty isolates us diplomatically from our close allies and has been condemned by the international community."
Christopher Simmons was 17 on Sept. 8, 1993, when he and a 15-year-old accomplice broke into a house in the St. Louis area to commit a burglary. The homeowner, Shirley Crook, recognized Mr. Simmons; by chance, she and Mr. Simmons had been involved in a car crash.
Prosecutors said Mr. Simmons bound, gagged and blindfolded Mrs. Crook, 46, with the help of the 15-year-old, drove her around in her minivan, and beat and retied her when she tried to break free. Mr. Simmons, now 27, pushed her off a railroad trestle to drown in a river.
Nearly 30 religious groups filed briefs arguing, in essence, that such offenders were too immature to be fully culpable. Briefs filed by medical groups argued that the brains of people 16 and 17 were not fully developed in areas involving decision-making and impulse control.
During the trial, prosecutors argued that far from acting on impulse, Mr. Simmons had talked beforehand with friends about committing such a crime and boasted of it afterward.
The Missouri Supreme Court set aside the death sentence last August. The 4-to-3 majority relied on a United States Supreme Court ruling in 2002 banning the execution of mentally retarded defendants on the ground that a "national consensus" held that such executions were wrong.
But the Missouri attorney general, Jeremiah W. Nixon, who is suing on behalf of Donald P. Roper, superintendent of the prison where Mr. Simmons is being held, argues that there is no such consensus.
If anything, Mr. Nixon argues in his brief, there is a consensus to use the death penalty "for the most heinous and dangerous crimes, even when committed by those who have not quite reached 18." Of the 37 states with capital punishment, 19 allow the execution of 16- and 17-year-olds. The attorney general's brief said 13 states, including Missouri, had inmates that age awaiting execution.
In addition, the attorney general's brief argues, the Missouri court overstepped its bounds when it found a "consensus" that the United States Supreme Court had not discerned.
The United States is the only nation in which juvenile executions are officially sanctioned. But the sentence is applied highly unevenly across the country. Texas has accounted for more than half of such executions since 1976, when the Supreme Court held that the death penalty was constitutional.
-------- homeland security
In Boston, all eyes on convention
July 20, 2004
By Audrey Hudson
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20040719-112733-4089r.htm
Hundreds of federal and local surveillance cameras will be used to watch for terrorist and criminal activity at the Democratic National Convention next week in Boston.
The Coast Guard will use night-vision cameras and infrared imaging to monitor Boston Harbor and the Charles River, and some police on the street will carry hand-held devices to view live video feeds.
Authorities also will be able to view and control about 75 state-of-the-art video cameras installed at six federal buildings near the convention center.
Hundreds of cameras used by the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, port authority, highway department and the Big Dig, a massive underground road construction project, will be available to law-enforcement officials by request.
Officials in the Homeland Security Operations Center will be monitoring security cameras in the Tip O'Neil and John F. Kennedy federal buildings, as well as the John Joseph Moakley United States Courthouse, said Ronald Libby, New England regional director for the Federal Protective Service.
"The cameras are there for regular law enforcement capacity. If they allow us to prevent a terrorist attack, great; if we stop a street crime, great," Mr. Libby said.
Tapes from the cameras will be retained only in the event of a crime.
He said the Oklahoma City bombing case might have been solved quickly had the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building been monitored with video cameras. "The wireless technology sends images over the Internet and the Oklahoma bombing video image could have been retrieved and every law-enforcement officer would be looking for the suspect who walked away from the truck," Mr. Libby said.
Privacy advocates are concerned about a lack of oversight.
"It will probably be the largest use of surveillance cameras by police agencies in American history," said Barry Steinhardt, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's technology and liberty program. "It's a massive system of video surveillance."
Boston is installing 30 cameras near the Fleet Center and will continue to use the cameras after the convention, the Boston Globe reported.
Calls to the Boston Police Department were not returned.
More than $50 million is being spent on security for the national party convention, the first since the September 11 attacks. Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge has warned that terrorists might try an attack to disrupt the political process.
Mr. Libby rejected concerns about privacy violations, saying the cameras will be used only in public areas.
"You have been told you are under surveillance and it is clearly posted when you enter federal property," he said. " If you don't want to be on [cameras], you probably should not come."
The hand-held devices and others installed in police cruisers would allow officers called to the scene to see immediately what is happening.
Federal buildings cover 27 million square feet in the downtown area near the Fleet Center. The John F. Kennedy Federal Office Building has 2,500 employees and 4,000 visitors daily.
The cameras have the capacity to turn right and left, zoom in and out and "pick up a face or license plate if it was of interest," Mr. Libby said.
Federal cameras will not be used when Republicans gather next month in New York because no federal buildings are near the convention site, said Marc Raimondi, spokesman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Manhattan.
"We have major federal facilities literally inches away from the Fleet Center," Mr. Raimondi said. "Our approach is quite different in New York, where there are 40,000 police officers."
Boston has 2,700 police officers.
--------
Governors Tell of War's Impact on Local Needs
July 20, 2004
By SARAH KERSHAW
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/20/national/20guard.html
SEATTLE, July 19 - With tens of thousands of their citizen soldiers now deployed in Iraq, many of the nation's governors complained on Sunday to senior Pentagon officials that they were facing severe manpower shortages in guarding prisoners, fighting wildfires, preparing for hurricanes and floods and policing the streets.
Concern among the governors about the war's impact at home has been rising for months, but it came into sharp focus this weekend as they gathered for their four-day annual conference here and began comparing the problems they faced from the National Guard's largest callup since World War II. On Sunday, the governors held a closed-door meeting with two top Pentagon officials and voiced their concerns about the impact both on the troops' families and on the states' ability to deal with disasters and crime.
Much of the concern has focused on wildfires, which have started to destroy vast sections of forests in several Western states. The governor of Oregon, Ted Kulongoski, a Democrat, said in an interview after meetings here Monday that the troop deployment had left his National Guard with half the usual number of firefighters because about 400 of them were overseas while a hot, dry summer was already producing significant fires in his state.
"We're praying a lot that a major fire does not break out," he said. "It has been dry out here, the snow pack's gone because of an extremely warm May and June and the fire season came earlier."
He added, "You're just going to have fires and if you do not have the personnel to put them out, they can grow very quickly into ultimately catastrophic fires.''
Gov. Dirk Kempthorne, a Republican of Idaho and departing chairman of the National Governors Association, also said through a spokesman that he was worried about the deployment of 2,000 members, or 62 percent of his National Guard, who are now training in Texas for a mission in Iraq.
"In the past we've been able to call on the National Guard," said Mark Snider, a spokesman for the governor. "We may not be able to call on these soldiers for firefighting capabilities."
California fire and forestry officials said they were not using National Guard troops to battle wildfires plaguing that state, but they did say that they were using nine Blackhawk helicopters borrowed from the Guard to fight the fires. Some of the helicopters are bound for Iraq in September.
More than 150,000 National Guard and Reserve troops are on active duty. Many of the Guard troops have received multiple extensions of their tours of duty since the United States went to war with Iraq last year.
While Western governors focused mostly on wildfires, governors and other officials from other regions expressed a host of other worries, both at the meeting here and in telephone interviews. In Arizona, officials say, more than a hundred prison guards are serving overseas, leaving their already crowded prisons badly short-staffed. In Tennessee, officials are worried about rural sheriff's and police departments, whose ranks have been depleted by the guard call- up. In Virginia, the concern is hurricanes; in Missouri, floods. And in a small town in Arkansas, Bradford, both the police chief and the mayor are now serving in Iraq, leaving their substitutes a bit overwhelmed.
"Our mayor and our police chief, along with six others were activated, and they're over in Iraq," said the acting mayor, Greba Edens, 79, in a telephone interview. "We had a police officer that could step in as chief, and I've been treasurer for 20 years so that just put me in the mayor's spot whether I wanted or it not."
Many of the most outspoken governors who expressed concerns here about the National Guard deployments over the weekend were Democrats, including Mr. Kulongoski, Tom Vilsack of Iowa, Mark Warner of Virginia and Gary Locke of Washington.
"This has had a huge impact," Governor Locke said during a news conference on Saturday.
In his state, 62 percent of its 87,000 Army National Guard soldiers are on active duty, including the majority of the guard's best-trained firefighters, at a time when wildfires are beginning to sweep through the state, according to state officials.
But even during a meeting that featured plenty of partisan sniping, Republicans also sounded worried about whether the deployments would leave them vulnerable in emergencies.
Roger Schnell, Alaska's deputy commissioner for the Department of Military and Veterans Affairs, said in a telephone interview that wildfires raging through central Alaska were especially worrisome, given that 15 percent of its National Guard was stationed overseas. Alaska's governor, Frank H. Murkowski, a Republican, attended the governors' association meeting but was not available for comment.
While it is a small deployment compared with that of other sates, "they are critical people," Mr. Schnell said, adding that the Alaska National Guard was called in two weeks ago to help battle the fires.
"It has the potential to get much worse than it is," he said. "It's already bad. That could put us in a bind."
Maj. Gen. Timothy J. Lowenberg, commander of the Washington State National Guard, who attended the Sunday meeting with Pentagon officials, said in an interview that he heard worries voiced by plenty of Republicans.
"There are absolutely no partisan pattern to the concerns being raised," he said. "They are being articulated by governors of both parties."
--------
Berger Time What goes on in the pants of a highly flappable official
reason.com
Tim Cavanaugh
July 20, 2004
http://www.reason.com/links/links072004.shtml
Former National Security Adviser Sandy Berger has been caught with his pants on fire, and such is the gravity of the crisis that experts everywhere are solemnly avoiding the temptation toward instant position taking that occasionally mars the public discourse. But what the hell: I'm going to go out on a limb here and hazard a guess as to what was in those documents Berger secreted close by his membrum virile: I'm predicting it was something that makes Sandy Berger look stupid.
That doesn't mean the missing classified documents-which reportedly include several drafts of an after-action report on anti-terrorism during the millennium celebrations, handwritten notes, index cards treating the Middle East peace talks, and a paper cutout of a turkey made from a tracing of Berger's own hand and marked "To Maddy, Hapy (sic) Thanksgiving, 1997"-will not provide more general embarrassment for the Clinton administration; or that they don't comprise materials necessary for a full rendering of the 9/11 Commission's report; or that they might not give a boost to the embattled Bush White House.
But it would be an error to view Berger as merely a garden variety apparatchik taking another dive to protect Bill Clinton's sagging legacy. First because Berger is an extraordinary apparatchik, and second because this misses Berger's particular self-regard, his confidence in his own institutional authority. With his bejowled, scowling mien, his sneer of lukewarm command threatening always to fade into a slow burn, Berger was the Gale Gordon of the Clinton years. The more indignities he endured, the more indignant he seemed. The more feckless and floundering the policy, the more sternly would Berger argue for its consistency and timeless morality.
You can get a sense of this Berger from his foreign policy prescriptions for some future Democratic president in the June issue of Foreign Affairs. The most distinctive passage in the article is one of those rhetorical dipsydoodles of which President Kennedy was a great devotee: "[O]ur natural allies are much more likely to be persuaded by the power of American arguments than by the argument of American power." Other than that, the recommendations are uncannily familiar: We must internationalize our conflicts. We must pursue the two-state Isrealestine solution once again. Why isn't Bush invading North Korea if he's so ba-a-ad? The only way to sort out our intelligence problems is by adding a new layer of management-an idea President Bush himself is more or less guaranteed to endorse. We must lead "across a broader agenda, in more places, and with a wider definition of our national interest."
If that sounds like a replay of Al Gore's half of the 2000 foreign policy debates, consider Berger's interview last week with Mark Bisnow, in which he concedes that the premises for invading Iraq were "not valid," but adds that "it would be a huge mistake for us to cut and run."
There you have the distinguishing features of Democratic foreign policy: It's the same as Republican foreign policy, only this time it's run by Democrats. So circumscribed is Berger's view, so timid are his boldest pronouncements, so little does he make an impression, that nobody even seemed to have realized he was working for John Kerry until he quit earlier today.
Faced with such harsh truths, wouldn't you be tempted to stuff your drawers with documents that might further lower your Q rating? In the Clinton administration, Berger endured his share of public humiliations, most notably the abortive Ohio town hall meeting designed to gin up support for 1998's offensive against Iraq, an event that (like the eventual offensive itself) ended in a fog of catcalling and pique. With the Democrats attempting to sell "competence" as an alternative to the Bush Administration's floundering, it's possible, even likely, that the pantsed papers did not reveal any gross incompetence or criminal neglect. It would be enough if they showed Democrats being precisely no better than the bumbling Republicans. When you're trying to build brand distinctions between two indistinguishable brands, such things matter.
It's important to note that the investigation shows every sign of being a low-wattage affair, and that the timing of the news is as suspicious as Berger's (and Kerry's) supporters claim. Joshua Micah Marshall notes that the question of whether Berger took home original documents (indicating he was seeking to purge the record) or copies (indicating he was merely careless and/or sneaky with homework) has become muddled. Unfortunately, it's muddled in a way that makes Berger look especially shady. According to John Solomon's original AP story, Berger attorney Lanny Breuer, "said Berger believed he was looking at copies of the classified documents, not originals." Translated from the indirect dialect, that means Berger did take home originals, and may or may not have done so innocently.
The tale of the other documents is also interesting: Somebody familiar with classification protocols can make the decision about whether a former national security advisor (presumably a person with a very high security clearance) should have to shoplift his own notes on national security. House rules or no, it's another indignity for a man who couldn't even do wrong right.
Tim Cavanaugh is Reason's Web editor.
-------- immigration / refugees
U.N. Reports 50 Million Displaced People
July 20, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Displaced-People.html
GENEVA (AP) -- Conflicts, natural disasters and unchecked development have left about 50 million people homeless in their own countries, a new estimate that dwarfs the number of refugees known to aid workers, a U.N. official said Tuesday.
The United Nations knows of about 14 million refugees worldwide who have fled their homes for safer foreign lands, said Dennis McNamara, director of the U.N.'s interagency campaign to help the displaced.
But there is no global registration system for people displaced within their own countries, and McNamara said 25 million have been forced from their homes by conflicts, with another 25 million driven away by natural disasters and development.
``They are the world's forgotten and neglected,'' he said.
McNamara arrived at his estimate after evaluating countries around the world, especially in Latin America and Africa. Of the 21 current conflicts worldwide, 18 are internal, he said.
McNamara noted that the U.N. estimates that 38 million people worldwide have HIV, a smaller number than the estimate of those displaced.
``I don't want to compare suffering or denigrate other massive problems,'' he said. ``But there isn't even a tenth of the attention given to an even greater group of pretty miserable people, suffering and living in abject squalor.''
More than 2 million people have been displaced for decades by civil war in Colombia, he said, but half of the world's displaced live in Africa.
In Sudan, 4 million remain displaced by a southern insurgency that appears to be drawing to an end, McNamara said. But 1 million others have been forced from homes in the western Darfur region, where the government has been accused of backing Arab militiamen driving black farmers off their land.
Estimates of those displaced in the Congo run at about 3 million. In Uganda, an insurgency in the country's north has displaced 1.6 million.
There have been some positive developments. McNamara said half of Burundi's displaced population has returned home in recent months, and nearly 2 million Angolans returned home last year.
Elsewhere Tuesday, the U.N. food agency said 27,000 refugees from Central African Republic trapped in Chad will run out of food in two weeks.
The World Food Program said it fears international attention is focused on Darfur and that the Central African Republic refugees will go unnoticed.
``These refugees represent the region's forgotten emergency,'' said the WFP's director in Chad, Philippe Guyon Le Bouffy.
-------- justice
Justice Dept. Seeks Decision on Sentencing
July 20, 2004
By LYLE DENNISTON
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/20/politics/20sentence.html
WASHINGTON, July 19 - The Justice Department is planning to rush to the Supreme Court in a matter of days to try to salvage the guidelines that control federal criminal sentences, now under siege in many courts.
Under the plan under discussion among lawyers and the court, the court could hear the dispute early in its new term, which starts Oct. 4. At the core of the matter is the rapid demise of the federal sentencing rules - a direct result of its own 5-to-4 ruling less than four weeks ago.
Paul D. Clement, the acting United States solicitor general, has approved taking two cases swiftly to the Supreme Court, according to a Justice Department official who spoke on the condition of anonymity. One would be a direct appeal from a ruling by a federal trial judge in Portland, Me., bypassing the federal appeals court in Boston. The other would be a regular appeal from a decision by a federal appeals court in Chicago.
The appeals will be filed soon, the official said, and the court will be asked to approve review on an expedited schedule. The court will decide whether to hear one or both of the cases, and whether to hear them separately or together. Both cases will focus on a critical issue now occupying federal courts: the constitutionality of the federal sentencing guidelines.
The justices are in recess until mid-September, but they are expected to act on the appeals through a telephone conference call.
"The government is looking for cases that present the best scenario" for testing the guidelines' validity, said Rosemary Curran Scapicchio, a Boston lawyer who represents a man in one of the cases that the Justice Department will be appealing. The man, Ducan Fanfan, 30, of Somerville, Mass., was convicted of cocaine trafficking. The government has appealed that case to the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, in Boston, but will ask the Supreme Court to rule in advance of any decision by that lower court.
The concept behind federal and state sentencing guidelines is to standardize the process by which judges mete out punishment. Guidelines tell judges which factors can lead to a lighter sentence, like service to the community or cooperation with investigators, and which factors can lead to a more severe penalty, like the use of a gun during the crime or a lack of remorse.
The new constitutional challenges to the current federal guidelines arise out of the justices' ruling in the closing days of the last term, in the case of Blakely v. Washington. That decision struck down key parts of a state sentencing guidelines system, finding that it gave the judge discretion to increase a sentence based on facts that had not been established by a jury in a guilty verdict or by a guilty plea. The right to a jury trial, the majority said, does not allow a judge to increase a sentence based on factual findings made only by the judge.
Although the court majority insisted it was not ruling on the validity of the federal guidelines, since the case involved only a state law, the dissenters predicted that the federal system would fall next. In a dissenting opinion, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor said the decision "threatens an untold number of criminal judgments," perhaps undoing all criminal sentences imposed under federal or state guideline systems for at least the last four years.
In fact, the June 24 ruling cast into constitutional doubt the entire federal sentencing regimen that Congress mandated in 1984. Sentences are now generally lighter than they would have been under the federal guidelines, on the premise that the guidelines have been undercut by the court's decision last month.
Because of the Supreme Court's decision, federal appellate and trial judges, as well as prosecutors and defense lawyers, have complained that the federal system is now in turmoil, and many have argued that the Supreme Court must act swiftly to straighten it out. Several times each week, another federal court, on its own or at the urging of defense lawyers, has joined the fray. The results have been somewhat mixed, but the dominant trend has been to scuttle the guidelines, in whole or in part.
If the current guidelines had been used in Mr. Fanfan's case, he would have been sent to prison for at least 15 years and 8 months. But Judge D. Brock Hornby of United States District Court in Portland ruled that it would be unconstitutional to use the guidelines range against Mr. Fanfan, so he sentenced him to 61/2 years.
The other case that Justice Department officials have chosen for an early appeal involves Freddie J. Booker, a Wisconsin man convicted of distribution of cocaine "base." Mr. Booker was sentenced before the Supreme Court's decision.
But the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, in Chicago, struck down Mr. Booker's sentence of 30 years to life, finding that the trial judge had acted unconstitutionally by relying on the guidelines. The judge had added time to the sentence after concluding that Mr. Booker had dealt more cocaine than the jury had convicted him of.
By taking the two cases to the Supreme Court, the department will be seeking to cover the two levels of lower court responses to the June ruling: imposing a lower sentence after abandoning the guidelines, and undoing a sentence based on the guidelines as they existed before the June ruling.
Ms. Scapicchio, Mr. Fanfan's lawyer, said one schedule proposed to her by Justice Department lawyers was to get a case to the Supreme Court for a hearing in September, even before the new court term formally opens. The court seldom holds hearings in September, but it did so last year in a major campaign finance case.
Ms. Scapicchio said she had replied that she preferred a second proposed schedule, with the case to be heard by the justices in the first week of the new term. She said she had been told by Justice Department officials that a rapid schedule had been cleared with the court.
-------- terrorism
Interview: EU anti-terror chief De Vries
(UPI)
By Gareth Harding Chief European Correspondent
July 20, 2004
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20040720-103218-3423r.htm
Brussels, Belgium, Jul. 20 (UPI) -- Dutch Liberal Gijs de Vries became the European Union's first anti-terrorism czar in March, following a bomb attack on morning commuter trains in central Madrid that left almost 200 dead. As EU justice ministers met in Brussels to take further measures to boost the bloc's fight against terrorism, United Press International spoke to the 48-year-old former minister about intelligence sharing between the EU's 25 states, al-Qaida's threat to Europe and anti-terrorist cooperation between Brussels and Washington.
UPI: Is the EU at war with terror in the same way the United States is?
Gijs de Vries: Europeans by and large dislike the phrase "war on terror" because there is a widely held view that terrorism cannot be eradicated or defeated by military means alone and that one really needs a mix of measures -- political, economic, legal and yes, ultimately military. The word "war" to European ears and sensitivities suggests a more one-dimensional approach than many here believe would be effective, so we think and speak more in terms of the struggle against terrorism and the defense against terrorism.
Q: Does the EU need a kind of European FBI capable of hunting down terrorists within the bloc?
A: The European Union differs in at least one crucial respect from the United States -- the EU is not a federal state, so we do not have a federal EU police force or a federal intelligence agency. The Union has a number of legal instruments it can use to help member states make their forces work properly across borders, but the Union is not run from Brussels. Tom Ridge has some 200,000 people working for him and a whole Department of Homeland Security at his disposal. The EU -- all institutions combined -- is not more than 25,000 people. So it's apples and pears. But the more fundamental point is that to build a new agency -- even if the Union were structured to do so -- takes time, and frankly to engage in a lengthy process of institution building among 25 sovereign governments would take longer than member states believe is helpful. So the clear majority view is that we have to focus on what we can do now and tomorrow rather than what we might be able to do in the distant future.
Q: Are you running out of patience with member states that fail to implement EU anti-terrorist laws they have signed up to?
A: I believe the sooner those laws are implemented the better. For example, we have agreed to a European arrest warrant -- quite an innovative instrument because it speeds up significantly extradition among EU member states. However, this instrument, which is of immediate practical use in the fight against terrorism, has not been implemented by all member states, so a number can use it and others cannot. The Union must face up to its responsibilities -- member states and national parliaments must make sure that once legislation is agreed in Brussels it is implemented at home.
Q: EU Justice ministers Monday agreed to pool information on convicted criminals, but when it comes to terrorists they seem reluctant to share data. How can intelligence be better coordinated between EU states?
A: A lot of the work must remain confidential. That doesn't mean nothing is happening, it's just not visible to the average television viewer. To give you an example, a few weeks ago there were simultaneous arrests in several member states, including Belgium, on the basis of cooperation between the security services. What we have agreed to do in Europe is two things: first, security services will meet together as 25, and, secondly, we will be creating a center for threat analysis here in Brussels that will bring together foreign intelligence services with security services.
Q: Is there a danger that these anti-terrorist measures will erode Europeans' civil liberties?
A: I think this debate is a crucial one, but it is not one in which it is helpful to talk in terms of black or white. Let us not forget that to defend people's right to life by protecting them against terrorism is also protecting their human rights, and to guarantee people's freedom of religion against murderous radicals who assume the right to judge whether others are apostates or not is also a fundamental human right. So the fight against terrorism is also a fight for human rights.
Q: Al-Qaida's truce offer to Europe ended a few days ago with the threat of renewed attacks against Dutch targets and EU institutions. How seriously do you take this?
A: It has been made quite clear by European governments that they will not allow themselves to be blackmailed by any terrorist threat, including this one. The idea of a truce, which Mr. Bin Laden flaunted, has been rejected firmly by all European governments.
Q: The Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, has said that a major attack on a European capital like London is inevitable. Do you share his fatalism?
A: Inevitable is not a word that comes very naturally to these discussions, but it must be recognized that in an open society one cannot guarantee security 100 percent. One of the key characteristics of open societies is that people go about their daily business as free people -- we move freely in our societies, and we must continue to do so. But that freedom necessarily brings with it certain risks, and I think the people of Europe recognize those risks but will not be deterred from continuing their lifestyle.
Q: Are Europeans safer or more vulnerable to attack after the Madrid bombings of March 11?
A: Certainly the fact that such a massive attack was perpetrated on European soil was a shock. Just as Sept. 11 was new to the United States, this type of attack was new to Europe. We all recognize that the struggle against terrorism may be a long-term phenomenon -- which means we must keep up our vigilance and continue to invest in international cooperation with countries like the United States. Clearly, we are faced here with a new dimension to terrorism. In Europe, it used to be more focused on the political changes terrorists wanted to obtain in certain countries. But this new type of terrorism is inherently global and requires a global response.
-------- POLITICS
-------- investigations
Clinton Aide Faces Inquiry for Taking Classified Documents
July 20, 2004
By MARK GLASSMAN and DAVID STOUT
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/20/politics/20CND-BERG.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, July 20 - President Clinton's national security advisor, Samuel R. Berger, inadvertently removed classified national security documents from the National Archives while vetting them in preparation for testimony before the Sept. 11 commission, his lawyers said Monday night. The revelation caused political fallout whose importance was not clear today.
Mr. Berger removed at least two slightly different versions of a memo critiquing how the government handled national intelligence and security issues before the millennium celebration in December 1999, as well as personal notes he had taken on classified documents, according to one of Mr. Berger's lawyers, Lanny Breuer.
"In the course of reviewing over several days thousands of pages of documents on behalf of the Clinton administration in connection with requests by the 9/11 Commission, I inadvertently took a few documents from the Archives," Mr. Berger said in a statement Monday night. "I also took my notes on the documents reviewed. When I was informed by the Archives there were documents missing, I immediately returned everything I had, except for a few documents that apparently I had accidentally discarded."
Mr. Berger said he "deeply regret the sloppiness involved" and that he did not intend to keep any document from the commission. The investigation and Mr. Berger's statement were first reported by The Associated Press. All of the documents and notes were returned by Mr. Berger to the archives in early October, within a week of his learning they were missing, his lawyers said.
"I think it's clear from his actions that he absolutely no intention to hide anything," Mr. Breuer said on Monday night.
Nevertheless, Mr. Berger's actions could have ripple effects. For one thing, he has been an adviser to Senator John Kerry, President's Bush's presumptive Democrat opponent. Then, too, the disclosure that the documents were mishandled comes just before the Sept. 11 commission is to release its long-awaited report. A spokesman for the commission, Al Felzenberg, told The Associated Press today that Mr. Berger's actions would have no effect on the work of the panel, which Mr. Felzenberg said had had access to all the materials it needed.
Senator Trent Lott, a Mississippi Republican and member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said people should not rush to judgment about Mr. Berger's actions. "I think we need more information," he said today on Fox News. "I mean, obviously the timing of it is not good if he is serving as an adviser to a presidential candidate. But from now on until the election, everything like this will have a spotlight put on it and examined very carefully."
"Let's wait and see what comes out here in the next couple of days," Mr. Lott said a moment later.
Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, Democrat of Connecticut, said he was surprised. "I know Sandy Berger well," Mr. Lieberman said on the same Fox News program. "He's a very patriotic American. Unless we learn otherwise, I have to assume that what Sandy says is right, that any removal of documents was inadvertent."
And David R. Gergen, the longtime political strategist who worked in the administration of President Bill Clinton as well as in the Nixon, Ford and Reagan White Houses, said he thought what Mr. Berger did was "more innocent than it looks."
"I have known Sandy Berger for a long time," Mr. Gergen said on NBC's "Today" show. "He would never do anything to compromise the security of the United States." Mr. Gergen said he thought it "suspicious" that word of the investigation of Mr. Berger came out just before release of the 9/11 commission report.
Mr. Berger is the subject of a criminal investigation, not the target of one. The distinction is crucial. A subject is a person whose activities are of interest to investigators; a target is a person who might be charged with actual wrongdoing.
Mr. Berger's lawyer, Mr. Breuer, sought on Monday night to retrace the events.
In June 2003, Mr. Berger was asked by a representative of the Clinton administration to examine the documents at the Archives to confirm that none of the material was privileged, Mr. Breuer said.
Mr. Berger's security clearance and his familiarity with the material made him the logical choice to review the documents, his lawyers said. Still, his lawyers said, Mr. Berger saw only copies. "Nothing he saw was an original," Mr. Breuer said.
For Mr. Berger, the review meant an opportunity to reacquaint himself with a document that he had asked Richard C, Clarke, then the counterterrorism chief, to prepare shortly after intelligence officials uncovered and prevented Al Qaeda terror plots to be unleashed during the January 2000 celebrations.
While reviewing one copy of the document in September and another in October, Mr. Berger noticed a slight difference and examined the two more closely, his lawyers said. Then, they said, he inadvertently packed them away and brought them home. It is possible that Mr. Berger repeated the mistake with more versions of the document.
Mr. Clarke said Monday night that it was doubtful that there was malicious intent on the part of Mr. Berger. He said that it would not have made sense to destroy a few versions of the memo; while several copies of that document existed, substantively they were all the same. The Associated Press said that employees of the National Archives alerted the F.B.I. to the possibility that Mr. Berger had removed documents. Agents subsequently searched his home and office in early January.
Federal agents investigated the allegations that Mr. Berger mishandled classified materials, a senior government official said Monday evening. The official said that the inquiry had concluded and was now being reviewed by prosecutors at the Justice Department who will decide whether any laws were broken.
Federal law makes it a crime to mishandle classified information, either by copying it or removing it from a government-approved secure room, even if the information does not fall into the wrong hands. Even so, prosecutors have in the past exercised wide latitude in cases in which former officials, including cabinet officers, would be treated under the law. It is unclear whether officials at the Justice Department have reached any decision in Mr. Berger's case.
Earlier this year, Paul O'Neill, the former Treasury Secretary, was found to have used classified material from his tenure in writing a book about the Bush economic team. An internal inquiry found that Treasury Department officials had improperly turned over documents that should have been classified but that Mr. O'Neill, did nothing wrong.
Before that, Johh Deutch, a former C.I.A. director, became the subject of an embarrassing inquiry into whether he had downloaded classified intelligence documents to an unsecured personal computer that he used to access Internet sites. On his final day in office, President Clinton pardoned Mr. Deutch, who was in the midst of negotiating a plea agreement with prosecutors on charges stemming from the accusations.
--------
FBI Probes Berger for Document Removal
Former Clinton Aide Inadvertently Took Papers From Archives, His Attorney Says
By Susan Schmidt and Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, July 20, 2004; Page A02
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A62776-2004Jul19.html
The FBI is investigating Clinton administration national security adviser Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger's removal of classified documents from the National Archives, attorneys for Berger confirmed last night.
Berger inadvertently took copies of several versions of an after-action memo on the millennium bombing plot from the Archives last fall, said his attorney Lanny Breuer. The lawyer said one or more of the copies were then inadvertently discarded.
The inspector general of the Archives began an investigation last October and turned it over to the FBI in January. FBI agents searched Berger's office and home safe, and the probe is continuing, Breuer said.
Berger spent three days at the Archives, on Pennsylvania Avenue NW, last summer and fall examining documents to provide the Clinton administration's responses to inquiries from the presidential commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The commission's final report is slated for release Thursday.
"There was huge pressure to review the documents quickly for claims of executive privilege and responsiveness," Breuer said. Berger reviewed copies of thousands of documents on July 18, Sept. 2 and Oct. 2, 2003, Breuer said. Later in October, the Archives notified Berger that documents were missing.
Berger discovered several versions of the classified memo in a leather portfolio he had taken to the Archives, his attorney said. He returned them and papers on which he had taken notes about materials he had reviewed. Those notes, Breuer said, were not supposed to have been removed from the Archives without review by employees there. Berger's actions, said Breuer, were the result of "sloppiness" and were unintentional.
One or more missing versions of the 15-page memo could not be located among Berger's possessions, and he thinks he probably discarded the papers, Breuer said.
Breuer said FBI agents have not interviewed Berger, although he has offered to cooperate. Breuer said agents did not take anything from Berger's safe, and took from his office a few index cards bearing notes from meetings on the Middle East that Berger made at Camp David.
One Sept. 11 commission member reached last night was not aware of the Berger investigation. A senior commission official said the panel has no comment on the probe.
The commission's staff was told in general about the investigation but did not view the documents as crucial, said sources close to the issue who declined to be identified because of the criminal investigation.
The Associated Press first reported late yesterday that the FBI was looking into Berger's handling of classified documents. Federal laws prohibit unauthorized release or removal of classified documents.
Breuer said the Justice Department and the FBI have informed him that Berger is the subject of a criminal probe but not a target.
In his testimony before the Sept. 11 commission in March, Berger said he had ordered the after-action review of the millennium threat and that the report contained 29 recommendations, most of which were implemented subject to funding. He also testified that the review led President Bill Clinton to request $300 million from Congress, primarily for domestic security programs, and to reallocate $79 million within the CIA's budget to counterterrorism.
The missing copies, according to Breuer and their author, Richard A. Clarke, the counterterrorism chief in the Clinton administration and early in President Bush's administration, were versions of after-action reports recommending changes following threats of terrorism as 1999 turned to 2000. Clarke said he prepared about two dozen ideas for countering terrorist threats. The recommendations were circulated among Cabinet agencies, and various versions of the memo contained additions and refinements, Clarke said last night.
Breuer said that Clarke had prepared a "tough review" and that the document was something of a critical assessment of what agencies did well and what they failed to do in the face of the millennium threat.
Clarke said it is illogical to assume Berger would have sought to hide versions of the memo, because "everybody in town had copies of these things." He said he could not recall most of the recommendations, but one that he did remember -- having FBI field offices send wiretap material to Washington for translation instead of translating it locally -- still has not been accomplished.
National security adviser Condoleezza Rice testified to the Sept. 11 panel that she did not recall being briefed on the report during the transition period to the Bush administration, and she said she did not read it until after the Sept. 11 attacks, when Vice President Cheney distributed it.
Rice characterized the report as concluding that Ahmed Ressam, later convicted in a plan to blow up Los Angeles International Airport, was caught by chance. "I think it actually wasn't by chance, which was Washington's view of it," Rice testified. "It was because a very alert customs agent" who was suspicious of Ressam as he attempted to cross into Washington state from Canada, she said.
Researcher Karl Evanzz contributed to this report.
-------- us politics
Parties Square Off In a Database Duel Voter Information Shapes Strategies
By Paul Farhi
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, July 20, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A62770-2004Jul19?language=printer
Fourth in an occasional series
COLUMBUS, Ohio -- The Democratic Party already knows a few things about the Victorian-style duplex on West Hubbard Street. It wants to know a lot more.
And so Mark Rutkus and Patrick Harris, armed with sturdy clipboards and cheerful smiles, are going on a data hunt. "Hi, we're here from the Franklin County Democratic Party," Rutkus begins as Linda Houston draws back her front door, tentatively at first. "Can we ask you a few questions?"
A longtime Democrat, Houston greets them enthusiastically. For the next few minutes, the local party operatives ask and she answers: Are you registered to vote? Do you reside at this address? Can you confirm the names of the other people living here? What do you know about the people living next door?
It may seem like basic shoe-leather canvassing, unchanged from the days when precinct captains kept their political machines oiled with up-to-date information gleaned from doorstep and barstool encounters. But in this year's election, there is a hidden high-tech twist. Rutkus and Harris are out to "map" the political demography of this neighborhood, trolling in the service of a quasi-science called "database targeting."
Houston's answers will bounce from Rutkus's clipboard to a computer in the state Democratic Party's offices here, and then 400 miles away to computers housed in the Democratic National Committee's headquarters in Washington.
Like rivulets flowing to rivers and rivers to the sea, this information will join an enormous data torrent streaming toward Washington from all around the country. Houston's "profile" is just one of 166 million -- or one for every registered voter -- that the DNC is constantly updating in a huge digital cache known as DataMart. The Republican National Committee tends a similar information trove, dubbed Voter Vault.
The fight for Ohio, and maybe the election itself, could come down to a battle of these databases. 'Very Powerful Tool'
The 2004 election will be the first presidential election in which both national parties use their database and number-crunching skills to shape their organizing and get-out-the-vote strategies.
Marketers have used databases to target customers for years -- they know enough about your credit history to offer you that low-interest credit card -- but the political world is just becoming acquainted. For several years, largely out of public view, the two major parties have been assembling their infobanks, each with the same daunting goal. By tracking the electorate, and employing ever more sophisticated statistical models through the field called "data mining," the parties and their candidates hope to zero in on who will vote, how they might vote, and how to persuade them to vote for Republicans or Democrats.
"You could ask me about any city block in America, and I could tell you how many on that block are likely to be health care voters, or who's most concerned about education or job creation," said DNC Chairman Terence R. McAuliffe. "And I could press a button and six seconds later you'd have a name, an address and a phone number for each of them. We can then begin a conversation with these people that is much more sophisticated and personal than we ever could before."
It is not quite that simple. Models and databases offer better-educated guesses, not certainty, about what a voter thinks and how he or she is likely to behave. But with enough computing power, enough personal details and the right search features, political database pros say they are improving the efficiency of an array of campaign decisions, including fundraising, advertising and get-out-the-vote operations.
Using little more than an off-the-shelf program and the desktop computer in his Washington office, Democratic consultant Hal Malchow shows how to predict turnout and target pools of supporters. Using the 2002 gubernatorial race in Arizona as his example, Malchow is able to match the poll responses of 5,778 likely voters against their database profiles. The program then slices and dices the data to uncover the characteristics -- in this case, middle-aged Hispanic men living in two metropolitan areas -- that defined the biggest groups of people likely to support Malchow's client but still uncertain about voting. A quick search of a voter database would return the names of those who fit this profile, making them the likely recipients of phone calls or a knock on the door by a candidate's field staff.
"This doesn't improve [a candidate's] message one bit," said Malchow, a direct-mail expert who has been a pioneer in such targeting techniques. "It doesn't change the way a candidate looks or his personality or where he started in the polls. . . . But it can be a very, very powerful tool. In the end, it's about having knowledge that allows you to use your resources in the smartest and most efficient way."
This fall, thousands of people such as Linda Houston -- who live in a county that Democrat Al Gore won by 4,156 votes in the 2000 presidential election -- will receive "customized" appeals from the parties, courtesy of the databases.
Those whom computer models have identified as, say, education voters may get a knock on their door from a teacher, who will talk up Sen. John F. Kerry's ideas about education. Senior citizens concerned about Medicare or Social Security might get a phone call on that topic from President Bush's volunteers, and perhaps campaign literature highlighting the president's views. Groups, such as the Democratic-leaning Emily's List and the conservative National Rifle Association, have their own database-driven efforts, piggybacking on the two major parties' electronic files in an effort to find and motivate voters.
Because of programs that sift and cross-reference reams of data, database jockeys are starting to discover some surprising behavioral nuggets in their info-mountains. By analyzing lists of Democratic donors and consumer data last year, Malchow found that people who live in households without a call-waiting feature on their phones are more likely than average to respond to a political fundraising pitch.
Malchow is not sure why, but he theorizes that people who do not have call waiting are older and have a more leisurely lifestyle -- the kind of people who might take a few moments to think about and contribute to a political cause. Room for Error
The DNC's database team has used modeling programs to project the top issues for groups of voters based on common personal characteristics. For example, the DNC estimates that health care is the top priority of 940,000 people in Ohio. It has also projected where these people live among the state's 88 counties, providing a valuable road map for campaign advertising.
Laura Quinn, the DNC's technology guru, cautions that the identity of each "health care voter" is based on statistical probability -- that is, it is a likely identification, not an absolute one (for competitive reasons, the DNC will not detail the cluster of attributes that marks someone as a health care voter).
Predicting voters' thinking this way is hardly foolproof. As a rule, more information about a person helps improve the accuracy of assessing which beliefs they hold. "You could take all the obvious things about a person and still not screen out the important variable," said Doug Kelly, one of the architects of DataMart and the DNC's donor database, known as "Demzilla."
"I might live across the street from a guy. We're the same age, we have the same approximate house value, same family size, same education, maybe even the same minivan. But he's a Republican and I'm not," Kelly said.
Even so, Quinn said, this kind of "statistical oddsmaking" is more reliable than the broad assumptions made about voters before. "We're no longer just speaking about 'women voters' or 'minority voters,' " she said. "The closer we can get to the real circumstances of people's lives, the better. What is more telling about a person is not how they feel about President Bush, but how they live and what they say about themselves."
In other words, Houston's address is not just a household on a precinct map; in the database, Houston may show up as many things: a Caucasian, a woman, a mother, a grandmother, a homeowner, a Democrat, a resident of a mixed urban neighborhood of renters and homeowners that turns out for liberal candidates by a 2 to 1 margin. A Complicated Task
Consumer marketers have been profiting from this kind of information for many years. Supermarket chains review data on purchase patterns, collected through "shopping clubs," for clues about how to "micro-target" new products to shoppers. Internet companies such as Amazon.com keep records on what customers bought to offer them deals on products they have shown interest in before.
But predicting which book or brand of breakfast cereal someone might buy is easier than figuring out how millions of people will vote -- or even whether they will vote -- several months before Election Day.
The task is complicated by the fact that accurate data on many voters are not readily available. Information in state voter files -- the foundation of the national databases -- varies by state. And every state protects the most basic and compelling political fact -- whom someone voted for. The only way to find out is to ask people directly, and that is an expensive and time-consuming job.
The parties are not even sure who is a Democrat or a Republican. Since only about a third of Ohio's voters are registered with a party, the vast majority of the state's electorate has no clearly marked partisan "trail."
So they ask. This is where field workers such as Rutkus and Harris come in. By marching door to door, they are able to assess whether a person marked as an "I" for independent on the voter rolls might be amenable to overtures from the Democratic Party (the two operatives ignore people listed on voter registration forms as Republicans).
Even without finding anyone home, the door-knocking exercise can offer some telling factoids. When Rutkus spots a placard for a labor union in the window of one townhouse, he notes this on his clipboard.
The two men also have another key assignment: verifying information. Individual data are notoriously volatile, as people move, age, marry, divorce or have children, and so much effort is geared toward weeding out old information -- "deadwood." During the 2000 election, before the creation of DataMart, the Florida Democratic Party's files on voters were in such a primitive state that Democrats could not contact 1.48 million registered supporters on behalf of Gore and statewide candidates.
"Almost a million and a half people never got a letter or a phone call from us because we had the wrong address or phone number," said McAuliffe, who upon becoming DNC chairman in early 2001 ordered changes. "And these were Democratic people! It was reprehensible."
Exactly what the parties have in their databases on Ohio's 4.7 million voters is closely guarded (DNC officials spoke in general about their files; the RNC declined to comment). But for starters, according to several sources, each file duplicates what is already available through state voter-registration rolls: name, gender, date of birth, address, county, state and federal congressional district, date of registration, party of registration (if any), and number of elections voted in.
This information has been abetted by block-level census data and lists sold by commercial brokers that give the parties a general fix on marital status, ethnicity, educational level, the number of people living in each house, estimated home value, the length of residency, and whether a person rents or owns the residence. Through their record-keeping, plus list swaps with other organizations, the parties know who has made political contributions or charitable donations. Lists of club and organization memberships, plus self-identifying groups organized by the campaign, fill out to the picture. The Bush campaign has about 30 "affinity" groups it communicates with periodically, including African Americans for Bush, stock-car racing fans and snowmobile enthusiasts.
What the parties do not keep, officials in both parties said, is information on consumer behavior, such as credit reports, automobile ownership or magazine subscriptions. "There's a lot of information that's useless in a political context," one operative said. "We don't really care who bought shoes at the Gap."
Republicans and Democrats alike agree that the RNC, which began assembling its database several years before the DNC did, has been more effective in using its information. The party's 72-Hour Task Force -- a voter-registration and get-out-the-vote program -- relied on block-by-block data during the 2002 congressional elections and in successful gubernatorial races in 2003 in Kentucky and Mississippi. Spooked by those efforts, and formerly dependent on state party lists alone, the DNC has hustled to catch up and is "almost at parity now," said Michael Cornfield of George Washington University, an expert in online politics. Larger Role May Be on the Horizon
As candidates get better at tailoring multiple messages for disparate groups of people, some worry that a kind of Tower of Babel effect could take over: Voters who are members of one targeted group will not know what is being said to another, and vice versa.
"It doesn't bode particularly well for democracy if everyone isn't hearing the same message," said Beth Givens, director of the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, a nonprofit consumer advocacy organization based in San Diego. For example, she said, it would be deceptive if a candidate sent a highly inflammatory message to people identified as strongly anti-immigrant while appealing to the mainstream with more moderate rhetoric.
Another potential shortcoming: As databases enable candidates to refine their get-out-the-vote programs to people identified as their most likely supporters, indifferent or less committed voters may be bypassed. Why bother trying to persuade someone whom a computer has tagged as a lousy prospect?
But Givens said this could work the other way, too. "Some of these strategies could bring more people to the polls if [a candidate] reaches out to people who weren't being addressed before, with messages they hadn't heard before."
As the field matures, most involved in it believe database-marketing techniques will assume an ever-larger role in campaigns. "These databases are going to be at the heart of what political parties are in the 21st century," Cornfield said. "They'll be able to say to their candidates and their [allied organizations], 'We'll give you the data you need; we have the most up-to-date stuff.' "
For decades, he said, the national parties' most important political commodities were manpower and money. Increasingly, he said, "it's information."
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Senate Panel OKs Flag - Burning Amendment
July 20, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Flag-Burning.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- A Senate panel approved a constitutional amendment Tuesday that would ban the burning of the American flag, but opponents of the measure say there's not enough support in the full, GOP-controlled Senate to push through a change to the Constitution.
The Senate Judiciary Committee approved a one-line change to the Constitution -- ``The Congress shall have power to prohibit the physical desecration of the flag of the United States'' -- on an 11-7 vote, which pushes the issue to the full Senate.
``The flag deserves constitutional protection, and legal scholars agree that this amendment is the only way to restore the law as it existed for most of our nation's history,'' said Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas.
Even though some Democrats are joining with the majority Republicans to support the change in the closely divided Senate, there won't be enough support to get the required 67 votes needed to approve a constitutional amendment, said Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., who opposes the change.
Many opponents say such an amendment would limit free speech rights.
``Thankfully, they do not have the votes to pass it on the floor so this becomes something of a political exercise in an election year,'' Feingold said.
A proposed constitutional amendment needs a two-thirds majority in the House and Senate and approval by three-fourths of state legislatures. The flag-burning amendment passed the House on a 300-125 vote in June 2003.
Lawmakers have debated the flag amendment almost annually since a 5-4 Supreme Court decision in 1989 saying flag-burning was a protected free speech right. That ruling overturned a 1968 federal statue and flag-protection laws in 48 states.
In 1990, Congress passed another law protecting the flag, but the Supreme Court that year, in another 5-4 ruling, struck it down as unconstitutional.
``This amendment gives Congress the right to do what it was able to do back in 1989,'' said Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif. ``It offers a way to return the nation's flag to the protected status it deserves.''
Since the Supreme Court ruling, the House has approved flag amendments in 1995, 1997, 1999 and 2001, all by more than 300 votes. The Senate, in votes in 1995 and 2000, came up with only 63 votes, four short of the two-thirds majority needed.
The Bush administration supports the flag-burning amendment, while Democratic presidential challenger John Kerry and his running mate John Edwards do not think the Constitution should be amended to add the ban.
The House bill is H.J. Res. 4 and the Senate bill is S.J. Res. 4.
On the Net: http://thomas.loc.gov
-------- ENERGY
-------- alternative energy
DaimlerChrysler aims for mass-market, hydrogen-fueled cars in 10 years
Tuesday, July 20, 2004
By Ansley Ng,
Associated Press
http://www.enn.com/news/2004-07-20/s_26012.asp
SINGAPORE - Car giant DaimlerChrysler said Monday it hopes to sell pollution-free, fuel-cell cars to the public within a decade but acknowledges that making them cheap enough will be its toughest challenge.
"We can expect to see a commercialization of fuel-cell cars in 10 years," DaimlerChrysler's Head of Technology and Environmental Communications Edith Meissner said in Singapore, as the company delivered five cars for road testing in the Southeast Asian city-state.
Since 1994, DaimlerChrysler has invested US$1 billion in the technology, which powers vehicles with compressed hydrogen. The engines emit no pollutants, as the only waste material is pure water.
Prototype hydrogen-fueled vehicles typically cost $1 million to $2 million each, including the $200,000 cost of making the fuel cell itself, according to industry estimates.
"At the moment, the cost is the biggest challenge we face. We are sure that with the economies of scale and the development of the techniques we will reach the goal," she added.
DaimlerChrysler is loaning five Mercedes-Benz A-class "F-Cell" cars to companies and a government department in Singapore for two years of road testing. It did not say what each model cost.
Worldwide there'll be 60 such DaimlerChrysler vehicles in cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles, Tokyo, and Berlin by the end of the year, the company said.
The tiny city-state was chosen as one of the test sites because of its tropical climate and government support for cleaner technologies, DaimlerChrysler's fuel cell director Dr Andreas Truckenbrodt said.
It'll cost 50 Singapore dollars (US$29.43) to refuel the car with a tank that can travel 100 miles (160 kilometers). Refueling can be done at a specially equipped gas station in the eastern part of Singapore.
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