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NUCLEAR
Iran Won't Give Up Uranium Program
Blame Europeans for our centrifuges, defiant Tehran says
Israeli Nuclear Whistleblower Risks Jail to Talk Exclusively to AFP
Plutonium from Bikini tests collecting in sea near Japan
Nuclear horror still haunts Hiroshima
The world's first A-bombed city draws a mantle of serenity
Part 1 of 3: Stockpile stalemate
Wash. Nuclear Power Plant Halts Operations
MILITARY
Taliban Fighters Increase Attacks
Many Afghans Complain Of Hastily Set Elections
Bowing to U.N. Demand, Sudan Says It Will Disarm Arab Militias
Powell Warns Sudan: Act on U.N. Demands
Iraqi Security Has Come Far, With Far to Go
U.S.-Led Troops Kill 13 in Fallujah
Bomb Blasts at Iraqi Churches Kill at Least 12
Making Wheels of Justice Turn in a Chaotic Iraq
Iraqi official: I'll quit if sons freed
Palestinian Fighters Torch Government Buildings in Jenin
Payoff pledge helps free 3 foreign hostages
Islamic Troop Plan Prompts Skepticism
Threat to Games Seen as Benign NATO Admiral Plans for Worst
Several Arrests Made in Pakistan Attack
Revealed: coalition forces imprison Iraqi children
Al Qaeda-Iraq Link Recanted
Al-Qaida detainee misled US on Iraq
Scope of Change in Military Is Ambiguous
In Memoir, U.S. General Tells of Gaps in War Plans
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Iranian dissident freed on bail
Military begins tribunals for Guantanamo detainees
U.S. Warns of Terror Threat Against Financial Buildings
Vatican Letter Denounces 'Lethal Effects' of Feminism
Holocaust Museum Calls Crisis in Sudan 'Genocide Emergency'
S. African Detained in Texas May Have Terrorist Ties
POLITICS
Grand Jury Hears Testimony From Powell
How the Press Was Spun
In China, an Editor Triumphs, and Fails
Republicans Sign Along the Dotted Line
Ex-General Gives His Take on Iraq War
President bypasses Congress
Poll puts Kerry ahead of Bush
OTHER
Reopening Forest Areas Stirs Debate in Alaska
ACTIVISTS
British Chernobyl scientist deported
ACLU quits federal donation program
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- iran
Iran Won't Give Up Uranium Program
August 1, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/01/international/asia/01nuke.html?pagewanted=all
TEHRAN, July 31 (AP) - Iran vowed Saturday not to give up its uranium enrichment program and confirmed that it had restarted building centrifuges for that purpose.
Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi said Iran had not resumed enriching uranium but had restarted work on centrifuges in response to the failure of Britain, Germany and France to resolve questions over Iran's potential nuclear program infractions in June.
"We still continue suspension on uranium enrichment, meaning that we have not resumed enrichment," Mr. Kharrazi said at a news conference Saturday, adding that Iran was not committed to another agreement with Britain, Germany and France on not building centrifuges.
Diplomats said this week that Tehran had restarted equipment used to make uranium hexafluoride, which - when injected into centrifuges and spun - can be enriched to low levels to be used as fuel to generate electricity or to higher levels to make nuclear weapons.
Mr. Kharrazi said Iran restarted the centrifuge construction after the three European countries failed to help resolve questions about Iran's compliance with International Atomic Energy Agency commitments despite promising in February to work toward closure by June if Iran stopped making centrifuges. Iran did so in April.
In talks still under way in Paris, officials from Iran and the three European countries are seeking a common position on Tehran's nuclear program amid increasing pressure from the United States to refer Iran's alleged nuclear violations to the United Nations Security Council for possible sanctions.
The highly secret talks began Thursday ahead of a meeting scheduled for mid-September of the board of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations nuclear watchdog, to discuss Iran's nuclear program.
Mr. Kharrazi said the talks in Paris sought to build international confidence that Iran was not seeking to make an atom bomb, but he added that there was no way Iran would give up its uranium enrichment program.
"We are holding these talks to reach further understanding and create more confidence in the direction that we are not seeking nuclear weapons," he said."At the same time, we will insist on our legitimate rights and won't allow others to deprive us of our natural and legal rights." .
The United States accuses Iran of trying to build nuclear weapons in violation of its Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty obligations and has been seeking to take Tehran before the Security Council. Iran insists that its nuclear program is entirely peaceful, geared toward the production of nuclear energy.
Iran suspended uranium enrichment last year under international pressure. In return, Britain, Germany and France promised to make it easier for Iran to obtain advanced nuclear technology.
Iran says it will remain committed to that suspension despite Europe's failure to provide Iran with the technology.
--------
Blame Europeans for our centrifuges, defiant Tehran says
August 01, 2004
washingtontimes
http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20040731-105055-5916r.htm
TEHRAN - A defiant Iran yesterday said it had resumed building nuclear centrifuges, saying the move was retaliation for the failure of three European powers to get its file closed at the U.N. nuclear watchdog.
The announcement by Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi hardened the lines between Iran and the United States, which has been pushing to take Iran's nuclear program to the U.N. Security Council.
Mr. Kharrazi told a press conference that Iran has not resumed enriching uranium but was manufacturing centrifuges in response to the failure in June of Britain, Germany and France to help close Iran's file of nuclear nonproliferation violations at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
"We still continue suspension on uranium enrichment, meaning that we have not resumed enrichment," Mr. Kharrazi said. "But we are not committed to another agreement with [Britain, Germany and France] on not building centrifuges."
Diplomats said this past week that Tehran had resumed building equipment used to make uranium hexaflouride which - when processed in centrifuges - can be enriched to low levels for power generation or high levels for nuclear weapons.
Officials from Iran and the European powers are meeting in Paris, seeking to reach a consensus on Tehran's nuclear program.
The EU "big three" have given no details of their meeting Thursday but U.S. officials say Iran told them it would not surrender its right to proceed with uranium enrichment.
"The British and the French tell us Iran insists it will not back down on its right to proceed with enrichment," a senior U.S. official in Washington said Friday.
Another U.S. official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told Reuters news agency that the Europeans were "not too happy" with the Iranian meeting.
"The EU three underscored their concerns and said [to the Iranians], 'Look, you're making a big mistake. You need to get back on the program,' " the U.S. official said.
"The fact that Iran just decided to back off its commitment took them by surprise and they weren't happy about it," he added.
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell warned Iran on Thursday that its case was increasingly likely to be referred to the sanction-imposing U.N. Security Council for failing to meet IAEA commitments.
Mr. Kharrazi said such comments were part of pressure to deprive Iran of its legitimate right to peaceful nuclear technology.
"We just want to produce fuel for our plants and we are not after nuclear weapons," he said.
Washington says Iran's nuclear program is a cover for seeking atomic weapons. It has been lobbying for the IAEA to refer Iran's nuclear file to the Security Council, which could impose sanctions.
The Paris talks prepare the ground for a September meeting of the board of governors of the IAEA, which is expected to discuss Iran's program.
-------- israel
Israeli Nuclear Whistleblower Risks Jail to Talk Exclusively to AFP
1st August 2004
Bellaciao
By Christopher Bollyn
http://bellaciao.org/en/article.php3?id_article=2281
Mordechai Vanunu, Israel's most famous dissident free after 18 years in prison, is ready to defy the severe restrictions imposed upon him by the Israeli military and tell the western media everything he knows about the Middle East's largest secret arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. However, because the hidden stockpiles belong to Israel, no American news outlet is interested in discussing this, except American Free Press.
"I have sacrificed my freedom and risked my life in order to expose the danger of nuclear weapons, which threaten this whole region," Vanunu said in an exclusive interview with American Free Press on July 28.
Vanunu spent 18 years in an Israeli prison-11 and a half of them in solitary confinement-for providing evidence of Israel's nuclear arsenal to a British newspaper in 1986. "I acted on behalf of all citizens and all of humanity," said Vanunu.
In October 1986, Vanunu, a nuclear technician who had worked at the Dimona Nuclear Power Plant in the Negev Desert for 10 years, traveled to London and gave photographic evidence to The Sunday Times that Israel was secretly developing nuclear weapons. Two months earlier he had converted to Christianity while traveling in Australia.
After having learned about the secret production of plutonium for nuclear weapons at Dimona, in 1985 Vanunu believed it was his responsibility to inform the citizens of the world that an arsenal of nuclear weapons was being created in Israel.
Vanunu provided evidence and described how Israel had built an arsenal of over 200 nuclear bombs and neutron bombs. Before The Times's story was even published, however, Vanunu had been lured to Rome and kidnapped by Israeli secret service agents. A secret trial followed, and Vanunu was locked in a tiny, windowless cell for more than a decade.
When Vanunu was released from an Israeli prison on April 21, the Israeli military authorities imposed severe restrictions on his freedom. He is banned from leaving the country, confined to an assigned residence and denied the right to be in contact with journalists or foreigners.
The human rights organization Amnesty International (AI) protested the restrictions imposed on Vanunu saying on April 19: "Vanunu must not be subject to arbitrary restrictions and violations of his fundamental rights on the basis of pretexts or suspicions about what he may do in the future."
The restrictions on Vanunu's movement, speech and association violate the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which Israel has ratified and is obliged to uphold, according to AI.
While Israeli officials contend the restrictions are to prevent Vanunu from divulging information about Israel's nuclear arsenal, AI sees it differently:
"Israel's determination to curtail Vanunu's freedom and contact with the outside world seem to be intended to prevent him from revealing details of his abduction by Israeli secret service agents 18 years ago in Rome in what was clearly an unlawful act," AI said.
According to Jonathan Cook of The Guardian in Britain, Vanunu's brother, Meir, who lives with him at St. George's, says there is another motive for the restrictions and confinement of Israel's most famous dissident: Vanunu's release brings attention to Israel's nuclear arsenal at precisely the moment when the justification for attacking Saddam Hussein's Iraq-his possession of weapons of mass destruction-is shown to have been hollow.
"If Vanunu were free to talk, he might remind the world that the greatest threat to Middle East peace comes not from Baghdad but from Tel Aviv," Cook wrote. "That is a message neither America nor Britain wants to hear right now."
The same controlled U.S. media networks that sent embedded reporters into combat in Iraq and published false reports about that nation's alleged weapons of mass destruction, are seemingly afraid to go to St. George's Cathedral in East Jerusalem and interview Vanunu, Israel's most famous dissident and peace activist, for fear of crossing a line drawn by the Israeli military.
American Free Press, however, and the London-based Arabic language newspaper Al Hayat have interviewed Vanunu recently from St. George's, where he has sought asylum in the Anglican church compound a short distance from the U.S. Consulate in East Jerusalem.
BEHIND THE JFK ASSASSINATION
Comments made by Vanunu during an interview with Al Hayat's weekly magazine Al Wassat, published on July 25, made headlines around the world but were completely ignored in the United States, where they could have caused immense political damage to Israel. As The Jerusalem Post's article headline read, "Vanunu: Israel behind JFK assassination."
Russia's Pravda article of July 27 began: "Israel may be implicated in the biggest crime of the past century, which took place in Dallas in 1963."
Iran's Tehran Times, writing from Jerusalem, said: "In a startling accusation, nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu has alleged that Jerusalem was behind the assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy, who was exerting pressure on the then Israeli head of state to shed light on the Dimona nuclear plant."
Similar articles appeared in newspapers around the world, but in the United States this explosive news was only reported by wire services and in Jewish newspapers.
Vanunu's comments that there are "near-certain indications" that Israel was involved in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy support the thesis of Michael Collins Piper, presented in his book Final Judgment, that Israeli agents played a key role in the murder.
AFP asked Vanunu to explain his comments about Israeli involvement in the murder of President Kennedy.
"My view is that Kennedy was assassinated because of his strong opposition to [Israeli prime minister] Ben Gurion," Vanunu said.
At the time, Ben Gurion was working to create a nuclear arsenal for Israel.
The group that was involved with Ben Gurion in developing and protecting Israel's nuclear arsenal "was behind the assassination of Kennedy," Vanunu said.
As Piper documents in Final Judgment, Kennedy's resistance to Israel becoming a nuclear-armed state led to increasing hostility between the two leaders until Ben Gurion resigned in June 1963. Kennedy had realized that the Israelis were producing illegal nuclear weapons from the nuclear reactor given to Israel in 1959 under the "Atoms for Peace" program.
In the Al Wassat interview, Vanunu said: "Israel possesses between 100 and 200 nuclear weapons, including a neutron bomb and hydrogen bombs, which are tenfold in their effect. If an atomic bomb can kill 100,000 people then the hydrogen bomb can kill a million.
"We do not know which irresponsible Israeli prime minister will take office and decide to use nuclear weapons in the struggle against neighboring Arab countries," The Jerusalem Post reported Vanunu having said. "What has already been exposed about the weapons Israel is holding [is that they] can destroy the region and kill millions."
A 'SECOND CHERNOBYL'
Vanunu also warned of the environmental dangers of nuclear leaks at Israel's antiquated nuclear facility at Dimona. An earthquake or nuclear accident at Dimona could result in the "leaking of nuclear radiation, threatening millions of people in neighboring countries," Vanunu said.
Jordan, in particular, was mentioned as being in danger of nuclear contamination. "Dimona's chimneys do not operate unless the winds blow in the direction of Jordan," Vanunu said.
A Jordanian government spokesman, Asma Khader, responded promptly to Vanunu's claim, saying, "The kingdom is free of radiation."
Vanunu also criticized the recent visit to Israel of Mohamed El Baradei, head of the UN's nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
"I am very disappointed by Mr. El Baradei because I expected him to go and inspect the Dimona reactor," Vanunu said. "The job of Mr. Baradei is to go and see if what I said . . . if it's true."
Vanunu stressed to AFP his strong desire to speak with the media despite the restrictions, and provide them with information and his views on the need for peace-and a nuclear-free Middle East.
Asked if the U.S. media was interested in meeting him, Vanunu said "not one" American or British newspaper or television network had visited him at St. George's since his release from prison.
"Why are they in silence?" Vanunu asked AFP about the U.S. media. "Why is the press not coming to see me? The media should bring my case to the people and the politicians. This case must be heard."
Linda Rothstein, editor of the Chicago-based Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, however, showed little interest in Vanunu's story, saying that Vanunu has his supporters and that the Bulletin is not an advocacy group.
Likewise, Kay Seok of Human Rights Watch said that there was nothing they could do. "Nobody at HRW is working on Israel right now," she said.
WANTS OUT OF ISRAEL
Vanunu desperately wants to leave Israel, where he is viewed as a traitor, and seek political asylum in the United States. Nick and Mary Eoloff of St. Paul, Minnesota, have formally adopted Vanunu and are ready to provide him sanctuary.
Mrs. Eoloff told AFP that Vanunu's life is in danger in Israel.
"I want to go abroad and start my life as a free man," Vanunu said after Israel's high court upheld the military's restrictions on his movement and freedom. "If Israel is a democracy, it should allow me to do it."
Asked if he had been tortured during his 18 years in prison, Vanunu said, "Of course."
He said he had been subjected to "mental and psychological torture" that was "cruel and barbaric."
Because he had converted to Christianity he had received worse treatment than Jewish prisoners, he said. Vanunu said he had been treated like a Palestinian and that his captors had tried to "destroy" him.
"I am a symbol of the will of freedom," he said. "You cannot break the human spirit."
Asked about his supporters in the United States, Vanunu said: "I need their support to get me out. Americans should raise their voices with their congressmen and ask them in a loud voice to visit me and bring attention to my case.
"My country is not Israel," Vanunu said. "I want to be free and to leave Israel."
"Israel does not respect my basic human rights," Vanunu said. "I am denied the freedom of movement and freedom of speech-like all Palestinians. I want peace and freedom from all nuclear weapons in the Middle East."
http://www.americanfreepress.net/html/vanunu.html
-------- japan
Plutonium from Bikini tests collecting in sea near Japan
(Kyodo News)
August 1, 2004
http://www.japantoday.com/e/?content=news&cat=1&id=307296
TOKYO - Plutonium particles scattered by a series of nuclear tests in the Bikini Atoll in the 1950s have been accumulating in seas close to Japan, a research team said Saturday.
The research group of the National Institute of Radiological Science said the contamination level is too weak to immediately cause serious impact on people or the environment. But the group said its findings could provide useful data in a study on how radioactive fallout produced by past atmospheric nuclear tests flows throughout the world's oceans.
Plutonium pollution from the Bikini tests had never been confirmed in seas around Japan. The particles are believed to have been carried by ocean currents even after 50 years, and some of the plutonium sank into the sea and attached to dead planktons, according to the team.
"If we could figure out how such plutonium particles are flowing around the world, it would be useful at a time of a nuclear accident," said Masatoshi Yamada, the research team's leader.
Unlike underground testing, atmospheric nuclear tests release huge amounts of radioactive material, called "dead ash," into the air. In 1963, Britain, the Soviet Union and the United States agreed to ban that type of nuclear testing. But France and China continued. (Kyodo News)
----
Nuclear horror still haunts Hiroshima
Royce Brier
Sunday, August 1, 2004
San Francisco Chronicle
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/08/01/INGI57TEN11.DTL
I am sitting on a park bench in Hiroshima, gazing up into a clear blue sky. Right here, directly over my head, 59 years ago this coming Friday an atomic bomb detonated.
It was 8:16 a.m. Another clear blue sky. A few airplanes overhead, nothing unusual during wartime.
Then in just a few seconds, nearly everything within 2 kilometers was obliterated. As if the sun were reborn, there was a flash of light so intense it would have instantly blinded anyone nearby who happened to be looking toward it at that moment.
Simultaneously, a tremendous wave of heat radiation fanned out in all directions, incinerating all living creatures and wooden buildings within about 1 kilometer. Then came a shock wave that collapsed most structures farther away, nearly to the edge of the city.
As the superheated air around the explosion rose upward, it sucked debris, dirt and ash into the sky, forming a giant mushroom cloud, and Hiroshima grew dark. Within a few hours, the ash mixed with moisture and fell back to earth as poisonous "black rain.'' Fire quickly swept through the city, destroying whatever structures had been left standing after the blast.
Today, this place where I'm sitting is called Heiwa Koen, or Peace Park. I'm facing the ghostly ruins of the Hiroshima Prefectural Industry Promotion Hall, with its bare steel dome ribs. It's one of a handful of reinforced concrete buildings that weren't flattened by the explosion.
The A-Bomb Dome, as it's called, is a stop on one of the streetcar lines. It looks terribly out of place among the modern high-rises and the beautiful, open park.
In the park, groups of people sit on the ground and have picnics. Joggers hustle by, old men sit on benches reading the newspaper, a few homeless people trudge along.
Teenagers get together down by the river opposite the dome to entertain themselves with guitars and singing. Tourists from all over the world stop to take pictures or just gaze at the many monuments scattered throughout the park.
One of the best monuments is a statue of a local girl who died of leukemia 10 years after the bombing. She believed that if she folded a thousand paper cranes, she would get well. She didn't. Today, spreading out around the statue is a sea of colorful paper cranes, millions of them, linked into long chains, woven into tapestries or just piled up at the foot of the statue.
At the other end of the park from the dome is the Peace Memorial Museum, containing exhibits, relics and photos from the aftermath of the bombing. It's a tour of hell.
The land that the park sits on was once a traditional shopping and entertainment district. It was wiped out, of course. More than 100,000 people died on the morning of the bombing or shortly thereafter. Of those who weren't killed right away, the heat from the blast burned some people's clothes off and made their faces and limbs swell. Their skin began to peel off and hang from their heads and arms.
Many of the survivors congregated in public parks by the rivers. Some who were burned and crazed with thirst jumped into the rivers and drowned. But because most of Hiroshima's doctors and nurses were dead, and medical supplies destroyed, and outside help was slow in reaching the area, thousands died from their injuries.
People wandered around in shock, looking for their children or husbands or wives, sometimes not able to recognize them when they found them, because of their burns.
Every year on Aug. 6, a commemoration is held in the park. People gather to pray for relatives and friends lost in the war, listen to speeches, protest against nuclear weapons. In the evening, some go down to the river to light candles and place them inside paper lanterns, which are floated out onto the water. The lanterns are inscribed with prayers for the dead or messages of peace. The event always gets good international press.
As years pass by, the numbers of survivors of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki dwindle. But there are still a few left to tell their stories of horror and grief to schoolchildren. There's also a wealth of personal history, poetry, film and art about these events.
People tend to get used to living now with the threat of nuclear weapons. Maybe it's good to hear the stories, see the ugly photos, try to put ourselves there, if only to remind us why we must never let this happen again.
Royce Brier is a freelance writer in Santa Rosa.
----
The world's first A-bombed city draws a mantle of serenity over itself and its visitors
August 1, 2004
By Peter Rowe
SAN DIEGO UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/features/20040801-9999-lz1t1hiroshim.html
HIROSHIMA - When the train eased into the station, I grabbed my bags and swallowed hard. This pilgrimage to the nuclear age's ground zero held all the appeal of a broccoli and liver sandwich. Good for me, perhaps, but nothing I'd enjoy.
So I rode the shinkansen, the bullet train, for a quick visit. Steps from the station, I caught a trolley bound for the Peace Memorial Museum and opened my guidebook.
"Although it's a busy, prosperous, not unattractive industrial city," the text noted, "visitors would have no real reason to leave the shinkansen in Hiroshima (population 1,085,000) were it not for that terrible instant on 6 August 1945 when the city became the world's first atomic bomb target."
IF YOU GO
City of Hiroshima: http://www.city.hiroshima.jp
Japan National Tourist Organization: www.jnto.go.jp/eng
Use Google or Yahoo to find information on Miyajima, the Island of Shrines and the Peace Memorial. Thus, the common wisdom. But that evening, departing Hiroshima for less haunted destinations, I arrived at a startling conclusion: the common wisdom is wrong.
Two months later, I returned for a longer stay, determined to see more of this city of nightmares, dreams and surprising beauty. Still, the second visit began exactly as the first had.
Shinkansen.
Trolley.
Museum.
During a six-month stay in Japan, I visited dozens of World War II memorials and shrines. Without question, the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum was the best. Exhibits here provide a nuanced, unblinking account of Japan's role in the war. Nor do they shrink from this city's record as a key military port.
"Each time Japan became involved in military action," read a caption under an 1894 photo from the Sino-Japanese War, "Hiroshima was the base for assembly and dispatching of troops. As years went by, Hiroshima's military facilities grew more numerous and substantial."
On a historic level, this helps explain why war came home to Hiroshima. On a personal level, though, this does nothing to soften the horrors of Aug. 6, 1945. The museum explains the bomb in scientific terms; that's tough enough. But to see a child's battered lunch box, the meal reduced to radioactive ash; school uniforms, scorched and shredded by the blast; photos of naked men and women, kimono patterns burned into their skin; the stories of a few of the 75,000 who died here: This is obscene.
Outside the museum, I watched a woman sweep the Peace Memorial Park's tidy grounds with a reed broom. The park is brightened by trees and flowers, but its hallmark is the skeletal Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall, now called the A Bomb Dome.
At the park's northern border is the Aioi Bridge; the bomb detonated about 1,900 feet over the T-shaped span. Here, as in many Hiroshima sites, the monstrous coexists with the mundane. The bridge is bracketed by the A Bomb Dome, and the Hiroshima Carp's stadium.
The bridge also has a trolley stop. I boarded and 50 minutes later got off 1,400 years in the past.
This is Hiroden-Miyajima-Guchi station, where ferries offer a 10-minute voyage to Miyajima, the Island of Shrines. As the ferry crossed the Inland Sea, I could see trees poking through Mount Miten's mist-enshrouded 1,740-foot peak.
In this overcrowded and overbuilt nation, pristine Miyajima is a breath of fresh, pine-scented air. The heavily forested slopes are dotted with pagodas and temples. On a shoreline promenade, I was charmed by the innumerable statues of deer.
Then the "statues" walked toward me. On Miyajima, the protected wildlife feel no qualms about panhandling strangers. Judging by the signs, these encounters can be unpleasant.
One warned: "Stay away from deer with antlers."
I did my best, carefully retreating to Itsukushima-jinja, a Shinto shrine established in 593. The shrine is a Japanese icon, the star of innumerable posters and postcards. Graceful arcades and piers lead to the sea. There, a torii gate, its pilings anchored beneath the surface, appears to rise from the sparkling blue depths.
Except at low tide, as when I visited. Then the majestic red gate rises over a muddy plain. The torii seemed to be marking the end zone for a Shinto version of football.
Returning to Hiroshima, my thoughts turned again to sports. This time, at least, I could not be accused of cultural insensitivity. In the ferry terminal, a massive TV was tuned to the day's biggest story. The Seattle Mariners were playing the New York Yankees.
Make that, Ichiro Suzuki's Mariners were playing Hideki Matsui's Yankees.
"Do Americans really like Ichiro and Matsui?" a Japanese woman asked me.
I gave a reflexive answer - "Of course!" But in my hotel that night, bewildered by the raucous spectacle of Japanese TV, I considered how little I knew of the Japanese.
Including their attitudes. "In newspaper polls," Gengo Nakajima told me, "even in Hiroshima, when Japanese are asked which country they admire most, the No. 1 answer is the U.S."
Nakajima would know. He's executive officer for international relations at the Japanese Newspaper Publishers' Association. He's based in Tokyo, but when business took him to Hiroshima, he graciously offered to act as my guide and interpreter. He introduced me to the Hon-dori shopping arcade and okonomiyaki, a local delight that resembles a pancake stuffed with cabbage and meat.
He also introduced me to several of the 80,000 hibakusha, or A-bomb survivors, still living in Hiroshima.
Yoshito Matsushige, 91, spent most of his professional life photographing singers and actors for the Chigoku Shimbun, Hiroshima's newspaper. But on the afternoon of Aug. 6, 1945, he shot five of the grimmest images ever captured by a camera.
When the bomb detonated, Matsushige was with his wife in their home, almost two miles from the hypocenter. For hours, he struggled to reach downtown Hiroshima, picking his way past sparking electric wires and witnessing a parade of victims stagger from the city, their skin falling from their hands and faces.
"They were walking like ghosts," he said.
By 2:30 p.m., he reached the city center. Dozens of survivors were huddled on Miyuki Bashi, a bridge, too physically or emotionally battered to move on. For half an hour, the photographer watched them. He clutched the tools of his trade, unsure of what to do.
"Before I became a professional cameraman, I had been just an ordinary person. So when I was faced with a terrible scene like this, I found it difficult to push the shutter. I was standing on Miyuki Bashi for about 20 minutes before I could do it.
"Finally, finally, I thought, I am a professional cameraman so I have to."
Among the blast's victims was Hiroshima Castle, first built in 1591, and nicknamed Carp Castle because of its location near the sea. The five-story castle was rebuilt in 1958. Perhaps Hiroshima wished to recapture its past and to offer something nonapocalyptic to future visitors.
No matter the motive, the castle is a winner. The white and black exterior towers over a wide moat. The effect is forbidding, but don't be put off. The first four floors contain armor, swords and other glimpses into Hiroshima's samurai era. The top floor offers great views from an outdoor observation platform.
The castle, though, lacks a few modern conveniences. Before climbing to the top, I spied this notice: "No lavatories in the castle."
Fortunately, when I exited the castle, I found a public restroom.
Unfortunately, the doorless men's room affords unimpeded views of everything.
Fortunately, in Japan no one is rude enough to stare as you conduct your business.
Two blocks east of the castle complex, I stumbled upon the 17th-century Shukkei-en Garden. This patch of greenery is often overlooked because it is not one of Japan's best gardens.
That means it's not staggeringly beautiful, only marvelous.
You could say the same of Hiroshima. Only its tragedy is world-class; with the exception of Miyajima, the rest of the city's attractions and achievements are merely splendid. Eating a fine breakfast in my pleasant hotel's nice restaurant, I met Dave and Gail Frank, tourists from Oregon, and their 19-year-old son.
"This is like my favorite city," Joel Frank said. "If I can come back to live in Japan, I'd come here. I love Hiroshima."
Rain had splashed the city the night before, but now the clouds were lifting. Fifteen stories below us, surrounded by rivers and freshened by stands of camphor and Japanese maple, Hiroshima's Peace Park glistened in the sunshine.
It was one helluva view, enough to break your heart.
-------- u.s. nuc weapons
Part 1 of 3: Stockpile stalemate
August 1, 2004
The New Mexican
By JEFF TOLLEFSON
http://www.santafenewmexican.com/news/2515.html
Robert Oppenheimer and his crew were virtually certain that the very first plutonium bomb tested at the Trinity Site would be successful, based on theory and mathematics alone. The bomb dropped on Hiroshima, which employed uranium in a completely different design, was never tested at all.
Nearly six decades and trillions of dollars later, backed by computers and experimental facilities that make those of the Manhattan Project look like an entry in the local science fair, the U.S. Department of Energy says maintaining a nuclear arsenal has gotten harder, not easier.
Oddly enough, many of the agency's critics seem more confident in its products - thousands of thermonuclear bombs and warheads - than the agency itself.
Indeed, if you listen to modern nuclear-weapons scientists talk about the woes of ensuring today's arsenal works without nuclear testing, it would appear that weaponeers have designed themselves into a corner: Today's bombs and warheads are so sophisticated that the slightest flaw can flip a mysterious switch resulting in failure.
Citing such concerns in arguments before Congress after the moratorium on nuclear testing went into effect in 1992, officials at Los Alamos and the other nuclear-weapons labs succeeded in establishing the Stockpile Stewardship Program. It was touted as a means of maintaining nuclear weapons through science rather than explosions.
Out of the initiative sprang supercomputers, massive machines that take X-ray pictures of explosions and convert metal into a kind of superheated shrink wrap, even a laser program theoretically capable of initiating fusion, the nuclear reaction that fuels both the sun and thermonuclear weapons.
At the heart of stockpile stewardship is Los Alamos National Laboratory, once revered, now battered by a series of scandals. During the last five years, Congress and the media have focused on spying, security lapses, fraud and coverups, sometimes to the dismay of people who are concerned about core questions of nuclear science and policy.
After all, the nuclear mission goes on, and the lab's budget grows every year.
"We're 10 years into stewardship, and we've learned a lot," said Joe Martz, deputy leader of X Division, the lab's primary weapons branch. Martz is a believer who envisions the capabilities established through stockpile stewardship becoming the nuclear deterrent as the weapons themselves are retired.
"In the midst of all these scandals, let's not forget the big picture," he said. If nuclear disarmament is the goal, "we're 90 percent of the way there."
The price tag for stockpile stewardship over the last 10 years exceeds $50 billion dollars, and budgets increase each year. With annual spending surpassing that of the Cold War, however, the jury is still out on whether computers and pure science will be able to answer the toughest questions as the nuclear arsenal ages. Talk of a potential return to testing is on the rise.
Even as the Energy Department lobbies for and spends billions on high science and new initiatives with debatable value, regular government audits indicate the agency has failed to keep up with the first line of defense: routine surveillance of the arsenal.
Moreover, despite the current focus on threats posed by "rogue nations" and terrorists, the United States still spends 12 times more on its own nuclear weapons than it does on nonproliferation efforts geared toward securing and disposing of nuclear materials around the world, according to a recent report by the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Meanwhile, defense planners, scholars and elected officials go back and forth about what our nuclear arsenal is actually deterring, given that the original target, the Soviet Union, dissolved in 1991. In a world of changing security threats, the defense planners under President Bush are redefining the word "deterrence" and deciding how many and what kind of nukes to maintain, or develop, in the coming decades.
And while lab and government officials tend to talk about extending the life of the current arsenal, make no mistake: Many see stockpile stewardship as a vehicle for full-scale design and development of new weapons in a world without nuclear testing.
Gauging uncertainty
The stewardship program does not require the Energy Department to be 100 percent certain of any weapon. It requires that the agency and its labs assess the reliability of the arsenal, which leaves us in a quandary: How certain is certain enough?
"I would urge you not to stand at ground zero for one of our current bombs. I would suggest that you not camp at ground zero for one of our current bombs 50 years from now."
That was Bob Peurifoy, a veteran weapons engineer retired from Sandia National Laboratories. While the nuclear labs fiddle with their equipment and ponder the details, people like Peurifoy rephrase the question in terms of deterrence. He says there is no reason to believe these weapons won't work indefinitely, with proper maintenance.
Many activists go a step farther, criticizing the labs for creating doubts where there need be none, for raising the bar to a level where uncertainty necessarily prevails.
Los Alamos National Laboratory says its job is to provide a solid foundation in the nuclear sciences by asking the what-if questions. What if age and radioactive decay disrupt the reliability of a nuclear bomb sooner rather than later? What if an entirely unforeseen problem is discovered in the stockpile?
One answer to both questions, at least under the Bush administration, is the Modern Pit Facility, a multibillion-dollar bomb plant that would be ready by the time the oldest weapons in the arsenal hit the ripe age of 45. The Energy Department temporarily withdrew that proposal earlier this year because of Congressional concerns about the justification for such a project.
Weaponeers often compare their bombs to automobiles in terms of complexity and the number of parts, although the science that drives these devices is much more advanced. The lab is developing computer models to assess potential problems as well as statistical methods for gauging the importance of all the little questions that arise during annual inspections of the aging weapons.
Things are looking good so far, but the list of nagging questions grows each year, says John Immele, the lab's deputy director in charge of national security. You could always substitute current weapons with older, simpler versions, he said, but for now the lab must work with what it has.
"The nuclear weapons of our stockpile are the Ferraris of the nuclear-weapons age," Immele says. "They are small, they are difficult to manufacture, and in some cases their design margins are (tight)."
In other words, little problems can become big problems, which is why the labs spend millions of dollars probing the mundane minutia of its bombs and warheads. In the past, weapons were switched out and upgraded regularly, so the labs never worried about the effects of old age.
Certification
Earlier this year, LANL Director Pete Nanos signed what might be the single most important document produced by the U.S. Department of Energy.
In addition to Nanos and the directors of the other two nuclear-weapons labs, Sandia in Albuquerque and Lawrence Livermore in California, Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham signed the document on March 18, followed by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in mid-April. It was then forwarded to President Bush.
For many, that document represents a commitment to the nation, the culmination of another year of the best science in the world. For others, it represents a sledgehammer carefully poised above the heads of Congressional appropriators.
Backed by $6.5 billion from taxpayers this year alone, the classified document could be summarized as such: Thermonuclear bombs in the current arsenal will explode when they are supposed to, but not before such time. In other words, no nuclear tests are necessary, at least for another year.
If any one of those individuals were to refuse to sign, it would ignite a political firestorm throughout Washington, D.C., and the world. In the face of significant doubt, conclusive proof that a bomb works, or does not work, can only be achieved through detonation. The only other option, one cited by Immele, is replacement.
The United States has so far upheld former President Clinton's commitment to nonproliferation efforts laid out in the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, although the U.S. Senate forcefully rejected ratification of the international treaty in 1999.
This policy has its roots in Congress, which passed a bill in 1992 that established a moratorium but left the Energy Department some leeway to argue for a few final tests. Then-President George H.W. Bush signed the legislation into law, and Clinton not only supported the ban but ended the debate by quashing the final series of tests. The nation's 1,054th and last test, Divider, took place on Sept. 23, 1992, 47 years after its first.
A statistical analysis
Ray Kidder began his career as a nuclear designer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 1955. When the Energy Department and the national labs were arguing in the early 1990s against a ban on nuclear tests, comparing modern nukes to Ferraris and claiming that Ferraris need to be driven to ensure peak performance, Kidder was on the other side of the table.
As requested by the House Armed Services Committee in 1987, Kidder performed a statistical analysis of nuclear-test data and reported that U.S. nuclear designers had pretty much mastered the craft by the 1980s. Kidder said a separate classified study by another Livermore scientist came to the same conclusion.
Kidder's investigation became a focal point in the debate over the 1992 testing moratorium, which remains in place today. If Congress' decision to move forward with a test ban is any measure, Kidder won.
In a recent telephone interview, Kidder said Immele of LANL is promoting the old lab line when he says nuclear weapons push the envelope of physics. He scoffs at the notion that current weapons are designed on the edge as suggested by Immele.
"There is documentary evidence - not just opinion - that the weapons that were produced, almost all of them, and the ones that are still in the stockpile are sufficiently robust that they can be maintained forever. Period."
Christopher Paine is a former staffer on the Senate Armed Services Committee and nuclear expert at the Natural Resources Defense Council in Washington, D.C. He says lab officials like to play up their technical prowess and maintain the mystique that surrounds the nuclear complex, as well as the burgeoning budgets that support it.
"The notion that these weapons are so-called 'on the edge' and likely to fail if there are small design changes, I never found that to be true when I had classified access," Paine said. "The DOE really does its level best to mislead. I don't believe the concerns are genuine. I don't believe these weapons will fail. And there's nothing in the testing record to indicate that they would."
That said, more than 20 years after the development of the W76, a submarine-launched warhead, a small group of LANL scientists is raising questions about whether a fundamental design flaw remains in that system. LANL says it is perfectly confident in the system, although one of the scientists raising the concerns told The New Mexican that the lab has a new design that would correct for the problem.
Hedging bets
Given that all of the questions will never be answered, Energy Department officials say the entire nuclear complex must remain mobilized to address the unforeseen.
"Don't anybody think that this program is going to be finished in a few more years and we are going to be able to sit back and tie a ribbon on it," said Everett Beckner, deputy administrator for defense programs at the National Nuclear Security Administration, DOE's weapons branch. "That's not the way it works."
The best way to maintain weapons is to maintain expertise, and the best way to do that is to attract budding young scientists with interesting work - before the generation of designers and technicians with testing experience retires. That reasoning, along with emerging geopolitical threats, is the backbone of the Bush administration's nuclear policy, which is increasingly geared toward new designs and more-versatile weapons.
The latest treaty between the United States and Russia might reduce the number of active weapons to a couple thousand, but DOE officials admit that most of the deactivated warheads will be stored, not dismantled. Russia is a friend now, but you never know.
Combine that with the Bush administration's efforts to move up the timeline for a possible return to nuclear testing, if such a decision were made, at the Nevada Test Site, and you see why nonproliferation advocates are up in arms.
"We'll end up with the worst of both worlds, but plenty of business for the nuclear-weapons industry," says Jay Coghlan, who heads Nuclear Watch of New Mexico. Coghlan says the United States missed a great opportunity to substantially reduce the nuclear threat after the fall of the Soviet Union.
"There should have been a much stronger push to go down to a minimalist deterrence," he says. "If DOE just stuck to the nuts and bolts of preserving the weapons while awaiting their eventual dismantlement, that would have been good. Instead, they've gone off on all of these exotic experimental facilities and introduced all of these major modifications and refurbishments that will likely undermine confidence."
By asking the wrong questions and heading into new experimental territory, he says, the labs are securing their own future, not that of the United States. Citing the nation's commitment in the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, requiring "good-faith negotiations" toward complete nuclear disarmament, Coghlan believes it would be wiser to push for nonproliferation and secure nuclear materials in other countries rather than further building up the nation's nuclear capabilities.
Time will tell
Government officials say the current policy does not contradict the nonproliferation treaty: Both the United States and Russia are on track for the long-term goal as both nations reduce the size of their arsenals.
In the meantime, it's a matter of hedging bets. Beckner points to both the fall of the Soviet Union and the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, as evidence that nobody can predict what kinds of threats the nation will or won't face in the future.
"Everyone knows we don't need 20,000 nuclear weapons ... but I think it's clear to a number of people that we do need a nuclear deterrent," Beckner said in a recent interview. "We just need to change it, transform it, so that we meet the needs of the modern world."
Hugh Gusterson is a cultural anthropologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and author of the book Labs in Crisis: Nuclear Weapons Scientists After the Cold War.
He describes the decision to halt nuclear testing as a "fantastically complicated and delicate political bargain," one that was probably more complex among agencies and entities in the United States than it was on the international scene. While there was an obvious need to ensure the reliability of the nuclear arsenal, Gusterson said the Clinton administration clearly recognized the political power of the national laboratories and gave them lavishly funded experimental facilities to keep them happy.
Gusterson is working on a new book about how that process has played out in the labs, where scientists have had to refocus their work. He said some seem pleased with the funding appropriated for things like computer modeling and fundamental nuclear sciences, although modern weapon designers might always long for a chance to test their work. "It's an enormous experiment, not only a science experiment but a political experiment," Gusterson said of the Stockpile Stewardship Program, and the nation might not understand the outcome of that experiment for a long time.
"I still don't think we know whether the first atomic bomb was worth it," Gusterson said. "If al-Qaida gets its hands on a nuclear weapon and an American city disappears, we may have a very different feeling about Oppenheimer."
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- washington
Wash. Nuclear Power Plant Halts Operations
July 30, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Nuclear-Plant-Shutdown.html
RICHLAND, Wash. (AP) -- Washington state's only commercial nuclear power plant stopped operations Friday after an automatic shutdown system failed to work properly.
State emergency officials said there was no release of radiation and no danger to the public.
The reactor, which is operated by Energy Northwest, will remain out of service until crews determine what caused the problem, said Brad Peck, spokesman for the company.
The automatic shutdown system was triggered by an indication of high pressure, said Ken Clark, a spokesman for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. As part of the shutdown, all 185 control rods were supposed to insert into the reactor. But lights on a control panel indicated that two rods failed to insert, said Heather McMurdo, a spokeswoman for Energy Northwest.
Backup systems operated correctly after the rods, which control the reactor's operation, were inserted manually, she said. Operators kept the plant shut down as a precaution, McMurdo said.
The reactor is located on land leased from the U.S. Department of Energy within the boundaries of the Hanford nuclear reservation in south-central Washington state, but is a separate entity.
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
Taliban Fighters Increase Attacks
August 1, 2004
By ERIC SCHMITT and DAVID ROHDE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/01/international/asia/01AFGH.html?pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, July 31 - Attacks against American troops in Afghanistan and Afghan security forces and civilians have increased steadily in the past several months, posing new hurdles for reconstruction and political stability efforts, American commanders and Afghan officials say.
Fighting has intensified, particularly in the east along the rugged, 1,500-mile border with Pakistan and in the south near Kandahar. Twenty-three American troops have died from ambushes, land mines and other hostile fire this year, compared with 12 combat deaths in all of 2003, according to military statistics. An increasingly popular weapon may have been inspired by insurgents in Iraq: remote-controlled bombs.
The Taliban have stepped up recruiting in the south and intensified strikes against newly trained Afghan soldiers and police officers, as well as foreign-aid workers. This week, the international aid agency Doctors Without Borders said it was withdrawing from Afghanistan after 24 years, in part because of the deteriorating security there.
The attacks appear to be having the most impact in rural areas of southern and eastern Afghanistan, where the Afghan government is still struggling to establish its authority nearly three years after the Taliban fell. That part of the country has been a traditional Taliban stronghold. Reconstruction in some areas has come to a near standstill, and local people remain hostile to the Americans and the Afghan government.
American commanders nonetheless paint an optimistic picture, saying the increased attacks are signs of the Taliban's desperation and of expanding allied operations. The United States has doubled the number of troops in Afghanistan in the last year, to about 20,000 troops at its peak recently, and expanded their presence throughout the country. Commanders say a new counterinsurgency strategy adopted late last year has paid dividends, by providing security for fledgling reconstruction projects and enabling soldiers to gather fresh intelligence to use in their attacks against militants.
`Huge Challenges' Remain "There are still some huge challenges, mainly in the security area," Lt. Gen. David W. Barno, the top American commander in Afghanistan, said by telephone from his headquarters in Kabul, the capital. "But on a broad scale, as we look to the election, we think this country is very much on the road to success."
While the attacks have increased, they still do not approach the level of violence in Iraq and have failed in many ways to halt reconstruction efforts, American and Afghan officials say. A Taliban campaign to derail a voter registration drive for the Afghan presidential election in October has largely failed, with roughly 8 million of 10 million eligible voters defying Taliban death threats and registering.
Taliban attacks appear to have virtually no effect on Afghanistan's main cities, where foreign reconstruction money, remittances from Afghans living abroad and the opium trade are fueling a construction boom. But the Taliban appear to be hampering the flow of aid in rural areas, particularly in remote regions in the south.
Stepped-Up Security This month, General Barno announced that American-led forces, joined by thousands of Afghan soldiers and police officers, would increase security operations for the Afghan presidential elections.
"Without question, the Taliban view this year as a political watershed," said General Barno, a West Point graduate who assumed command in October. "They have a very specific objective: voter registration and the elections. They're seeking to disrupt them with attacks against soft targets. That's helped to drive up the attacks."
General Barno is the architect of tactics adopted late last year in which American units down to the level of 40-soldier platoons have been dispatched to live in villages where they can forge ties with tribal elders and glean better information about the location and activities of guerrillas.
Previously, American forces typically gathered intelligence about hostile forces, carried out focused raids for several days against those targets, then returned to base to plan and prepare for their next mission.
American commanders say they are getting better cooperation in some areas, while pockets of hostility persist in others.
The United States is now operating in 26 locations around the country, including military outposts and provincial reconstruction teams aimed at enhancing reconstruction and extending the reach of the government, General Barno said; a year ago, there were 11 such locations.
American commanders say the increased American military presence has initiated new attacks against the insurgents and drawn fire from militants. Marines who recently withdrew from Oruzgan Province, home to the fugitive Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar, say they have killed more than 100 fighters in their four-month stay.
After the recent withdrawal of some 2,000 marines, there remain 18,000 American and other allied troops, including Romanian infantry and South Korean engineers, who are operating in Afghanistan alongside a 6,500-member NATO peacekeeping force in and around Kabul. Army and Marine helicopter gunships and Air Force A-10's and B-1's provide air power.
General Barno said he had repositioned two Army battalions to replace the departing marines, and would see if more troops were necessary.
An additional 1,800 NATO troops from Spain and Italy are to arrive in the coming weeks to help bolster security for the election, a far smaller force than Afghan officials have requested.
American forces are also trying to integrate 14,000 members of the new Afghan Army and 21,000 newly trained Afghan police officers. But some Pentagon officials expressed disappointment that the Afghan police and other security forces have been poorly integrated into the overall security structure.
Several hundred Special Operations forces are also spread across the country, conducting tasks including road-building, other civil works duties and paramilitary strikes against senior insurgent leaders.
Hundreds of additional troops have also been assigned to 16 provincial reconstruction teams around the country, part of General Barno's strategy to assert "ownership" of an area rather than hopscotch around the country.
"The bottom line is, even though attacks are up, we're getting done the business we need to get done," Maj. Gen. Eric T. Olson, General Barno's top ground commander, said in a telephone interview from his headquarters at Bagram Air Base.
Along the border with Pakistan, an array of spy satellites and reconnaissance aircraft help in the hunt for Osama bin Laden and other militants who slip back and forth across the mountainous border, and use their sanctuaries to launch nightly rocket and mortar attacks against American military outposts.
After little action for two years, roughly 40,000 regular Pakistani army troops and 30,000 paramilitary scouts mounted an offensive this spring to sweep foreign militants out of the tribal areas, according to Pakistani officials.
Mahmood Shah, a retired brigadier general who is in charge of security in the tribal areas, said a new operation started by the Pakistani military in the South Waziristan tribal area in June had resulted in the clearing of the Shakai valley, where several hundreds of foreign militants had been sheltered for the past two years.
Gains, But Deaths Mount But while there are successes in Afghanistan, the death toll continues to mount. Afghan government officials said they had kept no overall tally of the number of Afghans killed across the country, including soldiers and police officers.
But the review of attacks reported by news agencies indicates that in the first six months of 2003, Taliban fighters killed 119 Afghans. In the first six months of 2004, they killed 179 Afghans, an increase of 50 percent. Most of the killings involved Afghan police officers or soldiers being killed in ambushes, attacks or clashes with Taliban forces in rural areas in the south and east.
Beginning in early 2003, Taliban fighters also began singling out aid workers, killing at least 16 Afghan aid workers and at least one foreign aid worker between March 2003 and the present, according to the review.
This year numerous other attacks on foreigners have occurred, but it has been unclear whether the Taliban are responsible. In the first six months of 2004, attacks on foreigners soared, with 17 foreign contractors and foreign aid workers killed across the country. But it is not known whether the unidentified assailants were factional fighters, Taliban supporters or simple thieves.
Rural Attacks Increase In rural Zabul, Oruzgan, Khost, Kandahar and Helmand Provinces, attacks have grown in intensity in the last year, according to the review. Zabul Province, in particular, now produces reports of clashes between Afghan and American forces and Taliban fighters roughly each week.
An example of the trend in rural areas is northern Helmand, a drought-stricken area where the Taliban have gained strength this year, Afghan officials and aid workers said.
Mullahs in local mosques in northern Helmand have begun openly preaching jihad against Americans and the Afghan government, they said. A local warlord who tolerated the provincial governor has begun threatening government workers.
Shir Mohammad Akhundzada, the governor of Helmand Province, said in an interview in late June that Taliban forces had killed 15 to 20 soldiers in the province in the past four months. In all of the previous year, they killed 14 soldiers.
Mr. Akhundzada and his intelligence chief said that for the first time since 2001 the Taliban were recruiting young people in northern Helmand. Until now, fresh Taliban recruits had come from Pakistan, they said, where three million Afghan refugees still live. "Nowadays, I'm feeling that lots of local people also join them," the governor said. "Some of the people are a little bit angry with the Americans and some are unhappy with the government."
He said severe drought in northern Helmand continued to fuel poverty and frustration. He also called on American forces to "act very carefully with the people," as elections approach, and ensure that intelligence tips they receive are genuine and do not lure them into local feuds.
Fueling Local Anger House searches and arrests of innocent Afghans by American forces have angered the local population, highly conservative ethnic Pashtuns, he said. He complained about one raid where American soldiers confiscated heavy machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades from a government police station. "When they are going and arresting the police, the police will get very disappointed and angry," he said. "There are no other people to send there to north Helmand."
Malim Dadu, the intelligence chief in Helmand Province, estimated that the Taliban were 50 percent stronger now than a year earlier and were increasingly well financed. He said that local people were now helping the Taliban "a lot" and admitted that the Afghan government was failing on its own in some areas. He said security was lacking on the highways and government "administrative people are taking bribes."
Afghan officials say the situation is not yet dire. But they expressed concern about the growing strength of the Taliban in rural areas. "God willing, we are stronger than the Taliban now," said Mr. Akhundzada, the Helmand governor. "But we don't know about the future."
Eric Schmitt reported from Washington for this article and David Rohde from Peshawar, Pakistan.
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Many Afghans Complain Of Hastily Set Elections
Lack of Security, Resources Threatens October Vote
By Keith B. Richburg
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, August 1, 2004; Page A16
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A30746-2004Jul31?language=printer
KABUL, Afghanistan -- After being ruled by the gun for the past two decades and by kings for the previous two centuries, Afghans are less than three months away from voting in their country's first democratic election.
But is the country ready?
Some political analysts -- and a few candidates -- contend that despite Afghanistan's long wait for democracy, the presidential election scheduled for Oct. 9 has been hastily arranged by foreign governments more concerned with their own priorities than with those of Afghans.
In many parts of this mountainous, landlocked country the size of Texas, armed factional leaders exercise greater power than the central government, commanding private militias and collecting taxes and other revenue. Remnants of the ousted Taliban Islamic movement and the al Qaeda network continue to wage a running insurgency, battling 20,000 American and allied troops and vowing to disrupt the election.
In addition, no one is certain how many Afghans are eligible to vote, because there has been no census in decades. There are no clear guidelines for how candidates will finance their campaigns or who will guarantee their security if they travel around the country. There is no plan in place for international monitoring of the vote or for safeguarding ballots as they are moved from isolated villages to provincial capitals.
"It's paradoxical that the international community, especially the United States, has invested a lot in the electoral process but has not put in the resources to guarantee it's free and fair," said Vikram Parekh, senior analyst with the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based research organization. "The big question is: Is the country prepared for a democratic exercise?"
After U.S. forces and Afghan militias drove the Taliban from power in late 2001, Afghan factional leaders and representatives of foreign powers met that December in Bonn, Germany, to chart a path that would lead Afghanistan to a form of representative government.
In addition to naming Hamid Karzai president and parceling out positions in his cabinet among ethnic and regional factions, participants adopted a timetable that would bring elections by the middle of this year.
But many are questioning whether that goal was too optimistic. Even though the election is a few months behind schedule and will not include a vote for members of parliament, Parekh said he thought the time frame set by Bonn was "unrealistic, given what people had to establish here from the ground up."
Foreign Minister Abdullah, a former faction official from northern Afghanistan who has been the country's top diplomat since the Bonn conference, said he, too, thought the election was being held prematurely. The current government -- an interim administration chosen at a grand council, or loya jirga, in July 2002 -- needs more time to rebuild the country's shattered institutions, he said.
"A preferable situation might have been if we had a five-year term for the government, so we could create institutions and [do] the basic work," Abdullah said.
This past week, 23 candidates filed the paperwork required to run for president. Some said that the rush to elections favored the incumbent, Karzai, and questioned the fairness of the process.
"The situation for elections is not suitable," said a challenger from Karzai's Pashtun ethnic group, Ahmad Shah Ahmadzai. "This is not the right time. They should postpone it until next year."
Like many Afghans, Ahmadzai accused the Bush administration of pushing the Afghan process ahead so the election would take place before the U.S. elections in November.
"We are sacrificing our elections for the November election in America -- otherwise there is no reason to have our election in such a hurry," contended Ahmadzai, 60, a wealthy businessman. "Mr. Bush wants to show, 'I am a hero and had the election in Afghanistan.' They are forcing everything for their own election and not for the poor Afghans."
Other observers argued that there is no perfect time to hold an election in a country recovering from decades of war and that even a messy, flawed election would bring the Afghan government needed legitimacy.
"Is it going to be an election like we're used to in a Western democracy? Probably not. But it's a first step," said Grant Kippen, country director for the congressionally funded National Democratic Institute, which is helping with preparations. "I look at it more as a process rather than an event. We need to send a signal to a whole bunch of groups -- the ordinary citizens, the Taliban and al Qaeda, the government -- that we're serious about Afghanistan and helping them."
One thing observers agree on is that incumbency gives Karzai a formidable advantage over his challengers. He is known around the entire country and dominates the state-run media.
In a recent public opinion poll conducted in Afghanistan by the Asia Foundation, a U.S.-based nongovernmental group, 62 percent of respondents gave Karzai a favorable job-approval rating, and he received an 85 percent personal popularity rating. However, in southern Afghanistan, the Pashtun heartland where Karzai has his roots, his approval rating was only 35 percent, while 46 percent said he was doing a fair or poor job.
While he is widely credited with restoring stability to many parts of the country, Karzai is faulted for not having improved economic conditions for ordinary Afghans despite a massive influx of foreign aid.
"I prefer Karzai," said Shah Mohammad, 29, a fruit vendor in a northern Kabul neighborhood populated largely by ethnic Tajiks. "He hasn't created any jobs, but he's secured the country."
Another man, Shuja Mohammad, also 29, said he would vote for Yonus Qanooni, an ethnic Tajik former cabinet member who may be Karzai's strongest challenger. As for Karzai, he said, "If he was able to do something, he would have done it in the last two years."
That is precisely the kind of sentiment that Karzai's rivals hope to tap.
"The situation is degrading. The gap between the people and the government is growing larger every day," said Homayun Shah Asefi, a French-trained lawyer and former diplomat whose connections to Afghanistan's former king could enable him to challenge Karzai among Pashtun voters.
Ahmadzai, the other main Pashtun candidate, said: "Corruption is very high. If you collect all the corruption in the world, it wouldn't come close to Afghanistan."
He added, "When I list the defects of the government, every Afghan knows this -- that is why I am optimistic I can win."
Whether such calculations mean anything to the many poor Afghans with little formal education is hard to gauge. Many scarcely know what an election is, never having experienced one.
"We heard they will put a lot of boxes beside each other and tell us to put a card in the box for whoever we like," said Mohamed Shafi, a 57-year-old from Mazar-e Sharif who was selling melons from a kiosk in Kabul.
Asked about democracy, he replied: "Democracy means freedom, and do whatever you want."
-------- africa
Bowing to U.N. Demand, Sudan Says It Will Disarm Arab Militias
August 1, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/01/international/africa/01sudan.html?pagewanted=all
KHARTOUM, Sudan, July 31 (AP) - Sudan stepped back on Saturday from its rejection of a resolution passed by the United Nations Security Council, saying it would comply with the resolution's demand that it disarm Arab militias responsible for atrocities in Darfur.
Sudan's ambassador to the African Union, Osman al-Said, told reporters in Addis Ababa on Saturday that his government would comply, but said Khartoum would need help from the United Nations.
"We are not happy with the resolution, but we are going to implement it - we have no other option," Mr. Said said. But, he added, "It is difficult to implement, so we need the U.N. assistance."
The country's foreign minister, Mustafa Osman Ismail, said the resolution, passed Friday, did not go beyond commitments Sudan made in early July to Secretary General Kofi Annan to rein in the militias.
The resolution gives the Sudanese government 30 days to act against the Janjaweed militias. After the Security Council passed the resolution, the Sudanese information minister, Al-Zahawi Ibrahim Malik, said his country rejected the resolution, which "does not conform with the agreements signed between the government and the United Nations." Asked about Mr. Malik's statement, Mr. Ismail said, "The cabinet is the only body charged with responding to the resolution." After a cabinet meeting on Sunday, the government will issue its response, he said.
At least 30,000 people have been killed and more than one million displaced in a 17-month conflict in Darfur, where government-backed Arab militias have waged a campaign to drive out black African farmers.
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Powell Warns Sudan: Act on U.N. Demands
By Robin Wright
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, August 1, 2004; Page A17
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A30435-2004Jul31.html
KUWAIT CITY, July 31 -- Secretary of State Colin L. Powell warned Sudan on Saturday to accept a new U.N. resolution aimed at ending violence in the western province of Darfur and use the next 30 days to rein in a marauding Arab militia that has killed more than 30,000 people and forced more than a million to flee their homes.
The resolution, which passed in the Security Council Friday on a 13 to 0 vote with two abstentions, warned of unspecified punitive action if the government failed to follow through on promises to crack down on the militia, known as the Janjaweed, restore security and facilitate international aid to alleviate a growing humanitarian crisis.
"The issue now is to move forward to help the suffering people of Darfur," Powell said after a meeting with Kuwaiti officials. "I hope the Sudanese government will use the period in the resolution to do everything it can to bring the Janjaweed under control."
Sudanese Foreign Minister Mustafa Osman Ismail said the resolution did not go beyond commitments Sudan made in early July to U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan to rein in the militia.
"If we look closely at this matter, we will find out that there is no reason to reject the resolution as it doesn't contain anything new, . . . other than what already has been signed on in the agreement with the United Nations," Ismail said, according to the Associated Press.
Human rights and aid groups say that since the crisis began 17 months ago, the Janjaweed has carried out atrocities in Darfur, including killings, rapes and setting villages ablaze, forcing African villagers to flee their homes and crops.
During his week-long swing through North Africa and the Persian Gulf region this week, Powell found opposition to the idea of threatening sanctions without giving Sudan more time to restrain the militia.
"We can have polemics about the resolution. But let's not forget the fact that hundreds of thousands are in need, and they're the ones we need to be trying to help," Powell said at a press conference with Kuwaiti Foreign Minister Mohammed Sabah.
In Kuwait, Powell held talks with officials about Iraq, the stalled Palestinian-Israeli peace process and terrorism. Later, Powell visited Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital, to discuss the impending handover of command authority of peacekeeping troops from NATO to the European Union.
Powell will wrap up his trip in Poland, leading a U.S. delegation at the commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the Warsaw uprising against the Nazis.
-------- iraq
Iraqi Security Has Come Far, With Far to Go
U.S.-Trained Forces Hit by Defections
By Doug Struck
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, August 1, 2004; Page A18
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A30908-2004Jul31?language=printer
BAGHDAD -- Five hooded men hopped out of a car at the checkpoint, heavily armed and clearly eager for blood. Iraqi policeman Maytham Talib figured it was time to quit his job.
"Each one of them had an automatic weapon. The police, we had four rifles, but only two worked. We had seven bullets for each rifle. We ran," said Talib, 25. He had already seen two colleagues gunned down at a checkpoint and two others slain by a grenade. He fled, took a bus home and has not been back to work since.
Established by the U.S. occupation authority and trained by foreign troops, Iraq's police and National Guard have been targets of insurgent attacks for months. With the formal end of U.S. occupation, they have been dying in ever larger numbers -- at least 127 have been killed in the last two months. The danger, coupled with low pay, has caused many to quit.
Defections pose a serious obstacle to the rebuilding of Iraq's security forces but not the only one. Planning has been chaotic, units have staged mutinies, and essential equipment has not been delivered. In recent months, the entire process of recruitment and training has been largely scrapped and begun again, and the interim Iraqi government that was installed on June 28 has dictated more changes.
"It was worse than starting from scratch," complained Sabah Kadhim, a top official in the Interior Ministry, which is in charge of police. "We had to weed out criminals from the policemen who the Americans put there."
After more than a year under the occupation, Kadhim said, "the police lacked efficiency, lacked organization, lacked cars, lacked weapons, lacked communication. Literally, they didn't have clothing."
Now, Iraqi and U.S. officials insist, the security forces are making progress. They say the police and National Guard are starting to conduct their own raids and perform well under attack. Training camps will soon crank out graduates. The heavy U.S. military presence is gradually shifting to a backup role behind Iraqi forces, they say, and there are plenty of new recruits waiting to take the places of those who quit. Last week, interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi said the emerging security forces were starting to reduce the number of attacks in Iraq.
But his optimistic assessment seemed at odds with the daily drumbeat of mortar attacks, car bombs and ambushes.
"Security is the biggest problem we face," Defense Minister Hazim Shalan said in an interview. "We are working. But if you ask me, am I satisfied, I must say no." Approximately 225,000 men and some women are listed as serving in the Iraqi security forces -- nearly 88 percent of the recruitment goal. But the numbers are debatable; the police carry 30,000 more names on their payroll than they can account for. Of those who exist, only a fraction have any training, often consisting of a few weeks at a boot camp. Top officials insist they have relatively few resignations -- no reliable figures are available -- but officers on the street say hundreds quit every month after getting their paychecks.
"I'm waiting to finish this month and get my salary, and then I will quit," said Heider Abbas, a policeman in Baghdad who cited low pay. A laborer or shop worker, he said, "gets more than we do."
U.S. planners say Iraqi security forces must be strong enough to fight the insurgency before American troops can withdraw. But the rush to build the forces -- an effort one officer called "30,000 in 30 days" -- led to a crisis in April when Iraqi troops refused to fight.
According to a Government Accountability Office report released last month, nearly 3,000 policemen quit or were removed in one week in mid-April. Among the Iraqi National Guard, desertions ranged from 30 percent in northeastern and central Iraq to 82 percent around the western city of Fallujah, where insurgents battled besieging U.S. Marines. In all, 12,000 soldiers did not show up for duty, according to the report.
"Given the poor performance of the Iraqi security forces during April 2004, it is unclear what level of security they will be able to provide during the period leading up to Iraq's national elections" scheduled for January, the GAO concluded.
Shalan, who became defense minister last month, said the forces had to be rebuilt from the ground up after the April failures. The occupation authority "failed in how they chose people to be employed," he said in an interview last week. "They depended on how a person looked. I think it was whoever the translators liked. That created many of the current problems."
Now, he says, his forces are getting organized. He pointed to a recent sweep through Baghdad's tough Haifa Street neighborhood that resulted in more than 150 arrests and to recent gun battles in which the National Guard stood its ground.
Though U.S. officials envisioned the National Guard as the country's principal domestic armed force, with the army serving as a defense only against external threats, Iraq's new officials have revamped that plan. Allawi announced soon after taking office that the army would be used for domestic security, and Shalan said he expected to transform at least part of the National Guard into the core of a new Iraqi army of six divisions with about 50,000 soldiers. With small air force and marine contingents, he said, Iraq's total armed services would be about 70,000.
Shalan said he is conducting background checks on the guardsmen, who he said number 40,000, and is recruiting more. He would not estimate how many of the current National Guardsmen he thinks will qualify for the army. Those who do not, he said, will become civil servants.
The interim Iraqi government has plans for a proliferation of security agencies in the Middle East tradition of multiple forces that watch each other. The list includes a general security directorate for intelligence, an intervention force, a coastal defense force, an air force, border, customs, immigration and security police, a SWAT team, a facilities protection service and a diplomatic protection service.
The government is also working to get rid of poor hires and nonexistent workers. Though the police force, for example, is paying about 120,000 people, only 87,000 are accounted for, according to British Brig. Andrew Mackay, the coalition adviser for the Iraqi police. "There's a degree of ghosts in there," he said.
Training has gone slowly. For the Iraqi army, only about 3,000 soldiers have been trained and deployed in the field, according to Brig. Gen. James Schwitters, commander of the coalition training team assisting the army. One source of delays has been the lack of adequate training sites for recruits, he said.
Only 6,000 police recruits have received training in a police academy, according to Mackay. Another 21,000 have undergone a three-week training course, he said. At least 60,000 are untrained. To help, Washington has issued a $500 million, two-year contract to train Iraqi police and soldiers in Jordan and has asked NATO for assistance with training.
Schwitters said the training programs would soon start to produce more soldiers. "We will have five battalions by the end of this month, and by the end of the year, 27 battalions," he said.
Mackay, too, is cautiously optimistic about the police.
"The Iraqi Police Service has some way to go before you can really consider them . . . effective," he acknowledged. "They have come a long way. We have given them equipment -- but we haven't given them enough. More needs to come. But they are around. They are visible. They are responding. They are conducting individual operations that they plan themselves, execute themselves, and do the follow-up themselves.
He and other officers cite examples of police stations that come under mortar attack one day and are fully manned the next, of wounded officers returning to work, of applicants still streaming into recruiting offices. "All of that is hugely encouraging," he said. But "there's a lot more that needs to be done."
At a National Guard recruiting office in Baghdad, young men jostle in line to apply. They say they are undeterred by the danger or the low pay.
"I was in the army before," said Hassan Ghrier, 22. "Yes, it's dangerous, but I don't care. And the pay is better than it was before, in the army. Anyway, it's a job."
Zain Ali Abdeen Basl, 22, has completed the first part of his training and is anxious to start working. He slips secretly onto the National Guard base from his home on Haifa Street, where many of his neighbors are insurgents or gangsters. "My neighbors threaten the security forces. But I just want to serve my country," he said.
They are bolstered by the guardsmen nearby. Ali Edan, 23, was shot once while on duty, but "I don't want to quit. I want to protect my country," he said. "I will show my children that I was hurt protecting Iraq. I am proud of that."
Another guardsman, who declined to give his name, described a different reality: "There are a lot of people who want to quit. Last month, we got 250,000 Iraqi dinars [about $170]. This month, we got only 210,000 dinars [$145]. Lots of guys are waiting until the end of the month to see what their pay is, and then they will quit. Our life is in danger out there, and no one takes care of us."
The commander of the base, Lt. Col. Heider Abdul Rasul, was in the Iraqi army's special forces for 20 years. He has about 950 soldiers and a list of 1,500 who are waiting to get in, he said.
Rasul insists he has had only 20 to 30 guardsmen quit since he took over seven months ago. But he added: "I've fired 300 soldiers who were too scared. If I have someone who's scared, I don't want him here."
Rasul is enthusiastic about the "excellent training" the Americans are providing, he said. His men typically get 20 days of training here and 13 days at a National Guard boot camp. But some of the techniques they are taught are frustrating, he said. In a recent gunfight with opponents hiding in high-rise apartment buildings, for example, "the coalition forces told us not to shoot where there are women or children. In the old regime, Saddam would have destroyed the whole neighborhood."
The American soldiers at the base have stepped back from giving orders; they now give advice, they say.
"The Iraqis want to stand up for themselves," said 1st Sgt. William W. Tager, who heads 13 U.S. advisers at the base. "I'm pretty surprised they haven't quit like they did before. They have picked up the ball more. They are a little more confident."
Still, he acknowledged, "it's slow. We know where we want to get them, but they aren't there yet."
Special correspondent Bassam Sebti contributed to this report.
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U.S.-Led Troops Kill 13 in Fallujah
Iraq's Interim Prime Minister Seeks Pledges for Military Aid From Arab Countries
By Jackie Spinner
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, August 1, 2004; Page A18
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A30907-2004Jul31.html
BAGHDAD, July 31 -- Thirteen fighters died in overnight clashes with U.S.-led forces in Fallujah, the U.S. military said Saturday, while Iraq's interim prime minister, Ayad Allawi, sought additional pledges from neighboring Arab countries for help in stopping violence that the government has blamed on foreign infiltrators.
The U.S. military said it battled insurgents in Fallujah after a joint U.S.-Iraqi patrol was attacked. A hospital official in Fallujah, Salim Ibrahim, told the Associated Press that those killed in the clashes were civilians hit by U.S. airstrikes. No U.S. or Iraqi forces were killed, the military said.
Fallujah remains a thorny battleground for U.S. forces, which agreed to leave the city west of Baghdad in an effort to stop clashes in April. Insurgents now control the city.
Meanwhile, George Sada, a spokesman for Allawi, said the United Arab Emirates had agreed to provide military vehicles, de-mining equipment and training for Iraqi police. Allawi has recently met with the leaders of Syria, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait to request such support.
"We appreciate those brotherly aids and support represented by our brothers in U.A.E. to support Iraq's infrastructure and facilities to conduct the best circumstances to ensure safety and stability within the region," Sada said in a statement.
Iraqi insurgents said they had kidnapped two Turks and threatened to behead them within 48 hours, the latest in the country's unrelenting wave of abductions, the Associated Press reported. A group that identified itself as Jamaat al-Tawhid and Jihad demanded that the Turks' employers leave Iraq. A videotape aired on the al-Jazeera satellite television network showed three masked, black-garbed gunmen standing behind two seated men holding forms of identification, including what appeared to be Turkish passports.
Also Saturday, an Iraqi tribal leader who has been serving as a mediator in the kidnapping of seven foreign truck drivers said he had met with a representative of their Kuwaiti company. "We hope to reach a positive outcome for the sake of these hostages and rescue them," Hisham Dulaymi told Reuters. The seven hostages are from India, Kenya and Egypt. The kidnappers, who call themselves the Hoisters of the Black Flags, had threatened to start killing the hostages Friday unless the Kuwaiti company withdrew all its foreign workers from Iraq.
Groups reportedly linked to Abu Musab Zarqawi, a Jordanian national who is among the most-wanted insurgents in Iraq, have taken responsibility for many of the kidnappings. More than 70 foreigners have been abducted. U.S. military authorities have made several airstrikes in Fallujah in recent weeks aimed at Zarqawi, who they believe is based there.
In Baghdad on Saturday, shop owners in the Jadhriya neighborhood expressed concern that the same people behind the continued violence in Fallujah were responsible for car bombings and attacks in the capital.
Sitting in his cosmetics store, which was dark and hot because it does not have a generator and the city was under a rationed electrical blackout, Khaled, who declined to give his last name, quipped: "It's the great country. It's the great Iraq."
Khaled said he was not sure when the violence would end in Fallujah. "There is no solution from our government or the American side," he said. "My country is open and anyone can come inside."
Like several other Iraqis interviewed, Khaled said he did not believe that Zarqawi exists and suggested that the Americans had invented him so they would have someone to blame for the violence.
Ali Abdul Wahab, 28, who sells cigarettes, said the solution to ending the clashes in Fallujah is for the Iraqis and the American forces to team up. But Wahab blamed the Americans for causing the problems.
"They give them freedom, but they don't understand what the freedom is," he said. "If they pull out all the coalition forces, will the clashes stop? I don't think so. Iraqis should do something."
Special correspondent Luma Faruq contributed to this report.
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Bomb Blasts at Iraqi Churches Kill at Least 12
August 1, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-iraq.html?hp
BAGHDAD/MOSUL (Reuters) - Car bombs exploded outside at least five Christian churches in Iraq on Sunday, killing more than a dozen people and wounding many more in an apparently coordinated attack timed to coincide with evening prayers.
``We are expecting a huge number of casualties,'' an Interior Ministry source told Reuters, saying there had been four blasts at churches in Baghdad and two in the northern city of Mosul. Police in Mosul said they knew of just one church attack there.
The Vatican condemned the blasts -- the first attacks on churches during the 15-month insurgency -- echoing concerns among Iraqis that they aimed to inflame religious tensions.
In the deadliest attack, a suicide car bomber drove into the car park of a Chaldean church in southern Baghdad before detonating his vehicle, killing at least 12 people as worshippers left the building, witnesses said.
The U.S. military has warned that guerrillas opposed to the presence of more 160,000 foreign troops may try to deepen divisions between the country's diverse religious communities in their campaign to destabilize Iraq.
``It is terrible and worrying because it is the first time that Christian churches are being targeted in Iraq,'' said Vatican deputy spokesman Father Ciro Benedettini.
A U.S. military spokesman said three of the four attacks in Baghdad were known to be suicide car bombings.
An explosion at the Armenian church in Baghdad shattered stained glass windows and hurled chunks of hot metal. Another bomb exploded 15 minutes later at a nearby Assyrian church.
``Worshippers were inside the church and during the service a bomb went off,'' said Shakib Moussa Jibrail, a Christian.
An ambulance driver told Reuters that two people were killed in the explosion at the Assyrian church and several wounded.
U.S. Colonel Mike Murray of the 1st Cavalry Division said at least 50 people had been wounded at the church, some seriously.
``Those are terrorist acts against the Iraqi people and against Iraq, and we're going to finish them (the terrorists),'' Interior Minister Falah al-Naqib told reporters at the church.
In Mosul, officials said at least one person was killed in a blast at a church and 15 wounded. The U.S. military said the attackers fired a rocket at the Mar Polis Catholic Church before detonating a car bomb and put the toll from the attack at one dead and seven wounded.
There are about 800,000 Christians in Iraq, most of them in Baghdad. Several recent attacks have targeted alcohol sellers throughout Iraq, most of whom are Christians of either the Assyrian, Chaldean or Armenian denominations.
Christians account for about three percent of the population of Iraq, where attempts to provoke conflict have mainly focused on Sunni Muslims and members of the Shi'ite Muslim majority, who were oppressed by ousted dictator Saddam Hussein.
The U.S. military says a computer disk captured earlier this year contained a letter from Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian militant allied to al Qaeda, calling for attacks on Iraqi Shi'ites to try to spark sectarian conflict in Iraq.
In March, coordinated suicide bombings during a Shi'ite religious ceremony killed more than 170 in Baghdad and Kerbala.
BOMBINGS IN MOSUL
Earlier on Sunday, a suicide car bomber blew up his vehicle outside a police station in Mosul, killing at least five and wounding 53 in the latest strike against Iraqi security forces.
Witnesses said the Toyota Landcruiser raced toward a police checkpoint as guards screamed at the driver to stop. When he did not, they opened fire, killing him. But the car plowed on and detonated about 60 feet from the police station.
Police said four of the five killed were police officers and the wounded were both civilians and police. Doctors said many of the wounded were badly hurt and the death toll could rise.
Sunday's bombings came four days after an attack outside a police recruiting center in Baquba, north of Baghdad, killed 70 people. Police are frequently targeted by guerrillas who regard them as collaborators with U.S. forces.
The attacks followed another night of clashes between U.S. forces and guerrillas in the rebellious city of Falluja, west of Baghdad, in which at least 10 Iraqis died and 35 were wounded, a doctor at the main hospital said.
FATE OF HOSTAGES UNCLEAR
There were conflicting reports over the fate of three Indians, three Kenyans and an Egyptian taken hostage in Iraq this month and threatened with execution.
In Nairobi, Kenyan Foreign Minister Chirau Ali Mwakwere told a news conference that guerrillas had released the seven hostages. But their Kuwaiti employers and an Iraqi mediator negotiating their release said they were still in captivity.
Scores of hostages from two dozen countries have been seized by kidnappers in the last four months. Most have been freed but several have been executed -- at least four were beheaded.
Iraqi commandos freed a Lebanese hostage on Sunday, a Lebanese Foreign Ministry source said, but there was no word on another Lebanese snatched along with a Syrian driver on Friday.
A group linked to Zarqawi said it had also captured two Turkish drivers, and threatened to kill them.
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Making Wheels of Justice Turn in a Chaotic Iraq
August 1, 2004
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/01/international/middleeast/01LAWY.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
BAGHDAD, Iraq - His client list is packed with accused killers, kidnappers, con artists and thieves, men caught driving around with rocket-propelled grenades and others charged with attacking American soldiers.
His work is going to court and mincing the government's cases.
Fuaad Ahmed al-Jawary, attorney at law, has become the Johnnie Cochran of the insurgency, and as the resistance continues, his criminal defense practice has soared.
On a recent day, Mr. Jawary, a 40-year-old, 5-foot-7 dynamo with slicked-back hair and bright coffee-bean eyes, rushed into a Baghdad murder trial. He had two clients, a man in a bright orange jumpsuit with new-looking glasses and a 19-year-old woman whose chest heaved under her cloak.
The judge began grilling a witness.
"Where were you on Feb. 14?" - the day of the murder - the judge asked. "Did you see men with guns?"
After two more witnesses testified, Mr. Jawary jumped to his feet.
"Your pardon, sir," Mr. Jawary said. "These people didn't see everything. Can I bring more witnesses?"
A prosecutor ruffled a sheaf of papers. A clerk leaned over a giant ledger. The judge cast a long, hard look at Mr. Jawary and rapped his fingers on his desk.
It might be hard to imagine that in a place where bombs keep blowing up and raw sewage splashes in the streets there would be a functioning legal system, complete with subpoenas, autopsies, objections, search warrants, evidence reports and public defenders.
But there is, and American officials are increasingly turning to the Iraqi courts to prosecute suspects still being held in Abu Ghraib and other prisons.
Hundreds of detainees are being shuffled from American custody into one of the three tiers of the Iraqi criminal justice system: a special tribunal for Saddam Hussein and high-ranking Baath Party members; a new national criminal court for terrorism suspects; and local courts for run-of-the-mill crimes. American officials said that right now, of about 2,300 inmates at Abu Ghraib, 580 had been scheduled for prosecution in Iraqi courts.
Each defendant is allowed a defense lawyer, which is where Mr. Jawary energetically steps in.
His ethos: "Every man is born innocent."
Mr. Jawary's clients used to come straight from Baghdad's underworld of drug-running gangs and counterfeit rings and thugs who slipped razor blades under their tongues and slashed their way through the city's slums. A few years back, he said, he represented a woman who had drugged her husband so her lover could crawl through a window and shoot him in the head.
But the American occupation, and the violent resistance to it, changed all that. Mr. Jawary's bulging caseload now includes people like a student charged with shooting at American soldiers, a man caught driving with rocket-propelled grenades, a sheik's son accused of stealing a government generator for his father's ice factory and a merchant charged with bumping off a police captain.
To Mr. Jawary these clients are not necessarily insurgents.
"I try to take cases only where there is some doubt," he said.
He is rewarded handsomely - $5,000 for murder cases, up front, preferably in crisp greenbacks, and smaller fees for others. Sometimes he is paid in kind, with stereos, air-conditioners, watches, rings, sheep, even once a pair of Volkswagens.
His days begin by slipping on one of seven polyester suits, grabbing a breakfast of bread and chai and jumping into his dented 14-year-old Mercedes.
On the morning of the murder trial, his cellphone started ringing as soon as he drove off. "Habbiee, come on, we'll be right there," he shouted into it.
The trial was being held in Sadr City, Baghdad's Shiite slum. Mr. Jawary trotted up the courthouse steps, past turbaned sheiks, strutting judges, boys hawking scalding glasses of tea, secretaries buried under files and men wearing jumpsuits with "Department of Iraqi Prisons" stamped on their backs.
Just as the trial was about to start, the electricity in the courtroom blinked off, leaving Mr. Jawary, the judge and others sitting in a dimly lit sweat box, fanning themselves with court papers.
The victim was a boy on his way to feed a donkey and was cut down in a shootout between two families fighting over a woman.
Mr. Jawary conferred first with the woman, one of the suspects in the case.
"Just relax," he told her.
Then he turned to his other client, the one with the shiny specs.
"He looks smart, huh?" Mr. Jawary whispered, after speaking with him. "The glasses were my idea."
The proceedings went on for about an hour before the judge agreed with Mr. Jawary to call a recess.
The Iraqi court system is a French-inspired inquisitorial process in which lawyers can raise objections, though they traditionally play a smaller role than those in an American-style trial. In Iraq there are no juries, just a panel of three judges. There is a right to remain silent, but few suspects exercise it.
"Iraqis have such big mouths," Mr. Jawary said.
Iraq has a strong legal tradition, going back 3,800 years to Hammurabi's code. Even during the darkest hours of Mr. Hussein's rule, judges maintained some independence and were enough of a burr in Mr. Hussein's side that he formed his own special courts to punish political enemies. One result, after Mr. Hussein was toppled and his special courts disbanded, was a legal system that actually worked.
To be sure, it is still pretty low tech. "The rest of the world stopped using this 20 years ago," said another judge, Zuhair al-Maliky, holding up a piece of well-worn carbon paper.
It was also rife with corruption.
"Bribes, bribes, bribes, it still happens," Mr. Jawary said. "The only difference today is it's in dollars, not dinars."
When asked if he ever slipped anyone a bribe, Mr. Jawary shook his head. "Not bribes." He smiled. "Gifts."
After Sadr City, Mr. Jawary rushed over to the Central Criminal Court of Iraq, which American legal advisers helped establish last summer in a former Baghdad museum. Unlike the musky, smoky, rowdy confines of the local courts, the new criminal court hums with the decorum and supreme hush of a library or a mosque.
"Put your right hand on the Koran and repeat after me," a judge said at a recent trial. "I swear to tell the truth."
The new court specializes in cases involving organized crime and terrorism. Many suspects were swept up by United States armed forces during counterinsurgency raids and put in Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad. If there is enough evidence to warrant prosecution, American officials said, they are handed over to Iraqi authorities.
If there is not enough evidence, American officials classify the suspects as "security detainees" and continue to hold them under United Nations authorization that allows American forces to use "all necessary measures" to provide security for Iraq.
Judge Maliky, an investigative judge at the Central Criminal Court, said several insurgents had recently been tried and sent to prison for planting roadside bombs and assassinating local officials.
Mr. Jawary spoke to Judge Maliky for a few minutes about the case with the sheik's son and the stolen generator. The judge refused to drop the charges. Mr. Jawary left in a huff.
Iraq has a short workday, 9 a.m. to 2 p.m., and after court Mr. Jawary sped back to his office. He swallowed a glass of peach juice and studied his files. He scribbled out requests on a letterhead topped with "Fuaad A. al-Jawary, Lawyer" and a little drawing of scales.
Then he went home to his wife, Samira, and their three children, Doaa, Mushkat and Muhammad. The family squeezed together on a sofa and watched soccer on television and snacked on thick slices of Iraqi watermelon.
Mr. Jawary said life had not always been so sweet.
A Shiite himself, he was blacklisted by Mr. Hussein's government after he defended fellow Shiites who blew up an ammunition dump in 1991. Then he became ill with lymphoma in 1996 and sold everything he owned to pay for treatment in Jordan.
Sometimes he plays the fuzzy home video of the day he checked into the hospital. He was wearing a thin white gown and surrounded by relatives clapping and crying and kissing him.
"Iraq may be in a bad spot right now," Mr. Jawary said. "But what do I have to complain about?"
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Iraqi official: I'll quit if sons freed
aljazeera.net
Sunday 01 August 2004
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/8B1392B9-5B8E-4852-8E99-95523105CF60.htm
The governor of Iraq's Anbar province says he will happily resign if captors release three of his sons, snatched from their home by armed men.
"I am ready to give in to your demands, and if you believe my presence in the (provincial capital) city (Ramadi) does not serve the interests of the region, I am ready to go," said Abd Al-Karim Bargis in an open letter to the province on Saturday.
Bargis defended his period of office in the vast province on the border with Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, saying he had arranged convoys of food and medicine for residents in Falluja when the city was besieged by US troops in April.
On Wednesday, his sons, aged 15 to 30, were snatched by armed men who barged into and torched his family home in Ramadi while he was at work.
Dozens of foreigners have been captured in Iraq in recent months. But little attention has been given to Iraqis being seized.
Negotiations
Meanwhile, talks started on Saturday between an Iraqi mediator and a representative of a Kuwaiti firm to try to free seven of the company's employees held captive.
The Kuwait and Gulf Link Transport Company sent a representative to Baghdad for talks with Iraqi Shaikh Hisham al-Dulaymi to try to secure the release of three Indians, three Kenyans and an Egyptian seized by a group calling itself the "Black Banners" brigade of the Islamic Secret Army.
The foreigners were seized on 21 July.
On Thursday, the group issued a videotape showing one of the Indian captives, Antaryami, dressed in an orange jumpsuit and with a gun pointed at his head. A voice on the tape threatened to execute one of the drivers unless negotiations got under way.
Armed resistance fighters in Iraq have repeatedly dressed captives in orange suits before killing them.
Demands
Al-Dulaymi is the head of a major Iraqi tribal group and said he had acted as mediator in freeing other captives in Iraq including three Japanese who were released in April and two Russians who were freed the following month.
The captors have said they want the Kuwaiti firm to stop doing business in Iraq, and also want financial compensation for the victims of fighting and air strikes in the small city of Falluja.
India said it was dispatching a special envoy to Iraq to try to secure the release of its nationals.
India's junior foreign minister said on Saturday New Delhi's envoy to Oman, who speaks Arabic, was being sent to Baghdad to help secure the release of the men.
The decision came as the captors, who call themselves Holders of the Black Banners, said in a statement it extended the deadline to execute the captives by 24 hours to Saturday 1500 GMT, unless their demands were met.
In related news, a Turkish driver seized in Iraq earlier this month was freed after promising his captors he would not return to the country, CNN-Turk television said on Saturday.
Mehmet Dayar, who was picked up on 17 July after a convoy of trucks came under attack in the northern city of Mosul, was released after 12 days of captivity.
Protests
Meanwhile, protests and prayers seeking the release of three Indian nationals continued on Saturday in the north Indian hometown of one of the captives.
Roadblocks leading to driver Antaryami's village of Dehlan, 430km north of New Delhi, were erected by locals, blocking all traffic from entering or leaving.
Authorities in Himachal Pradesh state diverted buses and vehicles along a new route to prevent the traffic jams which were witnessed on Friday when thousands of villagers squatted on the highway leading to Dehlan.
"Roadblocks and protests will continue until the hostages are released"
a resident of captive Antaryami's native village Dehlan, in India's Himachal Pradesh province "Roadblocks and protests will continue until the hostages are released," said a villager manning a roadblock.
Protesters on Friday blocked roads with burnt tyres, parked vehicles and tree branches while others sat on railway tracks, disrupting train services.
Schools, shops and commercial establishments were closed as thousands shouted anti-government slogans.
Dozens of foreigners have been seized in recent months, most of them truck drivers working for foreign companies delivering supplies to occupation forces or Iraqi companies. At least eight have been killed - four by beheading.
-------- israel / palestine
Palestinian Fighters Torch Government Buildings in Jenin
By Molly Moore
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, August 1, 2004; Page A22
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A30910-2004Jul31.html
JERUSALEM, July 31 -- Palestinian fighters set fire to two Palestinian Authority buildings in the northern West Bank city of Jenin early Saturday, accusing officials of collaborating with Israel, according to the group's commander.
The attacks were led by Zakaria Zbeida, the leader in Jenin of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, the armed faction affiliated with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's Fatah political movement.
Zbeida and about a half-dozen of his men broke into the office of the newly appointed administrative governor at about 3 a.m., poured gasoline on desks and set offices ablaze while a cameraman from al-Jazeera, the Arab satellite network, filmed the attack. The group then torched the offices of the Palestinian intelligence services.
The attacks were visible evidence of the growing conflict between the armed fighters and political leaders within Fatah. A series of more violent attacks by al-Aqsa members took place two weeks ago against Palestinian Authority police stations in the Gaza Strip, prompting Prime Minister Ahmed Qureia to submit his resignation.
Zbeida accused the Palestinian intelligence services of assisting Israel in hunting down Palestinian fighters, becoming the first militant leader to openly confront the government with that allegation. Such rumors have circulated for months in Jenin and Nablus, where Israeli raids and assassinations of fighters have been relentless.
"This message is directed to the intelligence service, to stop them from pursuing the wanted people and collecting information about them," Zbeida said in a telephone interview Saturday morning. "This kind of information will be leaked to the Israelis through their security coordination."
"What is happening is a state of chaos," Qaddoura Moussa, who was appointed governor of the Jenin area last Sunday by Arafat, said in a telephone interview. "These barbaric messages are no way to solve problems."
Zbeida, who was shown by al-Jazeera pouring gasoline on Moussa's desk, said the governor's office was targeted because the Palestinian Authority had "failed to support those people who struggled defending the Palestinian people." He also said Moussa "promised he'd solve the problems of the wanted fighters, the prisoners and the injured before accepting the position of governor, but he failed to do so."
Last year, Zbeida kidnapped Moussa's predecessor, paraded him through the town and beat him, accusing him of corruption.
No one was injured in the arson attacks Saturday, and while some interior offices were destroyed, both buildings remained intact, according to Palestinian officials in Jenin.
In another early morning incident, Palestinian gunmen briefly detained three foreign church volunteers in the northern West Bank city of Nablus. The three men, an American, an Irishman and a Briton, were held for less than two hours and released unharmed, according to Palestinian security officials. No organization claimed responsibility for the abductions, and the incident did not appear to be related to the Jenin attacks, Palestinian security officials said.
Researcher Sufian Taha contributed to this report.
--------
Payoff pledge helps free 3 foreign hostages
August 01, 2004
ASSOCIATED PRESS
By Ali Daraghmeh
http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20040731-105259-5311r.htm
NABLUS, West Bank - Palestinian militants briefly abducted three foreign church volunteers, including an American, and won promises of payoffs for themselves and for comrades in Israeli prisons in exchange for their freedom, Palestinian officials said.
The promises by the Palestinian Authority came in a new test of strength between militant groups and the security forces, which recently were put under the authority of Prime Minister Ahmed Qureia.
The flare-up indicated that the agreement last week between Mr. Qureia and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat to share control of the security forces has failed to calm the underlying tensions that led to a paralyzing leadership crisis between the two men.
Five gunmen seized the three church volunteers - an American, a Briton and an Irishman - Friday night near their apartments and took them to the Balata refugee camp.
At around the same time, about a dozen armed men broke into the governor's building in the northern West Bank town of Jenin and set it on fire.
Both groups demanded financial support from the Palestinian Authority, which gives unofficial payments to militants sought by Israel, according to security officials and the militants themselves.
The Palestinian Authority officially denies that it funds the militants, but some officials, including lawmakers, say support is given to militants who pledge not to attack targets inside Israel.
Officials said the kidnappers, who belonged to a splinter group of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, were told that all their demands would be met and that the abduction was undermining the Palestinian cause in the eyes of the world. They said Mr. Arafat approved the promise.
The militants drove the hostages to a park early yesterday and called security forces to pick them up, the officials said.
The foreigners were first taken to the Nablus office of the Palestinian intelligence service, then spent the rest of the night as guests of Ghassan Shaka'a, a close Arafat aide.
The released hostages refused to speak to reporters, and their identities were not disclosed.
The foreigners were members of a Christian charity believed to be affiliated with the Union Church in the United States, and had been teaching English classes in Nablus, Reuters news agency reported, citing the head priest at a local Roman Catholic Church.
"We are safe and doing well," the 22-year-old American who identified himself only as Phil told Reuters after he was freed.
The chief of Palestinian intelligence services in Nablus, Talal Duikat, said his forces were searching for four suspects wanted in the kidnappings. The suspects did not belong to any specific group, he said.
Palestinian security forces were "shocked" by the kidnappings and Mr. Arafat instructed them by phone to do everything to get the captives released quickly, Mr. Duikat said.
In Jenin, the local commander of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, Zakaria Zubeidi, and his followers gutted the headquarters of the newly appointed governor, Qaddora Mousa. The building was empty, and no one was hurt.
Zubeidi made no attempt to hide his identity, and returned to the burned-out building in the morning brandishing an assault rifle for the benefit of photographers.
A similar spate of kidnappings and attacks on the Palestinian Authority in the Gaza Strip earlier in July triggered the crisis between Mr. Arafat and Mr. Qureia.
-------- mideast
Islamic Troop Plan Prompts Skepticism
Powell Casts Doubt on Saudi Proposal for Deployment of Muslim Force in Iraq
Sunday, August 1, 2004
By Robin Wright
Washington Post Staff Writer
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A30967-2004Jul31?language=printer
KUWAIT CITY, July 31 -- A Saudi initiative to send an Islamic force to help stabilize Iraq and reduce the need for the U.S.-led military force would probably take three months or longer to deploy and might not get off the ground at all, according to U.S. and Iraqi officials. The proposal is already mired in complex military issues and political sensitivities.
The logistics and diplomacy are so daunting that, even if there is an agreement to form such a force, the first major deployment might not happen until well into the fall, and a full deployment until much later, potentially too late to make much of a difference in securing Iraq before campaigns begin for national elections due in January, the officials said.
But the pivotal issue is more likely to be whether the force, drawn from Arab and Muslim countries, would bolster the 160,000 foreign troops in Iraq or come in as a separate force and begin to replace them. The difference could make or break the Saudi idea, the officials said.
The United States has politely welcomed the proposal since it was outlined in talks Wednesday between Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell. The Bush administration was in no position to reject the idea out of hand, U.S. officials said, because it came from a crucial oil-rich ally and because the United States has struggled to find new troops for the multinational force.
But the initial U.S. reaction was quickly tempered by officials who have used cautionary language in public and expressed deep skepticism in private.
"We appreciate the initiative, but it has to be studied in depth," Powell said tersely on Saturday after talks with Kuwaiti leaders. The proposal caught Powell's entourage off guard by unexpectedly dominating the secretary's week-long trip to the Middle East and Eastern Europe.
In Baghdad, Powell found some skepticism among Iraqi officials, who were wary about how a separate new force would work or replace the U.S.-led troops, and about Saudi goals in proposing the initiative.
"We will not close the door, but I don't think it's going to fly as the Saudis proposed it," a senior Iraqi official said on condition of anonymity because discussions have just begun.
During three weeks of behind-the-scenes diplomacy, Saudi Arabia, home to Islam's holiest sites, has canvassed allies about a Muslim force to gradually reduce and potentially replace the U.S.-led force. One goal is to reduce the mounting animosity against the United States and the West in the Islamic world sparked by the invasion of Iraq, which in turn has made governments allied with the United States vulnerable, Saudi officials said.
The officials said the proposal was also the only way to win Muslim troop commitments, because most Arab and Islamic countries would probably reject the idea of offering troops as part of the current U.S.-led force. Countries that border Iraq, such as Saudi Arabia and Jordan, would not be included, Saudi officials have said.
But U.S. officials said the Bush administration wants any new troops incorporated into the current multinational force, which is due to stay in Iraq at least through an 18-month transition until the first elections for a permanent government were held, and possibly much longer. Powell said Friday during a stop in Baghdad that the United States supported "the concept" of Muslim forces in Iraq, but did not extend that further to embrace the Saudi idea of a separate force.
The United States has made repeated overtures to several Muslim countries, notably Pakistan, to join the current force or contribute troops to a separate small protection force for U.N. personnel sent to help set up elections and do humanitarian work. But all U.S. requests have been spurned, the officials say.
Shortly after assuming office on June 28, interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi wrote to several Muslim countries, including Bahrain, Bangladesh, Egypt, Morocco, Oman, Pakistan and Tunisia, to appeal for troops. But, like the United States, the new Iraqi leadership strongly favors adding them to the current U.N.-approved force.
Arab countries are discussing ways to help Iraq, according to Kuwaiti Foreign Minister Mohammed Sabah. "We had a very constructive neighboring countries meeting in Cairo two weeks ago. We agreed that Iraq needs all the help it can get from its Arab brothers and its Islamic brothers," he said after talks with Powell.
But many of the countries are also caught between a desire to ensure that instability in Iraq does not spill over into the region or spawn another Afghanistan-like refuge for Islamic extremists and the dangers of getting enmeshed in Iraq's deadly insurgency, Arab officials said. The recent spate of abductions in Iraq, when Muslim civilians from Somalia, Pakistan and Egypt were among those seized, may not make the decision any easier, they added.
The idea of eventually allowing Muslim forces to replace the U.S.-led force introduces an awkward numbers game, U.S. and Iraqi officials said. The Saudi proposal calls for a one-for-one troop swap, they said, which may not be viable to contain or defeat the insurgency. Most troops from Muslim countries are not as well trained or well equipped as the U.S., British, Polish, Australian and Ukrainian troops that make up the bulk of the current force.
"Whether the idea is one-for-one or 10-for-one, it's not a good idea," the senior Iraqi official said. "There's no way the Bangladeshi army can or will replace the current multinational force."
For the United States, another major question concerns the chain of command, or how to coordinate with the military leaders of a separate force operating in the same or nearby areas, according to U.S. and Iraqi officials. In the past, the United States has insisted on maintaining a single chain of command in war zones, including Iraq.
The Saudis have suggested that a Muslim force operate under a U.N. umbrella -- something the Security Council and U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan have previously been unwilling to consider. It would also require a U.N. resolution.
In interviews Friday, Iraqis expressed uncertainty and confusion about the idea. Some said they feared that Iraq's neighbors would use the initiative to undermine Iraqi sovereignty, and they echoed the widespread belief that many recent bombings and other violent attacks had been committed by foreign Islamic extremists.
"I prefer that they don't come, especially from the nearby countries. They are the ones who are behind the explosions and the bombs, and we don't believe they want to benefit Iraq," said Mukdam Amir, 25, a shoe store manager.
In a sermon at Friday prayers in the city of Kufa, Moqtada Sadr, a powerful radical Shiite cleric with a large, youthful following, condemned the idea, saying: "We advise Arab and Islamic countries to refuse to send their troops. Even if they are Islamic and friendly, if they come to Iraq that means they are cooperating with the occupiers. Thus they will be considered occupiers, too."
Correspondent Pamela Constable in Baghdad contributed to this report.
-------- nato
Threat to Games Seen as Benign NATO Admiral Plans for Worst
By Bradley Graham
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, August 1, 2004; Page A17
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A30906-2004Jul31.html
NAPLES -- The U.S. officer overseeing NATO's preparations to help guard the Olympic Games said he has seen no specific intelligence information signaling a possible terrorist attack in Greece during the games this month.
"There's sort of a baseline hum you get in certain areas of terrorist activity," said Adm. Gregory G. Johnson in his first U.S. interview about NATO's role at the Olympics. In the case of Greece, "the noise level, shall we say, is pretty benign right now, and I just don't see any spikes."
Nonetheless, Johnson said the absence of such threat indicators is no cause for complacency, especially for an event as significant -- and as inviting a terrorist target -- as the world's largest gathering of athletes.
"We don't want to be too comfortable," he said. "There could be something deeply buried that we just haven't seen or anticipated."
Indeed, there were signs here last week at the headquarters of NATO's southern Joint Force Command that alliance authorities were continuing to plan for the worst.
Inside a bunker known as Tunnel 4, built into a hillside behind a complex of NATO office buildings, military specialists from a handful of alliance countries spent much of last week practicing responses to a series of massively damaging potential attacks. Seated at a long table filled with computer screens, the officers examined the likely effects of the release of chemical or biological agents or explosions of radiological devices at assorted locations in Greece, then assessed how fast NATO forces could get to the scene and from where.
But for all such doomsday rehearsing -- and headlines in recent weeks about NATO bolstering security at the Olympic Games -- the alliance's role appears destined to be limited.
NATO's involvement remains a sensitive issue for the Greek government, which has made clear it believes security is primarily its responsibility. Only after the bombing of trains in Madrid that killed nearly 200 people in March did Greece approach NATO for help, and that request was confined to air and maritime patrols and a 200-member unit that specializes in coping with the aftermath of a chemical, biological or radiological attack.
At the urging of the Bush administration, which wanted to add U.S. military commandos to the mix, Greece last month went a step further and asked NATO also to provide several hundred Special Operations Forces for rapid-reaction, counterterrorism missions. That request was controversial not just in Greece but also within the alliance, where some members -- most notably Germany -- treat counterterrorism activity as a civilian law enforcement responsibility, not a military one.
"Normally, counterterrorism missions have always been done on a bilateral basis, and this is the first time that NATO has taken on the mission," said U.S. Marine Gen. James L. Jones, NATO's top military officer.
Although alliance ambassadors approved the move last week, NATO officials said details on where to position the forces are still being negotiated with Greece. The forces will come from U.S. ranks and report to the U.S. officer heading all NATO operations related to the Olympic Games, Army Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch.
"We will have various basing modes, I'm sure, to include sea-basing and to include locations outside of Greece," Jones said in a telephone interview.
Other elements of NATO's involvement in the Olympics are being portrayed by alliance officers here as routine for high-profile international events, or a slight variation of alliance operations.
The AWACS surveillance aircraft that will be in the skies over Greece, for instance, also flew over recent summits of NATO and Group of Eight leaders. The fleet of eight ships that will patrol international waters outside the Aegean Sea, looking for suspicious craft that might be headed toward Greece, is the same NATO naval operation set up in October 2001 to monitor ship traffic in the Mediterranean after the Bush administration declared war on terrorism.
In a concession to Greece, the commander of this naval force will be Greek. Under the alliance's usual rotation schedule, the officer had not been due to replace the current German commander until September. But the change of command was accelerated to Aug. 5 with Germany's agreement, in time for the Games, which begin Aug. 13.
"To have a commander of the naval force who knows Greece well is advantageous, although NATO has been benignly neutral in this case," said Vice Adm. Ferdinando Sanfelice di Monteforte, who heads NATO maritime operations in southern Europe. "The matter was dealt with by Germany and Greece."
With the chances of an air or sea attack considered even slimmer than something occurring on land, NATO appears positioned at the Olympics less to help stop potential trouble than to help deal with its aftermath.
"There's not a lot NATO can do against what is essentially a high-grade, law enforcement problem," said E. Wayne Merry, a former diplomat and specialist in counterterrorism at the American Foreign Policy Council. "NATO's primary contribution would be in providing relief if there's a major attack."
Mindful of Greek sensitivities, Johnson emphasized that NATO would be playing a supporting role to the Athens government, which is deploying more than 70,000 security personnel and an array of devices, including hundreds of street surveillance cameras, several Patriot antimissile batteries and two mobile X-ray scanners for checking trucks and cars.
"If the question is, do I feel constrained or concerned about the constraints, the answer is no," Johnson said. "Greece has been more than generous and fully cooperative. We're very happy to be able to help in a very, very small way."
-------- pakistan / india
Several Arrests Made in Pakistan Attack
August 1, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Pakistan-Assassination-Attempt.html?pagewanted=all
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (AP) -- Pakistan has detained several people in the attempted assassination of the man selected to be the country's prime minister, a government minister said Sunday.
Others close to the investigation also said it was making progress, including a senior official who said the bomber's head had been discovered, along with what appears to be tatters of his clothing.
The clothing included a tag from a tailor in Attock, the main town near the site of Friday's suicide attack. The tailor was being questioned, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Shaukat Aziz, the finance minister tapped to take over as prime minister, escaped unharmed, but nine people were killed and three dozen wounded. Among the dead was Aziz's driver, an indication of how close the bomber came.
In a statement Saturday on an Islamic Web site, a militant group calling itself the ``Islambouli Brigades of al-Qaida'' said it was behind the blast.
``One of our blessed battalions tried to hunt a head of one of America's infidels in Pakistan while he was returning from Fateh Jang, but God wanted him to survive,'' said the Arabic-language statement.
It said the attack was in response to President Gen. Pervez Musharraf's handing of captured militants to the Americans. ``This operation yesterday will be followed by a series of painful strikes if you don't stop what you are doing by complying to the wicked (U.S. President) Bush's orders,'' the group said, addressing Musharraf.
The group said its message was ``the last warning'' and that ``within the coming few days, our brigades will speak with the language of blood which is the only language you understand.''
It was impossible to verify the authenticity of the claim. Lt. Khaled Islambouli was the leader of the group of soldiers who assassinated Egyptian President Anwar Sadat during a military parade in Cairo in 1981.
Information Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed told The Associated Press that security officials investigating the attack on Aziz ``have made some progress'' and have arrested some people. He would not say how many, or whether any of them were considered suspects.
Ahmed has said that the attack bore the fingerprints of al-Qaida. Osama bin Laden's terror network has already been blamed for two attempts to kill Musharraf in December, ione of which killed 17 people.
Musharraf has been a top U.S. ally in the war on terror, infuriating Muslim radicals in Pakistan and elsewhere, and his security services have arrested a number of top al-Qaida-linked figures, most recently Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani.
Ghailani, a Tanzanian who faces a possible death sentence in the United States for his role in the 1998 twin embassy bombings in East Africa, was nabbed July 25, but his arrest was not announced until Friday, hours before the attempt on Aziz.
The government said the arrest of Ghailani in the eastern town of Gujrat was ``a major blow'' to al-Qaida and vowed to keep hunting terrorists. Pakistan has already said it would consider extraditing Ghailani to the United States, where he could face the death penalty.
Aziz was tapped by Musharraf to take over as prime minister, but he must first win a seat in parliament before he can take the position. When the attack occurred, he was in the town of Fateh Jang, 35 miles southwest of Islamabad, campaigning in a by-election.
Pakistani television showed gruesome footage of Friday's bombing, with the camera capturing the suicide attacker approaching the driver's door of Aziz's armored Mercedes, raising his hand and then blowing up. Aziz was already in the car, but the driver had not closed his own door yet and was among those killed.
Al-Qaida No. 2 Ayman al-Zawahri called for Musharraf's assassination in a tape released earlier this year, and several homegrown militant groups also have been implicated in plots to kill him.
-------- prisoners of war
Revealed: coalition forces imprison Iraqi children
sunday herald
By Neil Mackay
01 August 2004
http://www.sundayherald.com/43773
BRITISH forces are arresting children in Iraq and handing them to US forces who interrogate and detain them indefinitely in prisons including the notorious Abu Ghraib.
A Sunday Herald investigation has uncovered an internal Unicef report written in June that reveals that children in Basra, which is controlled by UK forces, are being "arrested for alleged activities targeting the occupying forces".
The investigation has also established that at least 100 children, some as young as 10, are being detained.
Iraqi TV reporter Suhaib Badr-Addin Al-Baz says he saw the children's wing in Abu Ghraib when he was arbitrarily arrested by US soldiers while making a documentary.
He said there were boys under the age of puberty in the jail and "certainly hundreds of children".
He said he heard the cries of a 12-year-old girl who had been beaten. She was calling out: "They have undressed me."
He also told of a 15-year-old boy being soaked repeatedly with hoses and then being taken to look at his father, who was also in jail and had been hooded.
A US soldier, Sergeant Samuel Provance, who served at Abu Ghraib, has also blown the whistle on child prisoners being abused. He told how interrogators soaked a 16-year-old prisoner, covered him in mud and then used his suffering to break his father, who was also a prisoner, during interrogation.
Unicef has been denied access to jails holding children with the coalition powers citing "poor security" as the reason.
Between January and May this year the International Committee for the Red Cross registered 107 juveniles being held in six different coalition jails.
-------- spies
Al Qaeda-Iraq Link Recanted
Captured Libyan Reverses Previous Statement to CIA, Officials Say
By Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, August 1, 2004; Page A20
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A30909-2004Jul31.html
An al Qaeda commander who initially told interrogators that Iraq had provided chemical and biological weapons training to the terrorist organization later told CIA officers his statement was not true, according to intelligence officials.
Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, a Libyan captured in Pakistan on Nov. 11, 2001, later "changed his story, and we're still in the process of trying to determine what's right and what's not right" from his information, a senior U.S. intelligence official said yesterday. "He told us one thing at one time and another at another time."
Al-Libi's statement formed the basis for the Bush administration's prewar claim that Osama bin Laden collaborated with Iraq, according to several U.S. officials.
In an October 2002 speech in Cincinnati, for example, President Bush said: "We've learned that Iraq has trained al Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and gases." Other senior administration officials, including Secretary of State Colin L. Powell in a speech to the United Nations, made similar assertions. Al-Libi's statements were the foundation of all of them.
His about-face has not been made public by the CIA or the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which produced a critical investigation of the intelligence community's prewar information on Iraq. The committee describes the case in pages of its report that the CIA refused to declassify.
Al-Libi was once in bin Laden's inner circle and a senior operative who ran the Khaldan paramilitary camp in Afghanistan. He was captured in the fall of 2001 by Pakistani forces and turned over to the CIA in January 2002, although CIA interrogators had access to him before that, according to intelligence and U.S. law enforcement sources.
His capture was notable because it sparked the first debates within the U.S. government over how rough CIA officers could be in questioning al Qaeda members after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. That debate, involving the FBI and the Justice Department, led to the formulation of a policy under which CIA officers were given permission to use "enhanced interrogation methods" for some al Qaeda detainees.
Under questioning, al-Libi provided the CIA with intelligence about an alleged plot to blow up the U.S. Embassy in Yemen with a truck bomb and pointed officials in the direction of Abu Zubaida, a top al Qaeda leader known to have been involved in the Sept. 11 plot.
U.S. officials yesterday declined to say whether al-Libi's initial statement was made while he was being subjected to harsher interrogation measures. Nor would they say what may have prompted him to change his story.
The senior intelligence official cautioned that al-Libi's later contention that Iraq provided no help or training to al Qaeda could not be verified and that the CIA did not know whether he was telling the truth.
Al-Libi's conflicting statements and their ramification on the administration's prewar assertions were reported last month by The Washington Post, but without using his name. On July 5, Newsweek published a fuller version of the story, including his name, as did the New York Times in its Saturday edition.
--------
Al-Qaida detainee misled US on Iraq
aljazeera.net
Sunday 01 August 2004
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/D9072F7A-63F8-43B2-8C09-3C9AF9736245.htm
Claims of misleading information provided by an al-Qaida detainee regarding links between Iraq and al-Qaida have been revealed by The New York Times.
A top al-Qaida leader captured in Pakistan months after the September 11 terror strikes was the main source of now-discredited intelligence claiming Iraq provided chemical and biological arms training to members of the group, the paper reported on Saturday.
Quoting unnamed US intelligence officials, the daily said "Ibn al-Shaikh al-Libi, a member of Usama bin Ladin's inner circle, recanted the claims sometime last year, but not before they had become the basis of statements by President [George] Bush, Vice-President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell and others about links between Iraq and al-Qaida that involved poisons, gases and other illicit weapons."
Al-Libi, captured in Pakistan in December 2001, "is still being held by the Central Intelligence Agency at a secret interrogation centre, and American officials say his now-recanted claims raise new questions about the value of the information obtained from such detainees", the report said.
"Separate from the question of Mr Libi's account, an internal CIA review of its prewar intelligence on Iraq is still underway, continuing a push to evaluate the information used as a rationale for war," the report added.
"The strongest White House assertions of ties between Iraq and al-Qaida that involved illicit weapons were made beginning in October 2002, when Mr Bush said in a speech in Cincinnati that 'we've learned that Iraq has trained al-Qaida members in bomb making and poisons and gases'."
Ahead of the US-led invasion in March 2003, those claims were repeated by Bush and top advisers, but they have not repeated them recently, the report noted.
However, some observers blame the Bush administration for not doing enough to verify information obtained from foreign detainees before using the information as a reason to launch the war on Iraq.
-------- us
Scope of Change in Military Is Ambiguous
Transformation To Some Appears Minor to Others
Sunday, August 1, 2004; Page A06
By Thomas E. Ricks and Josh White
Washington Post Staff Writers
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A30901-2004Jul31?language=printer
Three years into the Bush administration's effort to transform the U.S. military -- a critical part of its defense platform in the last presidential campaign -- there is little consensus on whether progress has been made in creating the sort of radical change envisioned.
President Bush and his civilian Pentagon leaders were determined to move the military from a heavy, slow-moving industrial era-type force designed to fight the Red Army to a faster, more adaptive organization built around information age technologies. It would become more agile and easier to deploy, making it better equipped to deal with failed states, terrorism and other 21st-century missions. One of the first steps the administration took toward that goal was creating the Pentagon's Office of Force Transformation, led by retired Vice Adm. Arthur K. Cebrowski.
But many experts say that few tangible steps have been taken.
"It is hard to pin down anything concrete that has come out of the office," said retired Army Lt. Col. James Jay Carafano, who now follows defense issues at the conservative Heritage Foundation.
Retired Col. Douglas Macgregor, author of several studies of how to change the Army, said he thinks that, apart from better linking of military data networks, the armed forces have largely ignored Cebrowski's efforts.
"He has had no impact on programming other than to push the notion that networking will solve our problems," said Macgregor, a longtime advocate of radically changing the Army who left the service in June.
Overall at the Pentagon, he said, "I see no direction other than pouring money into a range of programs with their roots in the Cold War," such as the Air Force's F-22 fighter, the Marine Corps' V-22 tilt-rotor troop transport, space-based radars and national missile defense.
Cebrowski counters that the most important changes underway in the military are not in readily visible weapons systems and easily quantified budget items. The main successes in transformation, he said, have been in creating an openness to new ways of doing business and in organizational changes that make that possible.
The Army, for example, has moved to break its long-standing division structure in favor of smaller, more easily deployed brigade combat teams. "They aren't studying it anymore; they're doing it," Cebrowski said. He also pointed to major alterations made by the Bush Pentagon to the Unified Command Plan, which divides responsibility for various parts of the world among different U.S. military headquarters.
"These kinds of things point to how deep the roots of transformation are; whereas you add a program, you cancel a program, that's very superficial," Cebrowski said.
Cebrowski said he has pushed the military to focus less on preparing for combat in major battles, where it now faces few serious challengers, and more on the threats from less traditional directions, such as terrorism, guerrilla warfare, chemical and biological weapons, and cyberwar. He said he has affected military thinking in other areas, such as the Air Force's approach to spending on satellites and other space programs, on which the Pentagon spends billions annually.
One of the problems with the transformation effort is that, three years into it, there is not a clear understanding at the Pentagon of what the term means.
"It's become more a generic buzzword for ill-focused change," said Andrew Krepinevich Jr., a member of the 1997 congressionally mandated National Defense Panel, whose work heavily influenced candidate Bush's defense positions two years later.
Even transformation chief Cebrowski shies away from providing a definition of transformation.
"Some say it is about injecting new technology into the military," he states on his Pentagon Web site, www.oft.osd.mil. "Others believe transformation is about new ways of buying weapon systems. Still others hold that transformation is about the wholesale change of organizations." The statement then says, "Frankly, I don't care which one is used," as long as it is understood to be a process that keeps the U.S. military changing and competitive in warfare.
Asked to elaborate, Cebrowski said there was a good reason not to dwell on what exactly is meant.
"I've watched senior leaders get knotted up in the definition of transformation" and lose their focus on substance, he said in an interview in his Rosslyn office. His bottom line, he said, is that "what we're really talking about is changing behavior."
The haziness is a departure from the radical change that Bush outlined in his September 1999 campaign speech at the Citadel in South Carolina.
"The real goal is to move beyond marginal improvements -- to replace existing programs with new technologies and strategies, to use this window of opportunity to skip a generation of technology," Bush said then.
Among the specifics that Bush vowed to pursue once in the White House was making the Army more agile and better able to deploy in units smaller than "cumbersome" 15,000-troop divisions -- a change the service at first resisted, especially when advocated in the mid-1990s by Col. Macgregor, but more recently has embraced.
Bush also said he would "encourage a culture of command where change is welcomed and rewarded, not dreaded."
The record on that promise is more mixed, but surveys of officers and other internal studies have found that there is indeed an atmosphere more receptive to change than there was a few years ago.
"I think Cebrowski has pushed the military to change," said Army Lt. Col. Richard Lacquement Jr., author of a book on the Pentagon's reform efforts since the end of the Cold War. "I would submit that a lot of the changes the services have made have been in response to pressure from him, and through him, from [Defense Secretary Donald H.] Rumsfeld." He said these changes have occurred not in weapons programs but more in how the military is organized and thinks about itself.
Bush, in his campaign speech, vowed to "earmark at least 20 percent of the procurement budget for acquisition programs that propel America generations ahead in military technology."
That goal, however, appears to have been abandoned. Asked about the percentage of the Pentagon budget that now goes to such transformation, Cebrowski said, "I have no idea. I don't care," adding that it is a mistake to focus on a dollar amount.
Critics of the administration's efforts, however, say the effort to modernize the services' major budgetary decisions have essentially failed, leaving the Pentagon's transformation office to focus on other areas.
"There are efforts in transformation in some areas -- like UAVS [unmanned aerial vehicles] and networked Navy battle groups -- but if you look at the overall budget, what you see are the legacy programs," Krepinevich said. Most of the spending, he said, goes to large ships, submarines, fighter aircraft and other programs that he calls "the traditional force structure items."
Even one of the leading congressional supporters of Bush's transformation effort, Rep. William M. "Mac" Thornberry (R-Tex.), gave a lukewarm assessment of its course in recent years, saying he thought the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan had somewhat distracted top Pentagon officials from such efforts.
"I think it's generally a mixed bag," said Thornberry, a member of the House Armed Services Committee. "In some way it's advanced, in some ways it hasn't. . . . They're moving in the right direction, but it's not enough."
--------
MODERN HISTORY
In Memoir, U.S. General Tells of Gaps in War Plans
August 1, 2004
By THOM SHANKER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/01/international/01FRAN.html
WASHINGTON, July 31 - The Army general who commanded the Iraq war writes in a new book that intelligence failures produced "a nasty surprise" by not spotting that Saddam Hussein had dispatched trucks and buses filled with a large paramilitary force to wage an insurgents' campaign shortly after the conflict began.
The commander, Gen. Tommy R. Franks, also recounts that much of his certainty that his troops would face attacks by banned weapons - in particular biological or chemical arms - came from conversations with King Abdullah II of Jordan and President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt. The king cited "reliable intelligence sources," and Mr. Mubarak quoted conversations between his officials and Mr. Hussein.
In his book, "American Soldier" (ReganBooks), which goes on sale on Tuesday, General Franks dissects the two combat victories he achieved, in Afghanistan and Iraq. Those efforts are studied as much for their swift successes with more agile forces, as for the murky, unstable postwar environments.
In passages likely to add kindling to the debate over whether sufficient troops were committed to battle in Iraq and to the continuing postwar operations, General Franks writes that several of the evolving campaign concepts written before the war projected a maximum of 250,000 troops at the end of the combat phase and into the postwar mission.
General Franks writes of how his swift capture of Baghdad was accomplished with approximately 170,000 conventional ground troops.
Among the book's disclosures is that an American military officer pretended to be an agent for Iraqi intelligence, selling Baghdad fake war plans stamped "Polo Step," which was actually the name of General Franks's secret war-planning team. General Franks writes that the officer, code-named April Fool, prompted the Iraqis to believe that the Fourth Infantry Division, afloat at sea after being denied access through Turkey, would instead attack through Jordan.
Gen. Eric K. Shinseki, the former Army chief of staff, was criticized and ostracized by senior Pentagon civilians when, during Senate testimony, he suggested that it might take a force of several hundred thousand troops to pacify Iraq.
General Franks writes that he and his staff discussed the postwar phase in Iraq "throughout our planning" for the war itself.
He dismisses Ahmad Chalabi, and by extension the intelligence and advice that he and his Iraqi National Congress provided to Washington policy makers, saying Mr. Chalabi was "badly out of touch with what it would take" to stabilize Iraq.
He also writes that before the war, Jay Garner, the retired general appointed as the first, short-term director of reconstruction and assistance efforts in Iraq, "had spent weeks walking the corridors of Washington, hat in hand."
"He needed people and money," General Franks writes.
Within his own command, General Franks writes, "we had neither the money nor a comprehensive set of policy decisions that would provide for every aspect of reconstruction, civic action, and governance."
Of his civilian boss, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, the general recalls that during the difficult early days of the Afghanistan campaign, tensions ran so high that General Franks offered his resignation. Mr. Rumsfeld responded by saying that the general had his "complete confidence."
General Franks is well known throughout the ranks for his rough language, and he routinely quotes himself firing off large-caliber vulgarities. But the book, written with Malcolm McConnell, also seeks a patina of intellectualism by just as often quoting Shakespeare, Sun Tzu and Clausewitz.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- courts
Iranian dissident freed on bail
aljazeera.net
Sunday 01 August 2004
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/D0C12129-751B-4561-ABB5-6A277AF1826E.htm
Dissident Iranian academic Hashem Aghajari has been freed on bail after spending two years in jail for questioning the country's Shia leaders.
Family members and friends celebrated outside Aghajari's Tehran home on Saturday as the disabled leftist academic returned from north Tehran's notorious Evin prison.
"I hope that freedom, justice and human rights will be realised. I hope that all prisoners of conscience who have committed no crime will be released soon," the history professor said, defying an order to stay silent.
"I am so happy to be among people again. I am happy that the truth has prevailed. I pray for the victory of the Iranian nation," he said.
Iran's hardline judiciary allowed Aghajari out on a hefty bail of $112,000 pending his appeal of a five-year sentence.
Courting trouble
Aghajari, who lost a leg fighting in the Iran-Iraq (1980-1988) war, drew the wrath of the country's clergy when he said in a speech Muslims were not "monkeys" and "should not blindly follow" religious leaders.
"I hope that freedom, justice and human rights will be realized. I hope that all prisoners of conscience who have committed no crime will be released soon"
The speech was seen as blasphemy and a hardline judge in the western city of Hamedan, where Aghajari delivered his call for reforms sentenced him to hang.
But the verdict sparked widespread student protests and a re-trial was ordered. But the same Hamedan court again defiantly sentenced him to death.
Charges that solicitied the death penalty were dropped in a second re-trial and Aghajari was instead convicted of ''insulting religious sanctities, propagating against the regime and spreading false information to disturb the public mind''.
He was handed a five-year jail term, two years of which were suspended, as well as five years of ''deprivation of social rights'' to commence when he would be released from jail.
Aghajari's lawyer Saleh Nikbakht said scores of friends and supporters of the academic - whose health is ailing after his spell on death row and solitary confinement - had offered to post bail.
-----
Military begins tribunals for Guantanamo detainees
August 01, 2004
UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL
By Shaun Waterman
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20040731-114920-2402r.htm
The military has begun holding review tribunals for suspected al Qaeda and Taliban fighters held at the U.S. Naval Base Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, giving the detainees their first formal chance to explain why the United States should not consider them "enemy combatants."
All of the nearly 600 prisoners, many of whom have been held at the base for more than two years, will have the opportunity to appear before these tribunals, Navy Secretary Gordon England said Friday.
Mr. England said eventually he wants three tribunals holding up to 24 hearings a week to complete the entire process in 120 days. And each hearing, he said, would be a "fact-based administrative proceeding ... not a trial." It would determine whether the person detained had been correctly designated an enemy combatant.
The decision to hold the detainees as enemy combatants, rather than regular prisoners of war, has left them in what critics say is a legal black hole, without any means - until now - to challenge their detention.
The tribunals will "review information surrounding the capture of the detainee ... and any other pertinent information related to the designation as an enemy combatant," according to the Pentagon, which carefully avoids using the word "evidence."
After the hearing, the tribunal - a panel of three officers - will deliberate and make a recommendation, which will be reviewed by a military lawyer to ensure that they were "legally sufficient," Navy spokeswoman Cmdr. Beci Brenton said. The recommendations of the lawyer and the tribunal would be passed to Adm. James McGarrar, who will either approve the tribunal's decision or order another hearing.
If detainees are found not to be enemy combatants, the military "will then work with the Department of State for arrangements to return that person to their home country," Mr. England said. Those found to be combatants will remain in detention.
Detainees are not obliged to appear before the tribunals, but if they do, they will have the "opportunity to work with a personal representative" appointed by the military "to assist in preparing" their case, the Pentagon said.
But Cmdr. Brenton pointed out that these representatives would not be lawyers, nor would they be the detainee's advocate. "There's no confidentiality," she said. "If the detainee tells them anything incriminating, they are obliged to pass that on to the tribunal."
The tribunals are separate from the military commissions that later this summer will begin to hear charges in the handful of cases of detainees against whom the United States has sufficient evidence to prosecute. The commissions will be able to impose sentences up to and including death, and their verdicts will be subject to review by a military panel.
The tribunals also are separate from - though connected to - the writs of habeas corpus that every detainee was given the right to file by the Supreme Court last month. The hearings on those writs, which are being filed in the U.S. District Court in Washington, will likely turn on whether the review tribunals meet the test laid down by the Supreme Court in another case, that of Yaser Esam Hamdi.
In the Hamdi case, the court said that U.S. citizens detained as enemy combatants had a right to "due process" - meaning a fair hearing with the right to put their side of the story to a neutral adjudicator.
"Although the Guantanamo detainees are noncitizens," Eugene Fidell, president of the National Institute for Military Justice, said, "everyone is assuming that [the Hamdi case] is where the courts will look for guidance in terms of what the test should be."
-------- homeland security
U.S. Warns of Terror Threat Against Financial Buildings
August 1, 2004
By CHRISTINE HAUSER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/01/politics/01CND-THRE.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
Tom Ridge, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, said today that based on information that Al Qaeda was planning to target five buildings, the threat level has been raised in northern New Jersey and Washington, D.C., to the second-highest level, and remained at that level in New York City.
"This afternoon we do have new and unusually specific information about where Al Qaeda would like to attack," Mr. Ridge said at a news conference in Washington.
"As a result, today the United States government is raising the threat level to Code Orange for the financial services sector in New York City, northern New Jersey, and Washington, D.C.," he said.
He said reports indicate that Al Qaeda is targeting specific buildings, including the New York Stock Exchange and Citigroup buildings in New York City; Prudential Plaza in Newark; and the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in Washington.
He said that the executive leadership in those institutions had been contacted, but that the department did not have indication of the timing of potential attacks.
"We have told them that, at this time, there is no information that indicates a specific time for these attacks beyond the period leading up to our national elections," Mr. Ridge said.
He said the method of attack, as "suggested in reporting," was car and truck bombs.
Buffer zones around the buildings' perimeters, underground parking security, screening of vehicles and packages and other measures "both seen and unseen" were added steps to an already vigorous security effort, he said.
"We have no specific information that says an attack is imminent," Mr. Ridge said. But given the specificity of the information, he added, "these might be the targets" of a potential attack.
Spokesmen for the institutions targeted said they expected employees to come to work as usual.
The increase to orange alert puts those areas on the second-highest alert level, although New York has been on that level since the system was put in place after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The raised security level would allow authorities to increase protection in and around the buildings that require it, and to raise awareness, he said.
"Compared to previous threat reporting, these intelligence reports have provided a level of detail that is very specific," Mr. Ridge said. He said that information was coming from multiple sources and locations.
"It is alarming in both the amount and specificity of the information."
He said there was concern about targets beyond those buildings as well.
He did not link the potential timing of the attacks specifically to the upcoming Republican National Convention, which starts in New York City on Aug. 30.
"There is no specific information linking this new information to the convention," Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York said in a news conference.
But he said there has never been such specific information in terms of naming particular sites. He said of the information: "It is recent, it is high level, it is overseas."
In New York City, authorities have already increased security in general.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg said there would be greater law enforcement presence at sensitive locations, like landmarks.
"We are deploying our full array of counterterrorism resources," Mr. Bloomberg said at a City Hall news conference today. "We will spare no expense and we will take no chances."
The police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, said that there would be screening and searching of vehicles, some of them at random. An attack with explosives, by large vehicular bombing or smuggling by an individual, was seen as more likely than one with chemicals, but precautions were being taken for both, he said.
No trucks will be permitted to enter Manhattan on the Williamsburg Bridge, he said. Instead, they should use the Manhattan Bridge.
Gov. James E. McGreevey of New Jersey said in a news conference today that the increased threat level applied to five counties - Bergen, Essex, Hudson, Passaic and Union - and all state government buildings.
"I think Secretary Ridge made an informed, rational decision to provide not only the information to the intelligence community, the Office of Counterterrorism, but to the public at large," Mr. McGreevey said. And he encouraged New Jerseyans "to go on with their lives."
This afternoon metal fences surrounded the Prudential Plaza building on Broad Street, where about 1,000 employees work. Bank and Academy Streets, which run alongside the building, were closed to traffic. In addition, one lane of Bank Street and one lane of Halsey Street were closed. Newark police officers armed with assault rifles were stationed outside the building.
On Saturday night, the New York Police Department, responding to new information that terrorists may be planning to attack corporations or large public institutions in the city, advised building managers and corporate security personnel to step up their procedures to guard against vehicles rigged with explosives and against chemical agents placed in ventilation systems.
The warning followed meetings on Friday night and Saturday between Mr. Kelly and Pasquale J. D'Amuro, the assistant director in charge of the New York field office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, according to Mr. Kelly's chief spokesman, Paul J. Browne.
Mr. Browne said the meetings were held to discuss the latest reports of a terrorist threat against the city, but declined to comment on the source of the new information.
Saturday's warnings appeared to be linked to the arrest on July 19 in Texas of Farida Goolam Mohamed Ahmed after she entered the United States from Mexico by crossing the Rio Grande and crawling through the brush.
According to several news accounts, she had an altered passport along with several thousand dollars in cash and an airline ticket to New York. CNN reported that she was charged with illegal entry, making false statements and falsifying a passport.
The new information was first reported last night by ABC News, which said it had learned from several law enforcement agencies that an overseas source, which the network did not name, had provided information about suicide attacks being planned by Al Qaeda in the city. The ABC report said intelligence sources had described a plan by Al Qaeda to move non-Arab terrorists across the Mexican border into the United States. She has admitted to no criminal intent.
Another federal law enforcement official said the woman was believed to have been on a terrorist watch list. He said she might have been sent as "a courier" to pass along either a message or documentation to someone in the United States.
A law enforcement official in New York said, "the concern was that she may be part of a team" planning attacks in the city.
Thomas J. Lueck, William K. Rashbaum and Patrick Healy contributed reporting from New York; David Johnston and Eric Lichtblau contributed reporting from Washington; and Jason George contributed reporting from Newark for this article.
-------- human rights
Vatican Letter Denounces 'Lethal Effects' of Feminism
Document Outlines Formula for Man-Woman Relationships
By Daniel Williams and Alan Cooperman
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, August 1, 2004; Page A16
ROME, July 31 -- The Vatican issued a letter Saturday attacking the "distortions" and "lethal effects" of feminism, which it defined as an effort to erase differences between men and women -- a goal, the statement said, that undermines the "natural two-parent structure" of the family and makes "homosexuality and heterosexuality virtually equivalent."
The sharp critique was contained in a document issued by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, a chief adviser to Pope John Paul II and head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the department in charge of defining Roman Catholic orthodoxy. The 37-page document also outlined the Vatican's formula for relationships between men and women, calling for "active collaboration between the sexes" and rejecting subjugation of women.
The statement was the latest Vatican salvo against trends it regards as undermining its teachings on sexuality and the family. Vatican officials have assailed abortion and contraception; politicians who support abortion through legislation; and legalized same-sex unions. The pope approved the document, titled "Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Collaboration of Men and Women in the Church and the World."
Catholic feminists in the United States said the letter presented a caricature of feminism as antagonistic toward men and trying to deny any difference between the sexes. They said feminism seeks equal rights and respect for both genders.
"The demonization of feminism is most disturbing," said Frances Kissling, president of Catholics for a Free Choice, an advocacy group for abortion rights, who said her blood pressure "shot up 20 points" when she read the letter.
"It takes extreme positions that may have been historically held by five people and casts them as if they were held by every woman," Kissling said. "The feminism I know is all for partnerships and is all for empowering both men and women. The feminism I know does not ignore the fact that there are sexual differences."
Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza, a feminist theologian at Harvard Divinity School, said the document restated positions the Vatican has taken many times and that the only surprise was its timing. She said church leaders may be feeling some urgency to combat same-sex marriage, as well as renewed pressure to consider ordaining women in response to the worldwide scandal over sexual abuse by priests.
"It has some positive things in it, but the political function of the document is the same as the ones before," Fiorenza said. "It's trying to make a theological case, which they're really not able to make, against the full equality of women in the church."
Archbishop Angelo Amato, secretary of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, said on Vatican Radio that the aim of the letter was to critique two current strands in feminism: one that emphasizes "a radical rivalry between the sexes" and the other that seeks to "cancel the differences between the sexes."
The letter argued that "the obscuring of the difference . . . of the sexes has enormous consequences," including inspiring ideologies that "call into question the family, in its natural two-parent structure of mother and father, and make homosexuality and heterosexuality virtually equivalent, in a new model of polymorphous sexuality."
While assaulting what it said were the bases of feminist ideology, the letter tried to tackle the practical difficulties and inequities that feminists also decry. It appeared to attempt to strike a balance between a Catholic ideal of women raising children at home and the reality that many work outside the home.
Women ought not be stigmatized for desiring the life of a homemaker, the letter argued. "Indeed, a just valuing of the work of women within the family is required," it said. Women who choose to work in the labor force should be awarded a proper schedule and "not have to choose between relinquishing their family life or enduring continual stress," it said.
The Rev. Thomas Reese, editor of the national Catholic weekly America, said in an e-mail message that "although most American feminists would express their ideology differently than the Vatican, on the practical level they are on the same page (in terms of equality in education, politics, workplace) except on abortion and women priests." If there are differences, he added, "it is probably on the relationship between men and women in the family, not in society. . . . For the Vatican, the ideal is that a father be paid well enough so that a mother can stay home and raise the kids."
The letter called for the Catholic Church to take advantage of "feminine values" that include listening, understanding, caring and faithfulness. Although women are banned from the priesthood, their role in the church is not "a passivity inspired by an outdated conception of femininity," the letter maintained.
Almost a third of the letter was devoted to biblical declarations about the sexes. "From the first moment of their creation, man and woman are different, and will remain so for eternity," it said. Tracing the story of Adam and Eve, it said original sin opened the way to relations between man and woman "in which love will frequently be debased into pure self-seeking, in a relationship which ignores and kills love and replaces it with the yoke of domination of one sex over the other."
In the afterlife, the letter stated, men and women will continue to be different, but sex will come to an end. "The temporal and earthly expression of sexuality is transient," it declared.
Cooperman reported from Washington.
--------
Holocaust Museum Calls Crisis in Sudan 'Genocide Emergency'
August 1, 2004
By COURTNEY C. RADSCH
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/01/international/africa/01muse.html?pagewanted=all
WASHINGTON, July 31 - The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has elevated its assessment of the crisis in the Darfur region in western Sudan to a "genocide emergency" in response to the increasing level of violence and death.
This is the first time in the museum's 11-year history that it has made such a declaration, which is intended to draw world attention to the situation and to apply pressure for a response from Sudan's government.
Museum officials say they will open a display about Darfur on Monday to allow to the public to view the devastation in the Darfur region, where government-backed Arab militia members have been attacking black residents, most of them also Muslims.
After a unanimous decision by both houses of Congress last week to call the deteriorating situation in Darfur genocide, the designation by the nation's official Holocaust memorial further underscores the urgency of the situation.
Representative Tom Lantos, a California Democrat who is the only Holocaust survivor in Congress, said the designation carried "unique moral weight."
"I hope it will make people in a decision making position feel morally obligated and inspired to take action," he said, referring to NATO and European countries.
The designation of a genocide emergency is the most serious characterization the museum's Committee on Conscience may convey. The designation means that, in its view, genocide is imminent or is occurring. In 2000, the committee issued a genocide watch on Chechnya and a genocide warning on the Congo-Great Lakes region of Africa. Those designations are the two other levels the committee uses to draw attention to such situations. In 2003, the committee also issued a warning for southern Sudan, and earlier this year made the same declaration for Darfur.
The three-tiered scale was developed by the museum committee partly in response to the massacres in Rwanda a decade ago.
Last Monday, the museum halted normal operations in the Hall of Remembrance to draw attention to Darfur, an area a third of the size of the United States, where experts estimate that 30,000 to 100,000 people have died this year and 1.2 million have been displaced from their homes.
In a speech at the museum last Monday, Amal Allogabo, who left Sudan in 1999, said she did not know if her family was alive or dead. Another speaker, Nesse Godin, a Holocaust survivor, urged international action.
Jerry Fowler, the staff director of the Committee on Conscience, recently returned from Chad, where he interviewed refugees from Darfur. He said the situation there met the international definition of genocide because the attacks on certain groups by the Janjaweed militias could result in the "physical destruction" of the refugees.
-------- prisons / prisoners
S. African Detained in Texas May Have Terrorist Ties
Woman on Government Watch List Entered U.S. Illegally from Mexico, Was Bound for New York
By Sylvia Moreno and John Mintz
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, August 1, 2004; Page A08
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A30903-2004Jul31.html
Government sources say the FBI and the Homeland Security Department are investigating a South African woman detained at a South Texas airport last month after allegedly entering the United States by walking or swimming across the Mexican border.
"The concern is some of the people associated with her," a government official said, adding that either some of her acquaintances or some of her relatives were suspected of having terrorist ties.
"The government is looking at some possible Pakistani affiliations she may have had," the source said. "People are investigating possible terrorist connections in this case."
Her detention at the McAllen airport, just a few miles from the Mexican border, "set off about half a dozen red flags for the officials," said another government source.
U.S. Rep. Solomon P. Ortiz (D-Tex.) also told the Houston Chronicle that "very credible sources" in the federal government had told him the woman was on a government watch list for suspected terrorists and that concerns had been raised because of her frequent worldwide travel.
The woman, Farida Goolam Mahomed Ahmed, 48, was carrying a passport that had been doctored, thousands of dollars in cash and a travel itinerary that showed plane trips around the world prior to her journey by foot into Texas. Among her possessions were a pair of wet blue jeans and muddy shoes scored with thorns, a border official said.
Ahmed was detained the morning of July 19 as she was about to board a flight from McAllen to JFK Airport in New York, via Houston, said Eddie Flores, the spokesman for the McAllen sector of the Bureau of Customs and Border Protection.
She was questioned as part of a "routine inspection by our . . . border patrol agents at the airport," Flores said.
According to an affidavit filed in U.S. District Court in McAllen, Ahmed presented a South African passport that had no exit or entry stamps or other visa endorsements. It was determined later that six pages had been torn out of the passport.
When asked whether she had a visa to enter the United States, Ahmed told two border patrol agents that she had left it in New York, said the affidavit by Daniel V. Delgado, an FBI special agent assigned to the Joint Terrorism Task Force in the McAllen FBI office.
Ahmed was transported to the border patrol processing office in McAllen "to query all relevant immigration databases," according to the affidavit. Officers then determined Ahmed had no proof of legal immigration status and no current visas, and she was taken into custody for illegal entry and possible deportation proceedings.
Among her belongings were several plane tickets and itineraries. An Emirates Airlines itinerary dated July 8 showed travel for a Mrs. Farida Ahmed from Johannesburg, South Africa, to London's Gatwick Airport, via Dubai, United Arab Emirates. A second British Airways itinerary dated July 14 indicated travel from London Heathrow with a final destination of Mexico City.
A hearing for Ahmed was not held until Tuesday, before U.S. Magistrate Dorina Ramos in McAllen. At that hearing, according to the (McAllen) Monitor newspaper, FBI Agent Gary Simmons testified that Ahmed also was carrying about $7,300 in currency: $6,000 in U.S. dollars; a South African Krugerrand gold coin worth $400; and the rest in British pounds and Mexican pesos. Simmons also testified, the Monitor said, that Ahmed had a valid visa in 1996 and had visited a friend in McAllen before.
Michael T. Shelby, the U.S. attorney in Houston, which is handling the case, said Ahmed was being held for "significant violations" of U.S. immigration and criminal law, which included entering the country illegally, altering a passport and making false statements about her status in the United States.
But Shelby added: "Nothing alleged in the criminal complaint filed with the federal court nor any testimony introduced at the detention hearing held on July 27, 2004, suggests that Ms. Ahmed has established ties with any terrorist organization."
Nancy G. Herrera, an executive assistant U.S. attorney in Houston, said the office has 30 days to present the case to a grand jury. If the panel finds probable cause, it could hand up an indictment charging Ahmed with violating federal law by entering the U.S. illegally, altering a passport and lying to federal agents.
Ahmed remains in the custody of the U.S. Marshals Service. Attempts to reach her attorney, Kyle Welch, an assistant in the Federal Public Defender Office for the Southern District of Texas, were unsuccessful.
-------- POLITICS
-------- investigations
Grand Jury Hears Testimony From Powell
August 1, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-CIA-Leak-Powell.html?hp
WARSAW, Poland (AP) -- The U.S. grand jury investigating the leak of an undercover CIA operative's name has interviewed Secretary of State Colin Powell, but he is not a subject of the inquiry, the State Department said Sunday.
Department spokesman Richard Boucher, traveling with Powell on a diplomatic visit to Poland, said Powell appeared on July 16 at the grand jury's invitation. ``The secretary is not a subject of inquiry,'' Boucher said. ``He was pleased to cooperate with the grand jury.''
Powell is the latest official from the Bush administration to be called before the grand jury in Washington.
White House counsel Alberto Gonzales and spokesman Scott McClellan have been summoned, and grand jury investigators have interviewed President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney in their offices.
Powell's appearance was first reported Sunday by Newsweek.
The grand jury investigation is to determine who leaked the name of Valerie Plame to syndicated columnist Robert Novak last July. Disclosure of an undercover officer's identity can be a federal crime.
Novak revealed Plame's work for the CIA a week after her husband, Joseph Wilson, a former ambassador, criticized Bush's claim in the 2003 State of the Union address that Iraq had tried to obtain uranium from Niger, a major uranium-exporting nation in Africa.
The CIA had sent Wilson to Niger in mid-1992 to check the allegation, and he concluded it was unfounded. The administration has acknowledged that its inclusion in the State of the Union address was a mistake.
In printing Plame's name, Novak wrote that two administration officials said Wilson's wife suggested that he be sent to Niger.
Boucher referred questions about Powell's testimony to the Justice Department because grand jury operations are secret.
Asked whether Powell called or talked to Novak about Wilson's wife, Boucher said: ``Of course not!
-------- propaganda wars
How the Press Was Spun
Managing the news at the dawn of the Atomic Age: Part I of a special daily report this week.
By Greg Mitchell
August 01, 2004
Editor & Publisher
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/columns/pressingissues_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000590784
Starting today, and continuing every day this week, as the 59th anniversary of the first use of the atomic bomb approaches, we offer a special look at how U.S. officials managed the earth-shaking news via American newspapers. On Tuesday: the key role played by the most influential "embedded" reporter ever. These columns are adapted from my book "Hiroshima in America," co-authored by Robert Jay Lifton.
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On Aug. 6, 1945, President Harry S. Truman faced the task of telling the world that America's crusade against fascism had culminated in exploding a revolutionary new weapon of extraordinary destructive power over a Japanese city.
It was vital that this event be understood as a reflection of dominant military power and at the same time consistent with American decency and concern for human life. Everyone involved in preparing the presidential statement sensed that the stakes were high, for this marked the unveiling of both the atomic bomb and the official narrative of Hiroshima.
When the astonishing news emerged that morning, it took the form of a routine press release, a little more than a thousand words long. President Truman was at sea a thousand miles away, returning from the Potsdam conference. Shortly before eleven o'clock, an information officer from the War Department arrived at the White House bearing bundles of press releases. A few minutes later, assistant press secretary Eben Ayers began reading the president's announcement to about a dozen members of the Washington press corps.
The atmosphere was so casual, and the statement so momentous, that the reporters had difficulty grasping it. "The thing didn't penetrate with most of them," Ayers later remarked. Finally, they rushed to call their editors, and at least one reporter found a disbeliever at the other end of the line. The first few sentences of the statement set the tone:
"Sixteen hours ago an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima, an important Japanese Army base. That bomb had more power than 20,000 tons of TNT....The Japanese began the war from the air at Pearl Harbor. They have been repaid many fold....It is an atomic bomb. It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe."
(Tuesday: the key role played by the most influential "embedded" reporter ever.)
Although details were modified at the last moment, Truman's four-page statement had been crafted with considerable care over many months. If use of the atomic bomb was inherent in its invention, an announcement of this sort was inevitable. Only the timing was in doubt.
From its very first words, however, the official narrative was built on a half-truth. Hiroshima did contain an important military base, used as a staging area for Southeast Asia. But the bomb had been aimed at the very center of a city of 350,000, a continuation of the American policy of bombing civilian populations in Japan to undermine the morale of the enemy.
There was something else missing: Because the president in his statement failed to mention radiation effects, which officials knew were horrendous, the imagery of just a bigger bomb would prevail in the press. Truman described the new weapon as "revolutionary" but only in regard to the destruction it could cause, failing to mention its most lethal new feature: radiation.
Many Americans first heard the news from the radio, which broadcast the text of Truman's statement shortly after its release. The afternoon papers quickly arrived with banner headlines: "Atom Bomb, World's Greatest, Hits Japs!" and "Japan City Blasted by Atomic Bomb." The Pentagon had released no pictures, so most of the newspapers relied on maps of Japan with Hiroshima circled.
By that evening, radio commentators were weighing in with observations that often transcended Truman's announcement, suggesting that the public imagination was outrunning the official story. Contrasting emotions of gratification and anxiety had already emerged. H.V. Kaltenhorn warned, "We must assume that with the passage of only a little time, an improved form of the new weapon we use today can be turned against us."
It wasn't until the following morning, Aug. 7, that the government's press offensive appeared, with the first detailed account of the making of the atomic bomb, and the Hiroshima mission. Nearly every U.S. newspaper carried all or parts of 14 separate press releases distributed by the Pentagon several hours after the president's announcement. They carried headlines such as: "Atom Bombs Made in 3 Hidden Cities" and "New Age Ushered."
Many of them written by one man: a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The New York Times, "embedded" with the atomic project. General Leslie Groves, military director of the Manhattan Project, would later reflect, with satisfaction, that "most newspapers published our releases in their entirety. This is one of the few times since government releases have become so common that this has been done."
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In China, an Editor Triumphs, and Fails
Struggle Between New Press Freedoms, Communist Party Evident by Jailing
By Philip P. Pan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, August 1, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A30835-2004Jul31?language=printer
GUANGZHOU, China -- It was past 9:30 p.m. when the reporters finished writing. The presses were scheduled to begin printing the next day's issue of the Southern Metropolis Daily in a few hours, and space for a large headline had been reserved on the front page.
But when the night editor read their story -- an investigative report about a young college graduate who had been detained by local police and beaten to death in custody -- he hesitated. Then he picked up a phone and called Cheng Yizhong, the paper's star editor.
Cheng had built the Daily into this southern city's most popular and profitable tabloid, practicing a feisty brand of journalism editors across China were trying to imitate. But a few days earlier, in a clampdown ordered by a new Communist Party leader in the province, he had been stripped of his title as editor in chief. He was now running the paper as deputy editor.
Others in the newsroom had briefed him twice about the article, but given the circumstances, the night editor wanted to check with him one last time, colleagues recalled. The story was certain to anger government officials, and there was still time to pull it. Instead, Cheng gave the order to publish.
The article, published April 25, 2003, spread quickly on the Internet, and newspapers across the country reprinted it. Reporters dug deeper, exposing abuses in a nationwide network of detention camps that purchased and sold inmates like slaves. Put on the defensive by rising public outrage, Beijing ordered the camps closed and abolished a decades-old law that gave police sweeping powers to imprison people at will.
It was a landmark victory for the Chinese press; never before had reporters influenced national policy in such a dramatic fashion. But in March, Cheng was arrested and two of his colleagues were sentenced to long prison terms in a corruption probe that party sources said was an act of retaliation by local officials.
What happened to Cheng highlights a momentous and complex struggle now underway between the country's increasingly independent-minded and profit-driven state media and entrenched interests inside the ruling Communist Party. The outcome could determine the future not only of journalism in China but also of the largest authoritarian political system in the world.
More than a quarter century after China launched economic reforms while continuing to restrict political freedom, the government still owns and controls all of the country's newspapers and television stations. But journalists have fought off party censors in one sensitive subject area after another, and they are waging a daily battle for even greater freedoms.
This push is driven in part by economics. In a sweeping industry overhaul, the government is withdrawing subsidies from state media outlets, holding them responsible for their own profits and losses and opening the door to private investment. The market has led newspapers to set aside propaganda and deliver stories that readers are actually interested in. Many have turned to gossip or entertainment, but there is also a financial incentive to produce a scarce commodity: journalism that challenges the government.
The party is torn about this creeping expansion of media freedoms. It believes a more assertive press can help it fight corruption and improve governance, but is afraid of losing control over an institution critical to its monopoly on power. Regular skirmishing between journalists and officials who want to suppress stories that make them look bad has threatened the party's unity. And as journalists begin to view themselves as watchdogs for the public rather than lap dogs for the party, the government's old methods of control are weakening.
New Journalism
On Sept. 1, 1997, readers who picked up the Southern Metropolis Daily found a different kind of Communist Party newspaper. Instead of the latest pronouncements on Marxism, a quarter of the paper's 16 pages were devoted to the death of Princess Diana. The tabloid stunned its rivals; almost every newspaper in China had covered Diana's death with only a few hundred words.
The tabloid was an experiment launched by a staid party newspaper, the Southern Daily, to grab more advertising in this booming city of 7 million.
Cheng was not yet 30, the youngest member of a three-man committee appointed to set up the paper. He was a party member and a rising star, a peasant's son who landed a job with the Southern Daily after studying literature at Guangzhou's most prestigious university. He had already distinguished himself as a creative editor, so when he volunteered to help start the tabloid, he was named deputy editor.
"It meant more pressure and more work, but he asked to do it," recalled his wife, Chen Junying, a fellow editor at the Southern Daily. "He wanted work that was more honest, and more competitive, and of greater significance."
A quiet man with a youthful face, Cheng threw himself into the project, studying newspapers around the world, writing a 10,000-word plan of action and personally designing the tabloid's masthead using 5th century calligraphy from the Northern Wei dynasty. His wife had just had a baby, but it was the newspaper he doted on.
The newspaper employed fewer than a hundred reporters then, and Cheng edited and laid out several pages each night. He also pioneered a new genre of journalism in China, writing reviews of the foreign films that were becoming widely available on video CDs.
The newspaper bled money at first, and Cheng's bosses had their doubts. In one meeting, Cheng argued it would soon become Guangzhou's top newspaper. His audience burst out laughing, colleagues recalled.
But Cheng kept pushing. The paper became the first in China to offer daily consumer sections -- automobiles on Monday and real estate on Thursday, for example. It broke new ground with blowout coverage of World Cup finals in 1998, publishing eight pages a day for 43 consecutive days to the delight of this soccer-crazed nation.
The newspaper also began to distinguish itself with more critical reporting on such social problems as crime and corruption, causing a sensation, for example, with a report on restaurants that used cooking oil extracted from kitchen waste.
While other newspapers avoided angering local officials by muckraking only in other provinces, the Daily focused on hard-hitting reporting in its own city and region.
The strategy worked. Circulation climbed from 80,000 at the end of 1997 to 380,000 a year later. After a talented, young advertising manager, Yu Huafeng, joined the staff, revenues jumped, too. In its third year, circulation reached 610,000 and the paper eked out its first profit.
By 2000, the Southern Metropolis Daily had become both the thickest and most expensive daily newspaper in China, charging about 12 cents for 72 pages. The next year, the party promoted Cheng to editor in chief. Yu became a top deputy and the paper's general manager. The average age of the Daily's 2,200 employees was 27 in 2002. The average age of the members of its senior management was 33.
The newspaper was pugnacious. Once, local officials in the neighboring city of Shenzhen tried to banish it from its newsstands. The next day, a headline on the paper's front page declared, "Someone in Shenzhen Shamelessly Shut Out This Newspaper." A month and a half later, the ban was lifted.
Colleagues described Cheng as an eloquent speaker. At weekly staff meetings, he urged his reporters to remember they were working for the public. In one memo, a reporter recalled, he criticized an article describing the problems caused by the city's prostitutes. He said the paper should sympathize with the weak and concentrate on "supervising" the strong.
"In the newspaper business, we have already learned how to be out of power," Cheng said in an interview distributed by the paper's marketing department in 2002. "Now, we must learn how to act like a newspaper that is in power."
Cheng said the party had given the press a mandate to monitor local officials. But he said he also picked his targets carefully. "In China, supervision by the media can only proceed within the existing system," he said. "Freedom means knowing how big your cage is."
A Brief Victory
A few days after Chen Feng was hired as a reporter at the Southern Metropolis Daily in late March last year, he received a hot tip. A college student told him she had heard that a 27-year-old graphic designer named Sun Zhigang had died in police custody after being detained for failing to carry his temporary residence permit.
Chen was worried the story might be too sensitive. But without hesitating, his editor gave him permission to investigate, he recalled.
Chen, 31, a portly fellow with close-cropped hair, teamed up with a colleague, Wang Lei, 28, who was taller and thinner and sported a goatee and long hair. They found Sun's family, and convinced them to ask a medical examiner for an autopsy. A few weeks later, they learned the results: Sun had been beaten to death.
The two reporters briefed one of the paper's top editors. He immediately expressed interest, they recalled, and issued specific instructions: First, make sure to get every detail right. Second, get the story done fast before propaganda authorities could order the paper not to write about the subject. China has never employed an extensive system of censors. Instead, the party appoints the editors of every newspaper, issues directives banning coverage of specific subjects and relies on journalists to censor themselves. Those who don't comply are fired or demoted, and in some cases, their publications are shut down. On rare occasions, a journalist might be arrested.
Chen and Wang moved quickly, interviewing Sun's friends, employers and relatives as well as medical and legal experts. Then they tried to interview police and were told to go away at two precinct houses and city headquarters. They planned to write the story the next day.
But their editor was worried, they recalled. He said they should have waited until the last day to contact police, because the police might call the propaganda authorities and squash the story. Then he ordered them to write it that night.
The article was splashed across two pages. On the tabloid's front, a large headline read, "The Death of Detainee Sun Zhigang." A smaller one said, "University Graduate, 27, Suddenly Dies Three Days After Detention on Guangzhou Street, Autopsy Shows Violent Beating Before Death."
The public's response was overwhelming. Hundreds of people called and sent faxes to the newspaper to express outrage or tell their own stories of police abuse, and tens of thousands posted messages on the Internet.
Chen and Wang wrote a follow-up story the next day, but local propaganda officials blocked the piece, Chen recalled. The reporters then sent the story to a friend at a Beijing-based newspaper, where it was published a few days later under a pseudonym.
Soon afterward, they recalled, Cheng Yizhong, the star editor, summoned them to his office for a meeting. He urged them to keep digging, even if not all of the stories they wrote could be published. Then he said he hoped their reporting would lead Beijing to abolish the law used to detain Sun.
Chen recalled thinking his editor was crazy. "I thought he might be feverish," he said.
But the pressure for change continued to build. Sun had been detained under a law the party had used to restrict migration for decades, a sort of internal passport system that allowed police to send people without residence permits into any of about 700 custody-and-repatriation centers across the country. Legal scholars began calling for a review of the law, arguing that it violated basic human rights. Journalists began showing how police often detained people at will, forced them to work in the camps and then held them until relatives paid hefty fees.
Cheng kept the Daily at the forefront of the campaign, publishing a series of special reports and editorials. When Beijing announced the decision to abolish the detention system, he put that on the front page, too.
Local Retaliation
Afterward, some senior officials praised the Southern Metropolis Daily's reporting as a model of how the news media could play a constructive role in the party, party sources said.
But the end of the detention system deprived police agencies, a powerful branch of the state, of a lucrative source of income. More important, the story had embarrassed local leaders in Guangzhou and perhaps ruined their careers.
Local officials angry at the media usually go to propaganda authorities to demand that journalists be punished. But Beijing had all but endorsed the Daily's reporting by abolishing the detention camp system, which made it difficult for officials in Guangzhou to take action.
Still, they tried to pressure the newspaper. On the day the story of Sun's death was published, Guangzhou's party secretary angrily threatened to take the Daily to court, journalists said. Later, Cheng received a call from an old classmate who delivered a message from another senior city official warning him to back off, colleagues said.
Soon after Beijing abolished the detention law, Guangzhou party leaders ordered an investigation into the newspaper's finances and investigators began pressuring advertisers for evidence of corruption, party officials and advertisers said.
"They couldn't use the propaganda system to punish the newspaper because it hadn't made any serious mistakes," said one provincial party official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "So they turned to the justice system."
Within a month, prosecutors detained Yu Huafeng, the paper's general manager, and questioned him about a $350 necklace an advertiser had given his wife as a gift after she had a child. Yu replied that he had given the advertiser a $1,000 video camera when his wife had a child, and he showed them the receipt to prove it, according to his wife, Xiang Li.
The authorities refused to release Yu. But Cheng mobilized his own supporters in the party, and the provincial propaganda chief intervened and forced the prosecutors to let Yu go, two party officials said.
The showdown suggested the Daily had more support in the party than its enemies, and Cheng and Yu relaxed, colleagues said. They made plans to launch tabloids like the Daily in other cities, and opened talks with another newspaper to join forces and start one in Beijing.
In mid-October, in what appeared to be an important endorsement, the party's central propaganda department in Beijing approved the newspaper. Cheng was named the new paper's editor in chief.
Clampdown Intensifies
But Cheng had underestimated his enemies in Guangzhou. A year earlier, the party's top official in Guangdong province had departed. His replacement was Zhang Dejiang, a party leader who soon complained that reporters in Guangdong were too difficult to control, according to people who heard his remarks.
It was Zhang who had ordered the March clampdown in which Cheng was demoted to deputy editor, party officials said. He had also fired the editor of another paper and completely shut down a third.
In December 2003, city leaders won permission from Zhang or his deputies to continue the corruption probe of the Southern Metropolis Daily, according to two party officials. Prosecutors detained Yu again, and this time he was not released.
But Cheng refused to tone down the paper's coverage. Ten days after Yu's arrest, the Daily reported a world exclusive: Health authorities in the city had identified a suspected case of SARS, the first in China in several months.
The next day, the city confirmed the report and said it had been planning to make the announcement all along. Zhang was embarrassed and furious, a party official said, but because of the government's failed cover-up of the first SARS outbreak, it would have been difficult for him to punish the newspaper for the disclosure.
Instead, the corruption probe intensified. In early January 2004, prosecutors interrogated about 20 editors and business managers at the newspaper, including Cheng.
But even as the pressure grew, the Daily won some of the nation's top journalism honors and announced that circulation had topped 1.4 million and 2003 profits would approach $20 million, making it one of the country's most successful papers.
At the end of January, Zhang turned the screws tighter. At a large gathering of party discipline officials, party sources said, he asked sarcastically whether the party still owned the Daily. Then he declared that the media couldn't just monitor others; someone had to monitor them, too.
One of his deputies accused the Daily's executives of stealing state funds, essentially convicting Yu before trial, the officials said.
A few days later, Cheng delivered a defiant speech to his staff. Dressed in a black jacket and a cotton shirt and sitting at the head of a conference table in a room with more than 100 senior staff members, Cheng said a clash between the newspaper and "a few powerful individuals" had been building since the Sun Zhigang article was published, according to witnesses and a copy of the speech.
"Some people are sharpening their weapons. . . . This storm was bound to come sooner or later," he said. "We are already prepared. For the progress of the nation, the development of society and the happiness of the people, it is worth suffering some inconvenience and misery!"
"Whatever happens," he vowed, "we must not give up our ideals and beliefs."
A few weeks later, a local court convicted Yu of corruption for transferring bonus funds from the paper's advertising department to the newsroom, a common practice at many newspapers. The court also convicted him of bribery for paying a bonus to a supervisor at the Southern Daily, Li Minying.
In March, Yu was sentenced to 12 years in prison. Li received an 11-year sentence for accepting a bribe. The next day, police arrested Cheng.
The moves stunned the newspaper's supporters because there seemed to be no evidence of any crime and because the amount of money involved was relatively small. Journalists across the country signed petitions in protest, and many who had campaigned against the detention law began lobbying on behalf of the Southern Metropolis Daily.
As public outcry grew, three retired party chiefs in Guangdong wrote letters to Zhang urging him to review the case, arguing it had jeopardized the province's reputation as a pioneer of economic reform, party officials said. In an unusually public sign of division within the leadership, a Beijing magazine reported on two of the letters.
In June, the courts reduced Yu's sentence to eight years and Li's to six years on appeal. Cheng remains in prison but has not yet been charged with a crime, a sign that party leaders have not decided what to do.
The Southern Metropolis Daily is still publishing, but editors are more careful about criticizing local authorities. Almost all of the paper's key ad salesmen have resigned, and dozens of reporters have quit. In the first quarter of the year, officials said, the paper lost $1.5 million.
But the new tabloid started by Cheng in Beijing has adopted the aggressive style of the old Daily and appears to be prospering. "This is the way it works," said a senior editor in Guangzhou who spoke on condition of anonymity. "For every two steps forward, there is a step backward. But we're still going to keep pushing."
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Republicans Sign Along the Dotted Line
Sunday, August 1, 2004; Page A05
By Dana Milbank
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A31019-2004Jul31.html
I pledge allegiance to the . . . candidate?
Political campaigns are always eager to keep hecklers out of their pep rallies, but the Republican National Committee took that desire to a new level last week, requiring supporters to sign an oath of loyalty before receiving tickets to Saturday's New Mexico rally featuring Vice President Cheney.
The Albuquerque Journal reported on Friday that people seeking tickets to the Cheney event who could not be identified as GOP partisans -- contributors or volunteers -- were told they could not receive tickets unless they signed an endorsement form saying "I, (full name) . . . do herby (sic) endorse George W. Bush for reelection of the United States." The form warns that signers "are consenting to use and release of your name by Bush-Cheney as an endorser of President Bush."
The paper quoted a Republican official saying a "Democrat operative group" was trying to infiltrate the limited-seating event -- although the party apparently turned away uncommitted voters who simply wanted to hear Cheney speak.
RNC communications director Jim Dyke defended the practice on Friday. "Maybe we should start having joint fundraisers with the DNC," he mused. "Please."
John F. Kerry's campaign has charged that the Bush campaign routinely screens attendees of Bush's speeches, and the Democrats say they do not impose loyalty requirements on crowds for their nominee's speeches. This much is certainly true: If the Democrats are trying to keep crowds loyal, they aren't doing a very good job. When Kerry visited New Mexico a few weeks ago, a group of young men in the crowd waved flip-flops in the air during his speech and chanted, "Viva Bush!"
Uncorking a Distribution Fuss
Karl Rove might wish to employ a wine taster after the Justice Department let a deadline pass Thursday without filing a brief before the Supreme Court supporting direct shipments of wine across state lines.
The unusual case has former Whitewater prosecutor Ken Starr and President Bush's brother-in-law on the side of wine producers and evangelical Christians on the side of states and liquor distributors trying to block sales.
Thursday's decision pleased religious-conservative groups who oppose such shipments on the grounds that they could ease underage drinking. "The administration is going to remain neutral," said a content Richard Cizik, top lobbyist for the National Association of Evangelicals.
But the wine industry is in ferment, and grape growers are turning their wrath on Bush's top political adviser. "My understanding is they had a brief drafted in the can, ready to go . . . and my understanding is they got political pressure from the White House, that Karl Rove suddenly got engaged, possibly because of the evangelicals," said David P. Sloane, president of the trade group WineAmerica. Sloane said Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy G. Thompson also turned against the Justice brief at the last minute.
"Not true," replied Rove.
Maybe They Share a Speechwriter
Newly minted Democratic presidential nominee Kerry would be in a Boston jail cell today if rhetorical theft were a crime. In his acceptance speech, Kerry pilfered Bush's 2000 refrain "Help is on the way." And his promise to "restore trust and credibility to the White House" had a slight echo to Bush's acceptance-speech promise to "uphold the honor and dignity of the office."
But the grandest larceny involved a Bush line about weapons proliferation. "We must deny the world's most dangerous leaders from having and harboring the world's most dangerous weapons," is Bush's version, used in various forms since 2002. Compare that with Kerry's line on Thursday night: "We need to lead a global effort against nuclear proliferation -- to keep the most dangerous weapons in the world out of the most dangerous hands in the world."
Discord in the Show-Me Crowd
Democrats are crowing about the uncharacteristic unity the party demonstrated at its convention in Boston. But the Missouri delegation apparently didn't drink the Kool-Aid.
The state's Democrats are engaged in a fratricidal battle in advance of Tuesday's gubernatorial primary. Gov. Bob Holden is being challenged by state auditor Claire McCaskill. The two are in a dead heat as they fight for the right to run against the GOP candidate, Secretary of State Matt Blunt. The two Democrats have been trading attack ads; she has accused him of taking illegal campaign contributions, and he has accused her of taking illegal loans.
That Would've Been Some Announcement
A day late and Osama short:
" 'It would be best if the arrest or killing [of a senior al Qaeda official] were announced on twenty-six, twenty-seven, or twenty-eight July' -- the first three days of the Democratic National Convention in Boston."
-- The New Republic, July 19 issue, quoting an unnamed official with Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency describing instructions from a White House aide to ISI's director.
"Pakistan has arrested a top al Qaeda suspect wanted by the United States, Al Arabiya satellite news channel quoted Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf as saying." -- Reuters news service, July 29, 3:19 p.m.
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Ex-General Gives His Take on Iraq War
In His Memoir, Franks Also Seems Supportive of the Bush Administration
By Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, August 1, 2004; Page A10
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A30904-2004Jul31.html
Four days before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Gen. Tommy R. Franks, then the commander of the U.S. military in the Middle East, told his intelligence staff that his greatest fear was "a terrorist attack against the World Trade Center in New York," according to his new memoir.
He does not elaborate on what led him to that view.
"American Soldier," which goes on sale Tuesday, does not break much other new ground but does deepen and confirm some earlier accounts of the Bush administration's conduct of the war in Afghanistan in 2001 and the Iraq invasion in the spring of 2003. Coming as the presidential election season gears up, it probably will be seen as supportive of the Bush administration and critical of Democrats, who Franks portrays as lacking the "stomach" to confront al Qaeda terrorists in Afghanistan during the 1990s.
Franks conveys the sense that President Bush put him at ease, to the point that Franks felt able, because he was busy, to decline an invitation after a meeting in Crawford, Tex., for lunch with Bush.
Even so, two key Bush administration officials come in for harsh treatment in the book: Pentagon policy chief Douglas J. Feith and former White House counterterrorism director Richard A. Clarke.
Franks confirms the account in "Plan of Attack," by Washington Post Assistant Managing Editor Bob Woodward, which described friction between Franks and Feith. Franks calls the undersecretary of defense for policy "a master of the off-the-wall question that rarely had relevance to operational problems." He adds, "I generally ignored his contributions."
Franks later quotes himself as saying during the planning for the invasion of Iraq that Feith had achieved the reputation in some military circles as "the dumbest . . . guy on the planet."
Clarke, who has since written his own memoir, "On Terror," which is extremely critical of the Bush administration, is depicted as an impractical blowhard who talked a lot but failed to produce "a single operational recommendation, or a single page of actionable intelligence."
By contrast, Franks portrays Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld as a difficult but effective leader whose demands sometimes seemed to "border on harassment." He depicts their relationship as one that began somewhat rockily when they first worked closely together, during the Afghan campaign. Franks recalls being so stung by Rumsfeld's frustration at getting Special Operations troops into Afghanistan early in October 2001 that, he writes, he told Rumsfeld that he felt the defense secretary lacked confidence in him and offered to step down as chief of the U.S. Central Command.
But by May 2003, after the opening of the Iraq campaign, their relationship had so improved that Rumsfeld offered to make him the chief of staff of the Army, Franks writes. He turned down the job, which ultimately led Rumsfeld to bring out of retirement former Special Operations chief Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker.
Franks also discloses that Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, in an unusual move, bypassed the Pentagon chain of command to call him in September 2002 to express unease about aspects of the developing war plan for Iraq. "I've got problems with force size and support of that force, given such long lines" of communication and supply, Franks reports that Powell said to him in warning that he intended to raise his concerns with Bush.
Powell's criticism of the plan, especially its relatively small troop numbers, anticipated that made by many retired generals in television commentary when the war began six months later. Franks is dismissive of Powell's views, saying the man who headed the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the first Iraq war "no longer wore Army green." Powell had "earned his right to an opinion, but had relinquished responsibility for the conduct of military operations when he retired" as chairman of the Joint Chiefs in 1993.
In discussing the conduct of the spring 2003 offensive in Iraq, Franks gives more credit to the Air Force than some in the Army do. The bombing of the Republican Guard divisions near Baghdad that took place during a huge sandstorm in late March 2003 "was one of the fiercest, and most effective, in the history of warfare," and effectively ended organized Iraqi resistance, he states.
In his one overarching criticism of the administration's handling of the Iraq war, Franks faults Powell and Rumsfeld for failing to ease chronic friction between the State Department and the Pentagon. "I believe that better listening, more intellectual flexibility, and more willingness to learn and compromise would have better served . . . the commander-in-chief, and our country," he writes. But he does not offer specifics of interagency squabbling that troubled him.
Franks retired in the summer of 2003, just as the guerrilla campaign against the U.S. occupation of Iraq was getting underway, and has little new to say about the situation since then. He asserts that he always expected that the occupation would be long and difficult.
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President bypasses Congress
ASSOCIATED PRESS
August 01, 2004
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20040731-114916-6617r.htm
President Bush on Friday announced his intention to make 20 appointments during the congressional recess, including a new chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, a manufacturing czar and three ambassadors.
For FTC chairman, Mr. Bush intends to appoint Deborah Majoras of Virginia to replace Timothy J. Muris, who is stepping down. Mrs. Majoras, a former Justice Department deputy assistant attorney general, was one of the lead lawyers in the government's antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft Corp.
Mrs. Majoras' nomination has been blocked in the Senate by Sen. Ron Wyden, Oregon Democrat, who said there was no evidence she would change FTC policies that he says benefit oil companies and hurt consumers. By making the appointment during the congressional recess, Mr. Bush avoids the need for Senate confirmation.
Mr. Wyden said he hoped "that this undemocratic process for naming a new chair won't result in consumers being hammered with high gas prices again and again."
Jon Leibowitz of Maryland will be appointed to another seat on the five-member FTC. Mrs. Majoras and Mr. Leibowitz, like the other recess appointees, will serve until the end of 2005.
Mr. Bush also plans to nominate Albert Frink Jr. of California as assistant secretary of commerce for manufacturing and services. Mr. Bush's first pick for the manufacturing post, Nebraska business executive Tony Raimondo, was criticized for cutting U.S. jobs and shifting work to China.
The president also announced the following nominations:
• Paul Jones of Colorado to be a member of the Internal Revenue Service Oversight Board.
• Jonathan Dudas of Virginia to be undersecretary of commerce for intellectual property and director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
• Enrique Sosa of Florida to be a member of the Amtrak reform board.
• Richard Wagner of Florida to be a member of the National Institute for Literacy Advisory Board.
• Stephen Johnson of Maryland to be deputy administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency.
• Carin Barth of Texas to be chief financial officer of the Housing and Urban Development Department.
• Gary Lee Visscher of Maryland to be a member of the Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board.
• Ricardo Hinojosa of Texas to be chairman of the United States Sentencing Commission.
• Susan Johnson Grant of Virginia to be chief financial officer at the Energy Department.
• James Kunder of Virginia to be assistant administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development in the bureau for Asia and the Near East.
• John Rood of Florida to be ambassador to the Bahamas.
• Charles Graves Untermeyer of Texas to be ambassador to Qatar.
• Aldona Wos of North Carolina to be ambassador to Estonia.
• Scott Kevin Walker of Wisconsin to be a member of the advisory board of the St. Lawrence Seaway Development Corp.
• Roger Wallace and Jack Vaughn of Texas and Nadine Hogan of Florida to be members of the board of directors of the Inter-American Foundation.
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Poll puts Kerry ahead of Bush
aljazeera.net
01 August 2004
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/BC628EB5-B23B-48EE-B34E-91082B856D60.htm
US Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry is leading in a hypothetical two-way race with President George Bush, says a new opinion poll.
The latest Newsweek poll reported on Saturday indicates Kerry would get 49% of the votes compared to Bush's 42% in a three-way race, with independent candidate Ralph Nader getting 3%.
The poll of 1010 adults was taken on 29-30 July as the Democratic National Convention in Boston wound down.
The latest opinion poll also showed 60% of those asked said Bush's policies and diplomatic efforts had led to more anti-American feelings around the world.
Twenty-five percent thought they had not had much effect and 9% thought they had improved feelings towards the US.
Of those asked, 43% thought that in trying to achieve his foreign policy, Bush had not done enough to involve major allies and international organisations, 38% thought it was the right amount and 11% thought it was too much.
Thirty-eight percent said the way people in other countries feel about America ''mattered a lot,'' compared to 33% ''somewhat,'' 11% ''not too much'' and 13% ''not at all''.
-------- OTHER
-------- environment
Reopening Forest Areas Stirs Debate in Alaska
Many Question the Need to Aid Timber Industry
By Blaine Harden
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, August 1, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A31070-2004Jul31?language=printer
TONGASS NATIONAL FOREST, Alaska -- Old-growth hemlock and spruce trees, enough to build a suburban subdivision with 30 homes, have been clear-cut and left to rot here at the northern end of the nation's largest national forest.
The trees -- some of them stripped, stacked beside a new road and awaiting a logging truck that apparently will never come -- are the abandoned tail end of a timber sale that, on the front end, earned the U.S. Treasury about $45,000 but cost American taxpayers about $2 million to set up.
That sale is one of 10 that the federal government, in an attempt to keep the timber industry above water, has this year allowed local companies to walk away from.
"It seems crazy to me," said Floyd Peterson, a commercial fisherman who, as a member of the local Tlingit tribe, can drive his all-terrain vehicle across native land to this otherwise inaccessible corner of the forest. "Why do the politicians want this timber cut when there is no market for it?"
The abandoned sale, known as the Humpback-Gallagher sale, is part of a U.S. Forest Service logging program that, on an annual basis, is costing the federal government between $30 million and $35 million more than it collects in timber sales.
Even with the subsidy, local logging companies are struggling to make a profit in this coastal rain forest that sprawls across nearly 17 million acres on the rugged islands and panhandle of southeastern Alaska.
Having ordered the reopening of huge areas in this forest that had been closed to new logging roads, the Bush administration has become a major actor in a growing national debate about the value of federal subsidies for a shrinking industry in this fragile and slow-growing forest. Republican budget hawks in Congress have joined with environmentalists in questioning subsidized road-building and logging in the Tongass National Forest.
The House, with bipartisan support for a Republican-sponsored amendment, voted in June to ban federal funding for all new logging roads here. The Senate has yet to vote on the matter.
The conservative National Taxpayers Union said recently that if logging is not viable here under market conditions, "then taxpayers should not be expected to fund operations of these private companies."
Environmental groups have long maintained that large-scale logging in the Tongass, the world's largest intact temperate rain forest, is ecologically destructive and economically nonsensical.
Here in the Tongass, this criticism has angered logging company owners and frustrated Forest Service officials. They say the shrinking timber industry in southeast Alaska is at risk of disappearing altogether, not because it cannot produce lumber at a profit, but because decades of environmental lawsuits and fickle federal rules have made it impossible to manage a business that can adapt to the global market.
Referring to the felled and abandoned logs at the Humpback-Gallagher sale, Forrest Cole, supervisor of the Tongass for the Forest Service, said: "It makes me want to throw up. It makes me sick to see the product left behind, but it also makes me sick to see how we got to this point."
How the Tongass got to this point is a convoluted tale, governed by shifting, sometimes contradictory regulations about how to run a federal rain forest.
The story, too, has been shaped by increasingly cutthroat world competition in the forest products industry and by the rise of the lucrative cruise ship business in southeastern Alaska. Tourism and recreation have long since overtaken logging as the region's primary employers and engine of growth.
Cheap timber from Russia and South America has conspired to make logging in this forest -- always saddled with labor and transport costs that are among the world's highest -- even less competitive as a market commodity.
Meanwhile, cruise ships have made the forest an eco-destination for tens of thousands of summertime tourists. Marketing studies have found that tourists spend about $100 each, whenever they get off a boat. They come to watch brown bears, view humpback whales, fish for wild salmon and buy knick-knacks -- not to see clear-cuts striped with logging roads.
As one of its final acts, the Clinton administration closed about 60 million acres of federal forestland to new roads, effectively preventing new logging or mining. That order fenced off 9.4 million acres of the Tongass, depriving the Forest Service of three-quarters of the land it had been managing for logging.
The roadless rule punctuated a dismal decade for logging in southeastern Alaska. Global competition forced the closure of two antiquated pulp mills that had been the driving force for most year-round, high-paying logging jobs. Those jobs all but disappeared, falling from 3,500 in the early 1990s to no more than several hundred now.
Logging volume also plummeted, from 500 million board feet a year in the early 1990s to about 50 million board feet last year. Only three sizable lumber mills are still operating in southeast Alaska, along with a handful of mom-and-pop operations.
The rules of the forest are again changing, thanks to the Bush administration, with the enthusiastic support of Alaska Gov. Frank H. Murkowski (R) and the state's all-Republican congressional delegation.
The administration exempted the Tongass from Clinton's roadless rule last December -- and on July 12 it proposed overturning the rule in all federal forests. Agriculture Secretary Ann M. Veneman has said the abolition of the roadless rule would end litigation and encourage cooperation between state and federal officials.
The Forest Service says the changing regulations have played havoc with long-term plans for logging.
"We have gone from a full pipeline of timber sales down to absolutely nothing," Cole said. "We are working frantically to make new sales. How much economical wood do I have to offer now? The answer is less than sufficient to keep the two mills operating."
But if wood is in such short supply, why were felled logs left to rot this year at the abandoned Humpback-Gallagher sale?
Cole and logging company owners say that abandoned sale and the nine others abandoned since January were put together by the Forest Service at a time when the federal government was trying to discourage logging. They said those sales are "uneconomic" because they are on inaccessible terrain with thin tree cover and are too far from sawmills.
"We should never have bid on them," said Steve Seley, president of Pacific Log and Lumber, the largest operator in the Tongass. He cancelled a purchase of 17 million board feet of federal timber this year, after concluding that it was too far away from his mill to be cut profitably. "We were too optimistic. We wanted to keep our people employed."
Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), chairman of the Appropriations Committee and a champion of logging in the Tongass, made these contractual escapes possible by attaching a rider to last year's appropriations bill. The Bush administration then endorsed the measure.
Environmental groups -- and budget hawks critical of public subsidies to private companies -- have a much different take on the latest round of rule changes in the Tongass.
"There is more than enough timber available from existing roads to fully supply the timber industry at levels they have been cutting in recent years without building new roads," said Tom Waldo, a staff attorney at Earthjustice, which is suing the Forest Service in federal court in Alaska.
The suit claims that the Forest Service, in part to justify its own large payroll in southeast Alaska (about 500 employees), chronically overstates market demand and wastes money preparing timber sales that are not needed. It says that much of the most valuable -- and economically logged -- timber in the forest was cut down decades ago.
"This is driven by an ideological agenda and pressure from the timber industry to maximize profits," Waldo said. "People like Governor Murkowski and Ted Stevens still remember the glory days of logging, and they think we can go back to that time."
Environmentalists point out that the governor, in his state of the state speech last year, said the amount of timber cut in the Tongass should jump to 360 million board feet a year, a sevenfold surge over the 2003 number.
Yet, the governor's own Department of Labor said, in its 2003 report on forest-industry trends, that the "economic realities of the early twenty-first century point toward less expensive sources" of timber than what Alaska can provide on a "glutted market."
Logging company owners and timber industry groups say the governor is right and his Department of Labor is wrong. They say the market is not glutted and that they have found a profitable specialty market in the Lower 48 states for doors, moldings and windows.
To exploit this market, the industry needs timely access to a million more acres of old-growth timber in the Tongass, much of it in areas that are now without roads, said George Woodbury, president of the Alaska Forest Association, a trade industry group.
"The rest of it can stand untouched," he said.
Environmental groups describe this request for 1 million more acres of land as unnecessary, given world markets and the shrinking local logging industry. One million acres is more than twice the total timber harvest in the Tongass in the past 100 years.
-------- ACTIVISTS
British Chernobyl scientist deported
By James Hamilton
Sunday Herald
01 August 2004
http://www.sundayherald.com/43775
A BRITISH scientist who has spent years studying the fallout from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster was mysteriously deported from neighbouring Belarus yesterday.
Dr Alan Flowers was on a lecture tour in the former Soviet republic after being invited by the Belarusian State University.
The academic, who is based in the Faculty of Science at Kingston University London, arrived earlier this month.
But his visa was suddenly rescinded yesterday and the deportation order imposed by the interior ministry.
Vladimir Kuzura, an official from the ministry, refused to explain the reason for Flowers's deportation.
A Foreign Office spokes woman confirmed that the order had been made but would not comment further.
Flowers, who specialises in radiology, apparently told report ers in Belarus that he was being removed because of his contact with non-government organisations.
Freelancer Vera Rich wrote in the Ukrainian Weekly that Flowers had been studying the Chernobyl disaster since 1992.
Rich was Soviet correspondent for the scientific journal Nature at the time of the world's worst nuclear disaster on April 26, 1986.
The power station exploded, killing 30 people outright and forcing the evacuation of 135,000 nearby because of the high levels of radiation.
Rich wrote that Flowers said he had many colleagues in Belarus who believed the theory that the Soviet Union seeded clouds to make them rain, effectively "dumping" contaminated mat erial on Belarus to avoid it being blown towards Moscow.
The Belarusian government has consistently tried to play down the impact of the disaster, and outspoken researchers have been gagged.
President Alexander Luka shenko has imposed strict controls on freedom of speech and is increasingly isolated by the West.
----
ACLU quits federal donation program
Group refuses to use anti-terrorist watch list
Sunday, August 1, 2004
NEW YORK (CNN)
http://www.cnn.com/2004/LAW/08/01/aclu.donations/index.html
The American Civil Liberties Union has withdrawn from a federal donation program, refusing to follow U.S. Patriot Act rules requiring use of a government anti-terrorism watch list to check employees' names, a spokeswoman said.
The ACLU stands to lose about $500,000 by pulling out of the Combined Federal Campaign, which allows federal employees to donate to various nonprofit organizations through payroll deductions, ACLU spokeswoman Emily Whitfield said Saturday.
In 2003, the ACLU received $470,000 in such contributions.
ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero, in a letter to CFC Director Mara Patermaster, said Attorney General "John Ashcroft and this administration have created a climate of fear and intimidation that undermines the health and well-being of this nation."
Using the watch lists, developed under the U.S. Patriot Act, is one requirement of continued program participation. The Patriot Act -- which expires in 2005 -- was passed into law in the weeks after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
It strengthened government legal powers to conduct investigations and detain people.
Supporters of the law have said the Patriot Act has been a valuable tool in anti-terrorism efforts.
The ACLU, a legal organization that works to defend individual Constitutional rights, has long opposed the U.S. Patriot Act.
In his letter, Romero said, "We will act not only on our behalf, but on behalf of our nation's nonprofits, to defend ourselves against John Ashcroft and a government that tramples on the Constitution in the name of national security."
Romero said his organization withdrew from the program after seeing comments by Patermaster in Saturday's New York Times, indicating the ACLU could be dropped from the program for "violating the government's policy."
Whitfield said the lists contain "tens of thousands of names and aliases," and it's against the ACLU's principles to use any kind of watch list.
"Our experience with watch lists is that they are notoriously unreliable," Whitfield said.
The ACLU had received legal advice indicating it was not required to check employee names against the list, Whitfield said. The group was exploring its legal options, she said.
"The ACLU would never have signed the CFC's funding agreement if we believed for one minute we would have to check our employees against a list," she said.
Asked what the group will do to make up for the loss of the donations from federal employees, which have been rising each year, Whitfield said, "We'll just fight a little harder."
The CFC distributes the donations to more than 2,000 nonprofit groups, and the ACLU has been in the program since 1983. Other groups in the CFC program are the 4-H youth education program, National Public Radio and the Alzheimer's Association research organization.
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