Archive By Date | Today's Links to Search By
Activists' News | Nuclear | Depleted Uranium | Military | Police
Alternative Energy Etc. | From Subscribers
NUCLEAR
Group says it may have found missing H-bomb off Georgia's coast
China builds more nuclear power plants to ease power shortage
Arafat says bullets raising cancer rate
Ex UK defense head urges payout for ill Gulf war veterans
'End Fair Deal Delays for Sick Gulf Veterans' - Ex-Commander
Israel warns Iran will have nuclear weapons capacity in 2007
Fear of Nuclear Iran Could Influence U.S. Diplomacy
Poor Relations With Iran Turning Worse
Israel Sees 'Nuclear Capable' Iran by 2007
Official denies nuclear arms found in Iraq
N. Korea makes nukes offer
Roh, Koizumi pledge cooperation on North Korea nuclear standoff
North Korean U.N. Envoy Visits Capitol Hill
U.S. Envoy Urges Libya - Style WMD Solution for N.Korea
New York City and 8 States Plan to Sue Power Plants
Interest Groups Plan Suit Over Simi Valley Nuclear Site
Lawmaker Doubts Los Alamos Data Was Stolen
Lab Security Breaches Criticized
MILITARY
U.S. Tells Sudan to Restrain Militias Violence Continues In Darfur Region
Raytheon Developing New Variant of Joint Standoff Weapon
Memorandum for the Secretary of State
Fort Detrick labs searched again for anthrax clues
Blair Defends War in Iraq in Debate in Parliament
Britain Says It Will Cut Armed Forces, but Modernize Them
Halliburton's Work in Iran Stirs Democrats
Militants Intensify Abductions in Iraq With 6 New Hostages
U.N. Demands That Israel Remove 'Security Barrier'
Despite Vote in U.N., Israel Vows to Proceed With Barrier
Israel Defies U.N. Vote Against West Bank Barrier
Israeli Helicopter Fires Missile at Gaza Camp
Saudis Find Head of American Who Was Held by Militants
Pakistan army 'killing farmers'
Filipino Hostage Released; Arroyo Defends Iraq Pullout
Panel Cuts Bush's Budget Request for NASA
Remove Wall, Israel Is Told by the U.N.
A Shrinking Base
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Public Less Fearful Of Terrorist Attack
Bush to screen population for mental illness
Pakistan Army Ousts Afghan Refugees in Militants' Area
Officer Is a Focus in Pipe Bomb Case
Video Shows Security Check of 9/11 Hijackers
Neocons Revive Cold War Group
Afghans Try Americans on Torture Charges
POLITICS
Running scared
9/11 Report to Cite 10 Missed Opportunities
Former FBI Translator Sibel Edmonds
Grand Jury Steps Up Inquiry Into Possible Halliburton Ties to Iran
Bush - 'I want to be the peace president'
The hysterical skies
Warner Helped the Rev. Moon
Intelligence Plan Draws Skepticism
A Kerry Adviser Leaves the Race Over Missing Documents
ENERGY
Energized by Public Demand, Wind Power Picks Up
Long Island Utility Buys Into Energy Efficiency
OTHER
8 States Sue 5 Biggest Emitters of Carbon Dioxide
Permanent Hair Dyes Tied to Adult Leukemia Risk
Hearing on Antidepressants Canceled
ACTIVISTS
China Frees Dissident Physician
City to Appeal Limits on Searches of Protesters
Organizers Bow to Ultimatum on New York Rally Site
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- accidents and safety
Group says it may have found missing H-bomb off Georgia's coast
Associated Press
Wed, Jul. 21, 2004
http://www.thestate.com/mld/thestate/9207184.htm
WASSAW ISLAND, Ga. - A group says it might have discovered a missing hydrogen bomb that the Air Force accidentally dropped off the Georgia coast more than 45 years ago.
Derek Duke, a retired Air Force colonel, and others used equipment that detects radiation and large metal objects Tuesday to scour an area the size of a football field in Wassau Sound, a shallow area near Tybee Beach.
Duke said that radiation levels were seven to 10 times greater than normal at one spot. The group then detected a massive underwater object, he said.
"It might be nothing," Duke said. "Our big question now is, 'What do we do next?'"
Billy Mullins, associate director of Air Force Nuclear Weapons and Counterproliferation Agency, said that the bomb is best left alone.
The bomb is probably entombed in 20 feet of mud, he said.
"If you want to determine for sure that it was the (nuclear bomb), you would have to dig it up with a big dredging type of operation," Mullins said.
He said that presents two risks: The dredge could hit the bomb and detonate the high explosives, threatening the salvage crew, and an explosion might blow a hole in a clay layer protecting an aquifer that supplies drinking water to Savannah.
"We really don't think it's in the best interest in the safety of Savannah to be digging around there when it's perfectly safe where it is," Mullins said.
The bomb contains uranium and 400 pounds of explosives, but doesn't have a plutonium capsule, Mullins said. With no capsule, the bomb is incapable of creating a nuclear explosion.
Duke and others remain concerned that the plutonium capsule is in the bomb.
"If this is indeed the spot where the bomb is, the Air Force needs to come in and come clean," Duke said.
The crew of a B-47 accidentally dropped the 7,600-pound H-bomb in 1958 after it collided with another jet fighter. The military searched for the bomb for three months.
Duke said he plans to take the results of the search to labs for analysis. He is considering whether to hand over his findings to the Air Force or Georgia environmental officials.
Information from: The Post and Courier, http://www.charleston.net
-------- china
China builds more nuclear power plants to ease power shortage
Xinhua News Agency
July 21, 2004
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NucNews/pending?view=1&msg=12092
BEIJING, Jul 21, 2004 (Xinhua via COMTEX) -- The Chinese State Council on Wednesday approved two nuclear power plant projects in provinces to ease power shortage.
The decision to start construction of the second-phase project of the Ling'ao Nuclear Power Plant in south China's Guangdong Province, and the first-phase project of the Sanmen Nuclear Power Plant in east China's Zhejiang Province, was made at a State Council meeting on acceleration of nuclear power station construction by mainly relying on China itself.
"Nuclear power generating is a kind of clean and safe way of power supply with mature technology and good flexibility," the meeting pointed out.
"The increase of nuclear energy's proportion in total power supply is of great importance to the development of high-tech and manufacturing industries, the economic growth, adjustment of energy supply structure, safeguarding of energy security as well as the sustainable development strategy," the meeting said.
Up to now, China has put into use or is constructing 11 nuclear power generating units, with quite complete managerial and quick- response systems established in this regard, according to the meeting.
"But still only a small portion of the country's total power supply is provided by nuclear plants, which were constructed expensively," sources with the meeting said.
The meeting stressed that the relevant sectors should make great efforts to raise capabilities to build China's own brand nuclear power station with its own design by absorbing advanced technology from foreign countries.
Electricity generated by nuclear power accounts for only about 1.4 percent of China's total electricity supply, compared to 16 percent in developed countries, according to figures from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS).
There were four nuclear power plants in China by May 2004. They are the Qinshan Nuclear Power Plant, located in Haiyan County of Zhejiang Province, Daya Bay Nuclear Power Plant and Ling'ao Nuclear Power Plant in Guangdong Province, and Tianwan Nuclear Power Plant that is being built in Lianyungang City of eastern Jiangsu Province.
"China is expected to obtain 4 percent of its electricity, or 32 million kilowatts, from nuclear plants by 2020," Xu Jianzhong, a researcher with the Institute of Engineering Thermophysics under the CAS said.
Chinese engineers can easily develop the 1-million-kw nuclear generating unit on the basis of the 600,000-kw one, with the introduction of necessary advanced designing software from other countries, Ye Qizhen, chief designer of the second-phase project of the Qinshan Nuclear Power Plant told Xinhua.
All the Chinese nuclear power plants are located in economically developed coastal provinces, where the power shortage problems are particularly serious.
Statistics show that the country's electricity demand has increased about 16 percent in the first six months of this year over the same period last year, with 757,000 power brownouts imposed and some 19.45 billion kwh in electricity lost.
------- depleted uranium
Arafat says bullets raising cancer rate
July 21, 2004
By Paul Martin and Maria Cedrell
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20040720-115823-3692r.htm
RAMALLAH, West Bank - Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat accused Israel of polluting the West Bank and Gaza Strip with depleted-uranium bullets, causing a sharp increase in cancer rates.
"They have caused cancer that is like Hiroshima and Nagasaki," Mr. Arafat said in an interview.
"America could not find uranium in Iraq, but we have found it here in Palestine - and the Israelis are using it to kill our people."
Mr. Arafat, his eyes bulging with anger and his lips trembling, the effect of rumored Parkinson's disease, encouraged reporters to visit Palestinian hospitals and see the cancer patients.
Cancer specialists at two hospitals, one in Ramallah and the other in Bethlehem, said they had seen no increase in cancer rates during the current uprising, which began in September 2000.
The Palestinian leader was referring to dense bullets of depleted uranium that are sometimes used by U.S. forces to pierce tank armor. The Palestinians have no tanks.
Mr. Arafat also accused Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of being linked to the 1995 assassination of then-Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.
Mr. Sharon is "part of that group of fanatics who killed my partner, Yitzhak Rabin, with whom I signed the peace of the brave," said the Palestinian leader, referring to the now-defunct 1993 Oslo peace accords.
Israeli government spokesman Danny Seaman described Mr. Arafat's charges as "the product of a sick mind and a fevered imagination."
Apart from what Mr. Arafat said during the interview at his Ramallah compound, his tone and demeanor raised questions about the degree of control that the Palestinian leader has over national events and over himself.
The visit lasted several hours. Palestinian officials said two previous interviewers were ordered to leave after angering Mr. Arafat with their questions.
A list of questions or topics was demanded before this interview, and many questions were vetoed by Mr. Arafat's top adviser, Nabil Abu Rdeineh.
Mr. Arafat declined to discuss the recent upheavals within the Palestinian Authority.
To back the charges of cancer-causing uranium bullets, Mr. Arafat waved a report that he said he had received from the so-called Quartet behind the latest Middle East peace initiative - the United States, European Union, Russia and the United Nations.
"This report, an American report, proves it," he said, handing a copy to visiting reporters.
The document turned out to have been written by an obscure peace group. It contained no evidence that Israel had used uranium bullets. It did conclude that Israel probably has such weapons in its armory because it has a close military relationship with the United States.
Separately, no analysis of cancer rates was available at the Palestinian Authority's official bureau of statistics or its department of health.
Mr. Arafat's remarks mixed aggression toward his interviewers with anger at his enemies.
He became upset when asked why the Israelis had recently killed the two top leaders of the rival Palestinian group Hamas but had not eliminated him.
"How dare you?" he yelled, his finger pointing menacingly and lips quivering more than usual. "Are you a Mossad agent? Do you work for the killers of Rabin? Of course they want to kill me, too.
"Look at my bedroom that he bombed. Remember, one of [Mr. Sharon's] ministers said a 2-ton bomb would finish me off ... he tried to kill me 13 times in Beirut."
Israeli spokesmen have said that if their army or air force wanted to kill Mr Arafat, they could have easily done so numerous times. For more than two years, he has remained at his compound in Ramallah.
Mr. Arafat insisted on conducting the interview in a small room in front of a photo of the Dome of the Rock, the ubiquitous symbol of Palestinian ambition for sovereignty over the holiest site in Jerusalem.
Mr. Arafat said he was convinced Mr Sharon was not serious about his plan to withdraw from the Gaza Strip.
"If he'd wanted to withdraw, he need not have gone to his own [Likud Party] first - when they voted against," he said.
"He could have gone to the Knesset and got a big majority with [the opposition Labor Party] supporting him. So I think it's just a show, just a theater to fool the world."
----
Ex UK defense head urges payout for ill Gulf war veterans
2004-07-22
(Xinhuanet)
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2004-07/22/content_1625739.htm
LONDON, July 21 -- A former British chief of defense staff on Wednesday urged the British Ministry of Defense (MoD) to compensate ill veterans of the 1991 Gulf War.
"It is time for the MoD to accept that they have not been able to disprove that the individual's illnesses is not Gulf-service related and to compensate and apologize to those that have been kept waiting far too long for satisfaction," Lord Craig of Radley,chief of the defense staff in 1991, told an independent inquiry into the "Gulf war syndrome" in London told the three-week inquiry.
Lord Bramall, chief of the defense staff from 1982 to 1985 andGeneral Sir Peter de la Billiere, who commanded British forces during the Gulf war, also gave evidence to the inquiry that aims to take evidence from 30 ex-servicemen, medical experts and government representatives to establish the facts about Gulf war illnesses and resolve the long-standing dispute over their causes.
Thousands of British veterans say they have suffered from unexplained ailments including kidney pains, memory loss, chronic fatigue and mood swings. They blame the cocktail of tablets and vaccinations they were given to protect them against nerve agents,anthrax and botulism.
Exposure to Depleted Uranium munitions has also been identifiedas a possible cause of the illnesses.
However, it has never been accepted that the illnesses have a common cause arising from the Gulf war, meaning that hundreds of veterans have not been able to claim compensation.
The British government, which funded several studies of Gulf war veterans, has always denied the existence of the so-called Gulf War syndrome and has not agreed to hold an inquiry into the illnesses.
The MoD maintains that the illnesses are so varied that there can be no distinct syndrome or a specific cause.
----
'End Fair Deal Delays for Sick Gulf Veterans' - Ex-Commander
By Jennifer Sym,
PA News, The Scotsman
July 22, 2004
http://news.scotsman.com/latest.cfm?id=3236385
The commander of British forces during the first Gulf war today urged an end to the "nagging issue" of delays in pension payments for sick veterans.
General Sir Peter de la Billiere said he wanted to see a proper and thorough investigation of complaints, for the sake of both past and future personnel. The plea was backed up by other former members of the military command, who appealed for the Ministry of Defence to "apologise and compensate" the sick.
Sir Peter asked: "How long do you wait?
"If you delay it much longer a lot of people are going to be dead who should have benefited but never will and I would have thought that if my family or I had been involved and I had been ill then I would want to settle the matter.
"Otherwise it's going to be a nagging issue at the back of one's mind for the rest of one's days and probably in the minds of one's family."
Personnel in the first Gulf War were inoculated with a cocktail of drugs, including plague and anthrax, and given NAPS (Nerve Agent Pre-treatment) tablets.
Some believe the medication left them with a range of debilitating illnesses, including chronic fatigue, memory loss, depression, mood swings, aching joints and cancerous tumours.
Other factors could be pesticide sprays, or exposure to depleted uranium, the inquiry has heard.
Sir Peter said he himself had taken NAPS and been given around nine injections - and experienced flu-like symptoms for the following 48 hours.
But he said it would be "a very unwise commander" not to have ensured the protection of troops, although jabs were voluntary "as far as I'm aware although I don't think people were encouraged not to accept them".
The hearing was told estimated casualty figures were likely to have increased by around five per cent had Saddam deployed chemical and biological weapons.
Stress and locally-bought fly spray which apparently had the same ingredients as sheep dip could be investigated, he felt.
He questioned whether the NAPS tablets had ever been taken on as wide a scale and for so long as in the conflict.
His appearance before the three-strong inquiry panel was preceded by evidence from Marshal of the Royal Air Force, Lord Craig of Radley, then Chief of Defence Staff who served in the War Cabinet.
Successive governments, he said, had tried to establish a "common causative factor" to account for the variety of illnesses veterans complain of.
He told the inquiry: "This search for some Holy Grail is proving fruitless."
He said he feared a shortage of service doctors and nurses may have had a part to play in the veterans' conditions, but added that the lack of "closure" was indefensible.
"It is time for the MoD to accept that they have not been able to disprove that the individuals' illness is not Gulf service-related and to compensate and apologise to those that have been kept waiting far too long for satisfaction," he added.
Field Marshal Lord Bramall said when there was reasonable doubt, suffering veterans should be given the benefit of it and called for them to get a "fair deal".
The independent inquiry is funded by an anonymous donor and headed by former law lord, Lord Lloyd of Berwick.
Support groups claim about 6,000 veterans have suffered unexplained ill-health since the 1991 conflict and more than 600 are said to have died.
The MoD has always denied the existence of so-called Gulf War Syndrome, insisting there was no single cause of the illnesses suffered.
Following evidence from veterans, the inquiry adjourned this afternoon, and will reconvene early next week.
-------- iran
Israel warns Iran will have nuclear weapons capacity in 2007
Wed Jul 21, 2004
(AFP)
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/afp/20040721/wl_mideast_afp/israel_iran_nuclear_040721123045
JERUSALEM - Israeli intelligence chiefs told Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's security cabinet in a joint assessment that Iran will have a nuclear weapons capacity by 2007.
The warning came in an annual intelligence report delivered by the heads of the Mossad overseas spy agency, domestic Shin Beth intelligegence service and representatives from army intelligence.
Israel's military intelligence chief General Aharon Zeevi Farkash said earlier this month he believed Iran could build a nuclear weapon by 2007 but Wednesday's report comes with the seal of approval from all the main intelligence agencies.
Iran is now regarded as Israel's number one enemy since the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq and intelligence chiefs have increasingly voiced fears about Tehran's nuclear ambitions.
Earlier this week, one military intelligence officer accused Iran of resuming suspect nuclear activities linked to the production of enriched uranium which can be used to build atomic bombs.
The officer said Iran's activities -- which he did not specify -- contravened commitments by Tehran to the UN nuclear watchdog the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Iran has announced it would resume the assembly of centrifuges -- used to enrich uranium in the most sensitive part of the fuel cycle -- but said it was committed to an accord to allow tougher IAEA inspections, make a full declaration of its activities and suspend enrichment itself.
The IAEA is probing allegations that the country is using power generation as a cover for a secret weapons drive but Tehran insists its programme is solely aimed at meeting the future energy needs of a burgeoning population and freeing up its oil and gas resources for export.
Unlike Israel, which is widely thought to possess up to 200 nuclear warheads, Iran has signed up to the IAEA's nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT).
----
Fear of Nuclear Iran Could Influence U.S. Diplomacy
July 21, 2004
REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-iran-usa-strategy.html
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A revived debate in Washington over possible diplomatic engagement with Iran has been fueled by the growing fear that Tehran is determined to become a nuclear power and time is running out to stop it.
A quarter of a century of U.S. hostility and sanctions have not deterred Iran's nuclear ambitions and what Washington calls its support for terrorism.
A growing chorus of American experts says a fresh approach -- sustained dialogue coupled with carrots and sticks -- must be tried. But they acknowledge this is a long shot.
The intense antagonism that has existed since militant students held 52 Americans hostage for 444 days during the 1979 Iranian revolution ``could become a collision course,'' former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski said this week.
``But perhaps there are the makings of somewhat ameliorating the relationship between the two sides,'' he said.
With anti-Western clerics dominant in its roiling politics, Iran has shown little interest in making nice with Washington.
Many experts believe even if Tehran's hard-line leaders are replaced, it may have no impact on the quest for a nuclear bomb because a broad spectrum of Iranians endorse that goal.
Ray Takeyh of the National Defense University said it was apparent only in retrospect that China made the decision to go nuclear in 1955, a decade before testing a bomb.
``I don't know if Iran has crossed the point of no return. I suspect they are awfully close to it and they may have crossed it,'' he told the liberal Center for American Progress think tank. ``Time is not on our side.''
For two years, the Bush administration has accused Iran of developing nuclear weapons and some U.S. experts predict Tehran could have a bomb by the end of 2005.
But Washington was wrong about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and its credibility is now more suspect.
CRITICAL MOMENT
So far, no one has found a ``smoking gun'' that proves Iran is lying when it says its nuclear program is only aimed at peaceful energy needs.
But Tehran concealed many nuclear activities for 18 years and now admits it is developing the capability to enrich uranium, a key method of producing weapons-grade fuel.
``Once enrichment capability exists a major barrier to producing a nuclear weapon virtually vanishes. ... We are at a critical moment,'' former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft wrote recently in the Washington Post.
Scowcroft, who advised President Bush's father, has long advocated dialogue to reach out to the predominantly young population that is the future of Iran, a key oil-producing power in the Middle East. Presumptive Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry is willing to try this.
Bush, whose administration had 18 months of quiet contacts with Tehran before shutting them off in 2003, has shown little interest in new overtures and some predict he will intensify support for Iranian dissidents if re-elected.
This week a task force chaired by Brzezinski and former CIA Director Robert Gates organized by the Council on Foreign Relations added new urgency to the need for dialogue.
They said the lack of sustained contact with Iran is harming U.S. interests in the post-Sept 11, 2001 environment and urged a shift to ``cautious, selected ... national-interest oriented engagement.''
``Right now, we have no influence on the outcome of issues that are of real importance to our security interests in that region,'' including Iran's nuclear ambitions, terrorism policy and involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, which could make or break stability in both those countries, Gates said.
----
Poor Relations With Iran Turning Worse
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
July 21, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-US-Iran-Crisis.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Bush administration is pressing Britain, France and Germany for strong measures against Iran in response to its violation of a nonproliferation agreement reached with the three last fall, a State Department official said Wednesday.
The issue is part of a deepening American concern over recent Iranian activities that range from weapons programs to terrorism. To head off a potential crisis, some analysts believe the administration should work harder to promote a dialogue with Iran.
The United States believes Iran is developing nuclear weapons, a view reinforced by Iran's recent decision to resume construction of centrifuges. This is a key step in the development of a uranium-based bomb, one that Iran promised the Europeans last fall that it would not take.
It is not clear what the United States expects the three European Union members to do in response. The administration believes it is imperative that the three demonstrate to Iran that it must suffer consequences for not fulfilling the agreement.
Iran has said it feels no obligation to honor the agreement, alleging that the Europeans had violated a promise to ensure that the U.N. nuclear watchdog group would give Iran a clean bill of health.
Iran insists its nuclear program has nothing to do with weaponry and is meant to meet domestic electricity needs.
There are additional American concerns, including word that the bipartisan commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks has concluded that Iran gave al-Qaida hijackers safe passage through the country after their training in Afghanistan.
A White House spokesman said Monday there was no evidence that Iran had prior knowledge of the Sept. 11 plot. The commission report is due Thursday.
Amid the stepped-up accusations about its behavior, Iran has been projecting a benign image to the world. Rend al-Rahim Francke, Iraq's chief representative in Washington, told The Associated Press in an interview Monday that Iran has played a positive role in the post-Saddam Hussein Iraq. She said Iranian authorities recently captured 200 Afghan fighters who were en route to Iraq.
The Bush administration, in addition to lobbying the Europeans, has been attempting to persuade all members of the U.N.'s nuclear nonproliferation agency that it is time to refer Iran's nuclear activities to the U.N. Security Council.
John Bolton, undersecretary of state for arms control, told Congress last month that the Iranian program was a ``threat to international peace and security.'' He said Iran's hard-line Islamic regime, now 25 years old, clearly has a covert program to develop and stockpile chemical weapons and probably has an offensive biological weapons program.
Until about a year ago, the United States maintained a low-key dialogue with Iran, then decided it was a waste of time.
State Department spokesman Richard Boucher says a renewed engagement is possible only under certain conditions.
``We're willing to sit down, if the president determines it's in our interest to do so, and if we think there's the opportunity for progress,'' Boucher said Monday.
A Council on Foreign Relations task force issued a report contending the administration must do more to avert another crisis in the Persian Gulf region.
``The urgency of the concerns surrounding (Iran's) policies mandates the United States to deal with the current regime rather than wait for it to fall,'' said the report from the panel co-chaired by former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski and former CIA director Robert Gates.
Brzezinski told reporters Monday that engagement with Iran would be a useful step even if it produced no results because it would mold greater international solidarity in opposition to Iran.
Gates said the U.S. military option against Iran must never be ruled out. Still, he acknowledged, the costs of any such step would be exorbitant because key nuclear weapons sites are located in or near large civilian populations.
He added that a U.S. military attack would galvanize support for the Tehran government across the country. Iranian authorities, he said, could retaliate by destabilizing neighboring Iraq and Afghanistan, countries in which, he noted, the United States has an undeniable strategic stake.
----
Israel Sees 'Nuclear Capable' Iran by 2007
By REUTERS
July 21, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-israel-iran-nuclear.html
JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israeli estimates of when Iran will be able to build a nuclear bomb have been shifted two more years to 2007, an intelligence report said Wednesday and analysts credited the delay to international scrutiny of Tehran.
Security sources quoted the report -- delivered to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in private and leaked in part to the media -- as saying that within three years Iran would have the means to produce an atomic bomb by itself.
Iran vehemently denies pursuing nuclear weapons, arguing its atomic ambitions are limited to generating electricity.
Tehran officials have also accused Israel of trying to distract the international community from its own assumed nuclear arsenal and stoking world opinion against the last Middle East foe which could challenge it militarily.
In 2000, Israeli security sources told Reuters that Iran would be nuclear-capable within five years and was developing long-range missiles with which to lob warheads at Tel Aviv.
The regional picture has since changed, with a U.S.-led invasion of Iraq bringing neighboring Iran under closer watch by the West -- especially after Tehran admitted in November to buying centrifuges used to enrich uranium from a black market set up by Pakistani nuclear weapons expert Abdul Qadeer Khan.
For over a year, the United States has tried to pressure the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency to report Iran to the Security Council for hiding its uranium enrichment program.
``The sense in Israel is that the international pressure and threat of sanctions against Iran have held up its nuclear ambitions, if only by hindering the supply of equipment and know-how,'' said Alon Ben-David, an analyst with Jane's, which publishes Jane's Defense Weekly.
``But no one believes the Iranian program has come to a halt. This is seen as a hold-up only,'' Ben-David said.
Experts say that once a country has enough fissile uranium, it is only months away from a nuclear weapon.
As well as acquiring technology from Khan, Iran has experimented with various avenues of enriching uranium, Western diplomats say. Also, traces of bomb-grade uranium found inside the country last year have never been adequately explained.
But the Iraq upheaval, and the West's more stand-off approach to North Korea amid widespread beliefs that Pyongyang already has nuclear arms, may have accelerated Iran's ambitions, they say.
``Iranian leaders got together after the Iraq war and decided that the reason North Korea was not attacked was because it has the bomb. Iraq was attacked because it did not,'' a Western diplomat told Reuters this week, citing intelligence reports.
-------- iraq / inspections
Official denies nuclear arms found in Iraq
July 21, 2004
(UPI)
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20040721-081009-2541r.htm
Baghdad, Iraq, Jul. 21 -- A U.S. military official Wednesday denied a report of Iraqi missiles carrying nuclear warheads being found in a concrete trench northwest of Baghdad.
The daily al-Sabah newspaper Wednesday had quoted sources as saying three missiles armed with nuclear warheads were discovered in a trench near the city of Tikrit, the hometown of ousted Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.
A U.S. military spokesman in Tikrit told United Press International that the report was untrue.
"Nothing's been found. The report is not factual," said Master Sgt. Robert Cowens, a spokesman for the 1st Infantry Division, based in Tikrit.
The newspaper reported the three missiles were discovered by chance when Iraqi security forces captured former Baath party official Khoder al-Douri who revealed during interrogation the location of the missiles saying they carried nuclear warheads.
Al-Sabah said that the missiles were discovered in a trench under six meters of concrete, designed to evade sophisticated sensors.
A spokesman with Prime Minister Iyad Allawi's office told UPI that the report concerning the alleged missiles and warheads emerged "while gathering information for Saddam Hussein's tribunal" during the interrogation of a captured former official of Saddam's regime.
-------- korea
N. Korea makes nukes offer
From combined dispatches,
July 21, 2004
Reuters
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20040720-115817-5692r.htm
A senior North Korean representative said yesterday his government was ready to end its nuclear-weapons program if the United States changes its "hostile policy" toward Pyongyang.
Reflecting recent progress in talks with the reclusive Stalinist state, North Korea's representative to the United Nations, making his first visit to Capitol Hill, said Pyongyang would not only freeze its nuclear-weapons program but also refrain from transferring or testing nuclear devices.
"The Democratic People's Republic of Korea will give up its nuclear-weapons program if conditions are met to end the U.S. hostile policy," Pak Gil-yon said at a forum sponsored by the Korea Society and other groups in a U.S. Senate office building.
At a news conference afterward, the ambassador said Pyongyang has "very powerful nuclear deterrence" but has no plans to test atomic weapons, regardless of the outcome of the six-party talks on the North Korean nuclear standoff.
"The fact that the DPRK has their very powerful nuclear deterrence at the moment does not mean that it intends to test such nuclear weapons," Mr. Pak said.
Donald Gregg, chairman of the Korea Society and a former U.S. ambassador to South Korea, called the meeting a "historic session."
Mr. Gregg said it was the first time that a North Korean had appeared on Capitol Hill and this would not have happened without the progress made at the recent round of six-party talks in Beijing.
After three years of stalemate on the North Korean nuclear problem, "the process of dialogue has begun," said Mr. Gregg.
During the talks in Beijing last month, the United States and North Korea put forward proposals. Mr. Pak said the atmosphere in Beijing was different from previous rounds but his government still had difficulties with the U.S. position.
Mr. Pak, who became the first North Korean ambassador to the United Nations to visit Washington under the administration of President Bush, said whether North Korea conducts nuclear arms tests "does not depend on the outcome of six-nation talks."
Mr. Pak disputed U.S. reports that North Korea has a secret program to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons.
"We believe that that kind of allegations was to make a provocation," he said.
Mr. Pak also disputed that North Korea had acknowledged at the third round of six-party talks that most of its nuclear programs are weapons-related, as claimed by James Kelly, U.S. assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, during a recent congressional hearing.
"We have such a program for peaceful purposes, such as electricity generation as well as other peaceful use of nuclear energy. ... I don't believe that such remarks are true," Mr. Pak said.
----
Roh, Koizumi pledge cooperation on North Korea nuclear standoff
JEJU, South Korea (AFP)
Jul 21, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040721121027.wkv0ey6n.html
South Korean President Roh Moo-Hyun and Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi pledged Wednesday to push for an early end to the North Korean nuclear standoff as the Stalinist state topped the agenda of their summit talks here.
Efforts to resolve the 21-month-old impasse are at a delicate stage where real negotiations were beginning, Roh told a press conference after the 90-minute summit with the Japanese leader at this holiday resort island off South Korea's southern coast.
Roh remained upbeat, citing concrete proposals which were exchanged at the third round of six-way talks held in Beijing in June that brought together China, both Koreas, Japan, Russia and the United States. Though no breakthrough was achieved, new talks are set for September.
"I hopefully expect rapid progress to be made at the next round of six-way talks in September," he said.
"We two leaders appreciate that the negotiations aimed at resolving the nuclear issue enter a stage for substantial negotiations with concrete proposals put forward at the third round of six-way talks."
Both leaders said North Korea would stand to benefit significantly from scrapping its nuclear weapons drive, with Roh holding out the prospect of rapid economic cooperation to rescue the Stalinist state's moribund economy and Koizumi offering the possibility of normalized diplomatic relations within two years.
"I want to achieve (normalization) within two years if possible and maybe one year if that can be done," said Koizumi.
"We are in a position to normalize relations anytime after North Korea faithfully implements the Pyongyang declaration."
He was referring to a joint statement issued in September 2002 on improving bilateral ties when he visited North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il in Pyongyang.
However, issues including North Korea's admitted kidnapping of Japanese citizens in the 1970s and 1980s to train spies and Pyongyang's missile threat directed at Japan must be cleared up before diplomatic relations could be established, Koizumi added.
He said Japan would also work with South Korea and the United States to press North Korea to "completely dismantle its nuclear programmes".
The stand-off erupted in October 2002 when the United States accused Pyongyang of operating a nuclear weapons programme based on enriched uranium, violating the 1994 nuclear freeze of its separate plutonium-producing programme.
Roh and Koizumi also pledged to boost bilateral ties ahead of next year's 40th anniversary of the establishment of relations between the two nations with a history of tension and mutual suspicion.
They said they would work towards establishing a free-trade agreement and work to draft an extradition treaty.
Japan occupied Korea from 1910-45 and Koreans still harbour resentment about Tokyo's harsh colonial rule.
Fricton has also surfaced about Koizumi's visits to a shrine honouring Japan's war dead, including convicted war criminals and Japanese claims to an island in the sea between the two nations that Koreans say is their territory.
----
North Korean U.N. Envoy Visits Capitol Hill
Visit, Which Bush Administration Approved, May Be First by One of Nation's Top Officials
By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, July 21, 2004; Page A15
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A64943-2004Jul20.html
A senior North Korean official, in an unusual visit to Capitol Hill sanctioned by the Bush administration, said "big differences" remain between North Korea and the United States over Pyongyang's nuclear ambitions, but he asserted that the reclusive nation will pledge not to test or transfer nuclear weapons and would ultimately dismantle its nuclear programs if the United States dropped its "hostile policy."
Participants in the event said they could not recall any previous visit by a North Korean official to Capitol Hill. In fact, the Bush administration had previously refused at least twice to permit the official -- Pak Gil Yon, North Korea's ambassador to the United Nations -- to travel to Washington, said Rep. Curt Weldon (R-Pa.). Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kerry has criticized the administration for declining to meet directly with North Korean officials to resolve the impasse.
The State Department must approve any travel by Pak or his deputy, Han Song Ryol, outside a 25-mile radius of new York City. Han made an undislosed visit to Washington in September 2002.
Yesterday, however, Pak and Han spent hours on Capitol Hill, attending an all-day seminar in the Dirksen Senate Office Building with congressional officials, South Korean parliamentarians and Korean experts and holding a news conference. He said he would not speculate on why the administration finally permitted him to visit Washington and said Pyongyang -- which has broadcast pro-Kerry statements -- has no favorite in the presidential race. "It's entirely a U.S. internal affair," he told reporters.
Donald P. Gregg, chairman of the Korea Society, which helped organize the seminar, called the meeting a "historic session" and said it indicated that progress on restarting a dialogue was being made after three years of stalemate.
Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (Del.), senior Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said the administration's decision to permit Pak's travel was "some small measure of the realization on their part that there needs to be this direct contact between us." Earlier this month, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell met with his North Korean counterpart in Jakarta, Indonesia -- the highest-level meeting since North Korea abandoned an agreement to freeze its nuclear programs and began producing weapons-grade plutonium nearly two years ago.
Pak, in remarks to the seminar, reiterated that North Korea believes that the root cause of the standoff is the administration's "hostile policy" toward North Korea. He said Pyongyang "will give up its nuclear program if conditions are met through ending the USA's hostile policy against it." He added that "mistrust and misunderstandings are the biggest obstacles" between the two countries.
Pak said the more detailed proposal advanced by the administration during the round of six-nation talks last month in Beijing had positive aspects, including the administration's willingness to soften the diplomatic language outlining its demands. "However, we also found a lot of regrettable elements in it," he said. "We concluded it was a roadmap to disarm [North Korea] step by step."
Under the U.S. proposal, once North Korea declares it would end its programs, U.S. allies such as South Korea could provide immediate energy assistance. North Korea then would have three months to disclose its programs and have its claims verified by U.S. intelligence. After that, the United States would join in providing Pyongyang with written security assurances and participate in a process that could ultimately result in the normalization of relations.
Pak noted that a state of war still exists between the United States and North Korea and thus the administration's demand that North Korea give up its weapons first before discussions can proceed on other aspects of the relationship "has no credibility in terms of laws or lawyers."
Pak also asserted that the three-month time frame for verifying North Korean claims did not meet favor with other participants at the talks. "The three months of preparation for dismantling the nuclear program has little scientific and realistic nature with no parties' support," he said.
Last week, Chinese Embassy spokesman Sun Weide said at a news conference that China, along with other participants in the North Korean talks, believes the United States must reward North Korea with "corresponding measures" at the moment Pyongyang declares it has frozen its nuclear activities.
Speaking with reporters, Pak again denied U.S. allegations that North Korea has a program to produce highly enriched uranium. He called the charge "totally fabricated." U.S. officials have said that disclosure of the uranium program is essential to ending the impasse.
South Korean officials attending the seminar told Pak that the nuclear issue was an impediment to a better relationship between the two countries. But Pak responded that the nuclear issue was between the United States and North Korea, and should have little bearing on North-South relations.
--------
U.S. Envoy Urges Libya - Style WMD Solution for N.Korea
July 21, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-korea-north.html
SEOUL (Reuters) - North Korean leader Kim Jong-il can change his country's fortunes almost overnight by emulating Libya's strategic choice to abandon its illicit arms programs, the top U.S. disarmament diplomat said on Wednesday.
Undersecretary of State John Bolton -- who is usually identified with the sticks, not the carrots, in U.S. efforts to resolve a long-running nuclear crisis with Pyongyang -- highlighted the benefits Kim could reap if he followed the Libyan example.
``The case of Libya has shown concretely the benefits that can flow when leaders of isolated regimes make the strategic choice to invest in their country's future, and not in weapons of mass destruction,'' he said in a speech at Seoul's Yonsei University.
Bolton met senior South Korean officials and is to visit Japan Thursday in part of a drive by the administration of President Bush to breathe life into six-party talks aimed at ending the 20-month-old standoff.
Three rounds of talks involving the two Koreas, the United States, Russia, Japan and China have taken place since August last year. Little progress has been made.
If the North Koreans ``think that depending on the outcome of our November election they might get a better deal, I want to disabuse them of that thought,'' he told reporters.
Bolton said the United States had underlined its seriousness about the six-way talks with a proposal last month that would extend energy aid to North Korea as part of a crisis solution.
``But it's not the talks alone that are going to make progress, it's the decision North Korea needs to make to give up the pursuit of weapons of mass destruction,'' he said.
Kim should consult Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, who consummated years of efforts to repair ties with the West with an announcement in December that Tripoli was scrapping its nuclear and other unconventional arms programs, Bolton said.
``The difference between this year and last stems from the simple, yet profound, strategic choice by Colonel Gaddafi, who came to the realization that his pursuit of weapons of mass destruction made him less, not more secure,'' Bolton said.
``With Kim Jong-il, we are sadly still at that crossroads.''
FREEZE NOT ENOUGH
North Korea has been dismissive of the Libyan example, with its deputy representative at the United Nations recently saying Pyongyang was not interested and did not trust Washington.
Bolton addressed those concerns. ``Why should North Korea believe us?'' he said. ``First, because the United States has kept its word to Libya -- and the evidence of that is clear for all, even Pyongyang, to see.''
Libya had moved quickly from declaring its intent to scrap banned weapons to inspections by experts to the physical removal or dismantling of the arms, he said. In response, U.S. trade and travel sanctions were lifted and full diplomatic ties restored -- many of the steps Pyongyang demands.
``By ending its pariah status, Libya is no longer shunned by the outside world. Economic and security benefits have been the natural and inevitable result,'' he said.
The nuclear crisis erupted in October 2002 when U.S. officials said North Korea had admitted it was working on a secret program to enrich uranium for weapons. North Korea now denies having such a program.
That denial, and the North's insistence on retaining a peaceful nuclear program, are the two main barriers to progress, said Bolton.
The next round of talks is due by the end of September.
``North Korea's continued denial of its uranium enrichment program precludes a solution to this problem,'' he said. ``The United States knows that North Korea's nuclear programs are primarily intended to support its nuclear arms efforts.''
Pyongyang may have produced at least one and perhaps as many as eight nuclear weapons, U.S. officials say.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
New York City and 8 States Plan to Sue Power Plants
July 21, 2004
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/21/national/21pollute.html
Eight states and New York City plan to sue utilities today that they say are the country's biggest emitters of carbon dioxide, the heat-trapping gas that scientists have linked to global warming.
The states and the city will not seek financial penalties but, according to a draft news release, will demand "substantial cuts" in the emissions, which they say "pose serious threats to our health, our economy and our environment.''
State and city officials familiar with the effort said yesterday that they would not discuss details of the suit until today. The planned statements and other details had changed since the draft, dated July 16, the officials said, but they did not disavow the basic thrust of the release.
The states are California, Connecticut, Iowa, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont and Wisconsin. The suit will be filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan, according to the release.
The document was provided to The New York Times and other news outlets by a person at an industry-financed advocacy group in Washington opposed to restrictions on carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases.
The companies named as defendants in the draft were American Electric Power, Cinergy, the Southern Company, the Tennessee Valley Authority and Xcel Energy. They operate a total of 174 power plants that burn fossil fuels and that the states and city say emit 646 million tons of carbon dioxide a year, or 10 percent of the national total.
"The states are collectively deciding that our economy, our public health, our environment is being damaged,'' Marc Violette, a spokesman for Attorney General Eliot Spitzer of New York, said.
Many of the states in this suit as well as others have used suits to pressure out-of-state utilities to curtail nitrogen and sulfur emissions that travel long distances. Other suits have been filed by states and private organizations against the Environmental Protection Agency over carbon dioxide, saying the agency had failed to restrict the gas as a pollutant under the Clean Air Act despite growing evidence that it posed risks.
But the new suit is the first state legal action taken directly against companies that discharge carbon dioxide, an unavoidable byproduct of burning coal, oil and other fossil fuels.
New York City is joining the action, according to a statement in the draft from Michael A. Cardozo, the corporation counsel, "out of concern for the impacts that global warming will have on the city and its residents and as part of the Bloomberg administration's commitment to maintaining a clean and sustainable Big Apple."
The plaintiffs plan to base the suit on federal common law of public nuisance. The common law, the news release said, "provides a right of action to curb air and water pollution emanating from sources in other states."
Industry lawyers said yesterday that the plaintiffs would have a hard time making a case that carbon dioxide was a pollutant, and they noted that it flowed not only from power plants, but was also in exhaled breaths and the bubbles rising from open beer containers.
"Filing lawsuits is not a constructive way to deal with this issue," Melissa A. McHenry, a spokeswoman for American Electric Power, said.
Her company, Ms. McHenry said, has committed to reducing its carbon dioxide emissions 10 percent by 2006 below the average yearly discharge from 1998 to 2000, through changes at its power plants and by investing in tree plantings and other projects overseas that sop up the gas.
-------- california
Interest Groups Plan Suit Over Simi Valley Nuclear Site
July 21, 2004
WASHINGTON, DC, (ENS)
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/jul2004/2004-07-21-09.asp#anchor4
Two public health groups intend to sue the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) for alleged violations of federal environmental laws in the agency's ongoing effort to clean up Rocketdyne's Santa Susana Field Laboratory in Simi Valley, California.
They charge that the DOE's cleanup plan for the site, where various U.S. agencies conducted nuclear research over four decades, would leave dangerous levels of radioactive tritium, the solvent trichloroethylene, perchlorate, and other toxic chemicals and radioactive materials that pose a threat to public health.
The Energy Department says it intends that the land will eventually be used for housing, but has embraced a plan that would leave 99 percent of the contaminated soil in place.
The two organizations - the Natural Resources Defense Council and Committee to Bridge the Gap (CBG) - informed the agency on Monday of their intent to file the lawsuit.
The Energy Department now has 60 days to comply with the law in its cleanup effort to avert the legal action.
The groups charge that the agency is in violation of the National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA), the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA), and the Endangered Species Act.
The Energy Department, along with the Defense Department and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, have performed nuclear experiments at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory since the 1950s.
These projects included a plutonium fuel fabrication facility, a facility for cutting up irradiated nuclear fuel, and approximately 10 nuclear reactors, one of which experienced a partial meltdown.
Operators of the site also routinely burned contaminated reactor components in an open pit overlooking Simi Valley.
In late 2003, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency determined that DOE's cleanup efforts at the site will leave too much radioactivity in place to meet federal standards for unrestricted land use.
-------- new mexico
Lawmaker Doubts Los Alamos Data Was Stolen
July 21, 2004
By RALPH BLUMENTHAL and KENNETH CHANG
By The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/21/national/21lab.html
LOS ALAMOS, N.M., July 20 - A congressman who visited Los Alamos National Laboratory this week to examine security lapses said Tuesday that two missing computer disks containing classified information had probably been lost or misplaced but not stolen.
"The prevailing theory at Los Alamos is that it is not an espionage incident," said the congressman, Representative Joe L. Barton, Republican of Texas and chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. But Mr. Barton added that espionage had not been ruled out and that officials would be worried if the information on the disks, related to experiments in the laboratory's weapons physics division, got out to the wider world.
"If they were to fall into the wrong hands, it would not be a positive thing for the national security of the United States," Mr. Barton said.
He said the disks' disappearance, discovered July 7, indicated that serious security flaws continue at Los Alamos, one of the nation's two main nuclear weapons laboratories.
"Congress is fed up with these security lapses,'' he said.
Mr. Barton said that while the missing Zip disks had been in a building in a secure area, the safe that held them was at the end of a hallway, in the open.
--------
Lab Security Breaches Criticized
Los Alamos Could Face Firings and Criminal Investigation
By Dafna Linzer
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, July 21, 2004; Page A11
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A20-2004Jul20.html
Failure at the Los Alamos National Laboratory to follow security procedures is widespread and the highly secretive nuclear facility lacks an effective system to prevent employees from removing classified material, Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham said in a toughly worded statement yesterday that threatened firings and left open the possibility of a criminal investigation.
Missing computer disks, classified information sent out via e-mail and an accident involving a summer intern injured in the eye by a laser forced Los Alamos to stop nearly all of its operations over the weekend, including weapons research and field testing, as a major investigation into serious security breaches and accidents got underway.
The latest incidents at the New Mexico lab, which has been plagued by security problems for a decade, are being treated as accidental but that could change, said Rep. Joe Barton (R-Tex.), chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
"This may turn into intentional disregard for the rules or an espionage investigation led by the FBI," Barton said after returning from a tour of the laboratory Monday with Deputy Energy Secretary Kyle McSlarrow and Rep. Diana DeGette (D-Colo.), who serves on Barton's committee.
Los Alamos, established in 1943 to build the atomic bomb, conducts some of the nation's most sensitive scientific research and plays a key role in maintaining the country's nuclear stockpile. Scientists at Los Alamos work in a wide variety of disciplines, including nuclear weapons development, advanced military systems and new technologies used in homeland security.
Abraham ordered additional security personnel to Los Alamos and said McSlarrow and Linton F. Brooks, director of the National Nuclear Security Administration, would "coordinate with other federal agencies associated with the work of Los Alamos, as well as with the FBI, to keep them fully informed of this investigation."
In his statement, Abraham said his deputy and Brooks, who are overseeing the nascent investigation, were already "concerned that some within the laboratory work force fail to understand the seriousness of the situation."
"This clearly illustrates the need both for immediate, effective and permanent corrective action and for meaningful administrative and disciplinary action at an appropriate time," the statement continued.
DeGette said laboratory director George "Pete" Nanos "intends to fire some people and to change the culture there."
A senior official in the Energy Department, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, confirmed that firings were being considered along with revoking security clearances held by some scientists.
The laboratory reported two weeks ago that two computer disks containing secret documents were missing. This week, it acknowledged that classified information was sent out over insecure e-mail more than a dozen times and that a 20-year-old woman interning over the summer was seriously injured during a laser experiment.
In response, Nanos suspended much of the work done by about 12,000 employees last Friday, and on Monday the shutdown was extended to include work on plutonium research at the lab's field-test site in Nevada. Several classified projects deemed essential for national security will continue to operate.
Those involved in the investigation have said attention is focusing on a small group of Los Alamos veterans who are not abiding by laboratory rules. Nanos referred last week to "cowboys" who do not properly handle classified material. "I don't care how many people I have to fire to make it stop," he said. "If you think the rules are silly, if you think compliance is a joke, please resign now and save me the trouble."
Kevin Roark, spokesman for Los Alamos, said that during the shutdown, "supervisors are going to have one-on-one meetings with every single employee to explain the rules and expectations at Los Alamos.
"If we get the sense that someone here isn't willing to buy into that, then they should consider other places of work."
Abraham said all classified operations dealing with removable material will be stopped until new security arrangements are in place. Other areas may resume operations sooner.
"Given the very broad nature of the classified activities underway at the lab and likely differences in the ability of some divisions to implement security modifications more quickly than others," he said, "I expect the restart of the various operations to take place in stages rather than all at once."
Los Alamos has faced a growing list of security lapses, espionage charges and fraud allegations in the past decade.
In 2000, two disk drives were lost and then turned up behind a copy machine. In November 2002, the laboratory faced charges of equipment theft and purchasing fraud and last December, an inventory could not account for 10 computer disks containing information about the nuclear weapons program. Four Los Alamos workers also were contaminated from exposure to plutonium last year.
The University of California, which has been the sole manager of Los Alamos for six decades, has said it may not bid for the management contract next year.
-------- MILITARY
-------- africa
U.S. Tells Sudan to Restrain Militias Violence Continues In Darfur Region
By Colum Lynch
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, July 21, 2004; Page A15
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A438-2004Jul20.html
U.S. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said yesterday that he warned senior Sudanese officials on Sunday that President Bush and other foreign leaders "remain completely dissatisfied" with Khartoum's efforts to end the violent campaign by Arab militias in the Darfur region of Sudan.
Powell said he told First Vice President Ali Uthman Muhammad Taha and Foreign Minister Mustafa Osman Ismail that the government has not done enough to control the Arab militias, known as the Janjaweed, believed responsible for killing tens of thousands of black Africans in Darfur and driving more than 1 million from their homes.
The Sudanese government has responded to some extent to pressure in recent weeks from the United States, other countries and the United Nations, which are demanding a halt to the violence and better access for relief workers trying to feed and care for homeless civilians. But Powell and U.N. relief agencies say the violence against civilians continues.
"While I took note of some marginal improvement in the humanitarian side," Powell said, "I also pointed out to them as clearly as I could that I, the president and the international community remain completely dissatisfied with the security situation. Not enough is being done to break the hold of the Janjaweed."
"Rapes are still occurring," Powell added. "People do not feel safe leaving the camps to go out and forage for food. The situation remains very, very serious, and first and foremost the security has to be dealt with."
The crisis in Sudan began in February, when two rebel groups in Darfur took up arms against the Khartoum government, citing mistreatment of the region's main black African tribes. Human rights groups charge that Sudanese officials have organized the region's Arab tribes into an armed militia and provided them with military and political support as they carried out an ethnic cleansing campaign against the rebels' followers.
U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John C. Danforth met with senior U.N. officials in New York, including U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan's personal envoy, Jan Pronk, to keep the pressure on Sudan. Pronk, who returned this week from a visit to Khartoum, is to brief the 15-nation Security Council tomorrow.
U.S. officials hope that a stern message from Pronk could help them persuade the council to adopt a tough resolution criticizing Sudan's government and raising the prospects of sanctions against it.
But several key Security Council members, including Pakistan and China, along with the African Union, the Arab League and the Organization of the Islamic Conference have urged the council to show restraint. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said U.S. officials were conducting interviews near the Sudanese border in Chad, where more than 100,000 refugees fled the violence, to determine whether the killings in Darfur meet the legal definition of genocide.
-------- arms
Raytheon Developing New Variant of Joint Standoff Weapon
"We've received fantastic feedback on the combat capability of JSOW," said Ron Shields, Raytheon's JSOW program director. "We are working with the Navy to make JSOW an even more cost effective weapon with increased capability."
Farnborough (SPX)
Jul 21, 2004
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/gps-04zzg.html
Raytheon is developing a new variant of the Joint Standoff Weapon (JSOW) that will significantly lower unit cost and offer an additional payload option.
Raytheon, under contract with U.S. Naval Air Systems Command, expects to complete development of the JSOW Block II in early 2006. Block II is planned to reduce JSOW unit cost by reducing the parts count and improving the manufacturing process.
All variants of future JSOW will be manufactured in the Block II configuration. Block II will maintain all of the standoff and survivability of the current JSOW and include an improved anti-jam Global Positioning System receiver.
Development of a new payload option for the JSOW A is underway which should also be complete in early 2006. The new version will use a unitary 500 pound BLU 111 warhead.
This unitary variant will eliminate the unexploded ordnance concerns of cluster munitions while maintaining or increasing effectiveness against a broad target set. It is primarily intended for the international market. Work will be performed at Raytheon's Missile Systems business in Tucson.
"We've received fantastic feedback on the combat capability of JSOW," said Ron Shields, Raytheon's JSOW program director. "We are working with the Navy to make JSOW an even more cost effective weapon with increased capability." More than 400 JSOW-A weapons have been used in combat operations to date.
JSOW is a joint Navy and Air Force program. It is a family of low-cost, air-to-ground weapons that employ an integrated Global Positioning System/Inertial Navigation system to guide the weapon to the target. The JSOW uses a common and modular weapon body capable of carrying various payloads.
Its long standoff range of 70 nautical miles (maximum kinematic performance) allows delivery from well outside the lethal range of most enemy air defenses. The AGM-154A (also called JSOW-A) variant dispenses BLU-97 combined-effect bomblets for use against soft and area targets. It is produced for use on the F/A-18, F-16, F-15E, B-1, B-2 and B-52 aircraft.
The AGM-154C, or JSOW-C, variant incorporates an imaging infrared seeker for high precision and a BAE Systems' Broach multi-stage warhead that has both a blast-fragmentation and hard target penetration capability for use against point targets. JSOW-C entered low-rate initial production in June 2003. It is currently being produced for Navy F/A-18s and has been selected by Poland for use on its F-16s.
The new JSOW variant builds on a legacy of 13 years of development and production experience providing the weapons to Navy and Air Force for use on six different aircraft. Raytheon continues to add new capabilities to meet our customers' needs.
----
Memorandum for the Secretary of State
Presidential Determination No. 2004-40
July 21, 2004
White House Press Office
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/07/20040721-7.html
SUBJECT: Eligibility of Iraq to Receive Defense Articles and Services Under the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, as Amended, and the Arms Export Control Act, as Amended
Pursuant to the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, including section 503(a) of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, as amended, and section 3(a)(1) of the Arms Export Control Act, as amended, I hereby find that the furnishing of defense articles and services to Iraq will strengthen the security of the United States and promote world peace.
You are authorized and directed to report this finding to the Congress and to publish it in the Federal Register.
GEORGE W. BUSH
-------- biological weapons
Fort Detrick labs searched again for anthrax clues
July 21, 2004
By David Dishneau
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.washtimes.com/metro/20040720-110106-2901r.htm
FREDERICK, Md. - FBI agents yesterday combed laboratory suites at Fort Detrick - home to the Army's biological warfare defense program - and a source said they again were 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 persons and sickened 17 in autumn 2001.
FBI agents have visited Fort Detrick frequently since the unsolved attacks, amid speculation that the deadly spores or the person who sent them may be connected to the fort.
Mr. 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 she could not discuss details of the activity.
Much of the speculation about a Fort Detrick connection has centered on Stephen J. Hatfill, a former government scientist and bioweapons specialist who once worked at the infectious disease institute at Fort Detrick. The FBI had labeled Mr. Hatfill a "person of interest" in the case.
Mr. Hatfill has denied any role in the attacks. He 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 press implicating him in the attacks. His lawsuit seeks to clear his name and recover unspecified monetary damages.
His attorney, Victor M. Glasberg, had no comment yesterday.
Agents have been revisiting sites and leads in the investigation, code-named "Amerithrax."
In May, agents interviewed another former Fort Detrick researcher and his co-workers about his whereabouts when the letters were mailed, he and his attorney said. The researcher, Ayaad Assaad, who now works for the federal Environmental Protection Agency, said the FBI assured him he is not a suspect in the attacks.
-------- britain
Blair Defends War in Iraq in Debate in Parliament
July 21, 2004
By LIZETTE ALVAREZ
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/21/international/europe/21brit.html?pagewanted=all
LONDON, July 20 - Prime Minister Tony Blair on Tuesday forcefully defended his decision to join America in waging war against Iraq and told Parliament that intelligence assessments left "little doubt" that Saddam Hussein was trying to develop prohibited weapons.
Opening a debate in the House of Commons, which was by turns spirited and combative, Mr. Blair faced a volley of barbed questions from politicians about a report released last week. The report, compiled by Lord Butler, was highly critical of British intelligence on Iraq and the government's handling of the information, but it cleared Mr. Blair of intentionally deceiving the public.
Despite the criticism in the report, Mr. Blair said it was "absolutely clear" that Mr. Hussein was trying to build weapons of mass destruction, a conviction he said was shared by the international community. British intelligence assessments were unequivocal about the Iraqi leader's appetite for developing weapons, he added.
"It was absolutely clear that he had every intention to carry on developing these weapons, that he was procuring materials to do so and that, for example, in respect of ballistic missiles, he was going way beyond what was permitted by the United Nations," Mr. Blair said.
Asked why United Nations weapons inspectors had not been given more time to assess fully Iraq's arsenals, he said that without a United Nations resolution containing an ultimatum, which France opposed, Mr. Hussein would never have fully cooperated with arms inspectors.
"So what do we do?" he asked, heatedly. "We either back away, or we decide that we are going, this time, to make sure that he is incapable in the future of developing W.M.D."
"Removing Saddam Hussein was not a war crime,'' he said. "It was an act of liberation for the Iraqi people."
But Michael Howard, leader of the Conservative opposition, said Mr. Blair had irrevocably damaged his credibility by presenting the intelligence on Iraq as "extensive, detailed and authoritative," when in fact it was "sporadic, patchy, little and limited," according to the Butler report.
Mr. Blair "hasn't been straight with the British people today," Mr. Howard said, accusing the prime minister of "serial ignorance" on vital intelligence questions.
Parliament voted to send Britain to war in March of last year on the importance of disarming Iraq. Now, Mr. Howard added, it is clear that there were no weapons to disarm. "Had I known then what I know now, I would not have been able to vote for that motion," he said, adding, nevertheless, that he believes that the war was justified.
Mr. Blair announced several measures intended to rectify mistakes made during the approach to the war.
In the future, he said, all published intelligence reports will include "caveats" on the limits of the data on which they are based, and the Joint Intelligence Committee, which drafted a dossier that Mr. Blair relied on to argue for war, will not be used to publish documents to bolster the government's positions.
--------
Britain Says It Will Cut Armed Forces, but Modernize Them
July 21, 2004
By ALAN COWELL
The New York Times
LONDON, July 21 - Britain announced major changes in its armed forces today, saying it would cut personnel in the navy, army and air force but introduce more advanced technology to fight modern wars against terrorism and in fast-moving crises.
The cuts, trimming at least 15,000 people, would not, however, affect Britain's commitment to maintaining its current level of 9,000 soldiers in southern Iraq deployed in support of American troops further north, the government said.
In Parliament, Geoff Hoon, the defense secretary, said the cuts designed in part to save billions of dollars in Britain's defense budget were designed to make Britain's armed forces more flexible and efficient and to meet new challenges.
"The threats to Britain's interests in the 21st century are far more complex than was foreseen following the disintegration of the Soviet empire," Mr. Hoon said. In the future, he said Britain would spend more on weapons such as pilotless drones and computer systems to link battlefield units. The navy is also planning to acquire two new aircraft carriers along with more modern warships.
Mr. Hoon indicated that the cuts would mean shrinking the Royal Air Force from 48,500 to 41,000, the navy from 37,500 to 36,000 and the army from an estimated 108,000 to 102,000. Some 10,000 civilian jobs linked to the military are also to be cut.
At the same time, 12 older-model naval vessels and three squadrons of Jaguar warplanes would be retired, Mr. Hoon said. One R.A.F. base at Coltishall in eastern England would be closed by the end of 2006.
The announcement drew complaints that the measures, designed to save $5.2 billion by 2008 in return for an increase in the annual defense budget, would leave British forces overstretched. At present British troops are deployed in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Sierra Leone, Kosovo and Northern Ireland.
One conservative lawmaker, Patrick Mercer, said the troops cuts were "an act of madness created by financial strictures rather than any sort of tactical analysis."
Additionally, Mr. Hoon's plans to dismantle four battalions technically numbering around 650 soldiers each could draw criticism from supporters of such renowned regiments as the Black Watch, currently deployed in Basra and rumored to be among those set to be disbanded in its present form or amalgamated with other units.
Angus Robertson, a Scottish nationalist legislator, told a television interviewer: "Why anyone would want to be destroying our historic regiments is just beyond me."
And Nicholas Soames, the opposition Conservative defense spokesman, told Parliament that service personnel would fell "betrayed politically and morally" by the changes.
The reforms have been described by government officials as the most significant in a generation, finally reshaping Britain's armed forces from cold war thinking that prized numerical strength and large arsenals of tanks, warplanes and ships over flexibility.
"That might have been appropriate for the attritional warfare of the past," Mr. Hoon said, "But in today's environment, success will be achieved through an ability to act quickly, accurately and decisively, so as to deliver military effect at the right time."
-------- business
Halliburton's Work in Iran Stirs Democrats
By Robert O'Harrow Jr.
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, July 21, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A110-2004Jul20.html
Democrats who have been hammering away at Halliburton Co. and its former chief executive Dick Cheney about the company's work in Iraq yesterday added Iran to their list of complaints.
In a conference call with reporters, Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.) said he found it "unconscionable" that a Halliburton subsidiary appeared to be doing business with a country tied to terrorist activities at a time Cheney was Halliburton's chief executive.
The conference call, organized by the presidential campaign of Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), came one day after Halliburton disclosed that a federal prosecutor had subpoenaed documents as part of an investigation of whether a Halliburton subsidiary violated anti-terror sanctions on Iran. "This is such an outrageous bit of news," Lautenberg said.
In a filing with federal regulators Monday, Halliburton disclosed that the three-year investigation had escalated from an inquiry by the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control to a criminal investigation by the Justice Department.
Such cases are referred to Justice only when there is evidence "intentional or willful" violations have occurred, government officials said.
The Justice Department investigation relates to a subsidiary called Halliburton Products & Services Ltd., an oil field services company incorporated in the Cayman Islands. In a 2003 report, the company said the subsidiary "performs between $30 [million] and $40 million annually in oilfield service work in Iran."
According to financial disclosures filed with federal regulators, the company received an inquiry in 2001 about possible violations of national security sanctions that prohibit U.S. companies from doing business in Iran. Under federal sanctions law, foreign subsidiaries of U.S. companies can do business in a sanctioned country only if its operates independently of the parent company.
Halliburton has said repeatedly in documents on file with the government that its subsidiary operated legally in Iran, outside the control of U.S. executives.
"We look forward to answering any and all questions. It is important to understand, especially in the current political environment, that this is not a condemnation of the company, but a method of further studying the facts," Halliburton spokeswoman Wendy Hall said in an e-mail yesterday, referring to the Iran subpoena. "We welcome a thorough review of any and all of the company's business. We continue to believe that Halliburton's business in Iran is in compliance with applicable laws and regulations."
Cheney's office referred calls to the Bush campaign, which played down the disclosure. "This was the daily baseless political attack by the Democrats," said Bush campaign spokesman Steve Schmidt. "Today the hatchet man was Frank Lautenberg. . . . This is an attempt by the Kerry campaign to avoid a discussion of the issues."
The Justice Department's demand for documents on the company's dealings in Iran is the latest controversy the Houston oil services giant has faced recently. It is under investigation by several government auditors for allegedly charging inflated fees for oil and services in Iraq during the war and in its aftermath, as well as by authorities here and in France for alleged bribes related to work on a gas liquefaction plant in Nigeria when Cheney was chief executive.
-------- iraq
Militants Intensify Abductions in Iraq With 6 New Hostages
July 21, 2004
By IAN FISHER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/21/international/middleeast/21CND-IRAQ.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
BAGHDAD, Iraq, July 21 - Insurgents in Iraq said today that they had kidnapped six more foreign hostages - and threatened to behead one every 72 hours - a day after a Filipino truck driver was released in exchange for his government's withdrawal of troops from Iraq.
Violence, meanwhile, surged around the country today: American troops battled insurgents overnight in the hard-line Sunni Muslim city of Samarra, killing what a military official said were six attackers. Five people were reported killed in clashes with American soldiers in Ramadi, another center for the insurgency here. In Baghdad, a rocket hit a hospital, killing four patients, and a car exploded on a narrow street, killing another four people.
In taking six more hostages, insurgents here seemed aimed at repeating what seemed a concrete success in gaining widespread attention and forcing an American ally to weigh the cost of its presence in Iraq: On Monday, the Philippines finished withdrawing its 51 troops in Iraq, after the captors of the Filipino truck driver threatened to behead him unless his government did so. Iraqi and American officials urged the Philippines not to bend to the captors' demands, for fear that it would encourage more kidnappings.
Today, a group calling itself the Holders of the Black Banners released a videotape, photographs and a statement saying that it had kidnapped six more truck drivers - three Indians, two Kenyans and an Egyptian. The group threatened to kill one captive every three days unless their employer, identified as a Kuwaiti company, closed down operations in Iraq.
A videotape shown on the Arab news channel Al Arabiya showed three masked men, two of them with rifles, sitting in front of what it said were the six hostages, one of whom held up a piece of paper. In photographs given to The Associated Press, the paper appears to be a typed list of seven men's names, their nationalities and passport numbers. There is a stamp dated July 20 and a handwritten name that appears to be that of the company, Universal Services.
The extra name was that of another Kenyan, and no other reference was made to him.
"We have warned all the countries, companies, businessmen and truck drivers that those who deal with American cowboy occupiers will be targeted by the fires of the mujahedeen," read a statement given to The A.P. "Here you are once again transporting, goods, weapons and military equipment that backs the U.S. Army."
None of the countries of the kidnapped men have troops in Iraq. But foreigners working for companies employed by the American military have been a frequent target among the dozens of kidnappings in Iraq since April, when violence in Iraq spiked to its highest level. Two of the captives - a Korean translator and a Bulgarian truck driver - were beheaded, as was an American businessman.
Earlier today, a senior military official in Iraq noted a recent spike in violence here, following a lull in large-scale attacks of several weeks that coincided with the official handover of sovereignty from the American occupation to a new interim Iraqi government. The official, briefing reporters in the capital, noted especially a spate of car bomb attacks, killings of Iraqi officials and kidnappings aimed at spreading what he said was "fear and terror in the populace."
"Hostage taking has one goal only: that's to draw the attention to the cause of terrorists," the official said. "It serves no other function.
"The more media attention, the more global attention, it gets, in the terrorists' minds, it draws attention to their cause," he added. "In reality it does exactly the opposite. Because I think every nation on earth is repulsed by this type of activity and certainly it would not be the kind of thing that any group would want to offer to the future of Iraq."
Meanwhile, groups apparently emboldened the Philippines' withdrawal issued new threats to three other American allies in Iraq - Japan, Poland and Bulgaria - to pull their troops from here or face attacks.
The same group that kidnapped the Filipino truck driver, a group led by the Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who has claimed credit for some of the deadliest attacks in Iraq, issued a warning on an Islamic Web site against Japan, which has 500 troops working on reconstruction and humanitarian projects.
"To the government of Japan: Do what the Philippines has done," said a statement signed by the group. "Lines of cars laden with explosives are awaiting you; we will not stop, God willing."
Also today, a group identifying itself as the European branch of Al Qaeda issued threats on another Web site against Poland, which has 2,500 troops in Iraq, and Bulgaria, which has 480 troops here.
Officials in all three countries - all facing some public opposition to the presence of their nations' troops in Iraq - rejected the threats.
"The decision by the Philippines government only increases the danger for others," said the Polish prime minister, Marek Belka, back in Poland after a trip to Iraq, The A.P. reported. "It is a very clear example of how when you bow in to the pressure of terrorists you increase the danger to others."
An American soldier was killed today by a roadside bomb north of Baghdad, as the number of American soldiers to die since hostilities began here last year reached 900 by one count. Six others were injured in the attack near Ab Duluiyah, north of Baghdad.
On Tuesday, two Marines and two soldiers were killed in attacks in the restive Sunni region west of Baghdad. The military official said that American soldiers have been dying in Iraq at roughly the same rate since the handover of sovereignty on June 28 as in the six months preceeding it.
Meanwhile, both American and Iraqi officials played down a report in an Iraqi newspaper today that three missiles with nuclear warheads had been found in a bunker near Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit, north of Baghdad. The report in the Al-Sabbah newspaper said that the missiles were found in an underground tunnel six yards deep and were found during the arrest of a senior member of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party earlier this week.
The kidnappings came on a day of widespread unrest in Iraq, which has been jolted back to the violence of the last several months at a time of some increased optimism over the new interim government and several weeks relatively free of large-scale attacks.
In Samarra, a spot of frequent attacks against Americans north of Baghdad, United States soldiers and insurgents clashed overnight, the military official said, after an American observation post was attacked with mortars. The official said American soldiers destroyed three houses, one identified as the source of the mortars, the others as positions where insurgents fired on troops. Six attackers were killed, he said, adding that he did not know if any civilians had been killed.
In an indication that the situation in Samarra may be becoming serious, the military official did not discount reports that many residents were fleeing their homes in anticipation of what they believed to be a large-scale military assault there. The official would not say whether any such assault was planned there, but noted that Samarra is one place that American soldiers and Iraqi security forces "are looking at for plans on the way ahead."
The new Iraqi government, led by Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, has vowed a tough line against insurgents and has passed a law allowing for emergency measures like curfews and bans on public demonstrations. So far, the government has not put any such measures into effect.
In Ramadi, another restive city in the Sunni dominated area west of Baghdad, there were reports of clashes between American troops and insurgents, in which at least five people were reported killed and more than a dozen wounded. The United States military declined to comment on the clashes tonight, but denied earlier reports that a helicopter had been shot down there.
In Baghdad this afternoon, a car exploded on a residential street in southeast Baghdad, killing what hospital officials said were five people. At a scene spattered with blood and bits of flesh, both the car's roof and rear were destroyed and an artillery shell, often used as the explosive in car bombs, lay on the street. There was no apparent target in the area, suggesting that the bomb went off accidentally.
At the Baghdad Hospital for Special Surgery, a rocket hit the seventh floor this afternoon, killing four patients and injuring several others, a spokesman for the ministry of health said. Insurgents often lob mortars and rockets inside Baghdad, many of them missing their targets and hitting homes and other civilian areas.
-------- israel / palestine
U.N. Demands That Israel Remove 'Security Barrier'
By Colum Lynch
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, July 21, 2004; Page A15
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A108-2004Jul20.html
UNITED NATIONS, July 20 -- The U.N. General Assembly passed a resolution Tuesday night demanding that Israel abide by a world court ruling to dismantle a 451-mile "security barrier" that cuts through Palestinian territory.
The resolution in the 191-member assembly passed by a vote of 150 to 6, with 10 governments abstaining. The United States opposed the resolution, saying that the international court and the General Assembly are inappropriate venues for resolving the Middle East crisis. Israel, Australia, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia and Palau also opposed the resolution.
"We regret the rush of the General Assembly to adopt this resolution," said James B. Cunningham, the deputy U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. "A durable solution is only to be found in a negotiated settlement between Israelis and Palestinians."
The International Court of Justice in The Hague ruled on July 9 that the Israeli barrier is illegal, violates Palestinian human rights and must be dismantled. Like the court's advisory opinion, Tuesday's U.N. resolution is not legally binding. But its adoption by such a wide margin reflects broad international outrage over Israel's decision to erect the barrier.
Cunningham expressed concern over the court's legal conclusion, saying "it seems to say" that the U.N. charter's recognition of a state's inherent right to self-defense does not apply in the face of a terrorist attack.
Nasser Kidwa, the Palestinian ambassador to the United Nations, thanked the members who supported the resolution, saying it was a "historic development."
Dan Gillerman, Israel's U.N. ambassador, dismissed the ruling as "one-sided," saying it did not address a Palestinian terrorism campaign against Israelis.
The construction of the barrier, which he said had diminished the number of suicide bombings, will proceed, consistent with the legal rulings of Israel's supreme court.
--------
Despite Vote in U.N., Israel Vows to Proceed With Barrier
July 21, 2004
By WARREN HOGE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/21/international/middleeast/21CND-NATI.html?pagewanted=all
NITED NATIONS, July 21 - Israel said today it would continue to build its barrier in the West Bank despite a United Nations vote on Tuesday demanding the project be abandoned, and it expressed doubt about the reliability of European nations in the peace process after they backed the Arab-sponsored resolution.
The General Assembly approved the resolution overwhelmingly on Tuesday evening demanding that Israel obey a World Court ruling that it abandon and dismantle its separation barrier on the West Bank and pay compensation to Palestinians affected by its construction.
Israel's Foreign Ministry said in a statement today that the United Nations position actually "encourages Palestinian terrorism" and that the world body's agenda had been "hijacked" by those espousing a one-sided, anti-Israel political position.
"Israel is particularly disappointed by the European stand," the statement said. "The willingness of the E.U. to fall in with the Palestinian position, together with its desire to reach a European consensus at the price of descending to the lowest common denominator, raises doubts as to the ability of the E.U. to contribute anything constructive to the diplomatic process."
The European Union, along with the United Nations, the United States and Russia, make up what is known as the quartet, whose roadmap plan is aimed at two sovereign states for the Palestinians and Israelis.
Israel had said before the vote that it would not alter its resolve to continue building the barrier, which it says is necessary to prevent attacks but which Palestinians say is actually a land grab.
"Building of the fence will go on," Raanan Gissin, a senior adviser to Israel's prime minister, Ariel Sharon, told the Reuters news agency.
The General Assembly vote was 150 in favor and 6 against - including the United States - with 10 abstentions. Resolutions from the 191-member General Assembly are nonbinding and largely symbolic, unlike those passed by the 15-member Security Council.
Last-minute amendments agreed to by the measure's sponsors in a hastily called two-hour recess in the meeting succeeded in gaining the support of all 25 members of the European Union and more than 30 other nations that had abstained the last time the matter came before the assembly.
In that vote - a resolution on Dec. 8, 2003, that asked the international court to rule on the barrier's legality - there were 74 abstentions, many of them influenced by the European view, with 90 votes in favor and 8 against.
"Thank God that the fate of Israel and of the Jewish people is not decided in this hall," Israel's ambassador, Dan Gillerman, told the delegates after the result was posted on the electronic board next to the dais.
Nasser al-Kidwa, the Palestinian observer to the United Nations, hailed the outcome as "magnificent," saying: "The debate is completed. It is now time for implementation and compliance and at a later stage for additional measures."
The United States voted against the measure because, despite the revisions, it remained "unbalanced" and erred in assigning a problem to the courts that rightly should be solved through political negotiations, said James B. Cunningham, the deputy American ambassador.
"The resolution diverts attention from where it should be on the practical efforts to move the parties towards realization of the ultimate goal of two states living side by side in peace and security," he said.
Mr. Kidwa said before the vote that he would push for a binding Security Council resolution, even though such a move would draw an American veto. The United States vetoed a Security Council resolution condemning the barrier last October.
"The threat of veto will not thwart us, and all others who respect and uphold international law," Mr. Kidwa said in the debate on Friday.
The vote had been postponed twice since then in an effort to give Arab and European Union diplomats time to reach agreement on language that would persuade European countries to change their stance of abstaining on such measures to one of support. After the two-hour break on Tuesday evening, two paragraphs were added to the resolution that satisfied European demands.
The first called on the Palestinian Authority "to undertake visible efforts on the ground to arrest, disrupt and restrain individuals and groups conducting and planning violent attacks" and on the Israelis "to take no action undermining trust, including deputations and attacks on civilians and extra judicial killings."
The second added paragraph reaffirmed the right "that all states have the right and duty to take action in conformity with international law and international humanitarian law to counter deadly acts of violence against the civilian population in order to protect the lives of their citizens."
Mr. Gillerman disparaged these phrases as "grudging references to terrorism" and "carefully crafted, often constructively ambiguous phrases." He said that adopting the resolution was "pandering to an agenda that seeks to focus on the response to terrorism but to marginalize the gravity of terrorism itself."
Under the resolution, the assembly demanded that Israel act on the decision by the International Court of Justice in the Hague on July 9 that the barrier built on West Bank land to shield Israeli settlements was illegal and should be torn down. It also requested the Secretary General to compile a register of damages to be used in calculating reparations owed.
The barrier includes electronic fencing, concrete and wire walls and trenches and guard towers, all of which Israel asserts is needed to ward off Palestinian attackers and suicide bombers. It is, Israel says, a necessary defensive response to the Palestinian leadership's failure to hold back the attackers.
In the Friday debate, Mr. Gillerman called the barrier "the Arafat fence," saying it was made necessary by the intifada launched against Israel by Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian president. In a news conference the same day, Mr. Gillerman showed charts portraying a 90 percent dropoff in successful terror attacks, a 70 percent reduction in people killed and an 85 percent reduction in people wounded in areas where the barrier has been completed.
While Israel argues that the world court has no jurisdiction over the barrier, it has recognized the authority of the Israeli Supreme Court, which ordered the army to change the route of the barrier in a 20-mile stretch near Jerusalem, saying it was causing too much hardship on the local Palestinian population.
The American ambassador, John C. Danforth, said that the United States opposed both the resolution and the court's decision because they "point away from a political solution" to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Saying that a solution must be based on balance, Mr. Danforth told the delegates: "The resolution before us is not balanced. It is wholly one-sided. It does not mention the threat terrorists pose to Israel. It follows a long line of one-sided resolutions adopted by the General Assembly, none of which has made any contribution to peace in the Middle East."
Voting against the resolution with the United States and Israel were Australia, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia and Palau. Abstaining were Cameroon, Canada, El Salvador, Nauru, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Tonga, Uganda, Uruguay and Vanuatu.
Christine Hauser contributed reporting for this article.
--------
Israel Defies U.N. Vote Against West Bank Barrier
July 21, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-mideast-barrier-israel.html
JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israel vowed Wednesday to press ahead with construction of its West Bank barrier despite a U.N. resolution demanding it be torn down, but Palestinians called for international sanctions to force compliance.
Israel summoned key European Union ambassadors -- including Britain and the Netherlands, holder of the rotating EU presidency -- to protest against their governments' support for the Palestinian-sponsored resolution.
Israeli officials says the array of razor-tipped fences and concrete walls seals out Palestinian suicide bombers. Palestinians condemn it as an ``apartheid wall'' that takes away land they want for a future independent state.
The General Assembly voted 150-6, with 10 abstentions, on Tuesday to demand Israel obey a World Court ruling that declared the barrier illegal. The United States, Israel's main ally, stood with the Jewish state against the measure.
All 25 members of the EU, which is part of a ``Quartet'' of peace mediators, backed the resolution after its diplomats convinced the Palestinians and their supporters to dilute the wording and include a condemnation of terrorism.
Diplomatic fallout was swift.
Israel's Foreign Ministry told top diplomats from the EU, Britain and the Netherlands the European bloc's support of resolution ``raises doubts as to the ability of the European Union to constructively contribute toward advancing the peace process.''
``Building of the fence will go on,'' Raanan Gissin, a senior adviser to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, told Reuters.
He said Israel was not surprised by the nonbinding U.N. decision, calling it a ``tyranny of the majority'' in the General Assembly, where sentiment often runs against the Jewish state.
Nabil Abu Rdainah, an aide to Palestinian President Yasser Arafat, hailed the General Assembly's decision as a ``victory for the Palestinian people'' and called for sanctions to enforce it.
``The U.N. Security Council must now take steps to implement the General Assembly's decision to remove the wall,'' he said.
Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit echoed the Palestinian call for action, urging the United Nations and the international community to ``bear their responsibility.''
NONBINDING
The resolution, like the World Court ruling, is not legally binding but carries symbolic weight. Only the 15-nation Security Council can take action against Israel, but as a permanent member, the United States would be certain to veto it.
The World Court ruled earlier this month that construction of the 370-mile barrier, which is about a third built and cuts into West Bank land captured by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war, violated international humanitarian law.
But Israel, backed by the United States, flatly rejected the ruling by the U.N.'s highest tribunal.
``Israel will not stop building (the barrier) or abdicate its inalienable right to self-defense,'' Gissin said Wednesday.
But he reaffirmed the government's intention to reroute the barrier in line with a recent Israeli High Court order to minimize hardships to Palestinians.
The U.N. resolution demanded Israel comply with the World Court finding it was legally obliged to dismantle the barrier and pay reparations for damages caused during construction.
But under a concession to the EU after intense negotiations, the measure also condemned all acts of terrorism and urged both Israel and the Palestinians to meet obligations under the U.S.-backed ``road map'' to peace, now stalled by violence.
Australia, which voted against the measure, said it backed Israel's construction of the barrier but said the structure should not cross into occupied territories.
--------
Israeli Helicopter Fires Missile at Gaza Camp
July 21, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-mideast-gaza.html
GAZA (Reuters) - An Israeli helicopter fired a missile at a two-storey building in a Palestinian refugee camp in the southern Gaza Strip early Thursday, witnesses said.
The Israeli army said the target was a weapons workshop at the Khan Younis refugee camp operated by the Islamic militant Hamas group.
It said the missile strike, launched shortly after midnight, was followed by a ``series of explosions indicating there was a large amount of explosives inside.''
The raid came a day after a crude Qassam rocket attack launched from Gaza damaged a home in southern Israel, but caused no injuries. Israel has vowed to put an end to such attacks.
Witnesses said the Israeli missile hit a house and a metal foundry in the building which swiftly burst into flames, damaging at least three other neighboring homes.
Dozens of neighbors gathered at the scene of the blast, some of them trying to extinguish the blaze, while others combed through the rubble in search of casualties.
Medics said one person was treated at the scene for minor glass cuts while another was treated for shock. It was not immediately clear whether the family that lived in the top floor of the building was there when the missile struck, medics said.
Hamas, whose charter calls for Israel's destruction, is one of the main groups behind a series of suicide bomb attacks that have killed some 450 Israelis in the past four years.
More than 2,500 Palestinians have been killed by Israel since an uprising began in September 2000.
Thursday's air strike came as Gaza coped with a wave of internal strife over demands for Palestinian President Yasser Arafat to reform his security apparatus and delegate wider powers to Prime Minister Ahmed Qurie, who has offered his resignation.
The unrest was seen in part as a power struggle that has erupted among Palestinian factions jockeying for control of the seaside area, in anticipation of Israel's planned evacuation of Gaza in 2005.
-------- mideast
Saudis Find Head of American Who Was Held by Militants
July 21, 2004
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/21/international/middleeast/21CND-HOST.html?hp
CAIRO, July 21 - Saudi police made the grisly discovery in Riyadh of the frozen head of Paul M. Johnson Jr., the American hostage who was beheaded by his captors last month, the Interior Ministry announced today.
The head was found in a raid of the suspected hideout of Saleh al-Awfi, the purported leader of Al Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula, the main franchise in the kingdom of Osama bin Laden's group.
The raid led to a raging gunbattle with militants inside the house in which two men were killed, including the editor of the group's polished Web magazine, Sawt al-Jihad, or Voice of the Holy War, who was on the list of the kingdom's 26 most wanted terrorists, security officials said.
Mr. Awfi was believed to have been wounded in the raid, officials said. He fled to a mountainous area outside Riyadh that security forces had surrounded, they said.
The Interior Ministry statement noted that Mr. Awfi's wife and three children were in the sprawling villa at the time of the raid. They were detained and a huge weapons cache was seized, including a surface-to-air missile, a variety of bombs, 22 machine guns, 11 pistols and more than 30,000 bullets.
When police initiated the raid, on a villa in a well-off Riyadh neighborhood, they were met with a shower of both hand grenades and the rocket-propelled variety, said the statement, carried by the official Saudi Press Agency. In the ensuing battle, other members of the ``deviant group'' arrived, the statement said, and tried to attack the security forces and rescue their colleagues but were driven off.
The statement made no mention of the names of the others, but officials said Mr. Awfi was among them. Mr. Awfi, a former prison guard who reportedly met Mr. bin Laden and fought in Afghanistan, Chechnya and Iraq, was believed to have been named the head of the Al Qaeda offshoot in June after the previous leader, Abdelaziz al-Moqrin, was gunned down in Riyadh.
Mr. Moqrin, who had assumed the leadership in March after his predecessor was killed, planned and carried out a series of bloody raids against foreigners in the kingdom, culminating in Mr. Johnson's kidnapping on June 12. The group demanded the release of Al Qaeda prisoners in exchange for the life of Mr. Johnson, a 49-year-old Apache helicopter engineer who had worked in Saudi Arabia for more than a decade.
On June 18, the same night that the group posted bloody pictures of Mr. Johnson's beheading on the Internet, Mr. Moqrin and several top aides were gunned down in Riyadh. Last week the United States Embassy called off the search for Mr. Johnson's body.
The macabre discovery of the head, which was found in a freezer in the house, will prompt a renewed effort to find the rest of Mr. Johnson's corpse, officials said.
The two men killed in the raid were Issa bin Saad al-Oshan, the editor of Sawt al-Jihad, and Mujab Abu Ras al-Dosari, who was also on the kingdom's most wanted list, the ministry statement said. That brings the number of men on the list still outstanding to 11. Three other militants were wounded and a number were arrested, and three security officers also sustained injuries, the Interior Ministry statement said.
Security analysts said Mr. Oshan's killing was as significant a blow to the group as the death of any field commander because the Web magazine was the most important vehicle for disseminating the group's ideas. Before Mr. Moqrin's death, for example, he used it to detail how any Saudi could take up the armed struggle to overthrow Saudi Arabia's rulers.
There have been no significant attacks in Saudi Arabia since Mr. Johnson's kidnapping and death, but security analysts cautioned that, even with the militants on the run, it was too soon to write them off as potential threats. Just four militants have accepted a monthlong amnesty offered by the royal family in late June, and two of them came from outside the kingdom.
``Of course Al Qaeda is much weaker than it used to be but they are still there,'' said Abdullah Bjad al-Otaibi, a former militant turned reformist. ``I expect they are still capable of carrying out attacks because they retain large weapons caches. They just need someone willing to drive a car filled with explosives and there are many willing to do this.''
-------- pakistan / india
Pakistan army 'killing farmers'
Farmers are being brutalised, says the report
BBC
21 July, 2004
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/3915235.stm
Pakistani troops are killing and torturing farmers who refuse to give up their land rights to the army, a leading human rights group says.
Human Rights Watch says paramilitary forces working with soldiers and police are guilty of "brutal repression" of tenant farmers in Punjab province.
It accuses security forces of four extra-judicial killings in 2002-2003 in the campaign to acquire land.
A military spokesman denied the allegations, saying they were baseless.
Villages 'besieged'
The 54-page report by the New York-based watchdog accuses paramilitary forces of subjecting tens of thousands of farmers to a campaign of murder, arbitrary detention and torture.
Four extra-judicial killings between January 2002 and May 2003 took place as part of attempts to coerce the farmers into compliance Human Rights Watch report
On two occasions, the paramilitaries literally besieged villages, preventing people, food and public services from entering or leaving for weeks on end, it says.
"Pakistan's military and paramilitary forces are brutalising their own people in the Punjab instead of protecting them," said Brad Adams, executive director of Human Rights Watch's Asia Division.
At the heart of the dispute are tens of thousands of acres of fertile state-owned land in Okara district.
It is owned by the provincial government but managed by the army under an agreement struck with the old British colonial powers early last century.
The farmers began a fight for ownership of the land they have tilled for decades two years ago.
Human Rights Watch says its report is based on more than 100 interviews with tenant farmers, their children and some of those who carried out the alleged abuses.
'No truth' in report
Pakistan's government has denied similar accusations in the past - notably in 2002 when the army was accused of forcing farmers to sign new tenancy contracts.
On Wednesday, the army's top spokesman said there was "no truth" in the report.
"People can go and visit and see for themselves what's happening there," Major-General Shaukat Sultan told Reuters news agency.
A senior military officer from Okara also denied the claims, saying there had been no manhandling or torture.
He said the claims were propaganda used by non-government organisations to politicise the issue.
He also said collectively the farmers owed the military $3.5m in unpaid dues under existing contracts.
-------- philippines
Filipino Hostage Released; Arroyo Defends Iraq Pullout
By Doug Struck
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, July 21, 2004; Page A13
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A63438-2004Jul20.html
BAGHDAD, July 20 -- A Filipino man held captive for two weeks in Iraq was delivered to freedom in a black luxury sedan Tuesday, a day after the last of a small Philippine military contingent left Iraq to prevent his execution.
Philippine President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo earned the displeasure of her chief ally, the United States, for bowing to kidnappers' demands that her country withdraw its 51 troops from Iraq. But she was unrepentant Tuesday, saying the hostage, Angelo de la Cruz, had became a symbol of the 8 million Filipinos who have left their poor country to send home money from hard and sometimes dangerous work abroad.
"I made a decision to bring our troops home a few days early in order to save the life of de la Cruz," she said in Manila. "I do not regret my decision."
In western Iraq, meanwhile, three American military personnel were killed in action Tuesday, and a fourth died of wounds sustained earlier. The U.S. Central Command reported that all four -- two Marines and two soldiers -- died in Anbar province, but it provided no other details.
De la Cruz, the freed Filipino, was delivered to the United Arab Emirates Embassy in Baghdad shortly after 10:30 a.m. Witnesses said he was dropped off by a black BMW. He had some difficulty explaining to the embassy guard who he was before he was admitted. He was later driven to the Philippine Embassy.
De la Cruz, 46, a truck driver for a Saudi company, was kidnapped July 7 near Fallujah as he was transporting fuel to U.S. military bases.
In Bahrain, Army Gen. John P. Abizaid, commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East and Afghanistan, told reporters it was "regrettable countries are making decisions that would appear to be appeasing terrorists as opposed to standing up to them," according to the Reuters news agency.
In the Philippines, however, Arroyo's decision was cheered. The fate of de la Cruz, a father of eight, became a national drama, and there were celebrations in his northern home town on news of his release. Filipinos touched by his plight have offered de la Cruz a job, scholarships for his children and a new house for his family, now living in a two-room shack.
Arroyo said her decision proved that her government has an interest in Filipino overseas workers "wherever they live and work."
In addition to foreigners, Iraqi officials have been chief targets of the shadowy groups that have carried out kidnappings, car and suicide bombings and ambushes. In the southern city of Basra on Tuesday morning, a city councilman who was a candidate to become provincial governor was assassinated along with two bodyguards as they left his house for work.
The car of the official, Hazim Aynachi, was stopped by men in Iraqi police uniforms, who then fired into the car.
"Nobody feels safe," said Mohammad Hawi, 35, a Basra resident. "This undermines the new democracy and the new era for Iraq. No one here supports the assassinations." In the past week, another town official and the head of a humanitarian organization in Basra were killed by gunmen.
In other incidents, four Iraqi civilians were killed in Baqubah, about 35 miles northeast of Baghdad, when a roadside bomb blew up the bus they were riding in, according to local reports. The bomb apparently was intended for a military convoy, but the detonation was mistimed.
Iraq's interim prime minister, Ayad Allawi, was in Jordan on Tuesday as part of a swing through the Middle East to renew relations with Arab countries that viewed Iraq with suspicion during Saddam Hussein's decades in power.
At the same time, however, Defense Minister Hazim Shalan seemed to threaten Iraq's neighbors for allowing insurgents to cross their borders. In an interview with the London-based Asharq al-Awsat newspaper, Shalan said Iraq would "move the terrorist operations to the countries that support terrorism in Iraq."
Although Shalan did not name the potential targets of Iraq's anger, Iraq has accused Syria and Iran of undermining security in Iraq. Shalan did say that Iran has "formed several security and intelligence centers in Iraq" and has sent spies into the country. He said surrounding countries have been warned, "and we kept saying that we have the ability to move the aggression . . . to these countries."
"We have confronted these counties with evidence and facts, but nothing was done to stop their support of the terrorists and operations in Iraq," he said.
[A roadside bomb exploded north of Baghdad early Wednesday, killing one U.S. 1st Infantry Division soldier and bringing to at least 900 the number of U.S. military forces killed since the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, the Associated Press reported.
The most recent soldier killed was on patrol in a Bradley fighting vehicle in Duluiyah, 45 miles north of Baghdad, when the bomb detonated shortly after midnight, Maj. Neal O'Brien of the 1st Infantry Division said. ]
Special correspondent Emad Zainal in Basra contributed to this report.
-------- space
Panel Cuts Bush's Budget Request for NASA
By Guy Gugliotta and Dan Morgan
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, July 21, 2004; Page A02
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A64974-2004Jul20.html
A key congressional subcommittee slashed President Bush's NASA budget request by more than $1 billion yesterday, dealing a sharp early blow to the administration's efforts to set in motion an ambitious plan to send humans to the moon and Mars.
The panel eliminated $438 million the administration had requested to begin work on a new "crew exploration vehicle" to replace the space shuttle, cut its request for medical and biological research in space by $103 million, and eliminated $70 million for lunar exploration.
"The bulk of these savings come from the elimination of funding for new initiatives," said a statement from the House Appropriations subcommittee that oversees the departments of Veterans Affairs and Housing and Urban Development and other scientific and unrelated agencies.
The subcommittee passed by voice vote its proposed $90.8 billion 2005 spending bill for those programs. The measure is still awaiting action by the full House Appropriations Committee and the House. It then goes to the Senate.
NASA's share was $15.1 billion, down $229 million from this fiscal year and $1.1 billion below the president's request, effectively slowing the administration's plans to reorient NASA's priorities toward a return to the moon and eventual human space travel to Mars.
The committee made it clear in its as-yet-unpublished report on the proposed legislation that it did not fully agree with the president's priorities: "While the committee is supportive of the exploration aspect of NASA's vision, the committee does not believe it warrants top billing over science and aeronautics," said the report, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Post.
Still, lawmakers from both parties were reluctant to describe the cuts as a rebuke to Bush's "Vision for Space Exploration." Instead, lawmakers noted strictures for every agency in the subcommittee's portfolio:
"This fiscal policy is going to squeeze . . ., [and] scientific, research and social programs are not going to be carried out," the subcommittee's ranking Democrat, Alan B. Mollohan (W.Va.), said in a telephone interview. "NASA is not immune to that. It's a very difficult bill, and no constituency is going to be satisfied with it."
NASA also took a positive tone. Glenn Mahone, a spokesman for NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe, noted that "even within these very tight constraints, the subcommittee fully funded the shuttle and Mars exploration programs and expressed support for the new vision."
But while the Mars program got $691 million after a spectacular year punctuated by the success of the rovers Spirit and Opportunity, congressional sources said the $4.3 billion allocated for the shuttle may fall short by $450 million to $760 million as NASA pays the bills for the shuttle's return to flight after last year's Columbia disaster. The committee also expressed skepticism that the administration can finish building the international space station by 2010 and then retire the shuttle. Knowledgeable congressional staffers, who declined to be identified by name because of committee policy, suggested that this view contributed to lawmakers' decision not to fund the crew exploration vehicle.
"NASA needs to reevaluate this date in the context of the current budget environment and the technical challenges associated both with return-to-flight activities and the new system development needs," the panel's report said.
The report also urged NASA not to forgo the option of a shuttle servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope. O'Keefe has all but ruled out a shuttle mission to Hubble and is focusing instead on servicing of the telescope with a robotic spacecraft.
The subcommittee report earmarked funds for both aeronautics research, an area NASA had sought to cut, and materials research in space, an endeavor the agency is seeking to eliminate to focus on the medical and biological research it needs to serve the moon-Mars initiative. Congressional sources attributed the panel's decision to cut $12.4 million from a mission to explore the moons of Jupiter as a casualty of budget austerity.
This was felt by other agencies in the bill. Even though the panel boosted spending on the Department of Veterans Affairs by $4.3 billion over 2004, Mollohan said the department needed $1.3 billion more for VA housing. Also short, he said, was federal assistance for low-income renters of apartments and houses, despite a proposed funding level of $14.7 billion, $491 million more than in 2004.
The bill proposed paring the budget of the National Science Foundation to $5.5 billion, $111 million below 2004 and $278 million below the president's request. The Environmental Protection Agency's spending was set at $7.8 billion, $613 million below its 2004 level.
-------- un
Remove Wall, Israel Is Told by the U.N.
July 21, 2004
By WARREN HOGE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/21/international/middleeast/21nati.html?pagewanted=all
UNITED NATIONS, July 20 - The General Assembly approved a resolution overwhelmingly on Tuesday evening demanding that Israel obey a World Court ruling that it abandon and dismantle its separation barrier on the West Bank and pay compensation to Palestinians affected by its construction.
The vote was 150 in favor and 6 against - including the United States - with 10 abstentions. Last-minute amendments accepted by the Arab sponsors of the measure during a hastily called two-hour recess succeeded in gaining the support of all 25 members of the European Union and more than 30 other nations that had abstained the last time the matter came before the assembly. In that vote - on Dec. 8, 2003, on a resolution that asked the international court to rule on the barrier's legality - there were 74 abstentions, with 90 votes in favor and 8 against.
"Thank God that the fate of Israel and of the Jewish people is not decided in this hall," Israel's ambassador, Dan Gillerman, told the delegates after the vote on Tuesday night was posted on the electronic board next to the dais.
Nasser al-Kidwa, the Palestinian observer to the United Nations, hailed the outcome as "magnificent," saying: "The debate is completed. It is now time for implementation and compliance, and at a later stage for additional measures."
Resolutions from the 191-member General Assembly are nonbinding and largely symbolic, unlike those passed by the 15-member Security Council. Israel said in advance that the vote would not alter its resolve to continue building the barrier.
James B. Cunningham, the deputy American ambassador, said the United States voted against the measure because it was "unbalanced" and erred in assigning a problem to the courts that rightly should be solved through political negotiations.
"The resolution diverts attention from where it should be - on the practical efforts to move the parties towards realization of the ultimate goal of two states living side by side in peace and security," he said.
Mr. Kidwa said before the vote that he would now push for a binding Security Council resolution, even though such a move would draw an American veto. The United States vetoed a Security Council resolution last October condemning the barrier.
"The threat of veto will not thwart us, and all others who respect and uphold international law," Mr. Kidwa during the debate.
The vote had been postponed twice in an effort to give Arab and European Union diplomats time to reach agreement on language that would persuade European countries to change their stance of abstaining on such measures.
After the two-hour break this evening, two paragraphs were added to the resolution that satisfied European demands.
The first called on the Palestinian Authority "to undertake visible efforts on the ground to arrest, disrupt and restrain individuals and groups conducting and planning violent attacks" and on the Israelis "to take no action undermining trust, including deputations and attacks on civilians and extra judicial killings."
The second reaffirmed "that all states have the right and duty to take action in conformity with international law and international humanitarian law to counter deadly acts of violence against the civilian population in order to protect the lives of their citizens."
Mr. Gillerman disparaged those phrases as "grudging references to terrorism" and "carefully crafted, often constructively ambiguous phrases." He said adopting the resolution was "pandering to an agenda that seeks to focus on the response to terrorism but to marginalize the gravity of terrorism itself."
Under the resolution, the assembly demanded that Israel act on the decision on July 9 by the International Court of Justice in The Hague that the barrier built on West Bank land to shield Israeli settlements was illegal and should be torn down. It also requested the secretary general to compile a register of damages to be used in calculating reparations.
The barrier includes electronic fencing, concrete and wire walls and trenches and guard towers, all of which Israel asserts is needed to ward off Palestinian attackers and suicide bombers. It is, Israel says, a necessary defensive response to the Palestinian leadership's failure to hold back the attackers.
In the debate on Friday, Mr. Gillerman called the barrier "the Arafat fence," saying it was made necessary by the intifada launched four years ago against Israel by the Palestinian leader, Yasir Arafat. In a news conference, Mr. Gillerman showed charts portraying a 90 percent decline in successful terror attacks, a 70 percent reduction in people killed and an 85 percent decline in people wounded in areas where the barrier has been completed.
In an earlier blow to the barrier, the Israeli Supreme Court ordered the army to change the route of the barrier in a 20-mile stretch near Jerusalem, saying it was causing too much hardship on the local Palestinian population.
The American ambassador, John C. Danforth, said the United States opposed both the resolution and the court's decision because they "point away from a political solution" to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Saying that a solution must be balanced, Mr. Danforth said the resolution was "wholly one-sided."
"It does not mention the threat terrorists pose to Israel," he said. "It follows a long line of one-sided resolutions adopted by the General Assembly, none of which has made any contribution to peace in the Middle East."
Voting against the resolution with the United States and Israel were Australia, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia and Palau. Abstaining were Cameroon, Canada, El Salvador, Nauru, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Tonga, Uganda, Uruguay and Vanuatu.
-------- us
A Shrinking Base
Support for War Wanes Among Military Families Facing Redeployment
Washington Post Staff Writer
By Hanna Rosin
July 21, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A175-2004Jul20?language=printer
HINESVILLE, Ga. - Yes, sir, this is Bush country: Real pit barbecues, yellow ribbons on church doors, wild boar in the woods. Fort Stewart 10 minutes away. And one teenage party loyalist greeting guests for his mother's Party for the President, on National Party for the President Day, a boy with impeccable manners who, when peppered with questions by the adults in the living room, blurts out things such as "Condi Rice speaks, like, three languages!"
So why does hostess Michele Bourque sound as defensive as if she were living in Berkeley?
"There's just so much negativity around," she says, explaining her decision to host this party. "There's not a lot of positive affirmation about why George W. Bush should be president. We just want to let people know, he's not as bad as people think."
Bourque is not a balloons and party hats type. Her family just moved to this ranch house outside Savannah and the decorations are spare -- some birthday cards on the mantelpiece next to a portrait of the president and the first lady, plus trays of cold cuts and fruit to feed a couple of dozen people. Alas, only two have turned out this evening, an Army couple from the base.
But between them and the kids, they are plenty enthusiastic. Christopher, the young host, recently wrote Bush a letter to "cheer him up, and let him know how grateful I am for what he did in Iraq." His father, Staff Sgt. Kenneth Bourque, is about to be deployed there. Christopher's twin brother, Andrew, wrote one, too, telling Bush to "relax, have fun whenever he can, because right now he's in for a fight." A form letter response from the president also sits on the mantelpiece.
"Kerry, Kerry, Kerry," says one of the guests, Stacie Young. "These young guys in the squad say, 'I'm voting for Kerry,' " she says, meaning the guys who serve with her husband. "And I say, 'Why would you do that? Vote for your kids! Vote for your security!' "
To her husband, John, a sergeant who fought with the 11th Engineers, the view of Iraq in the media is unrecognizable. In the stories he tells at the party, Iraq is a place where soldiers throw candies to children and drink sweet tea. It's where he saw a sergeant get shot in the neck to save his platoon, where for the first time he felt a sense of purpose. Where "we felt like celebrities, we would march around and the people would chant, 'Saddam bad, Bush good.' " Many Unhappy Returns Sometime around Election Day -- rumors on the base say between November and January -- troops from Fort Stewart will be deployed to Iraq. Most here belong to the 3rd Infantry Division, the one known during the war as the tip of the spear. They are the troops who fought in Najaf, led the march into Baghdad, seized Saddam International Airport and Hussein's palaces, who led the fighting the day the iconic was pulled down. So for most, this will be their second tour. But the mood going in this time is very different.
Most have been home long enough to settle into a domestic routine, but not long enough to obscure the memory of watching someone in their unit get shot. Plus, this time the mission is murkier, the enemy more elusive and the return date open-ended.
"The first time I was kind of scared, but it wasn't as bad as I expected. We did our jobs without too much of a struggle," says Spec. Ben Schlabach, who's in a maintenance company. "Now it's a totally different ballgame over there. You don't know who's on your side. You have to be alert, keep your eyes open. You don't know when you'll come home. You just don't know what to expect."
The second time, it's hard to maintain the conviction that the citizenry of Iraq is entirely grateful to be liberated. Spouses have been trained to be on alert for signs of post-traumatic stress disorder, and all have heard the story of the soldier who came home and, when his wife asked him to change the baby's diaper, flung his wife across the room. Any sense of adventure is dampened by the existence of a new Heroes Walk on base, 45 saplings planted in honor of the men of Fort Stewart who died in Operation Iraqi Freedom.
Talk to a soldier eating his burger in the base food court and he'll tell you he's ready to complete the mission and support his commander in chief. "I got a job and I'll go out and do it," says Staff Sgt. Jeff Laplante. Others talk about unfinished business or even revenge, if someone they know was killed. They are professionals, they chose this path and they are deeply patriotic.
But some soldiers say the picture is murkier, particularly if their families are around. In the weeks leading up to deployment, soldiers are psyching themselves up by listing all that they fight for: family, buddies, their home town, democracy and God. Last time around the sentiment extended naturally to the president. Now that connection for some soldiers is what pollsters call soft.
Paul Rieckhoff fought with the division and has since left the Army. This week, he is launching Operation Truth, a nonpartisan group dedicated to telling the public about the war in Iraq from the perspective of those who fought there.
"People can deal with it if it's honest and up-front," he says about the deployments. "But they've broken their word so many times it gets frustrating. Everyone says they love George W. Bush, but when you get over there and see your buddies blown up and then think: 'What the hell are we doing over there?' You start to think: 'Who do I hold responsible?'
"My overall encapsulation is that the public will be overwhelmingly surprised at how many people coming back from Iraq will not vote for George W. Bush."
Yes, war is a fearsome enterprise, and yes, this is a new and dangerous world, but "how the deployment was handled made it worse," says Loren Thompson, a defense expert at the Lexington Institute, an Arlington think tank. Return dates are announced and canceled at the last minute. Missions are open-ended. For soldiers used to planned rotations, this kind of uncertainty crushes morale. Add to that the overall chaos in Iraq and "there's a lot of resentment," says Thompson. "If you're in the Army, you feel the institution is unraveling all around you."
"For the first time I hear officers openly debating against Bush," says Donald Vandergriff, an Army major and a professor at Georgetown University. "They don't want to vote for Bush and they don't want to vote for Kerry. What choices do they have? Zero, basically."
The Defense Department does not allow soldiers to be polled on their political opinions, and the culture still distrusts anyone who expresses those opinions too overtly. But it's clear that the military, famously conservative, hasn't pulled away from Bush. A recent poll of families with current and retired military members showed them supporting Bush 52 percent to 44 percent.
But at Fort Stewart, some of the support seems less of the enthusiastic than of the devil-we-know variety.
Aaron Symonette is in a transportation unit about to return to Iraq, and his wife, Judy, says this time she's "twice as scared, twice as nervous. To be honest with you, I feel it's unnecessary, that we should have pulled out once we captured Saddam."
Aaron Symonette doesn't think about those larger questions except "whenever somebody gets captured or killed. That's when we think, man, why are we really here?" To the families at Fort Stewart, the concept of exit strategy is not abstract. The families were expecting soldiers home on July 2, 2003, so Judy lost weight, got her hair done, hung white banners and balloons, ironed the kids' clothes, bought a bottle of her husband's favorite champagne. And then the night before, she was told, no, he wasn't coming home yet, and he didn't until October.
Still, "although I'm irritated, I still would prefer Bush over Kerry," she says. "Bush has already started this thing and he knows what's going on. The rapport is already established. A new person would just have to be briefed all over again and that makes me nervous." Ballot Battles
Most experts assume officers will continue to vote Republican. But as for the other components that make up the military vote -- enlisted personnel, veterans, dependents -- their votes are "in play," says Christopher Parker, a former Army captain and a political scientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
In an election in which national security is a prime issue, the morale of the troops takes on outsize significance. And it takes only small shifts to make a difference. If Eglin Air Force Base were in Alabama instead of Florida, says Thompson, Al Gore would be in the White House. A 5 percent shift in the veterans' vote would have given New Hampshire and Arkansas to Gore.
The people most likely to shift their support from Bush to Kerry are in the reserves and National Guard, says David Segal, a professor at the University of Maryland. "In the past the antiwar movement was rooted in college campuses," he says. "Now the major movement against the war is in reserve families." Reservists, used to serving a weekend a month, are being called up for a year at a time, over and over. They leave homes to serve in jobs for which they feel unprepared, attached to commanders and units they don't know. "We are the stepchildren, here to be abused," says Michael Ray Gibbins, eating his lunch at Fort Stewart with two buddies from the Texas National Guard at the end of a day that started at 3 a.m.
Gibbins lacks the sense of, well, reserve that keeps some career soldiers quiet about the election or the war.
"They ought to shoot the person who made us go over there," he says.
Gibbins has been grafted to a unit here for a year, and for now he's mostly guarding the base. He's a mechanic but like many reservists is being retrained as a military police officer. "If they sent us over there now, we'd die," he says.
Gibbins was on the crew that helped clean up after the crash of the Columbia space shuttle. He wears a shirt with this quote from Bush: "The crew of the shuttle Columbia did not return safely to Earth. Yet we can pray they are safely home."
"This does not -- I repeat -- does not show my support for Bush," he says. "I'm supporting the crew."
Even outside the reserves, it's not hard to find people who are newly disillusioned. They are parents who lost children, soldiers who went over and found it hard to maintain the sense that Iraqis were evil, or that their commanders had everything under control. They've become antiwar, and some are anti-Bush, but they don't sound like the usual suspects.
Jean Prewitt's son was with the 3rd Infantry Division and was killed three weeks into war. But she swears that has nothing to do with her opposition to the war. She's just been reading the papers, she says, and can't fight the sense that "we find out more and more each day how we were lied to. We went there for no good reason. It's just so big and tragic and horrible."
Her sister sent her a clipping about a group called Military Families Speak Out, and she joined. "A lot of them are radical, peace not war, that kind of thing, and I'm not one of those." She's a former postal worker and a lifelong conservative. But the war has changed her. "It just frustrates me, how they won't admit they made a mistake."
Sgt. Frank Carey went over with the 3rd Infantry Division. At first, he was "excited. It was like 'Red Badge of Courage.' " That feeling lasted through the initial invasion. "There was just elation, that we'd been bombed and we were still in one piece. That it had gone pretty smoothly."
But then came the occupation. "I didn't know what the plan was and I was hoping someone two grades above us knew and wasn't telling me for some reason. Then it dawned on me: I don't think there is one. It was a very uneasy realization."
Carey talked to Iraqis and found it hard to maintain the sense that this was part of the axis of evil. "The Iraqis were just like us, dads who don't want their daughter to marry some jerk.
"As time went on I felt like I'd been caught in some big machine and that machine had a goal and no matter what happened, it would achieve that goal."
Who will he vote for?
"That's a good question," he says. Last time he went out of his way to vote for Bush, getting special permission to leave a training mission and go to the polls. "This time I'm on the fence. But more on the fence between someone like Nader and Kerry." The Ones Back Home
It's summer, and deployment still feels far enough away. Some soldiers buy Harleys or motorbikes. A surprising number are in a rush to get married. On the drive to the Burger King or the base gym, Heroes Walk can look like a landscaping project. But there are signs of what's to come. The PX has just launched its Back to School sale, a reminder of the next important cycle parents will miss. Mothers are starting to notice how clingy their kids have become -- she's such a daddy's girl now, they'll say, I don't know what she'll do when he's gone.
Carrie Moss is an Army wife who's both calm and wants to know everything. "Whatever he'll tell me, I'll take." She knows every detail of how the men in her husband Brennan's battalion got killed or injured, and even some things he doesn't know she knows. Like when she overheard him tell his father on the phone, "Three times, I just knew I was gonna die."
She also knows her husband is one of the "crazy ones," that his view of combat is "when you play football, you don't train just to sit on the bench." And she knows there are some even crazier, like the guy in his battalion who was in a vehicle that exploded. He lost most of his hearing and some of his sight, but downplays his injuries so he can fight with the Special Forces.
She takes comfort in a couple of things: "He's not stupid," and he operates cannons, which means he shoots from a few miles away. And some part of her hopes he'll accept the Army's offer to become a recruiter, although she knows he wouldn't like it. "Either way, I'm not worried," she says.
Unlike her friend Julie Samples. Asked how she feels about the impending deployment, Samples says, without hesitation:
"I'm scared. I'm scared."
For Samples, calm is hard to maintain. She looks at al Qaeda Web sites. She's drawn to articles about the beheadings. "It's so scary over there now. All the suicide bombings and kidnappings. I don't want to use the word, but it's just barbaric."
Last year her 25-year-old daughter Ebony was found dead from an accidental overdose. Now she feels close to families who experience loss but finds no comfort with them.
"Who's that, sweetie?" she asks her daughter Treanna, 3, who has picked up one of the many glamour shots that decorate the living room. "That's my Ebony!" the child answers, referring to a sister she barely knew. This morning the family is busy getting ready for day care, for camp, for their father Corey, a staff sergeant, to go back to training. "The maid is off today," jokes Julie to Corey Jr., 7, as his father hustles Treanna out the door.
Only when her husband and youngest daughter are gone does she confess:
"If he were to die . . . ," she says, unable to speak for a moment. "I don't ever want to go there.
"God is good. He doesn't give you more than you can bear."
For her, waiting is all about praying. She founded a wives group at her church called Prayerfully Waiting. This is their special spouse's prayer: "Lord, give me the greatness of heart to see the difference between duty and his love for me. Give me a task to do each day to fill the time when he is away. While he is in a foreign land, keep him safe in Your loving hand. And when duty is in the field, please protect him and be his shield."
She does not see the need for this war but doesn't blame the president. The thought that a commander in chief may have done this for the wrong reason is just too scary. She "believes in Bush," she says, the way she believes in prayer. It's something she clings to.
While she's talking she notices Corey Jr. behind her. He just won a prize for a Cub Scout essay about how he wanted to be a soldier, she says brightly.
"No I don't," he answers.
"How come?"
"Bang. Bang," he says, pointing his finger at his chest and turning his head to the wall in mock death.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- homeland security
Public Less Fearful Of Terrorist Attack
Trend Worries Preparedness Officials
By John Mintz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, July 21, 2004; Page A12
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A21-2004Jul20.html
The percentage of Americans who have created an emergency plan for a terrorist attack has dropped in the past year, along with the proportion of Americans who believe that terrorists may strike near their home or workplace, according to two new studies released yesterday .
Civil preparedness experts said these and other trends are going in precisely the wrong direction, with U.S. authorities warning that al Qaeda is determined to strike the United States this summer or fall. The findings were announced at a conference yesterday at George Washington University.
"We need to narrow the universe of the unprepared, of those we need to worry about in a catastrophic situation, and it is not going to be easy," Red Cross President Marsha Evans said in a speech yesterday outlining her group's survey on emergency preparedness. "Every one of those unprepared Americans is a potential barrier to the effectiveness of our response to any disaster."
The Red Cross survey, conducted last month by Wirthlin Worldwide, found that the percentage of Americans who have created a family emergency plan on where to meet after a terror strike has dropped from 40 percent in August 2003 to 32 percent today.
The percentage of people who expressed concern that terrorists might strike near their home or workplace has declined more dramatically, from 71 percent right after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to about half today, according to a separate poll, also released yesterday, by the nonprofit Council for Excellence in Government.
Preparedness specialists believe that the number of people readying themselves for the aftermath of a terrorist attack has dropped as time has passed since the Sept. 11 strike without another attack on the United States.
Evans said the Red Cross survey found that unprepared Americans fall into five categories: "head scratchers" who don't know where to find preparedness advice; "head in the sand" types who believe preparation is unimportant; "head in the clouds" people who mistakenly believe they are ready; the "headset crowd" that is too busy and can't find time to do it; and people who "simply haven't thought about preparedness."
U.S. officials and counterterrorism specialists say encouraging Americans to stockpile supplies for an attack, prepare themselves emotionally and take action to ready their families is vital to both self-protection and bouncing back from any strike that does occur.
The Red Cross poll also found that the percentage of people who had assembled home emergency kits remained stable between 2003 and this year, at 42 percent. But only one in 10 families has taken all three steps considered crucial for preparation: creating emergency kits and family plans for reuniting after a disaster, as well as getting training in first aid, the Red Cross study said.
The Department of Homeland Security stumbled in its first attempt at a civil-preparedness campaign in February 2003, when they recommended that Americans purchase duct tape and plastic sheeting to protect their homes against chemical attack. The agency drew the ridicule of late-night comedians and generated public confusion. Nine days later the department announced a more thought-out "Ready Campaign" using radio ads to urge citizen preparedness.
Some public relations experts said stepped-up marketing efforts for such citizen involvement could ingrain terror preparedness into the popular consciousness just as the ad campaigns to buckle seat belts in the 1980s had children reminding their parents to secure their safety restraints. Those ads are credited with increasing seat-belt use from 10 percent in 1981 to 79 percent in 2003.
Terrorism experts say there are a number of national security reasons to keep the threat of terrorism in the public mind: People could report suspicious activity and help prevent an attack; after an attack, they will know what steps to take to protect themselves and get out of the way of rescuers; and in the weeks afterward they can help deny terrorists a sense of victory by getting U.S. society and the economy running again.
Preparedness experts cite Britain and Israel, both with decades of experience countering terrorism, as nations with citizens who are well informed about the dangers and possess a sense of social cohesion that has allowed a rapid return to normality after an attack.
Frank Cilluffo, a former counterterrorism official in the Bush White House who now runs George Washington University's homeland security program, said Americans need help from the government and public health groups in defining possible terrorist scenarios.
Patricia McGinnis, president of the Council for Excellence in Government, said the data "makes you wonder if the American people are fickle, disingenuous or in denial."
"We are probably a little of each, and that presents a very complex social marketing and communications challenge," she added.
The council poll, conducted by the Hart-Teeter firm, found that 47 percent of Americans say the country is safer today than it was on Sept. 11, 2001. Only 38 percent said that a year after the attacks.
In October 2002, 55 percent of the public said another major terror attack was "very likely," while today only 34 percent say that, the council poll found.
But some people want to avoid being overloaded with terror warnings. While 45 percent in the latest council poll wanted all available information about potential threats, 52 percent said, "I only want to know about the most serious threats because there is only so much I can do personally to prepare."
----
Bush to screen population for mental illness
Sweeping initiative links diagnoses to treatment with specific drugs
June 21, 2004
WorldNetDaily.com
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=39078
President Bush plans to unveil next month a sweeping mental health initiative that recommends screening for every citizen and promotes the use of expensive antidepressants and antipsychotic drugs favored by supporters of the administration.
The New Freedom Initiative, according to a progress report, seeks to integrate mentally ill patients fully into the community by providing "services in the community, rather than institutions," the British Medical Journal reported.
Critics say the plan protects the profits of drug companies at the expense of the public.
The initiative began with Bush's launch in April 2002 of the New Freedom Commission on Mental Health, which conducted a "comprehensive study of the United States mental health service delivery system."
The panel found that "despite their prevalence, mental disorders often go undiagnosed" and recommended comprehensive mental health screening for "consumers of all ages," including preschool children.
The commission said, "Each year, young children are expelled from preschools and childcare facilities for severely disruptive behaviors and emotional disorders."
Schools, the panel concluded, are in a "key position" to screen the 52 million students and 6 million adults who work at the schools.
The commission recommended that the screening be linked with "treatment and supports," including "state-of-the-art treatments" using "specific medications for specific conditions."
The Texas Medication Algorithm Project, or TMAP, was held up by the panel as a "model" medication treatment plan that "illustrates an evidence-based practice that results in better consumer outcomes."
The TMAP -- started in 1995 as an alliance of individuals from the pharmaceutical industry, the University of Texas and the mental health and corrections systems of Texas -- also was praised by the American Psychiatric Association, which called for increased funding to implement the overall plan.
But the Texas project sparked controversy when a Pennsylvania government employee revealed state officials with influence over the plan had received money and perks from drug companies who stand to gain from it.
Allen Jones, an employee of the Pennsylvania Office of the Inspector General says in his whistleblower report the "political/pharmaceutical alliance" that developed the Texas project, which promotes the use of newer, more expensive antidepressants and antipsychotic drugs, was behind the recommendations of the New Freedom Commission, which were "poised to consolidate the TMAP effort into a comprehensive national policy to treat mental illness with expensive, patented medications of questionable benefit and deadly side effects, and to force private insurers to pick up more of the tab."
Jones points out, according to the British Medical Journal, companies that helped start the Texas project are major contributors to Bush's election funds. Also, some members of the New Freedom Commission have served on advisory boards for these same companies, while others have direct ties to TMAP.
Eli Lilly, manufacturer of olanzapine, one of the drugs recommended in the plan, has multiple ties to the Bush administration, BMJ says. The elder President Bush was a member of Lilly's board of directors and President Bush appointed Lilly's chief executive officer, Sidney Taurel, to the Homeland Security Council.
Of Lilly's $1.6 million in political contributions in 2000, 82 percent went to Bush and the Republican Party.
Another critic, Robert Whitaker, journalist and author of "Mad in America," told the British Medical Journal that while increased screening "may seem defensible," it could also be seen as "fishing for customers."
Exorbitant spending on new drugs "robs from other forms of care such as job training and shelter program," he said.
However, a developer of the Texas project, Dr. Graham Emslie, defends screening.
"There are good data showing that if you identify kids at an earlier age who are aggressive, you can intervene ... and change their trajectory."
If you'd like to sound off on this issue, please take part in the WorldNetDaily poll.
-------- immigration / refugees
Pakistan Army Ousts Afghan Refugees in Militants' Area
July 21, 2004
By CARLOTTA GALL
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/21/international/asia/21afgh.html?pagewanted=all
GHAZNI, Afghanistan, July 19 - The Pakistani Army, backed by United States intelligence and surveillance, has stepped up its operations against supporters of Al Qaeda in the area near the Afghan border in recent weeks, displacing thousands of Afghan refugees.
Some 200,000 Afghan refugees have been living in the remote border areas of Pakistan, in poor and insecure conditions. In the past few weeks, as the Pakistani operations in the tribal area of South Waziristan have risen in strength and, according to some reports, prompted a matching increase in militant resistance, 25,000 people have poured back into Afghanistan, refugee officials said.
In the past five months, the Pakistani Army, at the behest of the United States, has pushed into the normally autonomous tribal areas, in an attempt to capture or kill an estimated 500 foreign fighters - many of them hardened Uzbek and Central Asian militants - and supporting tribesmen, and to search for Osama bin Laden and his Egyptian deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, who are often rumored to be sheltering in the area.
The United States military, which has 17,000 troops across the border in Afghanistan, has provided satellite intelligence and aerial surveillance to assist Pakistani operations, the Pakistanis have said. Last month a Pakistani tribal leader was killed in what officials in Pakistan said was a strike by a Hellfire missile launched from an American drone. Both Pakistan and the United States say American troops have not moved into Pakistani territory.
As the fighting has increased, the Pakistani military has hardened its position against the Afghan refugees living in the area, officials in Afghanistan said.
Refugees have been given as little as two hours' notice to leave before their houses were bulldozed, according to officials with the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Some have returned to Afghanistan with no belongings, homeless once again.
The Pakistani authorities have acknowledged closing and bulldozing two refugee camps, Zarinoor 1 and Zarinoor 2, in South Waziristan. A Pakistani official in Kabul said the government had decided to dismantle all camps within about three miles of the border "as part of a cleanup of the area, so militant-saboteurs would have no place for asylum."
"Inevitably that caused hardship to families," he said. "It's unfortunate, but it had to be done as part of the overall campaign against terrorism."
United Nations and Afghan refugee officials have raised grave concerns about the refugee exodus with the Pakistani government, saying people being forced to leave should be given adequate warning to collect their belongings and some choice as to where to go.
New arrivals interviewed in the town of Ghazni, south of Kabul, said they had been given 72 hours to leave their houses as the military moved to clear their area. Others said they fled in general panic as the fighting intensified around their villages and refugee camps as recently as four days ago.
The scale of the problem has only recently come to light after a nongovernmental organization, Tribal Liaison Office-Swisspeace, interviewed 1,500 families in Paktika, the province bordering South Waziristan.
The organization has estimated that nearly 4,000 families have taken shelter in Paktika Province alone. Afghan government officials say the total is nearer 5,000 families, with almost 200 more families arriving in Ghazni Province, and another 200 families in Baghlan Province, north of Kabul.
The United Nations refugee officials have been unable to travel to Paktika but also use the figure of 24,000 to 25,000 people. Daniel Endres, acting head of the United Nations refugee office in Afghanistan, said their ejection from Pakistan amounted to forcible repatriation.
Refugees interviewed in Ghazni said they had left homes not just on the border but also deep inside South Waziristan. One man called Afghan, 29, head of a family of nine, said people living in his Wachkala settlement, on the edge of the town of Wana, about 25 miles from the border, had been given 72 hours to evacuate their homes.
A long-distance truck driver, he arrived home a day after the announcement was made in the mosque and scrambled to pack up after 18 years in Pakistan. "When I saw everyone was leaving, I got very nervous and started planning to leave," he said. "Four to six trucks were leaving every day."
With no home to go to in Afghanistan, he came to Ghazni, where his parents used to live. He and his family slept in his truck for three days before someone took them in.
Two brothers, Amir Muhammad, 50, and Khaori Muhammad, 55, left with 15 family members just a few days ago, abandoning their home in the village of Piba, near Wana, when fighting came so close that helicopters were hovering over the village and bullets were winging overhead.
"We were scared we would be killed in the fighting, so we came here," Amir Muhammad said. The family lived near a Pakistani Army base, and when militants fired on the base, the military threatened to destroy homes in the nearby village, he said. "The government told us that if they came under fire from any place, they would destroy it," he said.
They were camping out in the ruins of their old house, destroyed more than 20 years ago in Soviet bombing raids. "For four days we have been sitting in the open under the sun," Mr. Muhammad said. "We left everything behind; we just brought ourselves."
Members of another family that arrived three weeks ago, said their father had tried to stay on but had had to abandon the house three days ago after fighting came too close. Ghumcha Gul, 15, said they had seen helicopters pounding an area called Shakai, where there is a refugee camp and a militant training camp, and soldiers being dropped from Chinooks in the mountains above.
-------- police
Officer Is a Focus in Pipe Bomb Case
July 21, 2004
By WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/21/nyregion/21bomb.html?pagewanted=all&position=
The police were investigating yesterday whether the young off-duty transit officer who reported finding a burning backpack in the Times Square subway station on Monday night might have actually planted it there himself and detonated the pipe bomb inside, several police officials said. The explosion panicked riders and shut down part of the busy station shortly after the evening rush.
On Monday night, the police had at first credited the officer with discovering the device, warning commuters away, and burning himself as he called for backup.
The officer has not been charged with any crime, and the police officials said they had no direct evidence tying him to the explosion. The officer, Joseph Rodriguez, 27, spent much of yesterday in Bellevue Hospital Center under observation and was later taken to the offices of the Manhattan Detective Borough, before being released. The officials said he had just been forced to retire on a psychological disability pension and yesterday was to have been his last day on the force, the end of a short four-year career.
Officer Rodriguez was accompanied by a lawyer from the firm representing the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association, the police officers' union, and denied involvement in the explosion, a lawyer at the firm said.
The police began focusing on the officer soon after the blast about 8 p.m. on the mezzanine leading to the A, C and E lines. The officials said their interest in the officer was provoked by his troubled psychiatric history, as well as questions that arose about his version of the events surrounding the explosion. They were exploring, for instance, why he had not suffered more serious injuries given how close he told investigators he was to the burning bag. The officials offered no details about his psychiatric history.
The bomb - made from a length of plastic pipe 6 to 10 inches long and about an inch around, packed with black powder and BB's - caused little damage and no injuries beyond those suffered by the officer. But it rattled nerves and prompted a huge police response in a city gearing up for the Republican National Convention next month amid heavy security and oft-stated concerns about the potential for a subway attack.
Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly, asked yesterday at a street-naming ceremony about whether any evidence pointed to the officer, would say only, "The whole situation is being examined at this point."
Officer Rodriguez had left the Manhattan Transit Task Force office in the Times Square station a few minutes before the end of his shift and, he later told the police, he saw a blue and black nylon backpack on fire near the stairway leading up to the southwest corner of 43rd Street and Eighth Avenue, officials said. But rather than call 911, or the task force offices, or return inside, the officer called the task force looking for a friend and fellow officer, a senior official said. He wound up being transferred several times before reaching his friend and notifying him of the burning bag, the official said.
As part of the investigation, which was being conducted by the department's Internal Affairs Bureau and detectives from the Midtown South Precinct, the police were conducting a series of forensic tests on the knapsack and clothing the officer was wearing when the bomb exploded, officials said. Technicians were trying to extract DNA from any sweat that may been left on the knapsacks' straps, although the bag was relatively new, one official said. The officer's clothes were also being checked for traces of unburned gunpowder, the official said.
Efforts to reach Officer Rodriguez at the hospital yesterday were unsuccessful, and a woman who answered the phone at his Lower Manhattan apartment and identified herself as his brother's fiancée declined to comment about the investigation into the officer's actions. Officer Rodriguez, who declined to make a statement to the police, was released after telling investigators that he was tired from the night and day in the hospital. He was accompanied by an unidentified lawyer, the official said.
Investigators were also checking videotapes from businesses near the subway entrance in an effort to determine whether anything useful had been captured by a camera. They were also trying to track down any witnesses who may have seen what was happening in the station in the minutes before the blast, another official said. Detectives yesterday had spoken to one of two commuters whom the officer ushered away from the bag in the moments before the blast. They were looking for the second, the official said.
Officer Rodriguez joined the Police Department on Sept. 29, 2000, just three days after his 24th birthday, officials said. When terrorists slammed two airplanes into the World Trade Center just under a year later, he had only been out of the Police Academy about six months.
Yesterday, several police officials referred to him as a hero for his actions in responding to the trade center disaster, saying he had been buried under rubble, although they were unable to provide details about precisely what his role was. One official said that it was his experiences on Sept. 11 that led to his psychological problems. The officer suffered a number of maladies afterward, including significant weight loss, a person familiar with his work history said.
Before joining the department, Officer Rodriguez had worked part-time at the John Jovino Company, a gun shop in Lower Manhattan that caters to police officers, according to Charlie Hu, who works there.
A person familiar with his tenure in the department said Officer Rodriguez had not wanted to leave the force, and was faced with the choice of being fired or taking the psychological disability pension. He had been on restricted duty for some time and was recently answering phones at the transit task force offices, one official said.
The pension was approved on July 14, another official said, and he had been expected to go to the department's pension section sometime this week to fill out the final paperwork.
Yesterday afternoon, outside Officer Rodriguez's building in Little Italy, detectives were stopping people who came in and out of the building and showing them a photograph of a man. It was unclear whether the picture was of the officer.
Isidro Rodriguez, 51, who identified himself as the officer's cousin, said outside the building late yesterday that he had just learned that he was in the hospital. "He's a good guy,'' he said. "He never had any problems."
An aunt, Rosa Rivas, who lives a few blocks away, said she had heard news reports about the investigation but had not been able to reach her nephew. "How can he do that? He's not that kind of guy,'' she said. "I don't know what's going on."
Reporting for this article was contributed by Colin Moynihan, Jess Wisloski, Adam Sank and Mike Wilson.
-------- terrorism
Video Shows Security Check of 9/11 Hijackers
July 21, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Attacks-Surveillance-Video.html?hp
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Surveillance video from Washington Dulles International Airport the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, shows four of the five hijackers being pulled aside to undergo additional scrutiny after setting off metal detectors but then permitted to board the fateful flight that crashed into the Pentagon.
The video shows an airport screener hand-checking the baggage of one hijacker, Nawaf al-Hazmi, for traces of explosives before letting him continue onto American Airlines Flight 77 with his brother, Salem, a fellow hijacker.
The disclosure of the video comes one day before the release of the final report by the Sept. 11 commission, which is expected to include a detailed accounting of the events that day.
Details in the grainy video are difficult to distinguish. But an earlier report by the commission describing activities at Dulles is consistent with the men's procession through airport security as shown on the video.
No knives or other sharp objects are visible on the surveillance video. But investigators on the commission have said the hijackers at Dulles were believed to be carrying utility knives either personally or in their luggage, which at the time could legally be carried aboard planes.
All 58 passengers -- including the hijackers -- and six crew members, along with 125 employees at the Pentagon, died when the flight crashed into the Pentagon at 9:39 a.m. on Sept. 11, 2001.
The video shows hijackers Khalid al-Mihdhar and Majed Moqed, each dressed conservatively in slacks and collared shirts, setting off metal-detectors as they pass through security. Moqed set off a second alarm, and a screener manually checked him with a handheld metal detector.
The pair were known to travel together previously and had paid cash to purchase their tickets aboard Flight 77 on Sept. 5, 2001, at the American Airlines counter at Baltimore's airport.
Al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi had been known to be associated with al-Qaida since early 1999 by the National Security Agency, and were put on a terrorism watch list on Aug. 24, 2001.
Only Hani Hanjour, believed to have been the hijacker who piloted Flight 77, did not set off a metal detector as he passed through Dulles security that morning, according to the video.
Moments after Hanjour passed alone through the security checkpoint, wearing dark slacks and a short-sleeved shirt, the final two hijackers, the al-Hazmi brothers, walked through the checkpoint.
Nawaf al-Hazmi, described by investigators as the right-hand accomplice of hijacker-planner Mohammed Atta, set off two metal-detectors, and a screener manually checked him with a handheld device.
Nawaf and his brother, each wearing slacks and Oxford shirts, were directed to a nearby counter, where they appeared to examine their tickets while another screener checked Nawaf's carryon bag with an explosive trace detector. Each was cleared to board Flight 77.
The Associated Press obtained the video from the Motley Rice law firm, which is representing some survivors' families who are suing the airlines and security industry over their actions in the Sept. 11 attacks.
``Even after setting off these alarms, the airlines and security screeners failed to examine the hijackers' baggage, as required by federal regulations and industry mandated standards, or discover the weapons they would use in their attack,'' lawyer Ron Motley said.
Elaine Teague, one of the family members suing over the death of her 31-year-old daughter, Sandra, said she had previously been shown the footage by the FBI. But the terrorists' faces had been digitally disguised.
Teague said she was surprised at how relaxed security was, given that airlines had received three warnings from the Federal Aviation Administration. One such warning, issued in June 2001, cited ``unconfirmed reports that American interests may be the target of a terrorist threat from extremist groups.''
On the Net:
FBI information about Flight 77: www.fbi.gov/pressrel/penttbom/aa77/77.htm
Commission chronology on events at Dulles:
www.9-11commission.gov/hearings/hearing7/staff--statement--3.pdf
--------
Neocons Revive Cold War Group
antiwar.com
by Jim Lobe
July 21, 2004
http://www.antiwar.com/lobe/?articleid=3075
A bipartisan group of 41 mainly neoconservative foreign-policy hawks has launched the third Committee on the Present Danger (CPD) whose previous two incarnations mobilized public support for rolling back Soviet-led communism but whose new enemy will be "global terrorism."
The new group, announced at a Capitol Hill press conference Tuesday, said its "single mission" will be to "advocate policies intended to win the war on global terrorism - terrorism carried out by radical Islamists opposed to freedom and democracy."
"The committee intends to remain active until the present danger is no longer a threat, however long that takes," said CPD chairman R. James Woolsey, who served briefly as former President Bill Clinton's Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director and has often referred to the battle against radical Islam as "World War IV."
Woolsey appeared with senators Joseph Lieberman, a neoconservative Democrat who was former Vice President Al Gore's running mate in 2000, and Jon Kyl, a Republican from Arizona with strong connections to the Christian Right.
In a joint column published Tuesday in the Washington Post, the two senators argued that "too many people are insufficiently aware of our enemy's evil worldwide designs, which include waging jihad against all Americans and reestablishing a totalitarian religious empire in the Middle East."
"The past struggle against communism was, in some ways, different from the current war against Islamist terrorism," they wrote, evoking the two past CPDs. "But ... the national and international solidarity needed to prevail over both enemies is ... the same. In fact, the world war against Islamic terrorism is the test of our time."
At the press conference later, Lieberman said the purpose of the new group is "to form a bipartisan citizens' army, which is ready to fight a war of ideas against our Islamist terrorist enemies, and to send a clear signal that their strategy to deceive, demoralize and divide America will not succeed."
The two senators also claimed that the new CPD consists of "citizens of diverse political persuasions," although the vast majority of the 41 members are well-known neoconservatives who have strongly helped lead the drive to war in Iraq and have long supported broadening President George W. Bush's "war on terrorism" to include Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia, as well.
Prominently represented are fellows from the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), such as former United Nations Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, Joshua Muravchik, Laurie Mylroie, Danielle Pletka, Michael Rubin and Ben Wattenberg. Members from Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld's Defense Policy Board (DPB) include Kenneth Adelman, Newt Gingrich, and Woolsey himself.
Committee members from the Center for Security Policy (CSP), include CSP President Frank Gaffney, Charles Kupperman, William Van Cleave, and Dov Zakheim, who just stepped down as an undersecretary of defense under Rumsfeld.
Board members or fellows of several other right-wing or mainly neoconservative think tanks have also joined the new CPD, including the Heritage Foundation, the Hoover Institution, the Manhattan Institute, Freedom House, the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, the former Committee to Liberate Iraq, the National Institute for Public Policy and Americans for Victory Over Terrorism.
The majority of members are associated with policy statements by the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) whose charter members in 1997 included Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Cheney and a number of other men and women who have pushed for hawkish positions on the Middle East and China, particularly from their perches at senior levels in the Bush administration.
The original CPD was formed in 1950 with the help of anti-Communist hawks in the administration of former President Harry Truman as a "citizens' lobby" by a high-powered group of Wall Street businessmen, public-relations specialists and university administrators to raise public concern about Soviet and Chinese threats and mobilize support for a huge military budget aimed at maintaining U.S. military supremacy.
CPD-2, which was officially launched immediately after the election of President Jimmy Carter (1977-81), was created as a coalition of neoconservatives - mostly hawkish Democrats who had supported the unsuccessful presidential candidacy of Senator Henry Jackson of Washington State (organized as the Coalition for a Democratic Majority, or CDM) - and aggressive Republican nationalists, such as Rumsfeld, opposed to the policies of détente pursued by Henry Kissinger under former presidents Richard Nixon (1969-1974) and Gerald Ford (1974-77).
During the Carter administration, CPD-2 essentially served as a "shadow" foreign-policy cabinet - churning out position papers and opinion columns, holding conferences, appearing on television news shows, and brokering leaks from unhappy hawks to prominent news media - to build support for much bigger military budgets, a much more confrontational posture vis-à-vis Moscow and for "rollback" of Soviet gains in what was then called "the Third World."
When Ronald Reagan was subsequently elected president in 1980, no less than 46 CPD members advised his transition team, and most of them were absorbed into his administration, many at senior foreign-policy-making levels.
While no members of the new CPD go back to the original one 50 years ago, a significant number played important roles in CPD-2, including Adelman, Kampelman, Van Cleave, Kupperman and Kirkpatrick - all of whom played prominent roles in the older group. Indeed, many CPD-3 members joined CPD-2 from the CDM, which was created to fight the antiwar forces that were becoming dominant in the Democratic Party in the early to mid-1970s.
Besides being hawkish toward the Soviet Union and friendly toward the Pentagon, both the CDM and the CDP-2 were also staunchly pro-Israeli at a time when the Jewish state found itself increasingly isolated on the world state.
A number of members of the new CPD, including Kampelman, Kemp, Kirkpatrick, Muravchik, Gaffney and Woolsey himself, overlap with the membership of the advisory boards of groups oriented toward Israel's governing Likud Party, such as the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), the Middle East Forum or the U.S. Committee for a Free Lebanon.
In addition, a husband-and-wife team that played a key role in the evolution of neoconservatism from the late 1960s to the present and was also associated with both CDM and CPD-2, former Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz and his spouse, Midge Decter (who co-chaired the Committee for the Free World with Rumsfeld during the Reagan administration) have also joined the new CPD.
Still, the new group does not include a number of individuals who would be politically compatible with its political views and institutional genealogy. The former DPB chairman and top Jackson aide, Richard Perle, for example, was not listed as a member, nor was his AEI colleague, Michael Ledeen.
Similarly, PNAC's leadership, including Weekly Standard Editor William Kristol, contributing editor Robert Kagan and staff director Gary Schmitt apparently opted out. Ironically, Kristol and Kagan were co-editors of an influential 2000 foreign-policy book that envisaged much of Bush's post-Sept. 11 foreign policy, called Present Dangers.
-------- torture
Afghans Try Americans on Torture Charges
July 21, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Afghan-US-Vigilantes.html?pagewanted=all
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) -- Three Americans went on trial Wednesday on charges they tortured eight prisoners in a private jail, with the group's leader saying he had tacit support from senior Pentagon officials who once offered to put his team under contract.
The U.S. military says the men were freelancers operating outside the law and without their knowledge.
Jonathan Idema, Brett Bennett and Edward Caraballo were arrested when Afghan security forces raided their makeshift jail in Kabul on July 5.
Standing before a three-judge panel in a heavily guarded Afghan national security court, the men listened quietly to the charges -- including hostage-taking and ``mental and physical torture.''
Three of their former captives described being beaten, held under water and left without food.
The Americans didn't testify. But Idema said afterward that the abuse allegations were invented. He said his men had arrested ``world-class terrorists'' and said he was in daily telephone and e-mail contact with officials ``at the highest level'' of the U.S. Defense Department, including in Pentagon chief Donald H. Rumsfeld's office.
Idema said a four-star Pentagon official named Heather Anderson ``applauded our efforts'' and wanted to place the group ``under contract'' -- an offer they refused for fear it would limit their freedom to operate.
There are no four-star female officers in the entire U.S. military. The name Heather Anderson is not listed in the Pentagon phone book.
``The American authorities absolutely condoned what we did, they absolutely supported what we did,'' Idema told reporters crowding around the dock. ``We have extensive evidence of that.''
An official from the U.S. Embassy observed the trial but declined to comment on the proceedings, where only one of the Americans had a lawyer.
Afghan and U.S. officials have left open whether the men, who face up to 20 years in Afghan jails if convicted, might be sent to the United States to face charges.
Judge Abdul Baset Bakhtyari adjourned the case for two weeks to give the three Americans and the four Afghans accused of helping them time to prepare their defense.
There was no attorney for Idema, a bearded former American soldier once convicted of fraud, who appeared in court in a khaki uniform with a reversed American flag on the shoulder.
Idema wore sunglasses in the courtroom, completing a look that once fooled even NATO peacekeepers, who sent explosives experts to help him with three raids before realizing they had been duped into thinking he was with U.S. special forces.
Idema, who is reportedly 48, told reporters his group had halted a plot to blow up the main U.S. military base with fuel trucks and assassinate Afghan leaders. ``We're talking about world-class terrorists,'' he said.
He also said his group delivered suspects to American special forces in the past.
Maj. Rick Peat, a U.S. military spokesman in Kabul, said he had no information on such a handover.
In court, Idema interrupted the judge to complain about the poor translation and glowered at his former prisoners and his Afghan assistants as they testified.
Turbaned men in the audience groaned in disapproval when prosecutor Mohammed Naeem Dawari said Afghan defendants told interrogators the Americans were ``always drunk'' and brought women to the house.
Ghulam Safi, a shopkeeper, said Idema's men stopped his car, put a hood over his head and bundled him off to their jail, where he was held for 18 days.
``They put me in the shower and let boiling water run over me,'' Safi told the court. He said he lost feeling in his hands and that his watch and money were stolen.
Taxi driver Ahmad Ali said his head was forced repeatedly into a basin of water and that he was beaten on the feet and stomach. He said he was fed two pieces of bread in seven days.
``They kept showing me pictures of people and asked if I knew them,'' Ali said. ``They said they'd bring my family and beat them as well.''
The third witness, a senior official at the Afghan Supreme Court named Maulawi Sidiq, said he wasn't allowed to go to the bathroom for 24 hours.
The American military says it has no idea what motivated Idema's group, which flew into Afghanistan on April 14. But there were indications they were intent on making money.
Idema, who claims to have fought the Taliban in 2001-2002, offered protection for journalists and hawked purported al-Qaida training videos to television networks. Idema, of Fayetteville, N.C., is featured in a book about the Afghan war called ``Task Force Dagger: The Hunt for bin Laden.''
The prosecutor said cameras -- as well as weapons -- were seized at their Kabul hideout, and that the Americans were ``making a film on counterterrorism.''
He said Caraballo, 35, was a cameraman and that Bennett, 28, who wore a military uniform in court, ``seemed to be a journalist.'' Bennett's hometown was not known.
Michael Skibbie, an American lawyer representing Caraballo, confirmed that his client was a journalist from New York City, but declined to elaborate. Skibbie said his defense would rest on distinguishing Caraballo, who appeared in court in jeans and a black T-shirt, from the two other men.
``I don't think anyone has said that he played an active part'' in the alleged crimes, Skibbie said.
-------- POLITICS
Running scared
Bin Laden was captured long ago, Reagan's death was hushed up and the coming election has been fixed. The White House's obsession with secrecy has turned America into a nation of conspiracy theorists
Jonathan Raban
The Guardian July 21, 2004 http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1265652,00.html
Dinnertime is the hour of the conspiracy theory here in Seattle. I've lost count of the times I've been told - always on excellent, but unnameable authority - that Osama bin Laden is already in American hands and that the Bush administration is waiting for the right moment to announce his capture. Ronald Reagan's body was on ice for many months, and his death was only announced when it became necessary to drive Abu Ghraib off the front page. Everybody knows, or thinks they know, that the administration will manipulate the intricate bells and whistles of homeland security to ensure the president's re-election. If terrorists don't strike in the run-up to November 2 (as most people assume they will) the level of alert will be jigged up to red, arrests will be made, the country will be declared saved from an evil plot and mass casualties, and Bush will storm past Kerry in the polls.
The latest theory comes hot from the mouths of anonymous agents in the Pakistan security service: the White House is putting immense pressure on the Musharraf regime to deliver "high-value targets", in the shape of Bin Laden and Mullah Omar, on July 26, 27, or 28, to spectacularly eclipse the opening of the Democratic party convention in Boston. Or, if that's too tall an order, they must be caught before polling day. My informant tells me that a senior Pakistani general, recently on a visit to DC, said: "If we don't find these guys by the election, they're going to stick this whole nuclear mess up our asshole."
Much the most interesting thing about this last story is the character of my informant - not, as usual, Jack talking from the barbecue pit, but the sober and conservative New Republic, a magazine fiercely pro-Israel, which enthusiastically supported the invasion of Iraq. A respected senior editor, John B Judis, is one of the three authors of the July Surprise? piece in the July 19 issue. Conspiracy theorising is coming out of the internet closet and going mainstream. Or, to put it another way, conspiracy theorising is fast becoming a legitimate means of reporting on a government so secretive that unnamed Pakistani security types may well be the best informed sources on the Bush administration's domestic policies and strategems.
Even before September 11, secrecy was this administration's hallmark, as when it invoked the principle of executive privilege to conceal from public view the proceedings of vice-president Cheney's energy taskforce. After 9/11, secrecy was advanced, proudly, as a guiding principle for a nation at war. In his address to the joint session of Congress on September 20 2001, Bush spoke of a new kind of war, "unlike any other we have ever known", that would include "covert operations, secret even in success." Donald Rumsfeld quoted Winston Churchill to the effect that in war "truth must be protected with a bodyguard of lies". Dick Cheney talked of a war to be fought "in the shadows: This is a mean, nasty, dangerous, dirty business. We have to operate in that arena". The great fear, shared by people not customarily given to paranoia, is that the Bush administration has taken these tactics for conducting a secret, asymmetric war and applied them wholesale to the day-to-day governance of the US.
To live in America now - at least to live in a port city like Seattle - is to be surrounded by the machinery and rhetoric of covert war, in which everyone must be treated as a potential enemy until they can prove themselves a friend. Surveillance and security devices are everywhere: the spreading epidemic of razor wire, the warnings in public libraries that the FBI can demand to know what books you're borrowing, the Humvee laden with troops in combat fatigues, the Coast Guard gunboats patrolling the bay, the pat-down searches and x-ray machines, the nondescript grey boxes, equipped with radio antennae, that are meant to sniff out pathogens in the air. It's difficult to leave the house now without encountering at least one of these reminders that we are being watched and that we live in deadly peril - though in peril of quite what is hard to say.
On May 26 - a black day for sallow-skinned grocers and news vendors - the attorney general, John Ashcroft, flanked by FBI director, Robert S Mueller, called a press conference to tell the nation of some "disturbing intelligence" that he'd recently received: preparations for an attack on the mainland US were 90% complete; likely targets included the upcoming G8 summit in Georgia, July 4 celebrations, and the Democratic and Republican conventions in Boston and New York. Al-Qaida intended to "hit America hard". Mueller produced seven mugshots - six were of men of, as they say, Middle Eastern appearance - and told us to keep a sharp lookout for these "armed and dangerous" characters. For a few hours, the country shivered in anticipation of the horror about to descend on it, and phone lines to the FBI were jammed with excited descriptions of neighbourhood news vendors and grocers.
Yet the colour-coded alert system remained at yellow, and within the next couple of days it became clear that Ashcroft's disturbing new intelligence was many weeks old, and that much of it came from a discredited source - an Islamist propaganda site on the internet well known to journalists for its daily stream of bloodcurdling boasts. Because Ashcroft had trespassed on the turf of homeland security chief Tom Ridge, and his freelance terror warning wasn't supported by the rest of the administration, we caught a rare glimpse of government Wizard-of-Ozzery at work. Ashcroft, it turned out, knew no more than the rest of us. Like us, he or his flunkies passed their time surfing the net. When he told us that evidence for his grim warning had been "corroborated on a variety of levels", did he mean anything more than that it could be found on more than one website?
Ashcroft's performance confirmed the suspicion held by many that the Bush administration is in the cynical business of spreading generalised, promiscuous anxiety through the American populace, a sense of imminent but inexact catastrophe, for reasons that may have little to do with national security and much to do with political advantage. In the past three years, in the name of homeland security, a vast, coast-to-coast, combined surveillance and people-scaring apparatus has been assembled, on a scale, and with an intimate reach, never before seen in a democracy. The administration appears to be still learning to play this marvellous instrument, and wrong notes, such as those struck by Ashcroft, are common. But practice makes perfect.
Obsession with secrecy is a contagion directly transmitted from government to people. Just as the administration now moves in Cheney's arena of shadows, so masses of ordinary Americans are seeing themselves as self-appointed master-spies, keeping watch on their government in the same covert way that the government supposedly keeps watch on al-Qaida. The backyard barbecue sounds like a convention of spooks. "Chatter" has been heard, though its source can't be revealed ... In such talk, Bush, Cheney & co are held to be as scheming, devious and hard to catch as Bin Laden himself.
The same tone is to be heard in current American journalism. On July 15, the solemnly judicious New York Times began a front-page story with the sentence, "In the annals of Washington conspiracy theories, the latest one, about vice-president Dick Cheney's future on the Republican ticket, is as ingenious as it is far-fetched." Buttering its bread lavishly on both sides, the paper went on to expend 40 serious column inches on the far-fetched story. Since we can no longer get real news of the administration, we now get intelligence, which is something altogether different.
This accounts for liberal America's ready embrace of Fahrenheit 9/11, Michael Moore's slapdash confection of strong documentary footage and connect-the-dots paranoia. Whenever Moore puts himself in the centre of the picture, he's pure Barbecue Man, brimming with "intel" that sounds even older and less reliable than that of Ashcroft. But Moore has rightly gauged the mood of his audience. People are hungry for classified information on their rulers, in part because their rulers are so busy collecting classified information on them, and Fahrenheit 9/11 promotes the happy illusion that, for once, the magnetometers and security cameras have been turned on the president and his gang.
This is an extraordinary moment in American history. Half the country - including all the people I know best - believes it is trembling on the very lip of outright tyranny, while the other half believes that only the Bush administration stands between it and national collapse into atheism, socialism, black helicopters, and gay marriage. November 2 looms as a date of dreadful consequence. A bumper sticker, popular among the sort of people I hang out with, reads: Bush-Cheney '04 - The Last Vote You'll Ever Have To Cast. That's funny, but it belongs to the genre of humour in which the laugh is likely to die in your throat - and none of the people who sport the sticker on their cars are smiling. They are too busy airing conspiracy theories, which may or may not turn out to be theories.
-------- investigations
9/11 Report to Cite 10 Missed Opportunities
Panel Faults Two Administrations but Doesn't Call Attacks Preventable
By Dan Eggen and Mike Allen
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, July 21, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A127-2004Jul20.html
The final report by the commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks details as many as 10 missed opportunities by the Bush and Clinton administrations to detect or derail the deadly terrorist hijackings, but the panel stops short of saying the attacks should have been prevented, according to government officials and others familiar with the document.
The report, to be released publicly tomorrow, includes a list of 10 "operational opportunities" that the government missed to potentially unravel the Sept. 11 plot, said a government official who has read the document. Six of the incidents listed came during the Bush administration and four were during the Clinton years, this official said.
But the nearly 600-page report acknowledges that many of the opportunities were long shots and that others would have required a lucky sequence of events to alter the outcome, said sources who declined to be identified because the commission wants the document kept secret until its release.
Another government official who has been briefed on the report said the tally of missed opportunities includes the CIA's failure to add two hijackers' names to a terrorism watch list; the FBI's handling of the August 2001 arrest of Zacarias Moussaoui, who has been accused of conspiring in the plot; and several failed attempts to kill or capture Osama bin Laden. The report also notes, however, the inherent difficulties that intelligence agencies have in assembling a clear picture of a terrorist threat, one official said.
The list of missed opportunities is the latest revelation to emerge in recent days about the final report of the panel, known formally as the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States. The report details broad government failures in connection with the Sept. 11 plot and recommends a wide-ranging restructuring that would include a Cabinet-level intelligence director to oversee the CIA, the FBI and other intelligence agencies.
The report also concludes that al Qaeda's relationship with Iran and its client, the Hezbollah militant group, was far deeper and more long-standing than its links with Iraq, which never established operational ties with the terrorist group, said officials familiar with the document.
Among the newest findings is evidence, disclosed in media reports this week, that as many as 10 of the Sept. 11 hijackers transited through Iran before the hijackings.
The findings will again put the panel in the middle of a political battle over claims by President Bush, Vice President Cheney and other administration officials that Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda may have had significant ties. Bush said on Monday that U.S. officials were now probing possible Iranian links to the Sept. 11 attacks.
Commission and government officials stress there is no evidence indicating that Tehran knowingly aided in the Sept. 11 plot. But Iran's apparent willingness to allow al Qaeda members to roam across its borders underscores the complicated relationship that emerged between them despite historic animosity between Sunni and Shiite Muslims. There is compelling evidence that Shiite Iran continued to give al Qaeda leaders haven even after the Sept. 11 attacks, according to the commission report and other intelligence sources.
Yesterday, the commission's chairman, Thomas H. Kean (R), and vice chairman, Lee H. Hamilton (D), briefed House GOP leaders on the report. Democratic leaders are to be briefed today.
Over 20 months, the 10-member bipartisan commission has tread carefully on the overarching question of whether the attacks could have been, or should have been, prevented. Kean and Hamilton have said at various times that the attacks could conceivably have been thwarted, but they have stopped short of saying prevention was likely or reasonable.
The panel decided several months ago that it would not include such a definitive judgment in its final report, said one commission member interviewed this week. Rather, this commissioner said, the decision was made to outline missed opportunities while acknowledging the tenacity and adaptability of al Qaeda in reaching its goal.
"There clearly were many opportunities out there that were not taken advantage of," said the commissioner, who declined to talk publicly because of the embargo on releasing the report. "From that, some will conclude it could have been prevented, others will say it might have been prevented and the rest will say it's impossible to tell. . . . We said we couldn't get an answer to this."
Yet by detailing a list of missed opportunities, the Sept. 11 commission intends to send the message that different actions by government officials in the years leading up to the attacks could have had a profound impact on the plot's outcome, officials who have seen the report said.
In a series of interim staff reports issued this year, along with questioning of witnesses in public hearings, the commission has focused intensely on the Bush administration's actions in the summer of 2001 amid a heightened state of alert about an impending al Qaeda attack. Former counterterrorism coordinator Richard A. Clarke testified that the Bush administration was distracted in its first eight months and was less aggressive than the Clinton administration in addressing terrorism.
Two officials familiar with the report said several of the missed opportunities identified by the commission occurred during this time. After arresting Moussaoui, for example, the FBI failed to get a warrant to search his belongings and the bureau's acting director was not briefed on the case, although CIA Director George J. Tenet was, according to commission testimony.
The commission's report will also examine at length a series of missteps and lapses that began with the CIA's failure to adequately follow up on a meeting of al Qaeda associates in Malaysia in January 2000 attended by two future hijackers, Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almihdhar.
The CIA neglected to add their names to a terrorist watch list to prevent them from entering the United States, and the FBI was slow and meek in its response once notified, according to previous findings and testimony.
Staff writer Walter Pincus contributed to this report.
--------
Former FBI Translator Sibel Edmonds Calls Current 9/11 Investigation Inadequate
By Jim Hogue
Jul 21, 2004
http://www.axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/article_10258.shtml
INTRODUCTION: Sibel Edmonds and Behrooz Sarshar, beginning in December of 2001, began filing reports to their superiors at the FBI. These reports could lead to the collapse of a corrupt power structure that has a stranglehold on the very institutions that are obligated to control it. We cannot excuse these institutions, for while they fiddle, they pass death sentences on their own troops, and on the people of Afghanistan and Iraq.
On April 30th, Sibel Edmonds was my guest for 50 minutes on WGDR radio. What follows is an edited transcript of the interview. The editing is for the sake of a more readable piece.
Sibel Edmonds is a former FBI translator. She blew the whistle on the cover-up of intelligence that names some of the culprits who orchestrated the 9/11 attacks. These culprits are protected by the Justice Department, the State Department, the FBI, the White House and the Senate Judiciary Committee. They are foreign nationals and Americans. Ms. Edmonds is under two gag orders that forbid her to testify in court or mention the names of the people or the countries involved.
THE INTERVIEW
JH: The people who have so far been interviewed on this program have all been authors and researchers, and here we have someone who, for the most part, has first-hand information. Ladies and Gentlemen, your guest is Sibel Edmonds, formerly of the FBI, a translator who joined the FBI shortly after 9/11.
Ms. Edmonds, what I'll do is invite you to tell us whatever you would like--your stint with the FBI--and what the brouhaha with Ashcroft and company is all about.
SE: I started working for the Bureau immediately after 9/11 and I was performing translations for several languages: Farsi, Turkish, and Azerbaijani. And I do have top-secret clearance. And after I started working for the Bureau, most of my translation duties included translations of documents and investigations that actually started way before 9/11. And certain documents were being sent that needed to be re-translated for various reasons, and of course certain documents had to be translated for the first time due to the backlog.
During my work there I came across some very significant issues that I started reporting in December of 2001 to the mid-level management within the FBI. They said to basically leave it alone, because if they were to get into those issues it would end up being a can of worms. And after I didn't see any response from this mid-level bureaucratic management I took it to higher levels all the way up to [assistant director] Dale Watson and Director Mueller. And, again, I was asked not to take this any further and just let it be. And if I didn't do that they would retaliate against me.
At that point, which would be around February 2002, they came and they confiscated my computer, because, they said, they were suspecting that I was communicating with certain Senate members and taking this issue outside the Bureau. And, at that point, I was not. They did not find anything in my computer after they confiscated it. And they asked me to take a polygraph as to the allegations and reports I'd made. I volunteered and I took the polygraph and passed it without a glitch. They have already confirmed this publicly.
In March 2002 I took this issue to the Senate Judiciary Committee and also I filed it with the Department of Justice Inspector General's office. And as per the Senate Judiciary Committee's request the IG started an expedited investigation on these serious issues; and they promised the Senate Judiciary Committee that their report for these investigations would be out by fall 2002 latest. And here we are in April 2004 and this report is not being made public, and they are citing "state privilege" and "national security" for not making this report public.
Three weeks after I went to the Senate Judiciary Committee the Bureau terminated my contract, and they cited "government's convenience." I started working with the Senate Judiciary Committee that was investigating this case, and I appeared before the Inspector General's office for their investigation several times, and I also requested documents regarding these reports under the Freedom of Information Act; and they blocked this by citing again the "state secret privilege" and "national security" refusing to make these documents public.
On October 18th 2002 Attorney General Ashcroft came out personally, in public, asserted this rare "state secret privilege" on everything that had to do with my case. And they cited "diplomatic relations" and certain "foreign relations" that would be "at stake" if I were to take this issue and make it public. And, since then, this has been acting as a gag on my case.
I testified before the [9/11] commission on February 11th 2004, and as I said, I have been waiting for this report that they [the Attorney General's office] have been blocking for a year and a half from becoming public. The information I requested under the Freedom of Information Act has been blocked for two years. And I have been campaigning for the past three months trying to get the Senate Judiciary Committee that has the oversight authority and responsibility to start its own public hearings. However, this request is again being blocked. Now they [AG] are citing this upcoming election as reason. And here I am.
JH: And it is the Attorney General who is blocking your testimony.
SE: Senator Leahy, on April 8, 2004, sent a very strong letter to Attorney General Ashcroft, citing my case stating that he, Senator Leahy, has been asking questions, and has a lot of issues that have not been addressed, and asking AG Ashcroft to come and provide answers. And AG Ashcroft for the past two years has refused. So he [Leahy] is calling for a public hearing. However, Senator Hatch, who is the Republican Chairman of the Senate, has been a road block. And Senator Grassley [a Republican member of the Senate Judiciary Committee] went on the record with New York Observer's Gail Sheehy and said that Senator Hatch is blocking this investigation from taking place and for this public hearing to be held by the Senate Judiciary Committee.
JH: So Hatch has the power to keep Leahy and Grassley....
SE: Correct. And now it is becoming a partisan issue. However, I keep reminding them that this issue is not a new issue that has come out for this election. This issue has been in the courts for two years and two months now.
JH: I've watched Hatch perform since the Contra Hearings in the mid 1980s, and I can assure you that for Hatch, everything is a partisan issue. You have a tough one.
SE: We have to remind the people: Congress has the constitutional obligation and public responsibility to oversee these issues and the Department of Justice's operations. That's why they are elected. That's why they are there. That's what they are getting paid for.
JH: Do you think that Leahy and Grassley are going to try to plow ahead with this, or do you think that there is a back door deal with Hatch?
SE: Well....as far as I see, Senator Leahy has been trying, and it's a strong letter that he issued a few weeks ago. [Ms. Edmonds refers here to the GPO's PDF (Senate--April 8, 2004; pages s4012-4014) regarding Ashcroft's appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2003. Senator Leahy describes the inaction of Attorney General Ashcroft since their first meeting on September 19th 2001 as a "flagrant avoidance of accountability."]
However, I'm very disappointed with Senator Grassley's office and his staff members. They initially were very supportive. But what I am getting from their office every time I call is, "Well this issue is under the Inspector General," and that their hands are tied. And then I press further and ask, "Well, what do you mean, 'our hands are tied'? Who's tying your hands? Untie it. Let's get it untied." They don't have any response. They say, "Well, this issue is very complex, and as you know, it is being investigated." And I'm not seeing any issue being investigated. What I'm seeing is that this issue is being covered up, and relentlessly being covered up, in consideration of "state privilege," which people are calling "the neutron bomb of all privilege."
JH: I can assure you that there are probably thirty issues just like yours that are being covered up. And they are allowing reporters, writers, internet contributors, and journalists from around the world to do these investigations, because they know that most Americans will never hear any of that. But as soon as someone like yourself gets too close to actually finding out who did anything, "state privilege" or something....
SE: "National security" as a classification.
JH: Why that makes us more secure, to let the people guilty of 9/11 run around free is, of course, the question that no one is willing to deal with.
I have a question having to do with "mid-level" management at the FBI. Why do you think that mid-level FBI management would care enough to stop you from doing your job?
SE: This was mainly for the reason of accountability. As you know, and as the chairman for the 9/11 Commission [Thomas Kean] answered during Tim Russert's show: to this day, not a single person has been held accountable. And certain issues, yes, they were due to a certain level of incompetence. But there were certain other issues--you know they keep talking about this "wall," and not having communication. I beg to differ on that, because there are certain instances where the Bureau is being asked by the State Department not to pursue certain investigations or certain people or certain targets of an investigation--simply citing "diplomatic relations." And what happens is, instead of targeting those people who are directly related to these illegal terrorist activities, they just let them walk free.
JH: And they interrogate people who are trying to make voting safe.
SE: And that is hypocritical. I see people detained for simple INS violations. On the other hand I have seen several, several top targets for these investigations of these terrorist activities that were allowed to leave the country--I'm not talking about weeks, I'm talking about months after 9/11.
JH: And there were four major FBI investigations, not counting yours, that were squelched in Phoenix, Minneapolis, Chicago and New York.
SE: Correct.
JH: And yours was even outside of that.
SE: Correct.
JH: So, obviously, we have mid-level FBI people who have been told something. It was the mid-level FBI people who knew enough to squelch many of these investigations before they went further. So how did they know to do that? Can all of them have been incompetent?
SE: No. Absolutely not.
JH: So they got the word down from Mueller, probably.
SE: I cannot confirm that for sure, but I can tell you that there is so much involvement, that if they did let this information out, and if they were to hold real investigations--I'm not talking about this semi-investigation they're holding under this "Joint Inquiry"--the pure show of the 9/11 Commission that has been getting the mass media's attention. If they were to do real investigations we would see several significant high level criminal prosecutions in this country. And that is something that they are not going to let out. And, believe me; they will do everything to cover this up. And I am appalled. I am really surprised. I'm taken back by seeing the mass media's reaction to this. They are the window to our government's operation and what are they doing?
JH: We've been screaming about it for a long time. And it goes on.
SE: And you see many people just turning away from these channels of mass media, and they're just turning in to alternative providers, because they just see what's happening.
JH: I have another question: when the gag order was written, it had to do with "diplomatic relations." Right?
SE: That is what Attorney General Ashcroft cited.
JH: Are you allowed to say that it's the Saudis?
SE: I cannot name any country. And I would emphasize that it's plural. I understand the Saudis have been named because fifteen of the nineteen hijackers were from Saudi Arabia. However, the names of people from other countries, and semi-legit organizations from other countries, to this day, have not been made public.
JH: And the information that you have been gagged on has to do with that specifically.
SE: Correct. And specifically with that and their ties to people here in this country today.
JH: I understand why you can't say anything about this, but there are several books out about the Bush ties to the Saudis and the bin Ladens in particular. And in David Griffin's book, The New Pearl Harbor, there is a very good synopsis of the ISI, which is the Pakistani intelligence service. He shows the direct connections between the CIA, the ISI, and Mohamed Atta. He makes a very convincing case that the Pakistani ISI had been helping to plan 9/11 for a long time.
I don't imagine that you are allowed to say much about that.
SE: You are correct. But I can tell you that the issue, on one side, boils down to money--a lot of money. And it boils down to people and their connections with this money, and that's the portion that, even with this book, has not been mentioned to this day. Because then it starts touching some people in high places.
JH: Can you explain more about what money you are talking about? "The most significant information that we were receiving did not come from counter-terrorism investigations, and I want to emphasize this. It came from counter-intelligence, and certain criminal investigations, and issues that have to do with money laundering operations."
--Sibel Edmonds, former FBI translator
SE: The most significant information that we were receiving did not come from counter-terrorism investigations, and I want to emphasize this. It came from counter-intelligence, and certain criminal investigations, and issues that have to do with money laundering operations.
You get to a point where it gets very complex, where you have money laundering activities, drug related activities, and terrorist support activities converging at certain points and becoming one. In certain points - and they [the intelligence community] are separating those portions from just the terrorist activities. And, as I said, they are citing "foreign relations" which is not the case, because we are not talking about only governmental levels. And I keep underlining semi-legit organizations and following the money. When you do that the picture gets grim. It gets really ugly.
....JH: Let me read you a short quote from Dr. Griffin's book, quoting from War and Globalization: The Truth Behind September 11 by Michel Chossudovsky and ask you to comment on it. "...The transfer of money to Atta [$325,000], in conjunction with the presence of the ISI chief in Washington during the week, [is] the missing link behind 9/11....The evidence confirms that al-Qaeda is supported by Pakistan's ISI (and it is amply documented that) the ISI owes its existence to the CIA."
SE: I cannot comment on that. But I can tell that once, and if, and when this issue gets to be, under real terms, investigated, you will be seeing certain people that we know from this country standing trial; and they will be prosecuted criminally.
JH: Here's a question that you might be able to answer: What is al-Qaeda?
SE: This is a very interesting and complex question. When you think of al-Qaeda, you are not thinking of al-Qaeda in terms of one particular country, or one particular organization. You are looking at this massive movement that stretches to tens and tens of countries. And it involves a lot of sub-organizations and sub-sub-organizations and branches and it's extremely complicated. So to just narrow it down and say al-Qaeda and the Saudis, or to say it's what they had at the camp in Afghanistan, is extremely misleading. And we don't hear the extent of the penetration that this organization and the sub-organizations have throughout the world, throughout their networks and throughout their various activities. It's extremely sophisticated. And then you involve a significant amount of money into this equation. Then things start getting a lot of overlap-- money laundering, and drugs and terrorist activities and their support networks converging in several points. That's what I'm trying to convey without being too specific. And this money travels. And you start trying to go to the root of it and it's getting into somebody's political campaign, and somebody's lobbying. And people don't want to be traced back to this money.
JH: [Laughter] I guess not. This leads me to think of a beef I have with Seymour Hersh that I'd like to bring up with you? Do you know who he is?
SE: Yes.
JH: He seems to presume that the U.S. Intelligence Services want to collect the kind of intelligence that you have been gagged from repeating. I have suggested to him in a letter that there is an alternative to incompetence as to why intelligence doesn't get through to where it is supposed to go. But he's not interested. He doesn't seem to want to take that step.
SE: Not many people are willing to do that.
JH: But there are a lot of people who have laid out the road map.
SE: But people and your listeners have to go further than that. I understand this administration and their anti-transparency, anti-accountability and their corrupt attitudes. But that aside, we are not made of only one branch of government. We are supposed to have a system of checks and balances. And I am saying, how about the other two branches? And putting the pressure on our representatives in the Senate and the Congress, and the court system. They should be counter-acting this corruption, but they are sitting there silent. And they are just an audience, just watching it happen. Senators Leahy and Grassley and Hatch have the obligation to do that. It's not that they can choose not to do it. They don't have that luxury. This needs to be demanded of them. People need to pick up their phones. They need to write to these people and say, "You'd better fulfill your responsibilities."
JH: And you know what Senator Leahy is going to do? He's going to forward his letter, his Senate testimony, on to us to prove how hard he is working.
SE: I saw a reporter the other day who had just spoken to Senator Leahy. And Senator Leahy said that, well...he doesn't know what the next step will be. And it came to the issue of the hearing, and investigating this case, and he basically ended the conversation. And I think that with a little more pressure from us, from you and from your listeners, we can change that.
JH: Some folks up here think of him as Saint Patrick, I'm afraid. Be that as it may, are you aware of the on-line news service, TRUTHOUT?
SE: I've heard of it.
JH: There is an article in the April sixth TRUTHOUT by Paul Sperry from WorldNet Daily about you and one of your colleagues...
SE: Mr. Sarshar?
JH: Behrooz Sarshar.
SE: He is another translator who worked in the same department as I did. Mr. Sarshar wanted to make this information public, however he just wanted to go to the Senate Judiciary Committee and receive their support and protection under the whistleblower protection act. And I facilitated this meeting, and several 9/11 family members and I took Mr. Sarshar to the Senate Judiciary Committee meeting in Senator Grassley's office. Mr. Sarshar provided them with detailed information, however, to this day Senator Grassley has not acted upon that, and he passed the buck to the 9/11 Commission. Next we arranged for a briefing between the 9/11 Commission and Mr. Sarshar, and he went there on February 12th, 2004 and he provided the investigators for the 9/11 Commission, for almost three hours with all the details of the investigation that had to do with the 9/11 terrorist attack. He gave them the names of certain assets used by the Bureau for at least twelve years. He gave them contact information for certain agents who were aware of these issues. And they, themselves, wanted to come and talk about it, but they needed certain protection. Mr. Sarshar provided them with all this information and where to look for these documents etc. and, to this day, the Senate Judiciary Committee and the 9/11 Commission have been passing this buck back and forth.
So, all this information has been sitting in front of them. They have not called any of those witnesses introduced by Mr. Sarshar to them. And during the 9/11 Commission hearing with [FBI] Director Mueller, none of these questions were asked. In fact they did not have any questions for Director Mueller, and they left it at that [except for the remark by Mr. Ben-Veniste that they should be addressing the translation issues behind closed doors.] And "behind closed doors" has become a black hole for me because I have been in these closed door sessions so many times within the Senate, within the Inspector General's office, within the 9/11 Commission. And whatever information you are providing them behind these closed doors, you know for sure that that information will stay there and will never get out.
That is why we are demanding to have public hearings with the Senate Judiciary Committee on the Senate floor and open to the public.
JH: Do you think the Ellen Mariani case will help any of this? [Ellen Mariani is a 9/11 widow whose attorney, Philip Berg, is suing the United States under the RICO statute for the death of Mr. Mariani at the WTC.]
SE: I have read about her case. But there is another lawsuit: the Motley Rice legal firm that is representing over a thousand family members. They sent me a subpoena to provide them with a deposition. And one day before that deposition took place, the government attorneys intervened and asked the court for a hearing and they quashed this subpoena request. They sent eight heavyweight attorneys from the Department of Justice, and Mr. Ashcroft's right hand. And basically put on this show in front of the judge, saying, "Sibel Edmonds, if you were to provide this information, our national security and our state secret privilege and our foreign relations will be destroyed. Therefore, Your Honor, we want you to quash this subpoena." Motley Rice told the judge that they wanted to ask for information that has already been made public. The government maintained that even though the information was public, it was still classified. And Judge Walton granted their request.
JH: There is some hope coming from statements made by former FBI counterintelligence agent I.C.Smith who thinks that 9/11 would have been stopped, had the FBI been allowed to do its job. He is strongly critical of FBI assistant director Dale Watson.
Do you believe that 9/11 could have been stopped if information like yours had been properly handled?
SE: At the very least, as early as May/June 2001, we could have issued a red code alert to the public, and we would have issued this very urgent warning system, which would, in return, have increased our Airport and INS security. Could we have prevented in 100% certainty? I don't think anything is that certain. However, we would have had a very, very good chance for preventing it. And agent Smith and I, we crossed the same person, because my case has to do with Dale Watson too.
JH: The trouble is: once you make this information public, you mess up the plan. And if one of the investigations from Phoenix, Chicago, New York, or Minneapolis had been followed through, let alone all four, it would have burst the bubble.
SE: Look, Jim, they had those four pieces you mentioned, and far more than that, believe me, far more than that. And that has not been made public. And for them to say that we did not have any specific information is just outrageous. Because what were they waiting for? An affidavit signed by bin Laden?
JH: "Hey Dumb Ass! Coming 9/11!" So their statement that they didn't have the information is outrageous.
SE: And they have been backing off from that. About two weeks before Condoleezza Rice appeared before the 9/11 Commission she made the statement, "We had no specific information." And I told the press that that was an outrageous lie. That was printed on the front page of The Independent [UK] and several other papers here. And what she did during the hearing was very interesting. She corrected herself saying, "Well, I made a mistake. I should not have said 'we.' I should say that I personally did not have specific information." And that is exactly what I stated. "We" includes the FBI, and therefore I can tell you with 100% certainty that that is an outrageous lie.
Yet the Commission didn't ask, "Well, who is the rest of this 'we'?"
JH: They don't want to know.
SE: No, they don't want to know. This is the heart of it. The attitude of the Senate members has been "See no evil. Hear no evil. Just let it go." And you can't let that happen. The only people I have seen who have been truly pushing for the truth are the family members. All they have asked for are three things. They want the truth, the facts, the real facts, the straightforward truth. They want accountability. And they want us to improve our security. That's it. They have no other agenda. And now they're smearing their names.
JH: They'll never run out of people to smear. Everybody who talks gets smeared.
SE: I have been given a warning that my turn is coming. I have been waiting for this for two years and two months, Jim. And they have not done it to this day, and they have not even denied anything. But I have been told to expect something to occur soon.
JH: Well, they have to figure out the angle.
[At this point we opened the lines for callers, as the scheduled time for the interview was drawing to a close.]
CALLER: But, of course, you are trying to spoil our American Dream. We want to dream in peace! What are you doing? [Laughter] Let us sleep!
JH: That's it. That's what they're up to.
CALLER: The depth of that psychology is incredible. It goes from A to Z through our life cycle. It's so disempowering. It's so depressing. Well, thank you for being lunatics out there who are trying to get yourselves shot. [Laughter]
JH: That's okay. Anytime. Just for you. Bye bye.
SE: Even from people from whom I've been receiving support, so many times you run across people who say, "Yeah, it's terrible. I understand. And it's very courageous what you are doing." But you know how this thing is. It's a boat you can't rock. And that is what is allowing these people to take everything this far. We need to stop saying we can't rock this boat when it needs to be rocked. Listen, we pay for this boat. We elect this boat. It's our money that maintains this boat. And we are the ultimate boss here. If this boat or some section of it needs rocking, you bet we have the right and we have the power to do it. And we have the power to demand it. Otherwise we are making ourselves powerless.
JH: And if we don't do it, we don't deserve it.
SE: Correct.
2nd CALLER: [Question re 9/11 stand down of the air defense system]
SE: I don't have direct knowledge of it. And I have been trying to stay within what exactly I know--the exact truth--not the conspiracy theories--no exaggerations--everything that I know, that I came across that is well documented where I can say, "Pull out this document; pull out this evidence. Make this document public; make that document public."
However, I have been working with other people who have been trying to address other aspects of this issue.
2nd CALLER: The issue of whether or not they new it was going to happen becomes somewhat moot when you look at the air force stand down. They new it was going to happen. Well, who did it then? There was a show on TUC [Time of Useful Consciousness] radio with....
JH: Michael Ruppert.
2nd CALLER: Yes. He went step-by-step of what actually happened with the Air Force stand-down. It's so obvious that we're in some sort of farcical dream, and what [the previous caller] said was quite relevant, that most people don't want to wake up from this. So I was just curious. I appreciate your work very much. And those are the two things that stand out to me--the Pentagon and the air force stand down. But what else can you really do at this point than just make a little noise? Anyway, thank you for doing what you are doing.
SE: He has a point there. There are so many questions that they don't want answered. And they remain unanswered. And I'm afraid they will not be answered unless we have a real investigation. And to this day there has been no real investigation. Without this, people cannot just let them wrap it up and say, "OK this is the report from the 9/11 Commission," where anything that has any value is redacted because it is top secret classified information.
JH: And pretty much all the shoes have dropped. The evidence at this point is overwhelming, and still nobody seems to be doing anything about it.
2nd CALLER: Right, but if you look at the Warren Commission--you look at the magic bullet theory--you know that's official! But who buys it? What can we do? This is going to happen. They're going to pull it off because the press won't report the truth.
SE: That goes to the heart of the matter: The media, as I said is the window to the government, and that window has turned into a wall.
JH: We can have a little more faith in the average person despite what [the two callers] say. I just did an informal survey in southern Virginia in a factory of over a hundred people, and I asked, "Would you be surprised to learn that the Bush Administration was complicit in the 9/11 attacks?" 100% responded, "No." So it's not like people are afraid to find out information. They go through life struggling, working eight hours a day at least. They don't believe anything the media or the government tells them any more. They are able to except the fact that Bush & Co was responsible for 9/11; and they don't care. They almost expect it.
2nd CALLER: I would have suspected the opposite. These are emotional issues where people don't want their bubble burst. They say, "Well, the government would never kill their own people." Psychopaths go oversees and kill people with war machines. They're over the notion of patriotism. And I think that for most people it's hard to make that step.
JH: I'm not saying they made or didn't make a step. I'm just saying that, for these workers, the machinations of government are beyond their concern. But Ms. Edmonds has to leave shortly....
2nd CALLER: OK I'll let you go. I appreciate very much what both of you have done, and thank you very much.
JH: Ms. Edmonds, thanks for being our guest.
SE: Thank you very much. I'm honored to be on your show and I hope I'll be on again. And I hope you will able to get Senator Leahy. I'd like to be able to have a chat with him. [Laughter]
JH: Fat chance. He withers at the thought.
SE: We're going to still be pounding. I'm preparing this petition, and it's going to be signed by many, many people and I'm going to be wheeling it in personally to both Senators Leahy and Grassley. And it will have some level of coverage. And once they see the cameras and the people, suddenly their personalities change. It's like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. They become very sweet.
JH: If you see either one of those two [Leahy or Grassley], I'd be more than happy to have either one them on - with you. Let's see what we can do.
SE: Okay, let's hope. Thank you, Jim. Bye.
EDITOR'S NOTE: Jim Hogue provided the following conclusion to this interview: "The facts reported by Sibel Edmonds and Behrooz Sarshar are incontrovertible. Result: Silence. And you must agree to be a part of this silence.The gag order permeates the White House, the Senate Judiciary Committee, all levels of the FBI, the CIA, the 9/11 Commission, the NSC, the Pentagon, the Republican Party, the Democratic Party, and the mass media. The media and the White House will next assassinate Miss Edmond's character, as they have done to others who haven't rolled over and played dead. Never in the course of human events has so great a story been covered up by so many on the orders of so few.
The likes of Seymour Hersh, Bob Woodard and Judith Miller should put their tails between their legs and slink away, while the obscure academic, Dr. David Ray Griffin, while candidate John Buchanan, citizen Eric Hufschmid, author Gore Vidal, independent journalists Michael Ruppert and Christopher Bollyn, and the 9/11 families are recognized among those who kept open the window to Democracy.
Miss Edmonds has challenged us to do our jobs as citizens. It isn't often that a phone call could change the course of history. Now is such a time."
http://baltimorechronicle.com/050704SibelEdmonds.shtml
--------
Grand Jury Steps Up Inquiry Into Possible Halliburton Ties to Iran
July 21, 2004
By T. Christian Miller and Peter Wallsten
Los Angeles Times
http://fairuse.1accesshost.com/news2/latimes230.htm
WASHINGTON - A Halliburton controversy erupted Tuesday, fueled by a grand jury investigation into whether the oil services giant violated federal sanctions by operating in Iran while Vice President Dick Cheney was running the company.
The investigation centers on Halliburton Products and Services Ltd., a subsidiary registered in the Cayman Islands and headquartered in Dubai that provided oil field services in Iran. The unit's operations in Iran included Cheney's stint as chief executive from 1995 to 2000, when he frequently urged the lifting of such sanctions.
Numerous U.S. companies operate in Iran, but under strict guidelines requiring that their subsidiaries have a foreign registry and no U.S. employees, and that they act independently of the parent company.
At issue is whether Halliburton's subsidiary met those criteria.
The Treasury Department has been investigating the matter since 2001. But Halliburton disclosed in public financial filings this week that the department had forwarded the case to the U.S. attorney in Houston for further investigation. The company said a federal grand jury had subpoenaed documents on its Iranian operations.
The Treasury Department refers such complaints only after finding evidence of "serious and willful violations" of the sanctions law, a government official said.
Sen. Frank R. Lautenberg (D-N.J.), whose office has provided information on the case to the Treasury Department, said Tuesday that Halliburton Products and Services was a sham that existed only to circumvent the sanctions.
"It's unconscionable that an American company would skirt the law to help Iran generate revenues," Lautenberg told reporters during a conference call arranged by the campaign of the presumed Democratic presidential nominee, Sen. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts.
Bush campaign spokesman Steve Schmidt called the allegations against Cheney baseless, and accused Democrats of trying to use Halliburton as a distraction. Cheney's office and the White House characterized the latest criticisms of Halliburton as political.
"The Democrats have made clear that their all-purpose strategy, no matter the issue, whether it's healthcare or John Kerry's plans to raise taxes or John Kerry's votes against our men and women in uniform or John Kerry's proposals to cut the intelligence budget, will be met by one word: Halliburton," Schmidt said. "The Kerry campaign has become increasingly flailing in their attacks as there has been increasing focus on John Kerry's record."
Democrats have long criticized Cheney for his connections to Halliburton, hoping to link the vice president to the company's contracts for Iraq reconstruction and its overbilling for services in that country. Cheney has denied any connection to the contracts.
The company has repeatedly found itself at the center of government investigations.
The Securities and Exchange Commission and the Justice Department are looking into allegations that top officials in a consortium that included a Halliburton subsidiary paid millions of dollars in bribes to win contracts in Nigeria. The Justice Department is also looking into reports that Halliburton officials took $6.3 million in kickbacks in Iraq. The Pentagon is examining whether the company overcharged U.S. taxpayers by more than $186 million for meals never served to U.S. troops abroad.
Treasury and Justice officials declined to comment on their inquiry into the Halliburton subsidiary.
Violation of the sanctions can result in criminal charges, and those found guilty can face 10 years in prison. A company can be fined as much as $500,000.
Lautenberg said that in the Iran case, the actions taken by the Republican-controlled Justice and Treasury departments showed that the accusations against Cheney were more than political.
He noted that the grand jury investigation comes amid a flurry of questions about Iran's role in terrorism against the United States.
The independent commission investigating the 2001 terrorist attacks is expected to conclude in a report due Thursday that several of the Sept. 11 hijackers passed through Iran on their way to the United States.
Lautenberg's office distributed copies of four letters from 1997 sent from a London arm of the Iranian state oil company to Halliburton Products and Services in Dubai.
The four letters, all requests for goods and services from the Halliburton subsidiary, included handwritten notations to specific individuals. Lautenberg's staff questioned whether the individuals worked for the foreign subsidiary or for a U.S. subsidiary, in violation of the sanctions.
Halliburton confirmed the authenticity of the documents, but said that two of the individuals were British citizens who had never worked for any U.S. Halliburton subsidiary.
The other two handwritten notations did not list first names of the individuals, and Halliburton said it was unable to locate records for them.
"These documents do not suggest that any violation of the applicable regulations occurred," Halliburton spokeswoman Wendy Hall said in a statement.
Hall said Halliburton's business in Iran had not violated any sanctions, and pledged full cooperation with the government's inquiry.
"It is important to understand, especially in the current political environment, that this is not a condemnation of the company, but a method of further studying the facts," Hall said of the grand jury subpoena. "We welcome a thorough review of any and all of the company's business."
The law forbids U.S. companies from doing business with countries considered by the U.S. government to be sponsors of terrorism. The list includes Iran, North Korea, Cuba and Sudan.
An executive order signed by President Clinton in 1995 specifically prohibits U.S. firms from activities that would benefit the Iranian petroleum industry. The order accuses Iran of sponsorship of international terrorism, undermining the Middle East peace process and developing weapons of mass destruction.
Development of petroleum resources, Clinton said at the time, "would provide new funds that the Iranian government could use to continue its current policies."
Halliburton's Iran operations are virtually all related to oil and gas, and generated at least $39 million in revenue last year, the company said.
The policy allowing U.S. firms to indirectly operate in prohibited countries has come under increasing attack.
One leading critic is New York City Comptroller William C. Thompson Jr., a Democrat who oversees the city's pension fund. He has launched an effort to persuade Halliburton and other firms he invests in to cut all ties to countries that sponsor terrorism.
A January report by CBS' "60 Minutes" featured Thompson and raised questions about the Halliburton subsidiary that does business in Iran.
In that report, a CBS reporter traveled to the company's Cayman Islands operations, only to find no such company there. Instead, the building is owned by a local bank.
A bank employee told the reporter that when mail arrived for the Halliburton subsidiary, it was forwarded directly to Houston.
-------- propaganda wars
Bush - 'I want to be the peace president'
Wed 21 July, 2004
By Adam Entous
(Reuters)
http://www.reuters.co.uk/newsPackageArticle.jhtml?type=worldNews&storyID=550630§ion=news
CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa - After launching two wars, President George W. Bush says he wants to be a "peace president" and has taken swipes at his Democratic rivals for being lawyers and weak on defence.
With polls showing public support for the war in Iraq in decline, Bush cast himself as a reluctant warrior and assured Americans they were "safer" as he campaigned in the battleground states of Iowa and Missouri against Democrat John Kerry and his running mate, former trial lawyer John Edwards.
"The enemy declared war on us," Bush told a re-election rally in Cedar Rapids. "Nobody wants to be the war president. I want to be the peace president... The next four years will be peaceful years." Bush used the words "peace" or "peaceful" a total of 20 times.
Bush has called himself a "war president" in leading the United States in a battle against terrorism brought about by the September 11, 2001, attacks on America. "I'm a war president. I make decisions here in the Oval Office in foreign policy matters with war on my mind," he said in February.
Despite a surge in attacks in Iraq and U.S. warnings that al Qaeda is plotting another major strike, Bush said U.S.-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq had already made America safer, and that his re-election would let him finish the job.
Ahead of the release of a report detailing the breakdown in intelligence and security before the September 11 attacks, Bush said, "We reorganised this government of ours to be better protect the people."
"For a while we were marching to war. Now we're marching to peace. ... America is a safer place. Four more years and America will be safer and the world will be more peaceful," Bush said.
But a few hours later, at an evening rally in St. Charles, Missouri, Bush warned "the world will drift towards tragedy" if America shows "weakness."
Bush was joined on the stump by his twin daughters, Jenna and Barbara, and campaign spokesman Scott Stanzel said the twins would pair up for campaign appearances away from their father starting Tuesday night in Missouri, Ohio and Pennsylvania. Stanzel said the events will be closed to the press.
Bush and Kerry are fighting hard in Iowa, which Bush lost to Democrat Al Gore in 2000 by just 4,144 votes, or roughly two votes for every precinct. Recent polls give Kerry a narrow lead, but a Kerry aide said the Iowa race and the one in Missouri remain a dead heat.
Bush won Missouri by 3 percentage points in 2000, and acknowledged in St. Charles that it would be a tough race this year.
At both rallies, he cast Kerry and Edwards as on the side of trial lawyers, who the president portrays as responsible for a flood of personal injury litigation that burdens the courts and is costly to small business. Edwards himself made his fortune as a trial lawyer.
Democrats get campaign contributions from the group, while many businesses tend to favour the Republicans.
"I'm not a lawyer, you'll be happy to hear," Bush said to cheers. "That's the other team. This is the pro-small business team."
The two-state swing was part of a weeklong offensive by Bush before the Democratic National Convention in Boston starting July 26.
--------
The hysterical skies
She survived a flight with 14 harmless Syrian musicians -- then spread 3,000 bigoted and paranoid words across the Internet. As a pilot and an American, I'm appalled.
July 21, 2004
salon.com
By Patrick Smith
http://www.majority.com/news/salon30.htm
In this space was supposed to be installment No. 6 of my multiweek dissertation on airports and terminals. The topic is being usurped by one of those nagging, Web-borne issues of the moment, in this case a reactionary scare story making the cyber-rounds during the past week.
The piece in question, "Terror in the Skies, Again?" http://www.womenswallstreet.com/WWS/article_landing.aspx?titleid=1&articleid=711 is the work of Annie Jacobsen, a writer for WomensWallStreet.com. Jacobsen shares the account of the emotional meltdown she and her fellow passengers experienced when, aboard a Northwest Airlines flight from Detroit to Los Angeles, a group of Middle Eastern passengers proceeded to act "suspiciously." I'll invite you to experience "Terror" yourself, but be warned it's quite long. It needs to be, I suppose, since ultimately it's a story about nothing, puffed and aggrandized to appear important.
The editors get the drama cooking with some foreboding music: "You are about to read an account of what happened," counsels a 70-word preamble. "The WWS Editorial Team debated long and hard about how to handle this information and ultimately we decided it was something that should be shared ... Here is Annie's story" [insert lower-octave piano chord here].
What follows are six pages of the worst grade-school prose, spring-loaded with mindless hysterics and bigoted provocation.
Fourteen dark-skinned men from Syria board Northwest's flight 327, seated in two separate groups. Some are carrying oddly shaped bags and wearing track suits with Arabic script across the back. During the flight the men socialize, gesture to one another, move about the cabin with pieces of their luggage, and, most ominous of all, repeatedly make trips to the bathroom. The author links the men's apparently irritable bladders to a report published in the Observer (U.K.) warning of terrorist plots to smuggle bomb components onto airplanes one piece at a time, to be secretly assembled in lavatories.
"What I experienced during that flight," breathes Jacobsen, "has caused me to question whether the United States of America can realistically uphold the civil liberties of every individual, even non-citizens, and protect its citizens from terrorist threats."
Intriguing, no? I, for one, fully admit that certain acts of airborne crime and treachery may indeed open the channels to a debate on civil liberties. Pray tell, what happened? Gunfight at 37,000 feet? Valiant passengers wrestle a grenade from a suicidal operative? Hero pilots beat back a cockpit takeover?
Well, no. As a matter of fact, nothing happened. Turns out the Syrians are part of a musical ensemble hired to play at a hotel. The men talk to one another. They glance around. They pee.
That's it?
That's it.
Now, in fairness to Jacobsen, I'll admit that in-flight jitters over the conspicuous presence of a group of young Arabs is neither unexpected nor, necessarily, irrational. She speaks of seven of the men standing in unison, a moment that, if unembellished, would have even the most culturally open-minded of us wide-eyed and grabbing our armrest. As everybody knows, it was not a gaggle of Canadian potato farmers who commandeered those jetliners on Sept. 11. See also the legacy of air crimes over the past several decades, from Pan Am 103 to the UTA bombing to the failed schemings of Ramzi Yousef, the culprits each time being young Arab males.
Air crews and passengers alike are thus prone to jumpiness should a certain template of race and behavior be filled. Jacobsen's folly is in not being able to step back from that jumpiness -- neither during the flight itself, at which point her worry and behavior are at least excusable, nor well after touching down safely. Speaking as a pilot, air travel columnist, and American, I find Jacobsen's 3,000-word ghost story of Arab boogeymen among the most overwrought and inflammatory tracts I've encountered in some time.
Most disturbing of all has been the pickup from Internet bloggers and news sources, including ABC, CNN, MSNBC and the New York Times. The writer hops a flight to California on which absolutely nothing of danger occurs, and the following are among the citations:
"Harrowing piece"
"The frightening true story"
"Disturbing account"
"Riveting article"
"An absolute must-read"
"Read all about the breaking Northwest airlines scare," advertises TheLosAngelesNews.com, suggesting perhaps a narrowly averted crash, a bomb defused during flight or a thwarted skyjacking. Click on over to hear instead about the toilet habits of a group of Syrian minstrels and one middle-aged woman's alarmist reaction to them. No matter; over the past week or so Jacobsen has found herself linked and excerpted in every last crevice of the Web. Those of you not convinced of just how paranoid and xenophobic Americans can be, look no further than the following online posts, which, along with thousands like them, have emerged in direct response to this story:
"You will never, ever, catch me on an airplane again!"
"My advice would be to de-plane as soon as I counted 14 Arabs as passengers. "
"Soon after 9/11 we were in a local McDonald's and a group of Middle Eastern men came in and got carry-out. They sat in their van for a while then headed North. I felt scared out of my wits. I wrote down a description of the vehicle and license, but never did anything with it. Guess next time I won't be so stupid."
Jacobsen spins her experience into a not-so-veiled call for racial profiling of airline passengers. Help me out with this one: If only those musicians had been interrogated prior to boarding, it would have been revealed they were, in fact ... musicians. (They had, of course, endured the same concourse X-ray and metal detector rigmarole as everyone else, and were in possession of valid passports and visas.)
My own feelings on passenger profiling are mixed, and I'm not as liberal on the issue as you might expect. However, I do think singling out a specific ethnicity for extra screening is less a racist idea than a wasteful and ineffective one. Does it not occur to people that Muslim radicals come in all complexions and from many nations -- from the heart of black Africa to the archipelagoes of Southeast Asia? (Many Syrians, no less, are fair-haired and light-skinned.) Does it not occur to people that terrorists are clever, resourceful and, in the end, bound to outwit such obvious snares? The notion that 14 saboteurs, replete with silk-screened track suits effectively advertising themselves as such, would obviously and boisterously proceed in and out of an airplane lavatory, taking turns to construct a bomb, is so over-the-top ludicrous it deserves its own comedy sketch. Indeed, Jacobsen is trying to portray a scene of angst and fear, but she inadvertently scripts out a parody. I half-expected her to tell me that one of the men wore a cardboard sign labeled "TERRORIST."
On Tuesday morning I appeared as a guest on a conservative, drive-time radio show in Philadelphia, and Jacobsen was the hot issue. The host, without much else to go on, proposed the Syrians had choreographed a "dry run" for a future attack. (At one point he referred to the involved carrier, Northwest Airlines, as "Northeastern.") When I dared express doubt, and noted that investigators from the Transportation Security Administration and the FBI had confirmed the men's identities and motives, I was mocked, ridiculed and eventually hung up on. The very suggestion that the men could have been innocent musicians seemed, in the eyes of the host and callers, preposterous. They had to be terrorists. Disagreeing got me called "a frickin' idiot," and a caller demanded to know which airline I worked for so he could be certain never to ride on a plane with a traitor like me at the controls.
Stop the presses: A sequel to "Terror in the Skies, Again?" has now been posted on WomensWallStreet.com, in which Jacobsen reinfects the conversation with a fresh dose of mongering. "And I now have another important question," she writes. "Is there a link between my experience ... and the arrest of Ali Mohamed Almosaleh by Customs agents at the Minneapolis Airport on July 7?" Almosaleh, a Syrian, was allegedly carrying a suicide note and "anti-American material."
Jacobsen's hint at conspiracy, however, is based exclusively on the coincidence that Almosaleh and the musicians happen to all be Syrian citizens. I see. That a supposition this groundless and stupid can make it into print and entice the likes of major news networks should outrage any clear-thinking American. How about we seek out all Syrians and put their names on airline blacklists?
Jacobsen's sequel is peppered with incendiary quotes from industry sources. Says an airline pilot: "The terrorists are probing us all the time." Another confides a maddeningly baseless belief that Jacobsen had been "likely on a dry run," while another states, "The incident you wrote about, and incidents like it, occur more than you like to think. It is a 'dirty little secret' that all of us, as crew members, have known about for quite some time."
Which dirty little secret, exactly, are we talking about? That foreigners ride on airplanes?
In a moment of truly ghastly philosophizing, Jacobsen includes a manipulative passage in which she is smitten with anguish as she recollects a photograph taken during the Sept. 11 attacks. She gives us this: "Political correctness has become a major road block for airline safety ... I think about the meaning of 'dry run.' And then I think about what it means to be politically correct. And I keep coming up blank."
So do I.
Aside from matters of politics and general opinion, is Jacobsen playing fast and loose with the facts? There appear to be embellishments in her original tale.
Aboard flight 327, as she, her husband and several passengers and crew are having their nervous breakdowns, comes this instance of B-movie tension: "[The flight attendant] leaned over and quietly told my husband there were federal air marshals sitting all around us. She asked him not to tell anyone and explained that she could be in trouble for giving out that information. She then continued serving drinks." Are we to believe not only that an airline professional was unwise enough to reveal such a thing, but that a group of marshals -- not one, not two, but several -- having gotten word that a covey of Arabs were flying to LAX, were on hand to trail and observe them? That's some tight logistical planning. Are we following Middle Easterners through airports now? If so, how does that work at Kennedy International, I wonder, where foreign airliners carrying thousands of passengers arrive daily from Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, Morocco, the UAE and elsewhere? That's a lot of dry runs, and there's no love lost, after all, between Muslim radicals and the governments who own and operate these airlines -- Pakistan International, Saudi Arabian, EgyptAir, Royal Jordanian, etc. Such subtleties are lost on that segment of the public who'd prefer a more digestible cock-and-bull yarn from high above the American heartland. As for those wacky airlines from abroad, why not simply ban them from American airspace?
Clearly I'm in a fit of envy over Jacobsen's cheap grab at notoriety. I've got a book out and could use some publicity. Here, let me give it a try.
Late last summer I boarded a nonstop flight from Dubai, United Arab Emirates, to Newark, N.J. After taking my seat, I noticed that well over a hundred of my fellow passengers looked to be Muslims! Yes, that's the same faith adhered to by those dastardly perpetrators who knocked down our Trade Center and demolished part of the Pentagon. Not only that, but our aircraft, a Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777, was registered and maintained by a company headquartered in a predominantly Muslim nation! What if the cargo holds had been stuffed full of anthrax or TNT by unscrupulous terrorists back in Kuala Lumpur!
Several passengers wore conservative Islamic dress -- men in white dishdashas; women concealed in full black burqa. Our plane contained a Muslim prayer enclave (for possible use by terrorists preparing for the throes of martydrom), and the seatback video displayed a graphic of the qibla, showing real-time distance and heading to Mecca. En route toward New York, dozens of Muslim passengers were seen socializing and using the lavatories, in some cases blatantly ignoring the illuminated seat-belt sign!
To my relief and utter astonishment, we landed safely (and on time).
Jacobsen simmers her own account in gratuitous detail and melodrama. It plays like a Hollywood disaster film -- the young child, the would-be villain who smiles innocently in a moment of spooky foreshadowing. We're waiting for the gunshots, the fireball from the lavatory, the marshals jumping up to yell, "Hit the floor!"
That her story concludes in such a painfully boring anticlimax ought to be the very point, and in the final few pages she still has time for a constructive moral, the clear lesson being not the potentials of global terror, but the dangers of our own preconceptions and imagination. Instead, she pulls a vile U-turn and chooses to bait us with racist innuendo and fearmongering. Nothing happened, but something might have happened, and so it serves us to remain frightened and draconian at all costs, furthering our nation's pathetic embrace of maximum paranoia.
Jacobsen's kicker: "So the question is ... Do I think these men were musicians? I'll let you decide. But I wonder, if 19 terrorists can learn to fly airplanes into buildings, couldn't 14 terrorists learn to play instruments?"
Excuse me? She concludes, as did the radio host Tuesday morning, by insinuating that the men were terrorists, despite every shred of evidence, not to mention common sense, arguing to the contrary. And with that her article, and her credibility with it, plummets from merely sensationalist to inexcusably offensive.
About the writer Patrick Smith is an airline pilot.
-------- us politics
Warner Helped the Rev. Moon
Senator's Office Says He Arranged for Meeting Space in March
By Charles Babington
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, July 21, 2004; Page A02
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A19-2004Jul20.html
Sen. John W. Warner's office acknowledged yesterday that the Virginia Republican arranged for religious activists to use a Senate office building last March for a ceremony in which the Rev. Sun Myung Moon declared himself the Messiah and said his teachings have helped Hitler and Stalin be "reborn as new persons."
The senator did not attend the coronation-like ceremony or realize it would involve Moon, a controversial figure who spent 18 months in prison in the 1980s for tax fraud, said Warner spokesman John Ullyot. "Our office felt misled" after news accounts described a long ceremony in which Moon and his wife were crowned as leaders of international peace, he said.
Many private groups use Senate office buildings for receptions and meetings, but they must obtain a senator's approval. The Senate Rules and Administration Committee has declined to reveal who approved the use of the Dirksen Senate Office Building for the March 23 ceremony, and a key organizer said last month the question was "shrouded in mystery." Warner's office acknowledged its role yesterday when asked for details by The Washington Post.
When news accounts last month described the ceremony, several of the approximately dozen lawmakers who attended said they were duped into going and had no idea the Moons would be the chief honorees. Some said they simply went to see a constituent receive an award and were unaware of Moon's long speech in which he said, "Emperors, kings and presidents . . . have declared to all Heaven and Earth that Reverend Sun Myung Moon is none other than humanity's Savior, Messiah, Returning Lord and True Parent."
In a March 11 letter, Christian Voice of Alexandria asked Warner to reserve room G-11 in Dirksen "for a reception Christian Voice plans to host in honor of the 'Ambassadors for Peace' award recipients." The letter, which the senator's office provided to The Post yesterday, was addressed "Dear John" and signed by group president Gary L. Jarmin.
"Nothing in the letter suggests any participation by Rev. Moon or his organization," Ullyot said. "Senator Warner's staff approved the event, since Mr. Jarmin is a constituent known to the Virginia delegation." Jarmin first made the request by phone, Ullyot said, and was asked to put it in writing.
A March 8 invitation sent to many lawmakers and others said the "primary program sponsor" would be the "Interreligious and International Federation for World Peace (IIFWP), founded by Rev. Dr. and Mrs. Sun Myung Moon." Several co-sponsors were listed, including the Washington Times Foundation, but Christian Voice was not mentioned.
The group, however, has been linked to Moon's far-flung religious and business empire in numerous articles over the years. An April article in Church & State magazine referred to "Christian Voice, a Religious Right group connected with the Rev. Sun Myung Moon." It said the group was "long associated with Moon operative Gary Jarmin."
A 1990 Los Angeles Times article said the Rev. Robert Grant -- listed on Jarmin's letter to Warner as chairman of Christian Voice -- founded the American Freedom Coalition, a group "dedicated to repairing Moon's tattered persona in the United States."
A 1989 Post article about Moon's empire also made several references to Jarmin and Grant. Grant responded to The Post with an op-ed column saying, in part, "the AFC has received support from business interests of the Unification Church," founded by Moon. "Since its founding in April 1987, the AFC has in fact received $ 5,252,473 from such business interests. This amounts to just 32.7 percent . . . of our total gross revenues."
In a phone interview yesterday, Jarmin said he requested the Dirksen room on behalf of Christian Voice because the ceremony involved hundreds of people and required an overflow room. A previous Dirksen room request, he said, "was done under the Washington Times Foundation." Senate rules limit any organization to one room per event.
Jarmin would not specify which senator approved the foundation's request, but suggested it was Warner. "The same senator can request two rooms," he said. "I had to use a different organization to get" the overflow room.
Ullyot said the March 11 letter from Christian Voice was "the only request we received" for permission to use a room for the March 23 ceremony. He said he did not know which senator approved the second room.
"From what was reported" about the ceremony, Ullyot said, "this was not an appropriate use of Senate space." He said he did not know whether anyone from Warner's office had complained to Jarmin.
Researchers Lucy Shackelford and Madonna Lebling contributed to this report.
---------
Intelligence Plan Draws Skepticism
July 21, 2004
By DOUGLAS JEHL
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/21/politics/21intel.html
WASHINGTON, July 20 - The idea of installing a new, cabinet-level national intelligence director got a cool reception Tuesday in its first test in Congress, as senators questioned whether such a restructuring would really improve the country's intelligence capabilities.
The recommendation is expected to be a centerpiece of a final report by the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks, but the skepticism expressed by most Republican and some Democratic members of the Senate Intelligence Committee reflected deep doubts about the plan.
The panel, whose own report about the prewar intelligence on Iraq delivered a scathing indictment of American intelligence agencies, has vowed to consider the question of intelligence restructuring. The rare open hearing by the Intelligence Committee on Tuesday - two days before release of the final report by the Sept. 11 commission - was the first in a planned series of such sessions.
Several committee members made clear that they were not convinced that creating a national intelligence chief would do much more than install a new layer of bureaucracy.
"We must base whatever action we take based on facts, not on expedience, or media-generated momentum, or politics,'' Senator Pat Roberts, the Kansas Republican who is the panel's chairman, said.
Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, a Democratic committee member, testified in support of her own plan to create a cabinet-level national intelligence chief, with budgetary and statutory authority over all 15 intelligence agencies, including the Central Intelligence Agency. Senator Feinstein and other advocates of such a plan say the current structure demands too much from one person and gives the C.I.A. disproportionate weight. Supporters of the Feinstein proposal include Senator John Kerry, the Democratic presidential candidate.
But Senators Carl Levin of Michigan and Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, both committee Democrats, questioned whether an intelligence chief who was given cabinet rank could ever hope to act with sufficient independence from the White House.
And Republicans, including Senators Orrin G. Hatch of Utah, Christopher S. Bond of Missouri and Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, all suggested that structural changes might do more harm than good, particularly if they meant drawing power away from the Pentagon, which oversees about 80 percent of the estimated $40 billion the country spends annually on intelligence agencies.
"I have a lot of difficulty seeing how this is going to change very much,'' Senator Hatch said.
Among witnesses who testified at the hearing, Lt. Gen. William E. Odom, a former director of the National Security Agency, and John Hamre, a former deputy defense secretary, both said they did not regard the creation of a new national intelligence chief as essential.
"We already have too much groupthink in a fractured intelligence community,'' said Mr. Hamre, who is president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. "I fear bringing it all under one chief would seriously threaten what little competition for ideas we have.''
General Odom said he believed there was "a desperate need'' to separate the jobs of C.I.A. director and overall intelligence chief. He said he believed an executive order could accomplish that task, but that creating a national intelligence chief by legislation "may be the only way it will happen soon.'' Any significant restructuring of intelligence agencies would require legislation to overhaul the National Security Act of 1947, which laid out the blueprint for the current structure. Members of the Sept. 11 commission plan to lobby on behalf of their recommendation, but the White House has not said if it will support the measure.
Various versions of the proposal have been endorsed by, among others, the joint Congressional inquiry on the Sept. 11 attacks, which issued its public report last summer; the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, led by Lt. Gen. Brent Scowcroft, the former national security adviser; Representative Jane Harman, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee; and Senator Feinstein, whose bill's sponsors include the Republicans Trent Lott of Mississippi and Olympia J. Snowe of Maine and the Democrats Barbara A. Mikulski of Maryland and Ron Wyden of Oregon.
Some approaches, including the one backed by Representative Harman, would stop short of giving an intelligence chief authority over the broad swath of the intelligence budget controlled by the Pentagon. But the versions supported by Senator Feinstein and General Scowcroft, who made his recommendation to the Bush White House two years ago, would include such a transfer of budgetary power.
Current and past top intelligence officials, including John E. McLaughlin, the acting director of central intelligence, and George J. Tenet and Robert M. Gates, former directors, have expressed opposition to creating a national intelligence chief. A better approach, they argue, would be to add to the authority of the director of central intelligence, who runs the C.I.A. but has limited authority to carry out his broader task of coordinating the work of all the intelligence agencies.
The White House has not made clear where it stands. Scott McClellan, the White House spokesman, would only say on Monday that President Bush was "open to additional ideas that build upon the reforms we are already implementing."
Among those reforms, Mr. Bush has identified three particular goals for improvement: human intelligence-gathering; technical capabilities, in order to ensure that agencies remain "at the cutting edge of change"; and coordination among the intelligence agencies.
The White House has said that Mr. Bush will wait until after the release of the Sept. 11 commission report to decide what further restructuring he might support. Mr. McClellan has also suggested that Mr. Bush would like to hear from another commission looking into the intelligence about Iraq's weapons programs. That commission, which Mr. Bush appointed in February, is not scheduled to report until next March.
--------
A Kerry Adviser Leaves the Race Over Missing Documents
July 21, 2004
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/21/politics/campaign/21berger.html?pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, July 20 - Samuel R. Berger, the former national security adviser to President Bill Clinton, resigned abruptly Tuesday as a senior adviser to John Kerry's presidential campaign after the disclosure that he had improperly removed classified material on terrorism from a secure government reading room last year.
The decision came after Mr. Berger endured a day of furious criticism from Republican leaders, who accused him of breaching national security and possibly passing classified material to Mr. Kerry's campaign. Democrats, in turn, accused the Bush administration of leaking word of an F.B.I. investigation of Mr. Berger as a way of diverting attention from the release of the Sept. 11 commission's final report Thursday.
Mr. Berger told reporters Tuesday evening outside his Washington office: "Last year, when I was in the archives reviewing documents, I made an honest mistake. It's one that I deeply regret."
Associates of Mr. Berger said that although his mishandling of the classified material was inadvertent, he had decided late in the day to step down at least temporarily from the campaign because he did not want to detract from the Kerry effort.
"With that in mind, he has decided to step aside as an informal adviser to the Kerry campaign until this matter is resolved," said Lanny A. Breuer, a lawyer representing Mr. Berger in the investigation.
Mr. Berger's aides acknowledged that when he was preparing last year for testimony before the Sept. 11 commission, he removed from a secure reading room copies of a handful of classified documents related to a failed 1999 terrorist plot to bomb the Los Angeles airport. Republicans accused him on Tuesday of stashing the material in his clothing, but Mr. Breuer called that accusation "ridiculous" and politically inspired. He said the documents' removal was accidental.
The departure of Mr. Berger was at least a distraction for the Kerry campaign, which had hoped to gain political advantage from the Sept. 11 commission's anticipated criticisms of the Bush administration's handling of terrorism intelligence.
For months, Mr. Berger has consulted regularly with Mr. Kerry on the Iraq war, Middle East relations, terrorism and other foreign policy matters, helping to formulate speeches, prepare op-ed articles and brief reporters on the candidate's positions, campaign officials said.
"Sandy Berger is my friend, and he has tirelessly served this nation with honor and distinction," Mr. Kerry said Tuesday in a statement. "I respect his decision to step aside as an adviser to the campaign until this matter is resolved objectively and fairly."
Associates said he would probably try to rejoin the campaign after the Federal Bureau of Investigation had concluded an investigation that began in earnest in January after the National Archives discovered that classified material Mr. Berger had reviewed was missing.
But for Mr. Berger the damage may be difficult to overcome. Some Democrats suggested on Tuesday that the episode could severely hurt his chances of becoming secretary of state or taking another cabinet position in a Kerry administration, jobs his name has been linked to.
Law enforcement officials said that the F.B.I. was continuing to investigate Mr. Berger's handling of the classified material and that the Justice Department had made no decisions about whether to seek criminal charges.
One crucial legal issue will be whether the evidence indicates that Mr. Berger's removal of the classified documents was inadvertent, as he and his lawyer assert. "That's clearly a question at the center of all this," said a law enforcement official who spoke about the investigation on condition of anonymity.
Though prosecutions for the mishandling of classified information are relatively rare, senior officials have become embroiled in such cases. In 2001, Mr. Clinton pardoned John M. Deutch, the former director of central intelligence, as he was negotiating a plea agreement with prosecutors over accusations that he had downloaded classified intelligence onto his unsecured computer.
Mr. Berger spent about 30 hours over three days in the summer and fall of 2003 reviewing classified material in a secure government reading room, his associates said.
Among those documents, officials said, were lengthy classified versions of an "after-action" report on the so-called millennium plots, which included a failed Qaeda effort to bomb Los Angeles International Airport in December 1999.
The report on the plot, according to a final version that was summarized in a staff report from the Sept. 11 commission earlier this year, concluded that American-led counterterrorism efforts "had not put too much of a dent" in Osama bin Laden's overseas network and that "sleeper cells" might have taken root in the United States.
Mr. Breuer, the lawyer, said Mr. Berger inadvertently put three or four versions of the report on the plots in a leather portfolio he had with him. "He had lots of papers, and the memos got caught up in the portfolio," he said. "It was an accident."
Mr. Berger also put in his jacket and pants pockets handwritten notes that he had made during his review of the documents, Mr. Breuer said.
Officials at the National Archives realized late last year that several documents were missing and turned the matter over to the F.B.I., which later searched Mr. Berger's home and office, officials said. Mr. Breuer said that Mr. Berger had returned two of the documents, but that he had apparently discarded several others inadvertently.
Mr. Breuer said the removal of even Mr. Berger's notes was a "technical violation," but he denied Republicans' assertions that Mr. Berger had removed the material intentionally to hide information that could be damaging.
J. Dennis Hastert, the House speaker, asked, "What information could be so embarrassing that a man with decades of experience in handling classified documents would risk being caught pilfering our nation's most sensitive secrets?"
And the House majority leader, Tom DeLay, said: "That is not sloppy. I think it is gravely, gravely serious what he did, if he did it, and it could be a national security crisis."
Mr. Breuer responded, "If there's a suggestion that he's shoving things down his pants, that is categorically false and ridiculous."
Democrats spent much of the day defending Mr. Berger as a man of integrity and asserting he had no reason to steal material already widely available to the Sept. 11 commission.
But late in the afternoon, Mr. Kerry's campaign announced that Mr. Berger was stepping down.
-------- ENERGY
-------- alternative energy
Energized by Public Demand, Wind Power Picks Up
July 21, 2004
CHICAGO, Illinois, (ENS)
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/jul2004/2004-07-21-09.asp#anchor1
New wind development has been stalled awaiting Congressional reauthorization of the production tax credit, but Chicago based Invenergy Wind is not waiting for Congress. The company is writing contracts, getting financing and developing windfarms. Utilities are lining up to purchase the wind power they will generate.
Wisconsin Public Power Inc.(WPPI) and Madison Gas & Electric are partnering to purchase 60 megawatts of renewable energy from an Invenergy wind farm planned for southern Fond du Lac and northern Dodge counties in Wisconsin.
The wind development, called the Forward Energy Center, is proposed for a site near Brownsville, just east of WPPI member community Waupun. The site covers 8,000 acres of agricultural land along the Niagara Escarpment, one of the windiest locations in the state. WPPI has entered into a 20 year contract with an affiliate of Invenergy Wind to purchase 20 megawatts of the renewable output - enough to power the annual needs of 6,500 homes. Madison Gas & Electric will buy 40 megawatts of windpower from the Forward Energy Center turbines, also under the 20 year purchase agreement.
WPPI currently owns two wind turbines near Worthington, Minnesota. With a combined generating capacity of 1.8 megawatts, the units are dedicated to providing power for the utility's renewable energy program.
But the power they generate has all been sold, so the utility is looking forward to the day, expected in August 2005, when it can market windpower from the Forward Energy Center. "Having fully subscribed the output from our Worthington wind units, this project can provide a substantial portion of WPPI's future renewable energy needs," said WPPI Vice President of Marketing Tom Paque.
Nearly 2,700 residential and business customers in WPPI member communities now purchase all or a portion of their electricity from renewable generation - wind, hydro, and biogas from wastewater treatment. Other Wisconsin utilities have shown interest in buying power from the Forward Energy Center, and Invenergy is designing the wind farm to produce as much as 200 megawatts. To produce that much power, 130 turbines would be spinning, and the wind farm would be the largest in Wisconsin.
Invenergy has another new wind farm project underway, this one in Tennessee. The Buffalo Mountain Wind Energy Center will consist of fifteen 1.8-megawatt Vestas wind turbine generators to be located on a ridge called Buffalo Mountain in Anderson County northwest of Knoxville. Energy produced by the 27 megawatt project will be sold to the Tennessee Valley Authority under a 20 year power purchase agreement.
TVA Chairman Glenn McCullough, Jr. said, "We are pleased to give the people of the Tennessee Valley the choice to buy electricity generated from renewable energy sources and make green power available to more residential, business and industrial customers."
A federal utility, TVA is the nation's largest public power provider serving large industries and 158 power distributors with 8.5 million consumers in seven southeastern states.
Commercial operation at the Buffalo Mountain Wind Energy Center is planned for the fourth quarter of this year, Invenergy said. Invenergy, founded in 2001, has emerged as one of the leading wind energy developers in North America with over 2,500 megawatts of wind energy projects under development from coast to coast in the United States and Canada.
While the production tax credit for wind energy expired last December and its renewal is stalled in Congress, Invenergy President Michael Polsky says his company is moving forward anyway. "Invenergy is committed to the development of environmentally friendly and cost competitive wind energy projects," Polsky said.
"This commitment, combined with our development expertise and our confidence that Congress will extend the production tax credit (PTC) for wind energy, has allowed us to move forward with this project despite the expiration of the PTC," he said.
"Few, if any, other developers have shown a similar commitment to this business." The American Wind Energy Association is forecasting "little to no growth in installed wind generating capacity this year, compared with a near-record 1,687 megawatts of new capacity installed in 2003" because the production tax credit has not been reauthorized.
-------- energy
Long Island Utility Buys Into Energy Efficiency
July 21, 2004
UNIONDALE, New York, (ENS)
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/jul2004/2004-07-21-09.asp#anchor7
The Long Island Power Authority (LIPA) has put an energy efficiency program in place that is aimed at reducing electricity use and enhancing reliability for the utility over the next 10 years.
CSGServices, one of six companies chosen by LIPA to accomplish the efficiency measures, will deliver the largest portion of the energy efficiency contract. LIPA's energy resource plan aims to achieve up to 73 megawatts of energy and capacity savings through long term energy efficiency programs.
The program to be implemented by CSGServices (CSGS), a Conservation Services Group affiliate, will deliver roughly 24 percent of the efficiency measures that LIPA is seeking - saving about 17.5 megawatts of power from energy efficiency measures.
CSGS will achieve energy economies by retrofitting buildings with energy efficient lighting, heating and ventilation systems, appliances and refrigeration systems.
Building owners will be offered incentives for installing the energy efficient equipment. CSGS is targeting medium size to large buildings including multi-family housing projects, schools, warehouses and commercial facilities.
Work is scheduled to begin this fall, pending final agreements between CSGS and LIPA. The project is expected to continue through December 2007.
In addition to securing CSGS as one of six energy efficiency contractors, LIPA has signed several other firms to reduce load through demand response and load management programs, as well as renewable energy technologies.
LIPA Chairman Richard Kessel, said, "Through these new contracts, we are expanding efforts to stretch our energy supply resources with a wide range of conservation and energy efficiency initiatives. At the same time, these strategies can help businesses on Long Island to remain competitive by reducing energy costs."
LIPA is not alone in its energy efficiency initiatives. In April, CSGS won a four megawatt contract to implement an energy efficiency program for New England's Independent System Operator (ISO-NE).
Stephen Cowell, CSGS chief executive officer, said the first anniversary of the biggest blackout in U.S. history which hit on August 14, 2003, will raise public consciousness about conserving power this summer. "We hope that the pioneering new approaches of LIPA and ISO-NE will pave the way for other groups to utilize cost effective, environmentally sound solutions for managing power."
-------- OTHER
-------- environment
8 States Sue 5 Biggest Emitters of Carbon Dioxide
July 21, 2004
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/21/science/21CND-POLL.html
Eight states and New York City sued five large utilities today that are the country's biggest emitters of carbon dioxide, the heat-trapping gas that scientists have linked to global warming.
The effort is the first by local governments to try to force companies outside their jurisdictions to curb gas discharges blamed for rising global temperatures and sea levels. Officials involved in the suit said they had acted to force cuts in the gases because the federal government has not.
In the suit filed today in Federal District Court in Manhattan, the states and the city said they were not seeking financial penalties but instead demanding significant cuts in the emissions, which they said posed serious threats to health, the economy and environment.
The states are California, Connecticut, Iowa, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont and Wisconsin.
The companies named in the suit were American Electric Power, Cinergy, the Southern Company, the Tennessee Valley Authority and Xcel Energy. They operate more than 170 power plants that burn fossil fuels and that the states and city say emit 646 million tons of carbon dioxide a year, or 10 percent of the national total.
At a Manhattan news conference, Attorney General Eliot Spitzer of New York said that science pointing to risks from warming was "overwhelming."
He added that cuts of 3 percent a year in carbon dioxide emissions from utilities were "technically and economically feasible" and could be achieved without a noticeable impact on electricity costs.
Representatives of some of the companies named in the suit said they were already acting to curb emissions of carbon dioxide and that the courts were not the right place to deal with the problem.
"Climate change is a global issue that can't be effectively addressed by any individual company or small group of companies," said Melissa McHenry, a spokeswoman for American Electric Power.
Many states, including many of those involved in the new lawsuit, have already been using litigation to pressure out-of-state power plants to curtail nitrogen and sulfur emissions that travel long distances.
Other suits have been filed by states and private organizations against the Environmental Protection Agency over carbon dioxide, contending that the agency had failed to restrict the gas as a pollutant under the Clean Air Act despite growing evidence that it posed risks.
But the new suit was the first state legal action taken directly against companies that discharge carbon dioxide, an unavoidable byproduct of burning coal, oil and other fossil fuels.
New York City joined the suit, said Michael A. Cardozo, the city's corporation counsel, "out of concern for the impacts that global warming will have on the city and its residents and as part of the Bloomberg administration's commitment to maintaining a clean and sustainable New York."
The plaintiffs plan to base the suit on federal common law of public nuisance. The common law, they said in a news release, "provides a right of action to curb air and water pollution emanating from sources in other states."
Lawyers and lobbyists for energy companies said the plaintiffs would have a hard time making a case that carbon dioxide was a pollutant, and they noted that the gas flowed not only from power plants, but was also in exhaled breaths and the bubbles rising from open beer containers.
But Richard Blumenthal, the Connecticut attorney general, cited the states' successful suits against tobacco companies as evidence that such efforts can succeed. "The basic principal we're enforcing today is that when companies do harm to their neighbors and citizens they should be held accountable and they should be stopped," he said.
-------- health
Permanent Hair Dyes Tied to Adult Leukemia Risk
July 21, 2004
Story by Amy Norton
REUTERS USA:
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/26122/story.htm
NEW YORK - People who spent years using older permanent hair dyes may have somewhat higher odds of developing leukemia, a new study suggests.
Researchers found that among men and women surveyed in the late 1980s, those who had used permanent hair dyes prior to 1980 were more likely to develop leukemia than adults who had never dyed their hair.
Acute leukemia is a quickly progressing form of leukemia in which immature, non-functioning blood cells accumulate and crowd out normal cells. Hair dyes have long been studied as a potential risk factor for a number of cancers, but research has yielded conflicting findings.
Older formulations contained potentially cancer-causing chemicals, and there is evidence tying hair dyes to the risk of blood-related cancers such as leukemia and multiple myeloma. Not all studies, however, have come to this conclusion.
The new study compared 769 acute leukemia patients with 623 adults without the disease. It found that men and women who had used permanent dyes one to five times per year for 15 years or longer were more than twice as likely to develop leukemia as people who had never dyed their hair.
Temporary hair dyes that wash out with a few shampoos and hair dye use beginning in 1980 or later were not linked to the disease.
Together with past research, these findings suggest hair dye use is a "potential but not an especially strong risk factor" for leukemia and other blood-related cancers, according to lead study author Dr. Garth H. Rauscher of the University of Illinois in Chicago.
And it does appear that long-term use and use of older coloring products are key factors, Rauscher told Reuters Health.
He and his colleagues report the findings in the current issue of the American Journal of Epidemiology.
The findings are similar to those of a study earlier this year that linked long-term use of older permanent hair dyes to an increased risk of non-Hodgkin lymphoma in women. Again, women who used hair dyes after 1980 did not have an elevated cancer risk, and the researchers speculated that changes in product formulations made in response to cancer concerns could be the reason.
Rauscher said evidence so far suggests that while people who have colored their hair do not seem to face a greater risk of most cancers, the "possible exception" is cancer of the blood or lymph nodes-which includes leukemia and non-Hodgkin lymphoma.
The reason is unclear, but it may have to do with the fact that the blood is the "first point of contact" for cancer-promoting chemicals that are able to penetrate the scalp, Rauscher noted.
However, he also pointed out that while some studies like his - comparisons of leukemia or lymphoma patients with healthy adults - have linked hair dyes to a higher cancer risk, other studies that have followed hair dye users over time have failed to do so.
--------
Hearing on Antidepressants Canceled
By Shankar Vedantam
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, July 21, 2004; Page A04
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A106-2004Jul20.html
A high-profile congressional hearing into the safety of antidepressant medicines was abruptly canceled on Sunday afternoon by a House panel whose chairman is weighing a top job at a trade group representing the biotech and pharmaceutical industries.
Rep. James C. Greenwood (R-Pa.) is reported to be considering an offer to become president of the Biotechnology Industry Organization, whose members include most of the pharmaceutical companies that were to send representatives to testify at the hearing.
In a statement -- an e-mail attachment titled "retirement.doc" -- the moderate Republican said he has been reviewing an opportunity and will shortly announce his decision. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) told reporters that Greenwood will be leaving Congress but did not say what his new job would be.
The outgoing president of the biotech trade organization, Carl B. Feldbaum, said the group has not talked with Greenwood about the antidepressant issue.
Patients rights advocates voiced outrage at the turn of events. "What this shows is that things are so corrupt," said Vera Hassner Sharav, a patient rights advocate, after learning that the hearing had been canceled. Sharav said that in calling a hearing into the issue, Greenwood had exploited the families harmed by the medicines. "We now suspect the whole investigation was done to up his price," she said.
The Energy and Commerce subcommittee on oversight and investigations said its hearing was postponed because the chief counsel has been called to Los Alamos. A new date will be announced shortly, a spokesman said.
A Democratic staff member who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue said he believes Greenwood canceled the hearing because of the job offer. The staff member, who noted that his views are shared by Republicans and Democrats, said Greenwood had likely decided that it would be unseemly to chair the hearing and then announce that he is taking a job at the trade group.
"He couldn't have held that hearing," the staffer said.
Greenwood, who supports abortion rights and is considered a Republican moderate, has seen eye to eye with the Biotechnology Industry Organization on stem cell research and other issues. Feldbaum said the group has mostly worked with Greenwood on bioethics.
The hearing had been called to investigate pharmaceutical companies that have kept negative data about their antidepressant medications secret. Greenwood had demanded information from the Food and Drug Administration on the issue and had requested a Government Accountability Office inquiry.
Companies have published only studies that found the medications to be effective, even though two-thirds of the studies found them no better than sugar pills. British regulators warned doctors last year not to prescribe the drugs, citing an elevated risk of suicidal behavior among children. The FDA is investigating the issue.
Executives from seven pharmaceutical companies were to testify at the hearing, according to documents the subcommittee gave Sharav. Bristol-Myers Squibb Co., GlaxoSmithKline, Eli Lilly and Co., Pfizer Inc. and Wyeth are all members of the Biotechnology Industry Organization, said Dan Eramian, the group's vice president for communications. Two other companies that were to testify, Forest Laboratories Inc. and Organon, are not members.
-------- ACTIVISTS
China Frees Dissident Physician
By Philip P. Pan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, July 21, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A63793-2004Jul20?language=printer
BEIJING, July 20 -- China has released the dissident physician who became a national hero for exposing the government's coverup of the SARS epidemic, sending him home Monday night after 49 days of confinement aimed at pressuring him to disavow a letter in which he denounced the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.
Jiang Yanyong, 72, a semi-retired surgeon in the People's Liberation Army who had briefly become China's most famous political prisoner, was returned to his apartment in western Beijing about 11 p.m. and appeared in good health, his wife, Hua Zhongwei, said by telephone Tuesday.
She said she and her husband had been ordered by the Chinese military not to speak to reporters, and she declined to discuss the circumstances of his release. But asked how she felt, she laughed and said, "You can guess by how I sound."
A person close to the family said Jiang succeeded in resisting the demands of his jailers despite seven weeks of intense indoctrination sessions. The closest Jiang came to backing down was a statement in which he conceded that others might have used his Tiananmen letter for their own purposes, but he also wrote that he should not be held responsible for other people's actions, the person said.
Jiang's release represented a remarkable retreat by the most senior leaders of China's ruling Communist Party, who appeared to have ordered his detention and then backed down in the face of rising international and domestic criticism.
"He sounds good. He's in good spirits," said Jiang Rui, the doctor's daughter, who lives in California. She said that she had spoken to her father on the phone but that security officials were in the room with him and monitoring the conversation. She also said it was unclear whether he would be allowed to leave his apartment without permission or supervision. "I'm happy he's home, but I don't know if he has any freedom at this point," she said. "I don't want to use the word 'free' yet. I would just say he's home. I tried to ask if he could move around freely, but it doesn't sound like it. It sounds to me like it's not over yet."
There was no comment Tuesday from the Chinese government. Jiang Yanyong was never charged with a crime, and the government had said only that the military was "helping and educating him" because he had violated military discipline.
Military officials have warned Jiang that his release does not mean his case is closed, a person close to the family said, but they have also indicated that he can resume giving medical advice to his patients. For his part, Jiang has expressed an interest in devoting his energies to China's AIDS crisis, the person said.
The decision to detain Jiang was a risky one because of the popular reputation for honesty and integrity he earned during the SARS coverup. In 2003, two weeks after a letter he wrote to China's state-controlled media blowing the whistle was leaked to foreign news media, the government fired the health minister and mayor of Beijing, sharply raised its official count of SARS cases and launched a campaign to alert the public of the disease and stop its spread.
Jiang then used the renown he had gained for another cause. In late February, he sent a letter to members of the Chinese leadership urging them to admit that the party's 1989 military assault on student-led, pro-democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square was wrong. The letter, in which he described treating scores of wounded civilians at his hospital on the night of the crackdown, was delivered to foreign media during the annual meeting of China's legislature.
While the party has acknowledged other errors, including the destructiveness of Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution, it has refused to admit any mistake in its handling of the Tiananmen protests, in part because doing so might prompt new demands for democratic reform.
China's military chief and former president, Jiang Zemin, rose to power in the leadership purge that followed the Tiananmen crackdown, and a source familiar with the party's decision-making process said the nation's top military body, which he chairs, gave the order to detain the doctor. Jiang's successor as president and head of the Communist Party, Hu Jintao, serves as one of the vice chairmen of the body, the Central Military Commission.
Jiang Yanyong was detained on June 1, just days before the 15th anniversary of the massacre. Military and security officials seized him while he was on his way to the U.S. Embassy to apply for a visa to visit his daughter, then transported him in an armored vehicle to a remote military facility on the outskirts of Beijing, sources familiar with the situation said.
The officials threatened to keep Jiang in custody under 24-hour supervision until he "changed his thinking" about the Tiananmen crackdown and forced him to write "thought reports" every day as part of the indoctrination process, one source said.
But the doctor refused to budge. When Hua was allowed to visit her husband on June 30, he told her he had been writing the same statement every day for the past month and would not change his view of the massacre, a person close to the family said.
Then, on July 7, two officials with the military's General Logistics Department visited Hua and told her the investigation of her husband was nearing an end, sources close to the family said. The visit came two days after a report about Jiang's detention was published in The Washington Post and described on Phoenix Television, a Hong Kong station that enjoys close ties to Beijing and is available in many mainland offices and homes.
China's state-run media have not reported Jiang's detention, but word of his situation spread via the Internet, and hundreds of people have signed online petitions on his behalf. President Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, pressed for Jiang's release in meetings with senior Chinese leaders this month.
During the July 7 visit with Hua, the military officials described Jiang as honest but politically naive, told her that he had finally made progress in his thought reports and showed her a statement in his handwriting, sources close to the family said.
But Jiang did not disavow his Tiananmen letter in the statement, the sources said. Instead, he acknowledged that other people might have used his letter for their own purposes, one person close to the family said. He also allowed that his jailers had helped him realize that the Chinese Communist Party in 1989 was "like a patient with complicated colorectal cancer" who faced imminent death unless emergency surgery was performed, the person said.
Jiang, a senior party member, wrote that surgery might prolong the patient's life, and he discussed the disease and the consequences of surgery in great detail in the statement. But he never said whether the patient -- in this case, the party -- should be saved, and he never condoned the military crackdown, the person said.
"It was a very calculated, measured statement," the person said. "He was very precise."
--------
City to Appeal Limits on Searches of Protesters
July 21, 2004
By DIANE CARDWELL
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/21/nyregion/21protest.html
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said yesterday that the city would appeal a federal court ruling restricting searches and other police tactics during protests at the Republican National Convention next month .
City officials could not say if they would seek an expedited appeal to ensure a decision before the convention, or which elements of the ruling would be appealed. The ruling, by Judge Robert W. Sweet of Federal District Court in Manhattan, bars general searches of protesters' bags at the convention and the use of four-sided pens to contain the demonstrators, but Mr. Bloomberg's comments indicated that it was the Police Department's ability to conduct general searches that was most at issue.
He said at a news conference in Brooklyn that he objected to limiting "the ability to search backpacks, not just for this event but for New Year's Eve and other times," and faulted the prohibition of searches "at big gatherings where common sense says if somebody wanted to be a terrorist they might very well show up."
Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly, who said he pressed for the appeal, agreed. He said that the prohibition on searches without showing what Judge Sweet labeled a specific threat to public safety is out of line with "the reality of our post-9/11-world" and takes "a valuable tool away from police officers."
Christopher Dunn, the lead lawyer on the case for the New York Civil Liberties Union, which brought the suit in an effort to prevent the police from using tactics that led to injuries during a February 2003 demonstration against the war in Iraq, said he would defend the judge's decision. He expressed surprise at the appeal, given the generally positive reaction from the Police Department when the ruling was released.
News of the planned appeal came as a poll indicated that the vast majority of New Yorkers believe that protesters should be permitted to demonstrate in Central Park during the convention, in contrast to the stance taken by Mr. Bloomberg and Mr. Kelly.
City officials have repeatedly denied requests by United for Peace and Justice, which organized the February 2003 demonstration, to hold a rally on the Great Lawn on Aug. 30, the day before the convention starts, but 75 percent of registered New York voters who were polled disagree with the decision, Quinnipiac University found. This figure was particularly striking since the poll also found that 40 percent of the 1,119 registered voters questioned believe the convention is a good thing for the city.
----
Organizers Bow to Ultimatum on New York Rally Site
July 21, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/politics/politics-campaign-protest.html
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Organizers planning a major protest march at next month's Republican convention agreed on Wednesday to hold their rally in the area designated by police rather than take the matter to court.
United for Peace and Justice had been pressing to conclude its Aug. 29 march, expected to draw about 250,000 to protest the policies of President Bush, in Central Park.
Instead, New York's police commissioner told the group last week the city's ``final offer'' was to let them march past the Madison Square Garden convention site but then turn south for a rally along Manhattan's West Side Highway.
The city argued a massive rally would damage the landmark urban park, which had a recent $18 million face-lift, and cause traffic and security problems.
The convention, which runs from Aug. 30 to Sept. 2, will nominate Bush for a second term.
Bill Dobbs, a spokesman for United Peace for Justice, said the group had to accept the city's plan. ``The city refuses to engage in meaningful negotiations and with the clock ticking we had to resolve this,'' he said.
Dobbs said organizers would meet with city officials to push for subsidies for public transport and drinking water for demonstrators as well as a subsidy to defray added costs of a sound system needed to extend along some two miles of road.
Organizers also want to ensure that metal barricades are not used to pen in protesters, Dobbs said.
-------
------- OneList (submissions from subscribers)
------- Depleted Uranium Keeps On Killing!
-----------
Posted
without profit or payment for research and educational
purposes only,
in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107.