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NUCLEAR
MacArthur Foundation Funds Creative Threat Reduction
WNA News Briefing
High Accident Risk Is Seen in Atomic Waste Project
Chernobyl veteran dies on hunger strike in south Russia
'Safe' Levels May be Raised for Dirty Bomb Attacks
Spanish nuclear plant to close in 2006
Signs of New Tension Emerge in India-Pakistan Peace Effort
N Korea, angry over US Congress vote
States, Environmentalists Challenge Power Plant Cooling Water Rule
Audit: Groundwater Cleaning Ineffective
MILITARY
Karzai Replaces Top Deputy On Ticket Kabul Put on Alert To Avert Violence
Afghan Leader, in a Surprise, Picks a New Running Mate
Nicaraguan army to destroy missiles
Iraq reconstruction flawed, say experts
Partial defeat in McDonnell Douglas suit
U.S. Military Picks IBM to Build Supercomputer
Taiwan shows force on beach facing Chinese mainland
China, Taiwan and U.S. Display Military Might
Iraqi Official Killed in Ambush
Early Steps, Maybe, Toward a Democracy in Iraq
U.S. Seeks to Provide More Jobs and Speed Rebuilding in Iraq
Reality TV hits home in Baghdad
Iraqi clerics laud Japan's role in reconstruction
Bent on Israel's destruction
Despite His Troubles, Arafat Endures as Leader and Symbol
Buried mines and ordnance continue to maim Iraqi civilians
For an Arab model, emirates
Peacekeepers 'stood by as Kosovo mob burnt homes' By Kim Sengupta
Iraqi Says U.S. General Witnessed Abuse
Suicides on the rise in Russian army: prosecutor
Sudan hits back over sanctions
Army Chief Sees No Need for Draft
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Amtrak Announces Precautions
At Ports, Cargo Backlog Raises Security Questions
Human Rights Watch slams Pentagon tribunals for status reviews
Less to Memorize, More to Learn;
Islamic Charity Says F.B.I. Falsified Evidence Against It
As Cities Struggle, Police Get By With Less
Penal system population hits new high at 6.9 million adults
Hussein's Day, Not Forgetting Cookie Snacks
Olympic Security Web
POLITICS
9/11 Report Says Plotter Saw Self as Superterrorist
Factual Back-Up For Fahrenheit 9/11: Section One
GOP 'War Room' Is On-Site
Iranian Prosecutor Shuts 2 Newspapers
In Enemy Territory, Republicans Fight the Democratic Party Line
At the Democratic Convention, Reporters Outnumber Delegates 6 to 1
In Boston, a Ringing Call for Change
Bush, Aides Discuss Findings of 9/11 Panel
Kerry, Campaigning in Virginia, Urges Extension of 9/11 Panel
Nation's First Trial Over Punch Ballots Begins in Ohio
ENERGY
Nevada University Will Produce Biodiesel With Ethanol
OTHER
Aloe May Save Lives on Battlefield, Study Finds
ACTIVISTS
Cage pen angers DNC protesters
Vanunu defies ban on speeches
Free Speech Behind the Razor Wire
-------- NUCLEAR
MacArthur Foundation Funds Creative Threat Reduction
July 27, 2004
CHICAGO, Illinois, (ENS)
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/jul2004/2004-07-27-09.asp#anchor2
The Center for International and Security Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park, has been awarded $2.2 million over five years for scientific training and research to develop new methods for controlling the spread of weapons of mass destruction.
The grant will support the development of an international framework for preventing the exploitation of biotechnology, contribute to the creation of new policy initiatives to prevent nuclear proliferation, and help promote security in outer space.
The funding is part of a set of four grants totaling more than $5 million announced last week by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation of Chicago aimed at reducing the threats from nuclear, biological and space weapons.
Jonathan Fanton, president of the MacArthur Foundation, says the foundation has been helping policymakers deal with the dangers posed by these weapons for 20 years, and at no time has the situation been more urgent than it is today. "Since 9-11, these dangers have risen to the top of the policy agenda," he said, "as governments seek to prevent biological or nuclear terrorism and stop the proliferation of such weapons to international terror networks."
"The Foundation's contribution to international peace and security is to increase scientific and technical expertise on weapons dangers, to promote new thinking about nonproliferation and disarmament, and to help educate policymakers working to reduce these dangers," Fanton said.
As part of this set of grants, $2.1 million over five years has been awarded to Harvard University's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs for its Managing the Atom Project to identify and highlight opportunities for securing existing weapons-usable material within the next four years and to provide governments with practical ideas to strengthen the international nonproliferation regime.
The MacArthur support will fund close to 50 fellowships for young scientists and engineers to conduct research on nuclear weapons issues and the safeguarding and protection of dangerous fissile material.
The Center for Strategic and International Studies has been awarded a grant of $550,000 to help reduce biological weapons dangers by promoting cooperation between scientists generating new biotechnologies and policymakers responsible for international security and public health.
The Center will use the funds to build a consortium of international experts from the scientific, public health, public safety, law enforcement, and medical communities who will develop a common international agenda for biological threat reduction.
The research and consultation will help identify gaps in the policy agenda, develop practical steps for improved biosecurity, and build bridges between leading researchers in the life sciences and those responsible for preventing new biological hazards.
The Arms Control Association received a grant of $400,000 for continued support of its flagship publication, "Arms Control Today," which provides information and analysis, and acts as a forum for debate on policies to promote arms control, disarmament, and nonproliferation.
With assets of about $4.5 billion, the Foundation makes grants totaling about $180 million each year. More information about the Foundation's International Peace and Security Program and the work it supports can be found in the Focus on Issues section of the Foundation's website: http://www.macfound.org.
----
WNA News Briefing
27 July 2004
World Nuclear Association
http://www.world-nuclear.org/nb/nb04/latestnews.htm
A weekly summary of international news relevant to the nuclear energy industry. [NB04.30-1] China: The State Council has approved two projects involving the construction of four new nuclear power reactors. The two projects are the second phase of the Lingao nuclear power plant in Guangdong province and construction of the first phase of the Sanmen plant in Zhejiang province. Two 1000 MWe units will be installed at each site. China Guangdong Nuclear Power Group - which will construct and operate the two reactors at Lingao phase 2 - plans to launch the project at the end of 2005 and use advanced technology from France. Phase 2 is expected to be operational by 2011 or 2012. China National Nuclear Corp (CNNC) will acquire technology for the Sanmen plant through future bidding. A decision on the second phase of the Qinshan nuclear power plant, also in Zhejiang province, has been delayed. This project would add two more 650 MWe reactors to the Chinese-designed plant. (China Daily Online, 22 July; Nuclear Market Review, 23 July, p3; see also News Briefing 04.22-1)
[NB04.30-2] Canada: Cameco Corp has been issued with a uranium mine construction licence by the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC) for the construction of specific surface facilities at the Cigar Lake uranium mine in northern Saskatchewan. The licence is valid until 31 January 2005. Cameco applied to the CNSC for approval to construct and modify both the surface and underground facilities at the Cigar Lake project in order to bring the mine into commercial operation. In an update to that application, Cameco sought approval to construct certain surface and underground facilities at the site prior to the CNSC deciding on its application for the full construction project. The CNSC said it was satisfied that Cameco would remove the surface facilities in a timely and safe manner, should the full construction application be declined. (CNSC, 21 July; see also News Briefing 04.27-1)
[NB04.30-3] Canada: Cogema Resources Inc has been issued with a decommissioning licence by the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC) for its Cluff Lake uranium project in northern Saskatchewan. The licence allows the company to decommission the mining facility, which consists of two underground mines, four open-pit mines, a mill, waste management systems, and associated site facilities. The granting of the licence follows five years of environmental assessment, public discussions and regulatory review. Contracts will now be issued for activities such as covering and sealing the tailings area and dismantling the mill. This will be followed by several years of monitoring to ensure the environment is being protected. Meanwhile, Cluff Lake has also achieved ISO 14001 certification, which verifies that environmental management systems used by Cogema Resources are strictly monitored and conform to rigorous international standards. (Areva, 21 July; CNSC, 20 July; see also News Briefing 04.16-4)
[NB04.30-4] US: Clan Resources has signed an agreement to acquire eight uranium properties in Oregon and Utah, all of which have had some level of past uranium (and in some cases vanadium) exploration and development expenditures. Among the uranium properties, the Aurora property in southeastern Oregon and the Velvet property in the Lisbon Valley of southeastern Utah are the most explored and developed. In addition, Clan has been granted first refusal to acquire any or all of an additional suite of prospective uranium properties in Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Texas, South Dakota and Wyoming. (Ux Weekly, 26 July, p4)
[NB04.30-5] US: The Department of Energy (DOE) issued two Records of Decision (RODs) on 20 July for the construction and operation of depleted uranium hexafluoride (UF6) conversion facilities at its Portsmouth and Paducah gaseous diffusion plants. The RODs were issued following reviews of Final Environmental Impact Statements (EIS) released in June, which considered three alternative locations on each site. Based on these EIS, the DOE has selected the preferred location of the facilities at Portsmouth and Paducah. Groundbreaking ceremonies will take place this week at both sites. (Ux Weekly, 26 July, p5; see also News Briefing 04.20-4)
[NB04.30-6] UK: An accurate terrorist attack on one of the country's nuclear plants would be extremely difficult to conduct, according to a report by the Parliamentary Office of Science & Technology (POST). The report, requested by the House of Commons Defence Select Committee, aims to 'provide parliamentarians with an overview of what is publicly known about the risk of sabotage of nuclear facilities by terrorists'. It highlights the difficulty in targeting the most sensitive buildings in a nuclear facility. The report states that there is 'sufficient information in the public domain to identify possible ways terrorists might bring about a release of radioactive material from a nuclear facility ... However, this information is not sufficient to draw conclusions on the likelihood of a successful attack, or the size and nature of any release'. It notes that 'additional protection measures have been put in place to increase security and to strengthen emergency planning at and around nuclear facilities' since 11 September 2001. The report - entitled 'Assessing the Risk of Terrorist Attacks on Nuclear Facilities' - is available through the POST website. (POST, July)
[NB04.30-7] France: Electricite de France (EdF) has postponed a decision on a site for its planned demonstration 1600 MWe European Pressurised Water Reactor (EPR). The delay makes it likely that the preferred EPR site or sites will not be designated until September at the earliest, pushing back the company's schedule for the project. EdF's tentative schedule calls for EPR licensing to begin after conclusion of the planned national debate on the project that would follow site selection - probably in the autumn of 2005. First concrete could be poured in 2007 and the reactor could be ready for startup in 2012. (Nucleonics Week, 22 July, p1; see also News Briefing 04.29-6)
[NB04.30-8] Hungary: The request by Paks NPP for permission to restart the Paks-2 nuclear power reactor has been conditionally granted by the Nuclear Safety Directorate of the Hungarian Atomic Energy Authority (HAEA). The approval gives Paks the right to start the unit as soon as it has complied with the conditions. The 468 MWe VVER unit has been idle since an incident in April 2003, during annual refuelling and maintenance, led to the damage of 30 fuel elements. (HAEA, 26 July; Energy in East Europe, 23 July, p14; see also News Briefing 04.24-7)
[NB04.30-9] South Korea: The first phase of a three-step program toward increasing the thermal power rating of four Westinghouse 950 MWe pressurised water reactors (PWRs) at Kori and Yonggwang by about 5% has been completed by Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power (KHNP). If detailed engineering studies are carried out as planned, the uprates could be completed by about 2006, officials said. The uprates, which involve making alterations in set points in systems and equipment, but would require no major plant modifications, are planned for the Kori-3 and -4, and Yonggwang-1 and -2 units. (Nucleonics Week, 22 July, p5)
[NB04.30-10] US: The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) may have to delay its evaluation of the Yucca Mountain licence application until an official decision is made on the radiation protection standards, NRC Commissioner Edward McGaffigan said. He said that if the evaluation is delayed, the Department of Energy's (DOE's) plan to open the proposed repository in 2010 could be delayed by five years or more. If the ruling by the Court of Appeals that annulled the radiation protection standard holds up through appeals, then the DOE might have to wait to submit the licence application until a new standard is set. Attorneys for the NRC are reviewing the Commission's responsibilities for evaluating a licence application in light of the court ruling. Either an appeals court decision, legislative action by Congress, or a new rule by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will need to be in place before the NRC can fully review the application. An outcome may not be reached until 2007, McGaffigan said. (SpentFUEL, 26 July, p1; see also News Briefing 04.28-10)
[NB04.30-11] UK: The government announced that a new state-owned 'company limited by guarantee' (CLG) will be established jointly by the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (DEFRA) and the Department of Trade & Industry (DTI) to hold the shares in the Nuclear Industry Radioactive Waste Management Executive (Nirex) and oversee its business operations. The new company will serve to greater transparency and accountability in the management of radioactive waste in the UK. Nirex shares are currently owned by the UK's main producers of radioactive waste - British Nuclear Fuels plc (BNFL), UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) and British Energy (BE). Although primarily funded by the new Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA), Nirex will be independent of the NDA. (DEFRA, 21 July; Nirex, 21 July; see also News Briefing 03.29-15)
[NB04.30-12] Japan: A plan to urge Kansai Electric Power Co to construct an interim storage facility for spent nuclear fuel in the town of Mihama in Fukui prefecture has reportedly been approved by the town's assembly. The decision comes despite strong opposition to the idea by the prefectural government. In addition, Kansai - which operates three reactors at its Mihama plant - has already stated that it plans to locate the facility elsewhere. (Power in Asia, 22 July, p21; see also News Briefing 03.09-15)
[NB04.30-13] UK: Two equity holders in British Energy (BE) - Polygon Investments and Invesco Perpetual - are opposing the government rescue plan for the troubled nuclear utility. With a combined 11% stake in BE, the two investment groups want to buyout bondholders with a cash offer of up to 800 million UK pounds (US$1472 million) and seize back 30% of the company. Although the European Commission (EC) looks set to approve the rescue plan later this year, shareholders must still approve the plan. Polygon and Invesco are seeking to block this approval. BE chairman, Sir Adrian Montague, has threatened to delist BE if shareholders do not support the existing rescue plan. (The Guardian, 26 July, p20; Daily Telegraph, 27 July, p25; see also News Briefing 04.25-13)
[NB04.30-14] US: Eight states and New York City have launched an unprecedented civil action against five of the country's largest power utilities, demanding that they reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions because of global warming. Attorney generals from California, Connecticut, Iowa, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont and Wisconsin, as well as New York City's corporation counsel, filed a public nuisance lawsuit in the federal court in Manhattan. They contend that CO2 emissions can be reduced by increasing efficiency at coal-burning plants, switching from coal to cleaner-burning fuels, investing in energy conservation, and using clean energy sources. The companies being sued are American Electric Power Co, Southern Co, Xcel Energy, Cinergy and Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). They collectively own 174 fossil fuel-burning power plants that produce 646 million tonnes of CO2 annually. The case is part of a growing movement among state authorities in the US to challenge President Bush's refusal to take action on climate change. (The Guardian, 22 July, p15; see also News Briefing 02.47-16)
-------- accidents and safety
High Accident Risk Is Seen in Atomic Waste Project
By MATTHEW L. WALD
NY TIMES
July 27, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/27/national/27nuke.html?th
WASHINGTON, July 26 - An Energy Department plant under construction in Hanford, Wash., that is designed to remove highly radioactive waste from leaking tanks and immobilize it in glass has a 50 percent chance of a major accident over its 28-year lifetime, according to an independent government audit.
The audit, which drew little notice when issued three years ago by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, has recently gained prominence through the efforts of Robert Alvarez, an adviser to the energy secretary in the Clinton administration.
The regulatory commission, whose report cited several design problems, was the last outside agency to perform an in-depth engineering review of the project. Since then, the Energy Department has altered the design, and has also sped construction in an effort to cut decades and tens of billions of dollars off the cost of solidifying the waste, which is left over from half a century of nuclear weapons production.
In a second report, however, the Government Accountability Office, the Congressional auditing agency formerly known as the General Accounting Office, criticized the department earlier this month for carrying out major construction before the design is complete, a risky technique called fast-tracking. The plant "departs from conditions appropriate for fast-track management," the G.A.O. said.
The Energy Department maintains that it has resolved the design problems and that it has no alternative to fast-tracking the project if it is to meet its promises, issued to the State of Washington and the Environmental Protection Agency in signed agreements, to empty the tanks into glass canisters by 2028.
Plans are for the factory, which the department hopes to open in 2011, to use technologies that have never been demonstrated on so broad a scale. It is to carry on a process called vitrification, in which the wastes, some of which will be radioactive for millions of years, are dissolved in an extra-strong form of glass and poured into steel canisters, which are then welded shut.
The plan is to bury the canisters eventually at Yucca Mountain, Nev., in a "glassified" form that is far more stable than the salts, sludges and liquids in 177 underground tanks now at the Hanford nuclear reservation. Many of those tanks have leaked, and some have oozed waste into the Columbia River.
But Mr. Alvarez, the former adviser to the Energy Department, said that the plant would have as much radioactive material inside as a nuclear reactor and that "the likelihood of it getting out is much greater."
Mr. Alvarez is the author of a paper on Hanford that has been accepted for publication by Science and Global Security, a peer-reviewed journal at Princeton. In an interview, he referred to the Hanford cleanup as "perhaps the most expensive, complex and risky environmental project in the United States." He said he was unable to determine what changes the Energy Department had made since the regulatory commission's report that would reduce the risk of a major accident at Hanford.
Roy J. Schepens, manager of the Office of River Protection, an Energy Department unit in Richland, Wash., that is in charge of the waste tanks and the vitrification project, said the commission's conclusions about the chances of a major accident concerned previous efforts at the site by a private company, BNFL, formerly British Nuclear Fuels Limited.
When BNFL's price estimate rose to $14 billion from $3.2 billion, the Energy Department dropped that company and hired another, Bechtel National, to build the plant as a government-owned project. The commission, which generally regulates only private facilities, then left the site.
Responding to the most recent criticism, by the Government Accountability Office, John Britton, a spokesman for Bechtel National, acknowledged construction problems, including improper testing of a stainless-steel tank that is supposed to hold liquid used in scrubbing the gas given off by heated waste.
"We had some quality-assurance issues with the vendor," Mr. Britton said, though adding that construction was going well.
Mr. Schepens, the Energy Department official, pointed out that a Congressionally created independent body, the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, monitored Hanford. He also said there had been many design improvements since the regulatory commission's audit.
Among them are plans for hardware that would limit the flow of radioactive waste into the glass; water in the waste can cause steam explosions when hitting molten glass. Another change is continuous mixing of the wastes and venting the tanks where it is stored, to get rid of hydrogen, an explosive gas produced by radiation in the tanks.
Mr. Schepens said the risk of an accident at the plant would be comparable to that at a civilian reactor, though Mr. Alvarez pointed out that the department had a history of melter accidents.
The cost of the project undertaken by Bechtel National has risen to $5.7 billion, a third more than the estimate. One reason is that the Energy Department decided to make the plant bigger so it could get the vitrification done more quickly. Another is that trying to build the plant while it was still under design caused costly delays.
The accountability office said it feared that the department might end up with a plant that could not treat all the waste. In fact, the department built a vitrification plant in South Carolina in the 1990's to deal with similar wastes and is still trying to resolve operating problems there. One of the problems is hydrogen gas in the system that prepares waste for the melter.
In a letter to Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham, Senator Maria Cantwell, Democrat of Washington, said the regulatory commission's estimate of the accident risk was "quite startling." The senator said that "it is not at all clear how and if D.O.E. has responded to the N.R.C.'s findings regarding safety issues at the waste treatment plant."
----
Chernobyl veteran dies on hunger strike in south Russia
MOSCOW (AFP)
Jul 27, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040727042844.v8g0x6a8.html
A veteran of the world's worst nuclear catastrophe at Chernobyl died in Russia's southern Krasnodar region while on hunger strike, the Interfax news agency reported.
Pyotr Budenny went on hunger strike after a six-year wait for local authorities to provide him with proper housing Chernobyl veterans are entitled to within three months of registration, chief of Russia's Chernobyl Union Vyacheslav Grishin said late Monday.
Budenny, 58, who had had both his legs amputated due to blood circulation failure, a typical Chernobyl affliction, before moving to Krasnodar in 1998, lived in a clay house with his wife.
"Pyotr began his hunger strike in early July, but a week later he was taken to an intensive care ward. After he left the hospital, he resumed the strike, but had to be taken back to intensive care several days after," Grishin said.
In the early hours of April 26, 1986, the core of Chernobyl's fourth reactor exploded and for 10 days the nuclear plant spewed radioactive material equivalent to more than 200 Hiroshima bombs into the air, contaminating a large part of Europe.
According to a Soviet estimate at the time, 31 people died as a result of the accident. But since 1986 an estimated 25,000 people from all over the former Soviet Union who came to clean up after the accident have lost their lives.
----
'Safe' Levels May be Raised for Dirty Bomb Attacks
Draft Guidelines Standardize Acceptable Levels of Radiation
July 27, 2004
NPR
http://www.npr.org/features/feature.php?wfId=3623230
The Department of Homeland Security is set to issue guidelines that will likely change the way emergency workers would respond to a dirty bomb attack. NPR received a preview of the new safety standards, which significantly increase the level of radiation exposure considered safe for emergency workers and residents.
For instance, the guidelines advise that residents should only be evacuated if they are in danger of getting a radiation dose greater than 1,000 dental X-rays; that's about four times the exposure a person gets each year from natural resources.
As NPR's David Kestenbaum reports, the new guidelines suggest that a dirty bomb does not pose as great a risk as the guidelines drawn up by many emergency services have suggested.
An overview of the new draft "protective action guidelines" recommended by the Department of Homeland Security:
First Responder Exposure: Over the course of the initial event, the new guidelines say it's safe for firemen, police and EMTs to receive a total exposure of five rem. That's the equivalent of 5,000 dental X-rays, or 20 times the radiation people normally are exposed to in a year from natural sources.
Evacuation: Residents do not need to be evacuated in the days immediately following the attack unless exposure surpasses one rem, or the equivalent of 1,000 dental X-rays. In some cases, exposure as high as five rem may be allowed.
Relocation: More permanent relocation would only be ordered if over the course of first year the total additional dose to a resident would be two rem -- eight times the radiation dose people normally get in a year. For subsequent years, the allowable additional radiation dose would be 500 millirem, which is twice the average annual background radiation dose from natural sources.
-------- europe
Spanish nuclear plant to close in 2006
MADRID (AFP)
Jul 27, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040727121409.yrzfxyzi.html
Spain's nuclear plant at Zorita, about 60 kilometres (40 miles) north east of Madrid will close at the end of April 2006, a spokesman for operator Union Fenosa said Tuesday.
The facility, the third-biggest Spanish electricity producer had initially appealed against in 2002 a decision by the finance ministry to close the plant on April 30, 2006, but revealed it had withdrawn the appeal without stating why.
In appealing, the firm had insisted that the plant could function safely through to 2008.
Zorita is Spain's oldest plant having opened in 1968. It generates about two percent of the country's nuclear-based electricity.
A further six "first generation" Spanish plants will remain in operation, though Spanish nuclear energy production, at just under one third of overall energy production, remains relatively small scale compared with neighbouring states such as France.
Environment groups, including Greenpeace, had repeatedly called for the the plant to be closed on safety grounds after a several reported breakdowns.
-------- india / pakistan
Signs of New Tension Emerge in India-Pakistan Peace Effort
July 27, 2004
By DAVID ROHDE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/27/international/asia/27kash.html?pagewanted=all
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, July 24 - Seven months after India and Pakistan began a peace effort, signs of strain are emerging.
Pakistani officials are expressing growing frustration over the failure of the two countries to engage in a detailed discussion of Kashmir, the disputed territory over which the nuclear-armed neighbors nearly fought a third war in 2002.
Indian officials, saying the process should not be rushed, accuse Pakistan of failing to dismantle militants' camps and charge that the infiltration of Pakistani-backed militants into the Indian-controlled portion of Kashmir has resumed in recent weeks. American diplomats, who also called for the dismantling of training camps earlier this month, say they continue to back the peace efforts strongly. A peace agreement between India and Pakistan is considered vital to stabilizing Pakistan and Afghanistan, two major fronts in the American-led effort to curb terrorism.
The Pakistani Army's perception of India as a major military threat has largely been responsible for Pakistan's development of nuclear weapons, support for the Taliban in Afghanistan and financing of Islamic militant groups battling Indian forces in Kashmir. Advocates of a settlement to the 56-year dispute say peace would foster economic growth, curb militancy and strengthen democracy in the region.
The dispute over the majority Muslim state of Jammu and Kashmir, a small but staggeringly beautiful Himalayan territory that both countries claim, is one of the most stubborn in the world, rivaling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in its passions, suspicions and deadlock.
When India and Pakistan gained independence from Britain in 1947, Kashmir's Hindu maharaja acceded to majority Hindu India. Majority Muslim Pakistan, maintaining that Kashmir belonged to it, has demanded that Kashmiris be allowed to vote for independence or to join India or Pakistan.
The nuclear armed rivals have fought two wars over Kashmir, with the first leaving the territory divided between them. Since 1989 Pakistan has covertly backed a separatist insurgency by Islamic militants against India, which has killed between 40,000 and 80,000 people.
[Violence in the Indian-held portion of Kashmir continued on Monday as suspected separatist rebels decapitated a 55-year-old man and his two children because they suspected them of being informers for security forces, Reuters quoted the Indian police as saying. In another incident, separatists aimed a grenade at soldiers visiting a hospital in northern Kashmir, wounding 26 civilians and two soldiers.]
Pakistani officials emphasized that they remain committed to the peace talks, but they said that the disappointment extends to President Pervez Musharraf himself. They said General Musharraf, who seized power in a bloodless coup in 1999, did not want talks on normalization in other areas to advance while Kashmir is not discussed.
"In the president's mind, it should not be seen as all the issues have been resolved except for Kashmir," said an aide, who like many officials involved in the talks spoke only on condition of anonymity. "It should be seen that there is progress."
Pakistani officials said they consider the next phase of talks "very important" but emphasized they were not setting a deadline. A series of meetings between Indian and Pakistani officials will culminate in talks between the countries' foreign ministers in New Delhi on Sept. 5 and 6.
"If they are not moving toward a Kashmir solution, then this is a waste of time," Sheik Rashid Ahmed, Pakistan's information minister, said in an interview. "Time will prove whether they are serious or not. The ball is in their court."
In a recent interview in New Delhi, a senior Indian official warned that the peace efforts will fail if Pakistan makes an agreement on Kashmir a "precondition" for talks in other areas. Indian officials have said the gradual improvement of relations between the countries, in areas like trade and nuclear security, will make brokering a settlement to the stubborn dispute easier.
"You cannot be setting deadlines to a very complex and old issue," an Indian official said in a telephone interview on Sunday. "You can't start by talking about Kashmir."
Both Indian and Pakistani officials praised the achievements of the talks so far, including the restoration of air, rail and bus links between the countries. But they confirmed that the Kashmir dispute itself has been discussed neither in public meetings nor in back-channel negotiations.
-------- korea
N Korea, angry over US Congress vote, threatens to quit nuclear talks
SEOUL (AFP)
Jul 27, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040727101208.o5v5xalp.html
North Korea said Tuesday it may consider pulling out of talks aimed at resolving the nuclear standoff in an angry response to the passage of a US human rights bill critical of the Stalinist state.
The US House of Representatives last week unanimously passed the bill, called "North Korea Human Rights Act of 2004," which moves to the Senate for a later vote before becoming law.
The bill calls for concrete steps on North Korean human rights abuses including aid to human rights groups and defectors.
North Korea's foreign ministry, in a statement carried by the official Korean Central News Agency, branded the bill a tissue of lies that slandered the Stalinist state by raising "non-existent" human rights issues.
Faced with such "ceaseless political provocations," the statement attributed to an unnamed ministry spokesman said North Korea could pull out of talks with the United States and boost its military firepower.
North Korea "is compelled to ponder over whether there is any need to continue dialogue with the US for the settlement of the nuclear issue at the moment," the spokesman was quoted as saying.
"The reality reinforces our conviction that it is the only way of protecting the sovereignty of the country and defending socialism which guarantees our life (is) to increase its physical deterrent force for self-defence to cope with the US evermore undisguised hostile policy toward it."
Among provisions in the bill are financial aid to rights groups and defectors and measures allowing North Koreans to apply for asylum in the United States.
North Korea and the United States are engaged in six-nation talks on the nuclear standoff that also include China, Russia, Japan and South Korea.
Three rounds of talks have been held so far with another scheduled for September.
North Korea has offered to freeze its plutonium-producing nuclear weapons programme in return for aid and other concessions but Washington, which accuses Pyongyang of running a separate uranium-based scheme, is demanding an end to all the communist state's atomic ambitions.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
States, Environmentalists Challenge Power Plant Cooling Water Rule
By J.R. Pegg
July 27, 2004
WASHINGTON, DC, (ENS)
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/jul2004/2004-07-27-10.asp
Six Northeastern states and a coalition of environmental groups filed separate law suits Monday challenging a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rule that regulates the intake of cooling water by existing power plants.
Both suits charge the rule is far too lenient and fails to minimize power plant fish kills as required by the Clean Water Act.
Power plants withdraw billions of gallons daily from reservoirs, rivers and lakes to cool their turbines. The practice kills large numbers of fish and other aquatic organisms that are drawn into intake pipes along with cooling water.
The regulation being challenged is known as the Phase II rule - it applies to some 540 existing power plants that withdraw more than 50 million gallons of water per day.
"The law requires EPA to issue and enforce rules that direct power plants to use the best and most effective technology to protect our nation's waterways," said New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer. "Once again, EPA has put the demands of power plant operators ahead of what is best for our environment. These rules violate the Clean Water Act and, if left unchallenged, will do serious harm to the aquatic environment."
Spitzer was joined by attorneys general from Connecticut, Delaware, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Rhode Island in a petition for review filed with the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston. Some nuclear power plants use two billion gallons of water a day to cool turbines. (Photo courtesy Tennessee Emergency Management Agency) The New York-based organization Riverkeeper, along with 13 other environmental groups, filed a separate suit Monday in the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals in New York City.
Both the environmentalists and the attorneys general have asked EPA to stay the regulation, set to become effective on September 7, 2004, until their challenges have been considered in court.
The agency is reviewing the suits and did not comment on their merits.
The challenged rule is the second of three cooling water intake regulations the EPA is required to develop under the Clean Water Act and pursuant to a consent decree filed in 1995 as a result of a lawsuit brought by several environmental groups.
The Phase I rule, which was finalized in 2002, called on new facilities that draw 10 million gallons of water or more a day from natural water bodies to use cooling systems with recirculated water.
These systems, known as "closed-cycle" cooling, can reduce fish kills by some 95 percent.
But the Phase II rule, finalized on July 9, allows existing plants to withdraw billions of gallons per day through their "once through" cooling systems, rather than converting to closed-cycle cooling.
It requires plants to reduce the number of aquatic organisms drawn into the cooling system by 60 percent.
Further reductions or a mandate to use closed-cycle cooling would be too expensive for the industry, according to the EPA, which estimated the Phase II rule will cost the utilities some $400 million annually to implement.
The agency estimates the environmental benefits of the rule, including improvements to recreation and commercial fishing, are worth some $80 million annually.
The environmental groups and the attorneys general say the rule's standard fails to meet the Clean Water Act's requirement that the cooling water intake structures "... reflect the best technology available for minimizing adverse environmental impact." Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal says the rule puts the interests of the industry above the environment. (Photo courtesy Connectictu AG's Office) In addition, they contend language in the rule could allow existing plants to avoid being subject to the regulation solely on the basis of cost.
"Effectiveness, not cost, should be the key factor in choosing water quality equipment," said Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal. "Once again, the Bush administration is stepping backward, compromising natural resources in deference to special interests. This surrender is unacceptable and illegal."
Both suits take aim at language in the regulation that allows facilities to meet the performance standards through the use of restoration measures, including the creation of artificial wetlands or the operation of a hatchery to replace wildlife.
The Phase I rule also contained that provision, which was struck down in February by the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals.
The court ruled that the EPA does not have the authority to allow power plants to opt for restoration of aquatic resources in lieu of installing technology to prevent fish kills. Critics of the rule contend utilities falsely assume the cost of using water from rivers, lakes and reservoirs is free. (Photo courtesy NRC) The Phase II rule "is unlikely to survive judicial review," said Reed Super, Riverkeeper senior attorney and lead counsel in Monday's lawsuit and the Phase I litigation.
"The Second Circuit court was very clear that the Clean Water Act requires best technology, not after-the-fact attempts at mitigation," Super said.
Federal regulation of cooling water intake has been a long time coming.
A 1972 amendment to the Clean Water Act called on the agency to create appropriate regulations - in 1977, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals remanded EPA's first attempt at under on procedural grounds.
Environmentalists sued in 1993, filed a consent decree in 1995 and in 2001 the EPA issued the Phase I rule. Phase II was finalized in February and published in the Federal Register on July 9.
The Phase III rule, scheduled for proposal in November 2004, will be for existing electric generating plants using smaller amounts of cooling water and for other manufacturers.
-------- washington
Audit: Groundwater Cleaning Ineffective
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
July 28, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Hanford-Groundwater.html
YAKIMA, Wash. (AP) -- The U.S. Department of Energy has not made significant progress in treating contaminated groundwater at the Hanford nuclear reservation, a federal audit concluded.
The agency has estimated that 80 square miles of Hanford's groundwater were contaminated at levels exceeding state and federal drinking water standards during decades of plutonium production for the nation's nuclear weapons arsenal.
The study released Tuesday by the Energy Department's inspector general reviewed the effectiveness of the agency's methods for water treatment. Those so-called pump-and-treat systems siphon contaminated water out of the ground, run it through filters and re-inject it.
Those systems have been ``largely ineffective,'' the audit concluded. The department has spent more than $85 million over the past eight years and will continue to spend about $8 million annually to operate the systems, the audit said.
More than $230 million is scheduled to be spent on the surface barriers.
For 40 years, the 586-square-mile reservation in south-central Washington made plutonium for the nation's nuclear weapons, beginning with the top-secret Manhattan Project to build an atomic bomb.
Today, it is the nation's most contaminated nuclear site. Cleanup costs are expected to total $50 billion to $60 billion, with the work to be finished by 2035.
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
Karzai Replaces Top Deputy On Ticket Kabul Put on Alert To Avert Violence
By Keith B. Richburg
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, July 27, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A15331-2004Jul26.html
KABUL, Afghanistan, July 26 -- Officially announcing his candidacy in the country's first democratic election, President Hamid Karzai dropped one of his vice presidents from his ticket, raising fears in the capital that the spurned faction leader might react violently.
NATO's international peacekeeping force in Kabul was on heightened alert and conducting additional patrols through the city after First Vice President Mohammed Fahim, who is defense minister and commands a factional militia from northern Afghanistan's Panjshir Valley, was left off Karzai's slate. "This is a sensitive time in the Afghan political process," said Cmdr. Chris Henderson of Canada, spokesman for the International Security Assistance Force.
Henderson and the spokesman for U.S. forces in Kabul said they had not noticed any unusual Afghan military or militia activity but would remain vigilant. The people of Kabul "have nothing to worry about," Henderson said.
Rules established for the presidential election, which is scheduled for Oct. 9, state that cabinet ministers cannot run for office unless they surrender their posts. Fahim was unwilling to give up leadership of the Defense Ministry, a source of power and patronage. He had also refused to disarm his militia, which was a key component of the Northern Alliance coalition that allied with the United States in late 2001 to drive the radical Islamic Taliban movement from power.
Many foreign diplomats, aid officials and human rights groups had said they regarded Fahim's status as a key test of Karzai's seriousness about confronting and disarming Afghanistan's warlords as he sought a popular mandate to legitimize his 2 1/2-year interim administration.
After spending weeks trying to persuade Fahim and other factional leaders to disarm and support the political process -- and accept key government positions in return -- Karzai had been widely accused of sacrificing a fair election to ensure a peaceful one. By now splitting with Fahim, Karzai might bolster his legitimacy with voters, but he also finds himself facing a potentially tough race against a viable opponent. Another key figure from the Panjshir Valley, Education Minister Yonus Qanooni, announced unexpectedly that he would run against Karzai and that he had Fahim's backing.
Fahim, an ethnic Tajik, made no public comment about the move by Karzai, an ethnic Pashtun.
As Karzai announced his candidacy Monday under intense security at the Presidential Palace, Fahim, Qanooni and Foreign Minister Abdullah -- all prominent Panjshiris -- were not among the assembled officials and advisers.
"Fahim is my brother and very close friend," Karzai said, responding in Dari to a reporter's question. "There's no disagreement." Speaking in Pashto, the other main Afghan language, Karzai said of Fahim: "I'm very sorry he's not here beside me. He's my friend, and I respect him."
In a move apparently intended to split the Panjshir Valley Tajiks, Karzai named as his running mate for the job of first vice president Ahmed Zia Massoud, the Afghan ambassador to Russia and a younger brother of the slain Northern Alliance commander Ahmed Shah Massoud. "I thought we should have a younger generation," Karzai said of his choice.
But Qanooni said on BBC Radio's Dari-language service that he had the support of another of Massoud's brothers, Ahmed Wali Massoud. Ahmed Wali Massoud declined to be interviewed about his intentions.
For the post of second vice president, Karzai retained Karim Khalili, a member of the Hazara minority.
Karzai's break with Fahim ends an uneasy partnership that began soon after the Northern Alliance, composed of Tajiks from the Panjshir Valley and other northern ethnic groups, swept into Kabul in the wake of the fleeing Taliban in November 2001.
At a conference near Bonn the following month, Afghan factions chose Karzai as president, but while the Pashtun leader had strong U.S. backing, he had no army of his own and little authority beyond Kabul. Fahim, who assumed command of the Northern Alliance after Ahmed Shah Massoud was assassinated on Sept. 9, 2001, had claimed the Defense Ministry portfolio, and his militia was the dominant force in much of Afghanistan.
Karzai's first move to assert independence from Fahim came in July 2002, when the president replaced his Defense Ministry guards with U.S. Special Forces troops. When international peacekeepers took over security in Kabul, the bulk of Fahim's forces were pushed out of the city but did not disband or disarm. Karzai also removed Qanooni as head of the Interior Ministry, shifting him to the lesser post of education minister.
In recent days, Karzai has made other moves aimed at breaking the power of some of the warlords who have continued to dominate Afghan politics since the fall of the Taliban. On July 20, he removed or demoted three militia leaders from their positions of command in the Afghan army -- Gen. Attah Mohammad, who was one of the most powerful Northern Alliance commanders; Gen. Hazrat Ali, who helped U.S. forces in the search for Taliban remnants and al Qaeda forces in eastern Afghanistan; and Gen. Mohammad Khan, a former anti-Soviet resistance fighter from the south.
Another powerful regional leader whose faction was part of the Northern Alliance, Gen. Abdurrashid Dostum, announced through his spokesman last week that he would run for president against Karzai.
Monday was the deadline for candidates to submit their applications, and the final list will be announced by the election commission on Thursday. About 20 Afghans had expressed an intention to run. Karzai is favored to win the election, but the large field could force him into a runoff if no candidate receives a majority of the votes.
Taliban fighters still active in the south and southeast of the country have threatened to disrupt the vote and have staged several attacks in recent months against election workers and voters carrying registration cards. But military officials said the attacks so far appeared uncoordinated and had been relatively ineffective.
--------
Afghan Leader, in a Surprise, Picks a New Running Mate
July 27, 2004
By CARLOTTA GALL
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/27/international/asia/27afgh.html?pagewanted=all
KABUL, Afghanistan, July 26 - President Hamid Karzai surprised many here on Monday by entering the October presidential race with the brother of a martyred hero as his choice for vice president, rather than his powerful defense minister.
Mr. Karzai's decision to drop the defense minister, Marshal Muhammad Qasim Fahim, showed the growing divide within the government over the persistence of armed private militias, which the president has called the greatest threat to the country's nascent democracy.
Marshal Fahim has the support of many of the powerful warlords and regional commanders in the north who have felt increasingly unhappy with efforts to disarm them and to reduce their power in the central government.
Mr. Karzai's action was hailed by diplomats as a bold move and a message to all of the warlords to disarm and work for the elections. But it also showed his political vulnerabilities.
Mr. Karzai's new vice-presidential nominee, Ahmed Zia Massoud, is a younger brother of Ahmed Shah Massoud, the commander of the Northern Alliance who was killed by Al Qaeda suicide bombers on Sept. 9, 2001. Dressed in a dark suit and tie, he stood beside Mr. Karzai at a news conference at the presidential palace. He has been serving for the past few years as Afghan ambassador to Russia.
The decision came after intense negotiations and heightened tension in the capital in recent days as Marshal Fahim, the defense minister, pressed hard to retain his other position as first vice president.
Immediately after Mr. Karzai's announcement, the education minister, Yunus Qanooni, announced his candidacy for president and said he was resigning from the government. He said he had the support of Marshal Fahim; the foreign minister, Dr. Abdullah Abdullah; and Mr. Massoud's younger brother, Ahmed Wali Massoud, who represent the core of the Panjshiri group, which has until now played a dominant role in Mr. Karzai's transitional administration.
Mr. Qanooni, who last month expressed his support for Mr. Karzai for president, is likely to represent the most serious challenge to Mr. Karzai in the Oct. 9 election.
Mr. Karzai did not suggest any role for Marshal Fahim in a future government. "I wish him happiness and good, but unfortunately he is not among us in this team," Mr. Karzai said. The president was to visit Pakistan this week but on Sunday suddenly postponed the visit when the crisis over Marshal Fahim arose.
One foreign official said Mr. Karzai had several meetings on Sunday in which everyone, including foreign diplomats, United Nations officials and Afghan leaders, told him to drop Marshal Fahim.
Although Marshal Fahim has been seen as the major block to progress on disarmament, he also has been seen by his own ethnic Tajiks, and in particular the resistance fighters, or mujahedeen, as a leader who has given away much of their hard-earned dominance.
Mr. Karzai's choice of Mr. Massoud was not immediately welcomed by the ethnic Tajiks, or Panjshiris, who represent the second largest ethnic group in the country. Most appeared unhappy that he had suddenly dispensed with Marshal Fahim, whom they still see as the strongest protector of their interests.
"The past two days have been very easy, just negotiating and talking," Mr. Karzai said, making light of the intense politicking of the past 48 hours, as he postponed the state visit to Pakistan and delayed selecting his running mates until the deadline for nominations on Monday.
Mr. Karzai chose one of his current vice presidents, the Shiite leader Abdul Karim Khalili, to be his second vice-presidential running mate.
His American and Afghan bodyguards were on special alert on Monday, warning journalists not to move as the president, flanked by ministers, walked out to make his announcement on the grounds of the palace, where no small number of Afghanistan's presidents and kings have met untimely deaths in the past.
The American ambassador in Kabul, Zalmay Khalilzad, promised Mr. Karzai that the United States would support whatever choice he made, one American official said. Mr. Khalilzad also met with Marshal Fahim over the weekend. The defense minister was attempting to negotiate for a position until the last minute, but then seemed resigned to being replaced, the official said. Fears that he would resort to violence or order tanks onto the streets did not materialize. "Fahim did not look like someone ready to go to war," the official said.
Mr. Qanooni was not happy with the way Marshal Fahim had been dropped, saying it "damages the stability of Afghanistan and the national unity of Afghanistan." Yet he made it clear at a news conference on Monday evening that he wanted to take the battle for power away from guns and war, and wage it instead through the ballot box.
"We are proud that we have brought our honored country, Afghanistan, to a level that military competitions are replaced by political competition," he said. "If we win, it will be a success, and if we don't win, it will still be a success. We believe in political pluralism. We believe in parliamentary challenges."
-------- arms
Nicaraguan army to destroy missiles
MANAGUA (AFP)
Jul 27, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040727200914.bsme0x3z.html
Nicaragua said it would like to meet US demands to destroy its 1,841 SAM-7 surface-to-air missiles, depending on the compensation offered.
Army commander Javier Carrion said that 333 of the shoulder-fired missiles were bound for the scrap heap on Thursday.
"If the United States should compensate the country and the army some other way, then we could discuss the destruction of all of the missiles," he said Monday.
The United States has pressured Nicaragua to destroy the Russian-made missiles, lest they wind up in the hands of terrorists.
President Enrique Bolanos agreed to meet the US demand and ordered the destruction of 666 of the missiles this year. A first lot of 333 has already been destroyed.
-------- business
Iraq reconstruction flawed, say experts
July 27, 2004
By Hannah K. Strange
United Press International
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20040726-053029-5356r.htm
Washington, DC, Jul. 26 (UPI) -- The Bush administration does not have the structure in place to cope with the privatized postwar reconstruction industry in Iraq, experts said Monday.
Speaking at the Global Defense Contractors' Conference in Washington, Peter W. Singer, national security fellow at the Brookings Institute, said that the government still lacks the personnel and expertise to conduct proper oversight and management of military outsourcing in Iraq.
Singer, who formerly served on the Balkans task force in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, noted that outsourcing in Iraq is 15 times higher than it was in Bosnia, yet only twice as many people are doing oversight.
The comments come in the wake of a Government Accountability Office report released last week that criticized the administration for a "piecemeal approach" to planning and a lack of oversight, leading to a failure to correct poor contractor performance or control efficiency and spending.
Both the positives and negatives of the business world have been brought into the military arena, Singer explained. Although there is greater scope for efficiency, specialization and lower costs, firms are also more vulnerable to market forces and imperatives of the profit margin.
The United States could not have carried out the operation in Iraq without private sector contracting to the military, he stressed, but some of the "darkest episodes" in the war have involved contractors.
Allegations of war profiteering and over billing have plagued private contractors in Iraq, particularly Halliburton, which is being investigated by the Defense Contract Audit Agency for alleged overcharges, including $88 billion for 3.4 million meals that were never delivered. The DCAA and Halliburton disagree over whether billing should be based on base camp population or meals actually served. Such a situation might never have arisen, said the GAO report, had there been more careful government oversight.
"Some companies and some employees within them are more interested in doing well than doing good," said Singer.
"In every human organization you're always going to have these bad apples. ... The difference here is that we don't have the structure set up to deal with those bad apples, and until we do it's going to raise scandals and complications for everyone involved," he said.
The recent revelations of abuse at Abu Ghraib prison highlighted the dangers of using private contractors to carry out military work. Contractors are not subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice, leading to an absence of accountability in the event of inappropriate or criminal behavior.
A lack of proper vetting of employees can also lead to individuals with insufficient qualifications or undesirable backgrounds operating on the ground, said Singer, which can endanger military efforts. He cited the case of an employee of a British firm in Iraq, subsequently discovered to have been discharged from the British military for working with an Irish terrorist organization.
The spiraling demand for work in the country has lead to many workforces ballooning in size within a few months, leading to a "watering down" of talent, Singer said. "If you were just making cookies, that would be a problem." The GAO report also cited a lack of qualification among employees, even responsible for oversight, as a major problem.
Approximately 60 firms are operating in Iraq at present, with an estimated 20,000 employees. As an astounding example of the lack of government accounting, Singer pointed out that the Pentagon had asked him to provide that figure for them.
Robert Adams, CEO of New Global Initiatives, a subcontractor operating in Iraq, spoke of a lack of dedication evident in the government and the corporate sector.
The administration did not properly understand the level of commitment the operation would take, he said. "They should have been better prepared," he said.
"They didn't envision the activities of foreign terrorists and of former Ba'ath Party members. They just weren't ready for it," he said.
There has been a failure to utilize the resources of America's multi-ethnic society, he added. There are at least a quarter of a million Iraqi-Americans who have a real commitment to Iraq, he said, and can communicate with local Iraqis in a meaningful way.
New Global Initiatives has four senior management members who are Iraqi-American, he pointed out, and who can narrow the gap between the two communities.
The company provides funding and assistance to local Iraqis who have ideas for community projects such as women's centers or orphanages. Only Iraqis can bid, and have primary responsibilities for everyday operations at every step of the way.
Such a method of engagement is critical, he said, adding that the failure of contractors to employ people who have a true vested interest in or understanding of the country is "astonishing."
The corporate sector does not understand, he said, "the difference between dropping bombs in Belgrade and dropping bombs in Baghdad."
Last week a former senior security adviser in the occupation authority told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that a key reason Iraqis haven't cooperated with the coalition against the insurgency has been resentment over the lack of progress in improving conditions and solving unemployment.
Although Adams felt that Iraqi expectations were sometimes unrealistic, he agreed that the "stumbling approach" to the postwar operation sent a confused message to the Iraqi people.
There are certainly many challenges to be resolved, said Singer. However the reality is that in warfare, there is an increasing gap between supply and demand, he said, and the market for defense contracting will continue to thrive.
"This industry is here to stay," he said. "We'd better deal with it that way."
----
Partial defeat in McDonnell Douglas suit
July 27, 2004
(UPI)
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20040727-105740-6089r.htm
Washington, DC, Jul. 27 -- A U.S. federal appeals Tuesday ruled McDonnell Douglas cannot keep the Air Force from revealing its tanker maintenance overrun costs.
McDonnell Douglas, a subsidiary of Boeing, objected to the Air Force telling competitor, Lockheed Martin Aircraft Center, the details in an Air Force contract to McDonnell Douglas for maintenance and repair of the KC-10 and KDC-10 aircraft, both advanced tankers for refueling warplanes.
In what the appeals panel called a 'reverse' Freedom of Information Act case, McDonnell Douglas appealed a decision by a federal judge to allow the information to be revealed to Lockheed.
McDonnell Douglas said revealing the information would put it at a competitive disadvantage.
Using FOIA, the appeals court upheld the judge's ruling as it pertained to cost overruns, but blocked the transfer of information on costs during the exercise of contract options, and on vendor pricing.
--------
U.S. Military Picks IBM to Build Supercomputer
Device Will Model Atmosphere, Oceans
By Anitha Reddy
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, July 27, 2004; Page E05
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A16518-2004Jul26.html
The Defense Department has picked International Business Machines Corp. to build the U.S. military's fastest supercomputer and the fourth-fastest in the world .
The supercomputer, which IBM said will cost less than $100 million, will be used to produce short-term weather forecasts for Navy fleets at sea. The Pentagon said the supercomputer's immense power will allow military scientists to model atmosphere and ocean dynamics for the entire surface of the Earth. The computer also will be able to analyze aircraft material at a molecular level to produce wings less likely to crack and to examine the flow of water around submarine hulls to improve their design.
The machine will be able to complete 20 trillion operations per second, about three times the capacity of systems at the Naval Oceanographic Office at Stennis Space Center in Mississippi, where it will be housed.
One reason the military, which was legally required to tap a domestic producer, selected IBM was because it proved its machine would "fail gracefully," shifting to backup computing power seamlessly in case of a problem, said Stephen Adamec, director of the supercomputing center at Stennis Space Center.
The world's fastest computer, the Earth Simulator, can execute 35 trillion operations per second. The machine, built by Tokyo-based NEC Corp. and housed in a Japanese government laboratory, models long-term climate change. The second- and third-fastest computers are at the Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos national laboratories.
IBM is working on a prototype of a new supercomputer called Blue Gene/L that it expects to be the fastest in the world within the next few years. Blue Gene/L will rely on thousands of standard microprocessors, unlike the custom chips that power the Earth Simulator. The use of standard microprocessors means a less expensive supercomputer.
The military's new supercomputer falls somewhere between the Earth Simulator and Blue Gene/L because its chips will be partly customized, said Debra Goldfarb, a vice president in IBM's deep computing division. The processors in the military's supercomputer cost a fraction of the highly specialized chips in the Earth Simulator, and they are produced in the tens of thousands, not the hundreds.
The Blue Gene/L project was initially conceived in 1999 to study protein folding, a mysterious process that leads to diseases such as Alzheimer's when it goes awry. But the effort eventually became a way for the company to explore expansion of the supercomputer market beyond governments and universities to businesses.
"The people who used supercomputers lived in ivory towers," said Goldfarb. "That has limited the marketplace and stunted innovation."
The military's supercomputer is made up of 368 of IBM's high-end corporate servers, the same ones used by Fortune 500 companies to generate the best drilling plans for oil fields or analyze the market for complicated financial securities. The processors are part of the family of chips that powers Apple's G5 Macintosh desktops and Nintendo's video game consoles. The supercomputer will comprise 30 to 40 3,000-pound "cabinets" the size of large vending machines.
-------- china
Taiwan shows force on beach facing Chinese mainland
TAIPEI (AFP)
Jul 27, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040727110152.6o2bpjsy.html
Taiwan's military flexed its muscle Tuesday with a fleet of attack helicopters and heavy artillery demonstrating their determination to fend off any attack on a beach facing the Chinese mainland.
Eight AH-1W attack helicopters and as many OH-58D Scout helicopters were shown on television firing missiles, rockets and guns at targets in a drill simulating a Chinese invasion on a beach in western Taiwan.
M-109 self-propelled cannons and M-110 eight-inch howitzers, as well as F-16 fighters and Seagull fastboats armed with anti-ship missiles were mobilized in the exercise, which is part of Taiwan's biggest annual manoeuvres codenamed "Han Kuang 20" (Han Glory).
Last week around 5,000 troops took part in exercises on the south coast simulating an attempt to repel a beach landing.
Two air force Mirage 2000-5 jets also landed on major freeways in an exercise to "review the air force's capability in using freeways for emergency landings and logistic support in case of war."
The exercises come amid growing tensions with China.
New Defense Minister Lee Jye said all the armed forces' various strategies needed to be "verified" through drills, which will climax when President Chen Shui-bian presides over major wargames slated for August 25 in southern Pingtung county.
Separately, Chen will Thursday visit Taiwan's two Dutch-built Sword Dragon-class submarines during a cruise off the main naval base in Tzuoying, in southern Kaohsiung county, the navy said.
Some parliamentarians criticized the high-profile visit as provocative at this juncture, but others said it was aimed to underscore the importance of the eight conventional submarines the United States has offered to sell to Taiwan.
The submarine deal is at the heart of a controversial special budget of 610 billion Taiwan dollars (18.2 billion US) to buy advanced weaponry, including modified Patriot anti-missile systems and anti-submarine aircraft, over a 15-year period from 2005.
The draft budget is pending parliament's final approval.
The navy says the submarines are critical to counter China's naval buildup.
Taiwan's display of military muscle comes after the China News Service said Monday China had held a military exercise in its southeastern province of Fujian as part of stepped up preparedness for conflict with the island, which it regards as part of its territory.
More than 3,000 troops took part in the war games.
Large scale joint sea, land and air drills on Dongshan Island, 150 nautical miles west of Taiwan, are also imminent, Hong Kong's pro-Beijing Wen Wei Po daily had said.
The holding of the drills by Taiwan and China -- still technically at war despite their commencement of civil contacts in 1987 -- has sparked concerns from the United States and calls for restraint.
But ruling Democratic Progressive Party lawmaker Lee Wen-chung played down concerns.
"These are all routine manoeuvres. I don't see the possibility of imminent war at this moment," Lee said.
Since pro-independence President Chen Shui-bian was re-elected in March, Beijing has stressed its long-standing vow to take Taiwan by force should the island try to declare formal independence.
The two sides split in 1949 after a civil war.
--------
China, Taiwan and U.S. Display Military Might
Exercises a Reminder of Potential for Conflict Over Island
By Edward Cody
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, July 27, 2004; Page A18
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A16425-2004Jul26.html
BEIJING, July 26 -- About 18,000 Chinese troops using their country's most advanced weapons systems last week rehearsed coordinated air, sea and ground attacks on Dongshan, an island in the South China Sea that resembles Taiwan in terrain and weather.
At about the same time, Taiwanese pilots 185 miles northeast landed advanced Mirage 2000-5 fighters on a blocked-off freeway to practice what they would do if their air bases were hit during a Chinese missile assault on the disputed territory.
Providing its own martial background music, the U.S. Navy staged a global readiness drill with seven carrier groups around the world to show that the United States could muster overwhelming force anywhere, including Taiwan, despite the war in Iraq.
Asia's season of concurrent military exercises reached a high point with the Dongshan maneuvers. The activity provided a reminder that, although Iraq is the main focus of military conflict for the moment, the standoff over Taiwan remains one of the world's most dangerous flash points.
The three governments involved, China, the United States and Taiwan, all insisted their military maneuvers were not timed to match those held by the others and should not contribute to the tension surrounding Taiwan. But their officials acknowledged that one purpose of holding such exercises was to demonstrate military resolve and ability to potential foes as well as friends.
China's eighth annual exercises around Dongshan Island, which lies just off the mainland's southern rim, concluded Friday after a week of activity. The government-run China Youth Daily said the exercises were intended to allow the military to practice joint combat operations and show Taiwan's independence advocates that China has the power to back up its threat to recover the island by force, if necessary.
In unusually detailed reporting on China's secretive military, the official newspaper said recently acquired Su-30 fighter jets, a Sovremenny-class destroyer and a Kilo-class submarine participated in the maneuvers. The drill, which coordinated different branches of the military, was designed to display the ability to seize air and sea dominance over Taiwan, the newspaper said.
A U.S. military official said the Dongshan maneuvers showed "some enhancements this summer that we haven't seen before" in coordinating air, sea and ground forces, but that they did not mark a startling departure from past exercises.
Taiwan's annual Hankuang exercises, which began Wednesday and are also scheduled to last a week, were unusual in that they opened with a landing by the two Mirage 2000-5s on Sun Yat-Sen Freeway in central Taiwan. According to reports from Taiwan, the landing was the first such use of the freeways since drills in the late 1970s.
Pilots operating the French-built aircraft practiced refueling and re-arming with air-to-air missiles, simulating what they would do if they were called on to combat a Chinese air attack if their normal landing facilities were destroyed. In addition, the maneuvers included practice operations against a mock Chinese amphibious landing and against an airborne attack by Chinese paratroops.
The Taiwanese maneuvers, although spectacular because of the freeway landings, seemed to have less real bearing on the island's defenses than a debate underway in the Legislative Yuan, or parliament, over a $16 million special budget allocated by President Chen Shui-bian's government for purchase of weapons from the United States. From among several weapons systems under consideration, PAC-3 advanced anti-missile defenses have been cited as the likely highest-priority purchase.
The Bush administration has pressed Chen's government to devote more resources to defense, in particular for the PAC-3 system to counter approximately 500 short-range ballistic missiles that China has deployed along its southern shore just across the 100-mile Taiwan Strait. A recently issued Pentagon report on the Chinese military estimated that the Beijing government was adding about 75 missiles a year to the array as part of a general modernization program.
The report said that China's defense spending has reached between $50 billion and $70 billion a year under the modernization program, ranking it behind only the United States and Russia. That estimate was considerably higher than the Chinese government's declared military budget for 2004, which reached $25 billion after an 11.6 percent increase from 2003.
The United States' global exercises, Summer Pulse '04, have touched the Taiwan issue peripherally, according to U.S. officials. The operation, taking place through mid-August, was designed to show "global surge capability," or the ability to use force in several places at once even with 140,000 U.S. troops locked into Iraq, according to Navy Capt. John Singley, spokesman for the U.S. Pacific Command.
Two of the seven carrier strike groups involved, the USS Kitty Hawk and the USS John C. Stennis, will conduct maneuvers in the Pacific, but not near Taiwan, Singley said.
Tao Wenzhao, deputy director of the American Studies Institute at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said Chinese officials had been informed of the dimensions of Summer Pulse and were not alarmed. The subject did not arise in official conversations during a visit to Beijing last week by Adm. Thomas Fargo, the head of the Pacific Command, Singley said.
But Fargo was told of China's growing frustration over Taiwan and what it fears is Chen's intention to push for independence during his second four-year term, which began May 20. The Bush administration's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, got a similar message when she visited here this month.
Former Chinese president Jiang Zemin, who heads the Communist Party's Central Military Commission, was reported recently to have told military leaders that China should take steps to recover Taiwan by the year 2020. Tao, although uncertain of the accuracy of the remarks attributed to Jiang, said that as reported they should not be seen as a military deadline but rather as an expression of a national goal over the next two decades.
"That means we realize it will take years to solve the Taiwan issue," he said.
-------- iraq
Iraqi Official Killed in Ambush
Egyptian Envoy Freed; Other Hostages Shown in Videos
By Doug Struck
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, July 27, 2004; Page A19
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A16433-2004Jul26.html
BAGHDAD, July 26 -- A senior Interior Ministry official was ambushed and killed along with two bodyguards on Monday as he left his home for work, officials said. At least five other Iraqis were killed, and several foreign workers taken hostage were shown in videotapes released Monday.
Late Monday, an Egyptian diplomat held hostage by militants over the weekend was released in good condition, Egyptian officials said, according to the Associated Press. Mohamed Mamdouh Helmi Qutb, a top diplomat at the Egyptian mission, was abducted Friday as he was leaving a mosque in the capital.
"He has been released and we have received him," said Badr Din de-Souki, at the Egyptian mission in Baghdad, the AP reported.
The dead Iraqi official, Mussab Awadi, was deputy chief in the tribal affairs department of the Interior Ministry. At least six ranking Iraqi government officials have been assassinated this year, in addition to a number of local councilmen, a local head of the Iraqi Red Crescent Society, the dean of law school at Mosul University, an oil company official and dozens of security personnel.
Fighters opposed to the U.S. presence in Iraq have declared that they consider anyone who collaborates with the United States a target, although some of the killings apparently have been motivated by individual or tribal grievances. The threat of violence has forced officials to surround themselves with security guards, who have in turn become targets.
An Iraqi woman, her child and a guard died Monday when a man driving a maroon Chevrolet Caprice detonated explosives at the entrance to a U.S. military camp in Mosul, 220 miles north of Baghdad, according to a U.S. military spokesman. The car was packed with rockets and mortars, but many of the armaments did not explode, the spokesman said.
In southern Iraq, four cleaning women were gunned down, two killed and two wounded, as they waited for a bus to take them to work at a British base in Basra, where they were employed by the U.S.-based Bechtel Corp.
"I pretended to be dead so they didn't shoot me. I was covered in the blood of my friends," a survivor, Montaha Khalil, told the Reuters news agency in Basra.
[A mortar attack early Tuesday in a residential area of Baghdad, near the compound housing the Iraqi government and the U.S. Embassy, killed an Iraqi civilian and wounded another, Reuters reported.]
The tally of kidnapped foreign workers also rose Monday. Two Jordanians were shown in a videotape obtained by Associated Press Television. The kidnappers threatened to kill the men, both drivers, in 72 hours unless their employer, a Jordanian construction and catering company, halted work in Iraq. In separate videotapes received by Arab television networks, two Pakistanis and an Iraqi were shown being held by men who made similar demands. The Pakistani government had said Raja Azad, 49, an engineer, and Sajad Naeem, 29, a driver, were reported missing over the weekend.
The kidnappings, aimed at undermining support for the U.S.-led military presence in Iraq, have continued after the Philippine government withdrew its contingent of 51 troops earlier than planned after a kidnapped Filipino truck driver, Angelo de la Cruz, was threatened with execution.
In Manila, President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo defended her decision in an address to the Philippine Congress on Monday.
"I cannot apologize for being a protector of my people," she said. "Sacrificing Angelo de la Cruz would have been a pointless provocation. It would have put the lives of 1.5 million Filipinos in the Middle East at risk by making them a part of the war.
The U.S. government and its allies in Iraq have charged that the decision encouraged kidnappers to take more hostages.
"The Philippine government succumbed to blackmail," Labeed M. Abbawi, Iraq's deputy foreign minister, said over the weekend. "This is not good for us, or even for the Philippine government. This sets a precedent from which these elements get encouragement. Immediately after that, these groups starting issuing a lot of threat."
Seven foreign truck drivers -- three Indians, three Kenyans and an Egyptian -- were seized last week. The kidnappers said in videotapes released Monday that they would extend the deadline for talks. The group has demanded that the Kuwaiti company employing them stop working in Iraq.
Six hostages have been killed since April, at least three of them by beheading.
--------
POLITICS
Early Steps, Maybe, Toward a Democracy in Iraq
July 27, 2004
By IAN FISHER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/27/international/middleeast/27conf.html?pagewanted=all&position=
BAGHDAD, Iraq, July 26 - Whether democracy is really coming to Iraq, or whether it is even possible here, seemed of no immediate concern to Dr. Ahmad Abu-Raghif, a physician in Baghdad. He was game anyway.
He showed up at a university hall here on Sunday with a good haircut, a blue suit and a big smile: the outfit of the office-seeker worldwide. He buttonholed 50 people, he said, at the grass-roots caucus, making the pitch for their votes.
"I explained myself to a lot of people," Dr. Abu-Raghif, 37, said before the voting began. "I have a Ph.D. I am a city council member. And I think I am a good candidate to win." Plus he had personal connections, which never hurt.
"Some of them are my patients," he confided.
His Western-style vote-corralling is part of what may become the birth of democracy in Iraq, something that never really existed here. As with much in Iraq since the American invasion, the experiment is at once inspiring and troubled, full of potential but not at all assured of success.
Caucuses like the one Dr. Abu-Raghif attended have been convening around Iraq to select roughly 1,000 delegates, who will hold a national conference in Baghdad in the next week.
The concrete goal of the conference is to vote - openly and freely - on a 100-seat transitional council that will oversee the government of Iyad Allawi, the interim prime minister, until national elections are held in January. But the conference is also meant to function as an opportunity for a national dialogue, in which for the first time since the fall of Saddam Hussein, Iraqis from all religions, regions and political and ethnic groups begin to discuss the way forward.
With widespread violence and fragmentation, that has turned out to be difficult, so much so that the United Nations is urging Iraq to postpone the conference at least briefly.
A thousand or more fledgling politicians make a tempting terror target, aside from the many logistical challenges - as basic as where everyone will sleep - that surround such a big event. But the major issue is that many groups considered crucial to any broad national dialogue are refusing to take part, largely because they view the process as controlled by the United States.
Wamidh Nadhmi, a newspaper editor and a leader in two nationalist parties that are refusing to attend, said exercises like the conference seemed aimed more at "public opinion in America to tell them that authority was passed to the Iraqi people.''
"This argument might help Mr. Bush in his election, but the change is very little in Iraq," he said. "We do not want to be part of this American solution."
In recent days United Nations officials have been urging the conference's organizers to postpone it to give more time to bring groups like Mr. Nadhmi's on board.
Others who have refused to attend but are considered major players include the Muslim Scholars Association, a relatively moderate group of Sunni Muslim clerics and intellectuals, and the rebel Shiite Muslim cleric Moktada al-Sadr, who has a large following among poor and angry Shiites.
Jamal Benomar, the United Nations diplomat who is advising Iraq on the conference, called it "a huge challenge" that "cannot be rushed." He said more time was needed to convince reluctant groups that they should join and to publicize the event more to lend it wider legitimacy.
"It is not just to delay it for the sake of delaying it," Mr. Benomar said. "That is not acceptable. If it is to make it more successful, and to minimize the risks, I think it is worth considering. But again, this is a national conference. It is an Iraqi conference, and it's up to the Iraqis to decide."
But Iraqi officials are balking at any delay. The transitional laws that created the new government and scheduled the elections for January also specified that the national conference was to take place by the end of July. Fuad Masum, the Iraqi official who is organizing the conference, said the credibility of the law, and thus the entire process of creating a permanent government, requires that it be held on time.
"The operation is proceeding forward," Mr. Masum said.
But he did not minimize the problems. "Naturally it's not an easy procedure," he said. "It is something practically new for Iraqis."
The idea of a national conference was floated last fall by many Iraqi leaders as a way that Iraqis themselves, rather than the American occupation, could chose a new government and do so in a broad and public way.
That remained the hope of some leaders here this spring as the former United Nations special envoy Lakhdar Brahimi worked with the United States and Iraqi leaders to craft an interim government to take sovereignty at the end of June.
But the ultimate compromise settled on an appointed government, with the conference to be held afterward. That deflated any hopes for a more powerful or immediate role for the conference, even if its specific task of appointing the transitional council remains important. The council, while unable to pass laws, will be able to veto government decisions, approve the 2005 budget and question Dr. Allawi.
In many ways, though, the conference is significant as a test of support for the new government and as an early glimpse of how Iraqis are trying to move forward in this experiment toward democracy.
One favorable sign is that several major groups that refused to take part in Dr. Allawi's government are now taking part in the national conference, thus endorsing at the least the process established in May by the United States and the United Nations. The most important are the various branches of the Dawa Islamic Party, the Shiite Muslim party that is the biggest in Iraq.
Khudar Jaafar al-Kuzai, the party's leader, said it could not endorse Dr. Allawi's government because it was appointed - "something that Iraqis reject," he said. This new conference, he said, is much closer to an election and may help prepare the nation for actual elections in January.
"We are very pleased to take part in this experiment," he said. "We want to live this experiment."
After 35 years of dictatorship under Mr. Hussein, the process is unlike anything most Iraqis have ever seen. The conference has two complicated stages, which started with the selection recently of 1,000 delegates from the nation's tribes, political parties and trade and artistic unions.
More than 500 of the delegates are being selected from the various regions by local caucuses, an exercise in the chaos of democracy that has struck some here with both surprise and anger.
The biggest problem so far, organizers say, is that among the groups that want to take part, there has been an almost unmanageable number of candidates. In Kut, a Shiite city south of Baghdad, 1,248 people competed for 22 seats. In Najaf, a city considered sacred by Shiites because of its shrines, there were 920 candidates for 20 seats, prompting complaints from Mr. Sadr's group and other leaders that the process was not inclusive or democratic enough.
At the caucus in Baghdad, one of four for this city of five million people, 436 people competed for 40 seats, 10 of which were set aside for women. Women are to hold 25 percent of the seats on the council.
In some ways the Baghdad caucus, held in an auditorium at Baghdad University, was a democrat's dream: candidates stood up with a microphone and nominated themselves openly as men on stage wrote out their names in marker on whiteboards for everyone to see.
The most ambitious, like Dr. Abu-Raghif, worked the crowd, which was itself not elected but appointed by political parties, local government councils and aid groups. Voting was on pieces of paper, tucked into five wooden ballot boxes, and the counting was public.
"We have heard about the development of Europe, how they began with simple steps like this one," said Arian Said Kalaf, 59, a well-known poet and columnist in Iraq who was competing for a seat at the conference. "We want to follow the same track."
But others complained of disorganization, of secret deals, of candidates who were looking only to enrich themselves by becoming part of politics here - complaints, to be fair, that are often heard in democracies worldwide. Expectations here, though, are high.
"They have to put their country before themselves," complained Dhia Hamandi, 64, a merchant active in local affairs, who was also vying for a delegate's seat. "That's the most important thing. But 90 percent of these people put themselves first."
The challenges of the national conference, the date of which has not yet been announced, are even more daunting. The 1,000 delegates must whittle themselves down to a 100-member council. Of course, 22 of the seats are already taken by former members of the Iraqi Governing Council, which was appointed last year by American officials to help run the nation.
To be fully legitimate, Iraqis and foreign diplomats say, it must somehow squeeze in representatives of all of Iraq's 25 million people: every region; the Shiites, Sunni Arabs and Kurds, as well as Christians, Turkmen and other minorities; women; and various political parties.
It must try to do so, as the United Nations has worried, without the participation of several major Iraqi groups, some of which have ties to the violent insurgents but still address the issues most important here: violence, reconstruction, the justice system.
Perhaps most immediately, it must do so in an atmosphere of violence, in which insurgents have turned increasingly to kidnappings and assassinations of members of the new government.
"Imagine how worried I am about this big occasion," said Mr. Masum, the conference organizer.
--------
RECONSTRUCTION
U.S. Seeks to Provide More Jobs and Speed Rebuilding in Iraq
July 27, 2004
By ERIK ECKHOLM
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/27/politics/27reco.html
WASHINGTON, July 26 - Impatient with slow progress in the rebuilding of Iraq, the State Department is conducting a major review of the $18.4 billion program, seeking ways to provide more jobs and visible results more quickly to Iraqis, according to American diplomats and private advisers.
The aid effort, intended to transform Iraq's crumbling infrastructure as it wins the support of the Iraqi people, was adopted by Congress in the fall of 2003. While the Pentagon was initially put in charge of designing projects and doling out contracts, it has increasingly shared authority with the State Department.
But the program has moved more slowly than many officials had expected: only about one-third of the money has been designated for specific projects so far, and most of those ventures are still in planning stages.
The Pentagon's approach to the aid - focusing on huge power, water and other building projects, with billion-dollar-plus "prime contracts" given to a small number of American companies - has been criticized by development experts and some diplomats as misdirected and wasteful.
A new look at spending goals and methods has been a priority of the new American ambassador to Iraq, John D. Negroponte, who took charge of the American mission after the transfer of formal sovereignty to an interim Iraqi government on June 28.
William B. Taylor Jr., a State Department official who previously worked in Afghanistan, is managing the review, which officials hope to complete by early August. Later this year, he is expected to take over as the Baghdad-based chief coordinator of aid, replacing David J. Nash, the retired navy admiral who has directed rebuilding so far.
State Department officials agree that Iraq's decayed and war-damaged infrastructure needs an overhaul, and they say they do not expect to fundamentally alter the aid program's aims, although they will consult with Congress on recommended changes.
But they are asking, for example, whether larger amounts should pass through Iraqi ministries with careful conditions rather than be handed to Western firms; whether labor-intensive building methods, spreading jobs and benefits, can be more strongly supported; and whether some large-scale infrastructure needs might just as well be met by international lending agencies like the World Bank, according to a senior State Department official.
"The Iraqis deservedly have a reputation for knowing their own system," the official said in an interview on Monday, noting the enormous confusion and start-up costs as Western firms moved quickly into the alien territory of Iraq during the past year. Diplomats are going out of their way to describe the review as a routine and long-planned step. But after the American-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003, some officials complained that the Pentagon pushed aside the State Department's planning for restoring the traumatized society. Aid experts criticized what they saw as the military's reflexive "big project, big contract" approach to aid. The Defense Department remains formally in charge of most contracting in Iraq, but must share increasing authority with the State Department.
"The projects have been way too large," said Rick Barton, an expert on economic reconstruction at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a private research organization in Washington. "Building large infrastructure is not usually what you do first in a post-conflict society."
"You need to get things going in the right direction, and the process will pick up speed later on," he said of economic reconstruction. "If you try to build pyramids in the beginning, it will suck up all the money," as well as provide easy targets for sabotage, he said.
In recent days, for example, the Iraqi minister for public works noted that because of large and rising costs for security, insurance and administration, expensive water projects will end up providing only half as much potable water as projected.
Pentagon and State Department officials have described the comparatively quick and positive results of small aid projects managed by military commanders in the field, and they are looking for ways to duplicate the success. "People see their situation improve and that the coalition is paying for it," the senior State Department official said.
The infrastructure needs are huge, Mr. Barton agreed, but many problems can be better attacked "in bite-sized pieces." Instead of handing off most tasks to multinational corporations, he said, "we need to really engage the Iraqis, possibly making use of the local governing councils we've created."
"We need to make sure the Iraqis have ownership," he said, "so when something goes wrong, they'll fix it themselves instead of blaming outsiders."
--------
Reality TV hits home in Baghdad
July 27, 2004
The Christian Science Monitor
By Annia Ciezadlo
http://csmonitor.com/2004/0727/p01s04-woiq.html
BAGHDAD - The scene: a humble clay house on one of Baghdad's meanest streets. A knock at the door. When the man of the house answers, he is astonished.
"We have presents for you!" warbles Shaima Emad Zubair, a young siren with tangerine lipstick. Batting her blue-mascaraed eyes, she pokes her microphone his way. Behind her, several boys unload a washing machine, refrigerator, TV, sofa set, and more from the back of a truck as a camera crew films. "This is a big surprise," says Ahmed Hassan Kadhim, standing in the doorway with a gap-toothed grin. "What can I say?"
"We've brought you a whole set of furniture!" says Ms. Zubair. "We're trying to compensate you for what you lost!"
"Labor and Materials" is Iraq's answer to "Extreme Home Makeover" and the country's first reality TV show. In 15-minute episodes, broken windows are made whole again. Blasted walls slowly rise again. Fancy furniture and luxurious carpets appear without warning in the living rooms of poor families. Over six weeks, houses blasted by US bombs regenerate in a home-improvement show for a war-torn country.
"The main point isn't to rebuild the house, but to show the change in the psychology of the family during the rebuilding," says Ali Hanoon, the show's director. "The rebuilding has a psychological effect on the families - their memories, their lives, are in these walls."
The idea is simple: Take Iraqi families whose houses were destroyed. Rebuild their houses, filling them with new goods, all donated by viewers who respond to the message flashed at the end of the show. (Donations count as zakat, the one-fifth of yearly income all Muslims must give to charity.) The show is so popular that a host of scam artists now circulate Baghdad pretending to collect "donations" for the families on it, now national celebrities.
"I watched it from the first house that they rebuilt, which was the house of Umm Hussein," says Rasha Said Redha, a young housewife from the working-class neighborhood of Hurriya. "When they opened the house, I began to cry, I was so happy."
Staffed by a crew of jolly ex-Baathists - most of them worked for Saddam Hussein's Ministry of Information - "Labor and Materials" airs every Friday on Al Sharqiya ("The Eastern One"), Iraq's first privately owned satellite channel. The scrappy station is the newest venture of London-based Iraqi media tycoon Saad Bazzaz, who owns the Arabic- language daily Azzaman and is reputed to have political ambitions.
For now, the station is supported by investors. But shows like "Labor and Materials" are expensive - each of the two houses rebuilt so far have cost about $28,000 - and the station is considering trading donations for advertising.
Today, the crew is going to the Sunni stronghold of Adhamiya, a tough neighborhood where residents still battle US troops. For protection, everybody wears white baseball caps with the Sharqiya logo emblazoned in Arabic, which they jokingly call their hijabs (head scarves). Two months ago, Mahdi Army militants pistol-whipped a Sharqiya cameraman, thinking he was a Western journalist, and stole his equipment. They gave it back when they realized he was from an Iraqi station.
"OK, everybody, put on your hijabs," says Riyadh Salman, the show's gentle bear of a producer, as the car pulls up to Kadhim's house.
Inside, an overwhelmed Kadhim watches while the crew unloads box after box into a room. "On our program, the last episode is like Christmas," says Mr. Hanoon, smiling with pride.
Kadhim's house was reduced to a smoking ruin on April 9, 2003, as coalition troops battled fedayeen loyalists in a cemetery across the street. Today, it has been recreated down to the last detail. "There were scorpions in our house, the walls were black with smoke, there was no roof," says Ahmed Abbas Kadouri, Kadhim's adult son, showing photos of charred walls. "And you see it now."
Mr. Kadouri applied to a host of aid agencies - US, European, and Iraqi - without result. Then Sharqiya chose them for its second house. (Usually, families apply via e-mail - so far, the station has received 3,000 applications from Baghdad alone).
Standing in a forest of new appliances, Kadhim recites a Koran verse about how good deeds multiply. "Those who spend their wealth in the way of God are like a grain of corn," he says emotionally. "It grows seven ears, and each ear has a hundred grains."
As the crew leaves, the family spills out on to the street for a joyous sendoff. Beside their door is a plaque: "On May 4, 2004, AL SHARQIYA TV rebuilt this house, which was destroyed by war," it reads, the station's name in large green letters.
"Just wait," jokes Kadhim. "Tonight, there will be more fighting, and the house will be ruined again. And it will say 'This is the house that was rebuilt, and then rebuilt again, by Al Sharqiya television!'"
Everybody laughs, but the joke is serious. The night before, US troops battled militants in their neighborhood, breaking one of Kadhim's brand-new windows.
On the way back to the station, the crew stops to look at a house whose roof was ripped off. As they film it, a blast rips through the air, and smoke billows from a nearby mosque. The next day, "Labor and Materials" shows footage of the blast, which killed a young boy, as well as of Kadhim's house. "I like the program, and Al-Sharqiya, because it expresses the suffering of Iraqis without making it pretty," says Mrs. Redha. "It shows the reality."
-----
Iraqi clerics laud Japan's role in reconstruction
The Japan Times
July 27, 2004
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/getarticle.pl5?nn20040727a8.htm
Senior Iraqi clergymen expressed gratitude Monday for Japan's reconstruction efforts in their country and asked for further support in the fields of medicine, electricity and the media.
During a meeting with Foreign Minister Yoriko Kawaguchi, members of the Inter-religious Council of Iraq, a nonsectarian organization of Shiites, Sunnis and Christians, voiced hope that Japanese firms and citizens' groups will come to Iraq to help rebuild the nation, according to a ministry official.
The religious leaders cited medical support for children, restoration of hospitals and electric power generation, and technical support for media organizations, as key fields where assistance is needed, the official remarked.
"The security situation in Iraq is gradually improving," Seyed Hassan Bahralulom, a Shiite member of the council, was quoted as saying by the official. "But we still need outside support for reconstruction."
Kawaguchi said the Self-Defense Forces deployed to the southern Iraq city of Samawah engage in humanitarian aid activities and Tokyo has pledged to provide $5 billion in aid by the end of 2007.
She thanked the religious leaders for their efforts when five Japanese nationals were briefly held hostage in Iraq in two separate occasions in April by gunmen demanding that Japan withdraw its troops from Iraq.
-------- israel / palestine
Bent on Israel's destruction
July 27, 2004
By Alon Ben-Meir
A UPI Outside View Commentary
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20040727-084756-6033r.htm
New York, United States, Jul. 27 (UPI) -- Having been a witness for nearly three decades to the plight of the Arabs and Israelis and involved in one form or another in the ups and down of the conflict between them that has caused so much suffering and sacrifice, I sometimes wonder if the situation is simply hopeless.
Only a few days ago, I almost succumbed to these feelings during a discussion I had on Iranian television with three prominent Arabs: Hosni Ez el-Din, Hizbullah's media spokesperson, Bsharah Marhuz, a member of the Lebanese Parliament, and Ahmed Ramadan, the Director of al-Quds Press.
The discussion began with the violence instigated by the assassination of a senior Hizbullah operative in Beirut, Lebanon. Ez el-Din insisted that Israeli agents were behind this atrocity and that Hizbullah will not limit its revenge to the two Israeli soldiers killed the following day. I said that Ez el-Din had no more evidence than I did as to the real perpetrator or perpetrators and, in any event, the tit-for-tat violence will result in only more killings. I underscored this point by referring to the past four years of the second intifada and the destructive consequences for both sides, especially for the Palestinians.
But this argument fell on deaf ears: For Ez el-Din, Israel is the sole culprit, the sole aggressor; and the only language it understands is that of counter-violence. Israel would not have exited southern Lebanon, he stated, had it not been for Hizbullah's constant attacks that killed nearly 1,000 Israeli soldiers. Similarly, Israel will be chased out of the occupied territories only through continuing violence. Unfortunately, in making this argument, Ez el-Din seems to ignore that there are no political, territorial, religious, or cultural comparisons between southern Lebanon then and the West Bank now. When I tried to explain that this equating of the two situations had destroyed the nascent Palestinian entity emerging in the aftermath of the Oslo Accords, Ez el-Din remained unmoved. To him, violence is the reason-d'etre behind the Palestinian revolution; it will end not just the Israeli occupation: it will destroy Israel itself.
For Ahmed Ramadan, the security barrier Israel is building is the source of all evil. He sees the "wall" as both a violation of international law and the source of tremendous hardship for Palestinians. And he views it as another of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's schemes to grab Arab land in the name of Israel's national security. Ramadan insisted that Israel must heed the call of the International Court of Justice and the U.N. General Assembly and tear down the barrier immediately. Although I personally feel that the barrier symbolizes both sides' failure to resolve their conflict, it has also unfortunately become a necessary evil to end the carnage inflicted by the suicide bombings.
That said, it is impossible to deny that the barrier inflicts terrible hardship on many Palestinians, which is why Israel's own Supreme Court instructed the government to reroute part of it and compensate those Palestinians who have been harmed by its existence.
But that Israel has been building the barrier to stop the suicide bombings seems never to have crossed Ramadan's mind. That Sharon himself initially objected to the wall, fearing the isolation of Israeli settlements to its east, but then was forced to yield to public pressure, did not matter to Ramadan either.
The truth is that the barrier may have aggravated the conflict, but it did not cause it. No "wall" existed in the Summer of 2000, when Israel offered the Palestinians 97 percent of the West Bank and all of Gaza (under the Barak-Clinton plan at Camp David), an offer Palestinian Authority leader Yasser Arafat flatly rejected. Rather than continuing negotiations, he then green-lighted the unprecedented violence that subsequently shattered every vestige of civility between the two peoples.
Ramadan's amnesia had led him to view the tearing down of the barrier as the sine-qua-non for any future relations between the two sides. Instead of removing the causes for the barrier, Ramadan and his like-minded followers use it as an excuse to their doing absolutely nothing to end the senseless violence while even encouraging it.
Bshara's argument against the Israeli occupation rang the same disingenuous old bells that many members of the Palestinian Authority, including Arafat, have sounded. According to these arguments, peace would require an Israeli withdrawal from all of the West Bank and Gaza and the repatriation of all Palestinian refugees and their descendants to their original homes in Israel proper.
I told Bshara that I could understand the demand to end the occupation. Besides dehumanizing the occupier and the occupied, under any circumstance, Israel must end the occupation sooner than later.
But ending the occupation is not Bshara's or the Palestinian Authority's real goal. When I asked Bshara and his colleagues if there is any circumstance that will make them accept the reality of Israel, they answered that Israel must first to withdraw from the territories and then repatriate the Palestinian refugees. Specifically, they first seek to end the Israeli occupation by whatever means, preferably violent ones, and then obliterate Israel "as a Jewish state" through demographic means -- that is, via repatriation of millions of refugees. This is precisely what Arafat demanded at Camp David, and it remains the demand of most Palestinian leaders and their supporters throughout the Arab world.
Finally, I asked Bshara and the other panelists if they really expect that Israel would ever voluntarily commit political suicide by accepting, even in principle, the repatriation of the refugees? If their answer was no, then wouldn't such a requirement doom any prospect for peace? Caught up in the frenzy of their own rhetoric and in trying to outscore one other in the vehemence of their arguments, they seemed not concerned by these questions. At that moment, I realized how tragic it is that the Palestinian people must continue to pay so dearly for their misguided leaders and for the intellectuals who greatly affect public opinion.
After our hour-long discussion, I sadly concluded that the three gentlemen simply did not want to hear any truths, or see the reality on the ground. They preferred the comfort of their own delusional rhetoric and denial. I was able to find some solace, however, in recent events in Gaza, where the people are finally saying "enough is enough" and in the belief that this change in attitude will spread to the West Bank. The recent unrest and lawlessness in Gaza are the products of years of abuse by self-centered leaders who have betrayed the Palestinian people. The public's rejection of the corruption of Arafat and his cronies and the demand for change and democratic reform may eventually strike a deep chord.
As Israel proceeds with its unilateral plans to withdraw from Gaza and part of the West Bank, we can expect a long, tough, and possibly bloody struggle. It will struggle between hard-core extremists who want to preserve the status quo and those who seek to break free of the senseless violence that could rob them of their future as it has destroyed their past.
The writer is Middle East Project Director at the World Policy Institute, New York, and a professor of International Relations at New York University.
(United Press International's "Outside View" commentaries are written by outside contributors who specialize in a variety of important issues. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of United Press International. In the interests of creating an open forum, original submissions are invited.)
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NEWS ANALYSIS
Despite His Troubles, Arafat Endures as Leader and Symbol
July 27, 2004
By GREG MYRE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/27/international/middleeast/27mide.html?pagewanted=all
RAMALLAH, West Bank, July 26 - Yasir Arafat the politician has had a rough 10 days. Gunmen turned their weapons on his security forces in the Gaza Strip, his prime minister submitted his resignation, and his parliament sent him a rare rebuke. But Yasir Arafat the icon appears to have suffered only minor scratches.
The recent turmoil put on display an easy-to-miss truth about Mr. Arafat's place among the Palestinians. His policies have become fair game for criticism and even expressions of despair, yet he remains the enduring symbol of Palestinian aspirations to full nationhood. Even as violence flared in the streets of Gaza, his staunchest Palestinian critics were not making explicit calls for his ouster.
Many of the sharpest complaints about corruption and ineffectiveness in the Palestinian leadership have come not from rivals, but from within his own Fatah movement, the core of his support. Almost anywhere else, this would signal that a leader was in trouble.
In Mr. Arafat's case, it has meant something more subtle: he must endure harsh criticism, and perhaps make some political concessions. Still, many Palestinian and Israeli political experts agree, there is no serious threat to his position, at least for now.
Ahmed Qurei, his prime minister, had said he was quitting because of the chaos in Gaza and the disarray in the security agencies, and he had expressed frustration at the limited powers allotted to the prime minister under Mr. Arafat.
Mr. Arafat and Mr. Qurei now plan to meet Tuesday. There were hints that they were patching up their dispute, and that Mr. Qurei might be willing to rescind his resignation, delivered on July 17.
Mr. Arafat said Saturday that he would support any cabinet changes sought by the prime minister. But it was not clear whether he was prepared to yield on the most important issue, his tight control over all of the Palestinian security forces.
In Gaza, militants linked to Fatah have carried out a series of kidnappings and battled members of the Palestinian security forces. The fighting embarrassed Mr. Arafat and reflected his inability to rein in the factions in Gaza, where Israel's government says it intends to pull out soldiers and settlers. Yet the militants identified the problem as the corrupt security chiefs appointed by Mr. Arafat, not Mr. Arafat himself.
The militants, from Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades, say they are waging a vigilante campaign against corruption, while remaining loyal to Mr. Arafat.
"We do not like taking the law into our hands," the group said in a statement last week. But, it added, "the leadership is neglecting our plight and suffering."
Indicting "the leadership" did not include Mr. Arafat though. Instead, Al Aksa described him as "the symbol of our struggle" and called on him "to seriously and immediately go after those who are corrupt."
When Palestinian lawmakers gathered in Ramallah to address the crisis, they, too, opted for an indirect approach. They said Mr. Arafat should accept Mr. Qurei's resignation and appoint a new government with expanded powers to combat lawlessness. In effect, they turned to Mr. Arafat as the man who could fix the problem, not as the one who had helped create it.
"We have a saying in Arabic: The man sees the wolf but prefers to just follow his tracks," said Salah Tamari, the minister of youth and sports. "Arafat is the wolf, and we should have had the guts to confront him, and not just work around him."
So Mr. Arafat, 74, has remained on familiar political ground: maneuvering around the infighting Palestinian factions, an exercise at which he has been consistently successful for more than 30 years.
He often seems to thrive during times of crisis, embracing his role as a unifying figure for the Palestinians, a people of many competing groups without either a state or strong institutions.
There are Islamic militants like those in Hamas and more secular nationalists like those in Fatah. Some leaders seek a bargain with Israel on a two-state solution, while groups like Hamas reject any acceptance of a Jewish state. There are rivalries between Palestinians who stayed in the West Bank and Gaza all through the Israeli occupation and others who went into exile with Mr. Arafat for more than a quarter century.
Mr. Arafat's powers have been whittled away in the last few years, and he now presides over a crumbling and impoverished Palestinian Authority. Israel has confined him to his battered compound in Ramallah for more than two years, while the United States and some European nations have stopped sending diplomats to visit.
Though he has found it increasingly difficult to exercise day-to-day leadership, there is little doubt that his voice would still carry the day on any substantive issue affecting the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
"From his point of view, I'm sure he feels he has survived many crises like this one," said Ziad Abu Amr, a Palestinian legislator and a critic of Mr. Arafat. "He can probably outmaneuver his rivals in this crisis, but I'm skeptical that he is prepared to make any real changes."
Most Israelis are happy to see Mr. Arafat squirm, but they also believe there will be no resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as long as he remains in power.
Shlomo Avineri, a political science professor at Hebrew University, sees him as skilled in exploiting a tradition that avoids direct attacks on political rulers.
"There is no tradition of legitimate criticism against the leader, and this is true throughout the Arab world," Mr. Avineri said. "You can criticize corruption, or maybe a particular policy, but not the leader himself."
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Buried mines and ordnance continue to maim Iraqi civilians
By Dogen Hannah
Knight Ridder Newspapers
Tue, Jul. 27, 2004
http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/9255405.htm
SULAIMANIYAH, Iraq - Fifteen-year-old Zana Hussein Mahmood was shepherding cattle when he found an intriguing finger-sized metal tube. Nine-year-old Arjan Mohammed Hussein was digging in the yard when he found one.
Both boys paid dearly for their discoveries.
The tubes exploded. Mahmood lost the tips of two fingers on his right hand and shrapnel peppered his face and right shoulder. Hussein lost his right hand.
Though the Iraq-Iran war ended almost 16 years ago, millions of land mines and detonators like those that injured Zana and Arjan remain implanted along the roughly 1,000-mile border between the two countries.
Unexploded mines - along with ordnance from that war and a little from the U.S.-led invasion - are taking a toll in Iraq, especially in the high mountains and broad valleys of northeastern Iraq bordering Iran.
"Worldwide, it's one of the most severely affected areas," said Sherko Rashid, who manages a program based in Iraq's Sulaimaniyah province to find and remove land mines and unexploded ordnance. It's supported by a Norwegian charity.
Much of Sulaimaniyah was a battleground during the almost nine-year war. Iraqi and Iranian forces planted land mines to defend their positions, while firing mortars and artillery to weaken those of their enemy.
Poor records make it difficult to know how many land mines were sown, let alone where they are, Rashid said. By one estimate, 10 million to 15 million are scattered around northeastern Iraq alone.
Postwar explosions of mines and ordnance killed an estimated 3,500 Iraqi civilians in Kurdistan - the northern and northeastern provinces of Sulaimaniyah, Irbil and Dohuk - between 1991 and 2002. They injured 6,000.
Mahmood, the 15-year-old shepherd, had thought he could gently pick up the detonator before his cattle disturbed it.
"As I lifted it, it exploded," he said from his bed in a Sulaimaniyah hospital. "I was told by my friend that there were mines here, but I wasn't sure to what extent."
Alone at the time he was injured, Mahmood ran for about 15 minutes to his house. His family drove him three hours to the nearest hospital in a borrowed car.
Mahmood's injuries were mild compared with victims who lose limbs, but he fears losing his fingertips will stigmatize him as an amputee.
"I'm very sad," he said.
Land mines have economic consequences, too. They deny people access to grass for grazing, land for cultivation or water for irrigation, Rashid said. Disabilities also make it difficult for victims to work.
It's been nine years since Haider Hamma Aziz, 31, stepped on a land mine as he walked to his relatives' village in northeastern Iraq. He lost both legs at mid-thigh.
Aziz, once a farmer, hasn't worked since then. He lives in his father's house in Sulaimaniyah, with his wife and 3-month-old son. He has no income.
He feels "handicapped twice," he said, because he lost his livelihood along with his legs.
Often, he spends the day at Handicap International, a Belgium-based charity that has run a clinic in Sulaimaniyah since 1991. It makes prosthetic limbs and shows amputees how to use them.
Aziz is trying out a new pair of prosthetic legs, his second since his injury. Bracing himself between parallel bars, he took a dozen or so steps before resting, standing with his artificial knees locked upright and sipping a soda.
His regimen runs from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. almost daily. He hopes to spend less time in his wheelchair and get to the bathroom by himself. He doesn't even hope to work.
"People won't offer me work because I'm disabled," Aziz said.
On a rocky hillside an hour's drive from Sulaimaniyah and within sight of the Iranian border, deminers have worked since September 2002 to clear 20 acres of mines. They've finished less than two acres, unearthing 51 mines and 11 pieces of ordnance. They hope to be finished with the 20 acres by May 2005.
The site, near an Iraqi observation post used before and during the Iran-Iraq war, had been used for animals to graze. It includes a vineyard and lies within a few hundred feet of the main road linking several mountain villages.
"There have been a lot of casualties" from mines and ordnance embedded in the hillside, said Hersh Mohammed, who leads the 13-man demining team. That makes clearing it a top priority.
Deminers, hired and trained by Norwegian Peoples' Aid, work in heavy, Kevlar vests as they inch along narrow lanes. They drop to their knees when their metal detectors squeal a warning and begin to scrape away teaspoonfuls of earth with a trowel or bayonet.
Shrapnel, tin cans and other litter set off many false alarms. Elsewhere, telltale blue-tipped wooden stakes mark where the team has detonated mines with controlled explosions. In some uncleared places, weathered mines lie half-buried, exposed by years of erosion.
The miners earn $320 per month, a middle-class salary in Kurdistan.
Still, said Rashid, the Norwegian group's local demining program manager, "it's not easy to find a person for the job."
Farman Othman, 27, now a supervisor, did it for five years.
"You serve humanity when you clear mines," he said.
-------- mideast
For an Arab model, emirates
July 27, 2004
(UPI)
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20040727-094811-3038r.htm
Dubai, United Arab Emirates, Jul. 27 -- One of the ironies of history may be that in the quest for reforms, smaller Muslim countries may end up as models for Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Algeria and others whose policies of repression impoverish and enslave their people.
Malaysia and the United Arab Emirates are two good examples for those Arab "ruling lions" who keep issuing that old tired slogan of "striking with a fist of steel" every time some opposition demands reforms. These warnings, one might add, no longer frighten nor intimidate, as we can see in every Arab country.
For some months now, obtuse Arab rulers and some of their servile press pundits have screamed that social and economic reforms cannot be imposed by Americans or Europeans. Reforms must conform to our "Arab and Muslim" traditions.
We agree that reforms cannot be imposed from outside. But where are those reforms? What are they? Why are they taking so long to come? Will they ever happen? And while we wait, are those saying that reforms can only be gradual aware of the fact that time is way past for this kind of "one step forward, two steps backward" approach.
Reforms are not an American or Western request. Just look at what is happening in Palestine. There is a full-fledged rebellion against the Palestinian National Authority, headed by Yasser Arafat.
Once feared, Arafat is watching his authority and any respect that came with it melt before his eyes. He stands accused by his Palestinian people of corruption and nepotism. Hanan Ashrawi, one of the most r