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NUCLEAR
Manual Shutdown of U.S. Reactors on Fire May Be Allowed
Reactor Pressure Causes Columbia Generating Station Emergency Scram
USEC Inc. Reports $11.7 Million Net Income for 2nd Quarter;
Anarchy and Occupation, the Epilogue To Genocide
Plutonium particles accumulating in Japanese bay
New N. Korean Missiles Said to Threaten U.S.
Rev. Moon's submarines, sold to Kim Jong-Il
North Korean Official To Attend N.Y. Seminar
Space invaders
Nuclear sword of Damocles
Greenpeace urges UN to track down nuclear material looted in Iraq
Part 3 of 3: Politics, science hold future of nuclear arms
Court Overrules Government's Lax Radiation Standards
Los Alamos's Super-Secret Heritage Shows Some Cracks
Nuclear Lab Shutdown Puts Pluto Mission In Jeopardy
Catawba plant may test MOX
100 tons of fuel still in K Basins
MILITARY
Up to 50 militants believed killed in Afghan border clash: US
First made in India battle tank set to roll out
US will not back down from arms sales to Taiwan, senators say in China
Russian, Central Asian militaries launch joint exercise in Kyrgyzstan
Halliburton Sues Retired Executives
Cheney Not Charged in Halliburton Investigation
Lockheed Wins Contract for New Spy Plane
IBM to Build Army Supercomputer
Access to Contract Data Questioned
Haven Offered to 2 Militias in Colombia, if They Disarm
Church Bombings Outrage Iraqis of All Faiths
Turkish Hostage Executed As Iraqis Condemn Violence
Car Bomb Kills 6 Iraqis as New Round of Violence Breaks Out
Secular Party Bends to Help Sharon
3 Palestinians Are Killed in Gaza Explosion
3 Palestinians Who Spied for Israel Are Killed in Gaza
Israelis Wonder if Corruption Is Soiling the Zionist Dream
Islamic group warns Saudi Arabia not to send troops to Iraq
Egypt denies it told US general that Saddam Hussein had WMDs
Germany, UAE in joint project to help rebuild Iraqi army: press
Pakistan Sweep Against Al Qaeda Widens
Paramilitary role for Pentagon meets resistance
Victor Bout's American Connection
Accused Army Chaplain Resigning Muslim's Case Had Been Dropped
Old Vietnam Hands in Charge in Iraq
U.S. Military Holds Hearing on Guard in Prison Abuse Photos
Former Abu Ghraib Reserve Unit Returns Home
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Supreme Court to Review Federal Sentencing Rules
Lawyers Seek to Block Guantanamo Hearings
Street Closing Irks D.C. Leaders
Pre-9/11 Acts Led To Alerts
U.S. Officials Defend Warning of Possible Terror Attacks
Few Measures Exist to Avert Truck Bombs, Experts Say
Intelligence Chief Without Power? Support Leaves Questions
Federal, State and Local Officials Step Up Security Efforts
Ridge on defensive after terror alert
Evicted From Camp, Sudan Refugees Suffer in Limbo
Police ensure business as usual
Detainees Seeking to End Hearings Without Counsel
Al Qaeda Arrest In June Opened Valuable Leads
Al Qaeda computer revealed latest threat
Karpinski claims conspiracy kept her in dark over prison abuses
POLITICS
Access to Contract Data Questioned
The Most Influential 'Embedded' Reporter Ever
Distortions Surrounded Press Response to Hiroshima Attack
The First On-the-Scene Report From Hiroshima
Reports That Led to Terror Alert Were Years Old, Officials Say
Cheney hails U.S. defenders
Bush Backs Creation of Intelligence Director
Bush backs intelligence czar
Kerry Urges Calling Back Congress
Bush Endorses Naming a Chief on Intelligence
ENERGY
California Approves New Wind Power Transmission Line
Biodiesel Popularity on the Rise
OTHER
Inside Help Suspected in Terror Plans at World Bank and Monetary Fund
ACTIVISTS
Scottsdale band gets MTV play with antiwar music video
Iraq War Crimes Tribunal: The People will Judge George W. Bush
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- accidents and safety
Manual Shutdown of U.S. Reactors on Fire May Be Allowed
August 3, 2004
WASHINGTON, DC, (ENS)
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/aug2004/2004-08-03-02.asp
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is poised to allow manual shutdown of nuclear power plants in the event of fire, instead of insisting that plant operators protect electric cabling with physical fire barriers as required by law. The manual strategy allows operators to dispatch station personnel throughout a reactor facility to turn valves, pull circuit breakers, or flip switches to shut down the reactor.
According to documents obtained by the Nuclear Information and Resource Service (NIRS) under the Freedom of Information Act, many reactor operators already have adopted manual action strategies that are unapproved by the commission, unanalyzed for reactor and worker safety, and illegal under federal law.
Current federal law requires that nuclear power station operators physically protect emergency backup electrical systems - power, control and instrument cables - used to remotely shut down the reactor from the control room in case of fire.
Turkey Point Nuclear Power Plant, 25 south of Miami, Florida, uses manual actions rather than fire barriers. (Photo courtesy NRC) The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) states that nuclear power plants will encounter "three or four significant fires over their operating lifetime," in its 1999 report "Severe Accident Risks; An Assessment for Five U.S. Nuclear Power Plants."
The regulation at issue requires the physical fire protection of electrical cabling to be independently tested to American Society Test and Measure standards for rating as qualified fire barriers.
These fire protection systems are to be designed, installed and maintained to resist the passage of flame and hot gas to protect the encased electrical cables from excessive temperatures for either:
- a minimum of three hours
- or one hour in conjunction with sprinkler and smoke detector equipment
- or to provide physically separate redundant cables with a minimum of 20 feet between them with sprinklers and detectors in the same area
But documents obtained by NIRS show that instead of requiring nuclear utilities to upgrade and maintain physical fire protection features at reactors, the commission and the nuclear industry association, the Nuclear Energy Institute, are seeking to abandon the requirement by substituting "operator manual actions."
"The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is lowering the fire protection bar at nuclear power plants to bring its regulations into compliance with widespread nuclear industry violations," said Paul Gunter, director of NIRS' Reactor Watchdog Project.
"The federal retreat from fire code enforcement simultaneously raises the risk to public health, safety and security around the nation's nuclear power stations," Gunter warned.
The fire code was put in place for U.S. nuclear power stations following the fire at Alabama's Browns Ferry nuclear power station on March 22, 1975 to ensure that no single fire could destroy a control room's ability to safely and remotely shut down the reactor.
The Browns Ferry fire was started by an employee using a candle flame to check for air leaks along electrical cable trays under the reactor control room, initially igniting polyurethane foam insulating material. The fire burned out of control for seven and half hours destroying over 1,600 electrical cables including 628 safety related cable systems.
Browns Ferry Nuclear Power Plant (Photo courtesy TVA) "The Browns Ferry fire demonstrated that a high number of circuit failures can occur in a relatively short period of time, in this case within 15 minutes from the ignition of the foam material," wrote Patrick Madden of the NRC in a July 28, 1998 report.
In an assessment of the fire in 1976, the Union of Concerned Scientists wrote that it demonstrated that the federal government's non-regulation of fire protection requirements at nuclear power stations was a principle contributing factor to the seriousness of the fire. Station nuclear engineers privately confided a catastrophic release of radiation was avoided only by "sheer luck," the UCS report said.
In 1992, the majority of the U.S. nuclear power industry, 79 out of 104 nuclear plants, was found to be using "inoperable" Thermo-Lag 330 fire barriers in an unsuccessful effort to protect the reactor safe shutdown systems from fire damage.
Other nuclear power station operators were found to be in violation of the alternate requirement for 20 feet of separation between backup safe shutdown wiring.
By 1998, NRC began issuing a series of Confirmatory Orders requiring licensees to replace the non-functioning Thermo-Lag fire barriers and restore fire barrier operability at nuclear power stations. Through a set of Confirmatory Orders licensees responded that they would come into compliance with the law by restoring operability to the fire barriers.
Between 2000 and 2004, renewed NRC fire inspections discovered that a large number of nuclear power station operators never fulfilled their obligations to restore fire barrier operability or achieve cable separation.
While a few NRC inspectors had, on a case-by-case basis, provided approval for a small number of simple operator manual actions through the regulatory exemption process, the industry had adopted a wholesale application of manual actions that never sought to get NRC approval nor completed adequate safety reviews, NIRS found.
One station operator was discovered with over 100 unapproved and illegal manual actions.
NRC identified that licensees had taken manual actions to the "extreme interpretation" resulting in a significant increase in risk of reactor core damage in the event of fire.
One NRC official, John Hannon, wrote in a November 2001 letter to Alex Marion of the Nuclear Energy Institute, "This condition is similar to the condition Browns Ferry was in prior to the 1975 fire." The letter was disclosed as part of NIRS' Freedom of Information Act request.
The NRC has found that the violations are so numerous throughout the industry that an enforcement effort "creates a prospect of significant resource expenditure without clear safety benefits."
In its June 2003 document, "Rulemaking Plan On Post-Fire Operator Manual Actions," the NRC wrote, "Licensees faced with enforcement actions might flood NRC with exemption or deviation requests, which would divert NRC resources from more significant safety issues and may not result in any net safety improvement if the operator manual actions are determined to be acceptable."
"NRC is abandoning front line fire protection features at nuclear power stations and falling back to what should be considered desperate last ditch efforts, just to provide industry with a less costly compliance strategy," responded Gunter.
But the industry sees the new approach to fire protection as a step in the right direction. "The NRC and the industry agree that, in general, regulations should become more risk-informed and performance-based," the NEI says in a July 2003 statement.
"A risk-informed and performance-based approach to fire safety in a nuclear power plant would include an assessment of the actual risks in various areas - the amount of combustible material, potential ignition sources, whether fire suppression systems have been installed and so on," the NEI says.
Oyster Creek Nuclear Power Plant nine miles south of Toms River, New Jersey has been issued a Compliance Order to install fire barriers, but has not complied, according to documents discovered as part of NIRS' Freedom of Information Act request. (Photo courtesy NRC) "It also would consider the relative importance of the systems and components in that area to achieving and maintaining safe shutdown of the plant. Fire protection measures would then be based on a more realistic assessment of the actual fire hazard than is assumed in existing requirements," the industry association says.
"There is no assurance that workers sent into the reactor to manually operate safety equipment won't encounter hazardous conditions, such as fire, smoke, radiation, or even terrorists, that prevent them from accomplishing vital tasks," Gunter said. "That's why qualified fire barriers for electrical cable protection and separation were mandated to provide adequate safe shutdown margins in the first place."
But the NEI says the "automatic" fire barrier regulation creates problems for power plant operators. "If something triggers the system falsely, there is a potential for electrical equipment to be damaged by the suppression system when no fire threat exists." So some companies have asked the NRC's permission to use manually activated suppression in areas where electrical equipment is located, and some 1,200 exemptions have been granted.
The industry complains that the three hour and one hour fire barrier ratings are "somewhat arbitrary."
"They apply equally to all areas where fire barriers are used, regardless of the actual fire hazard in a given area. In practice, however, the NRC has granted limited exemptions for plant areas where the fire hazard is low and where features of the plant would make it extremely difficult to install a fire barrier," the NEI says.
NIRS is not the only organization concerned about the commission's move to allow manual shut downs in case of fire. The Project On Government Oversight, a Washington, DC organization which has investigated safety and security issues at nuclear power plants since the mid-1990s, also opposes the NRC's draft revision to the fire protection regulations. "The NRC's acquiescence to the nuclear power industry is extremely distressing," this group wrote in January.
The agency struggled with the non-compliant and non-cooperating nuclear industry until 1998 before issuing Orders to restore compliance, wrote NIRS in public comments to the commission on the "Draft Criteria for Determining Feasibility of Manual Actions to Achieve Post-Fire Safe Shutdown."
"The industry blatantly failed to comply with agency Orders and further violated fire code law by instituting illegal operator manual actions without NRC review," wrote NIRS. "These compounded violations didn't start turning up until the Triennial Fire Protection Inspections were instituted in 2000."
Comanche Peak Nuclear Power Plant four miles north of Glen Rose, Texas, was issued a Compliance Order for fire barriers that it has yet to comply with. (Photo courtesy NRC) NRC manager Sunil Weerakkody documents that after years of noncompliance, the industry and the commission agreed to forgive and forget the fire protection violations. "NRC and nuclear industry agreed to suspend debate over past history and focus on regulatory actions that would permit these actions provided their feasibility could be assured," he stated for the record on November 12, 2003.
So, today the NRC proposes to provide nuclear power plant licensees with an option to voluntarily abandon physical fire protection requirements and adopt an alternate set of criteria that would bring "feasible" manual actions into interim "compliance."
Through subsequent rulemaking, the NRC proposes to codify the interim criteria into law, deeming industry designated manual actions not only legal but providing the equivalent level of safety as independently tested and qualified fire barriers, sprinkler and smoke detection systems and designed physical separation for reactor shutdown electrical systems.
But NIRS contends this decision "is extremely disturbing and does not warrant the trust of the public and the fire protection community."
In public comments to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission Gunter writes, "NIRS sternly advises NRC not to attempt to 'suspend' enforcement of Confirmatory Orders along as part of the so-called 'historical debate' over inadequate fire protection and industry non-cooperation to remediate these dangerous inadequacies. In our view to do so is a serious dereliction of the agency's mandate and duty to protect the public health and safety."
----
Reactor Pressure Causes Columbia Generating Station Emergency Scram
August 3, 2004
RICHLAND, Washington, (ENS)
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/aug2004/2004-08-03-09.asp#anchor2
Nuclear engineers are investigating the cause of automatic shutdown at the Columbia Generating Station on Friday. Plant officials declared an emergency when pressure inside the reactor increased to a level that triggered the plant to shut itself down.
There was trouble during the shutdown when two control rods did not insert into their proper positions, and control room staff had to insert them manually. Another piece of equipment, the wetwell-to-drywell vacuum breaker, also malfunctioned.
The plant had been operating at full power, but it is now completely shut down. Investigation into the cause of the automatic shutdown, called a scram, and the actual control rod position, and the other problems is ongoing.
Energy Northwest spokesman Brad Peck told ENS that investigators have identified "a faulty electronic controller card which controls the governor valves that feed steam to the turbines, and those turbines are what spins the generator."
There are four governor valves, Peck explained, and during normal operations at least two and sometimes three of the valves are full open. One is partly closed to regulate steam flow, which maintains pressure level in the reactor vessel, he said.
"When that controller card failed, that valve fully closed which produced an increase in pressure in the reactor vessel, restricting the steam flow to the turbines. Pressure increased, and there was an automatic shutdown," Peck said.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission's Operations Center notified its own local officials, state of Washington officials, the Department of Homeland Security, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Department of Energy, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the U.S. Environmental Protectioni Agency and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and all emergency equipment was poised and ready for action.
But plant personnel brought the incident under control and all concerned breathed a temporary sigh of relief.
Operated by Energy Northwest, the Columbia Generating Station is Washington State's only operating commercial nuclear power plant. The boiling water reactor and produces 1,150 megawatts of electricity - enough to meet the needs of a city the size of Seattle.
The electricity Columbia produces is sold to Bonneville Power Administration (BPA), the federal agency that sells power throughout Washington, Oregon, Idaho, western Montana and parts of Wyoming, Utah, Nevada and northern California.
-------- depleted uranium
USEC Inc. Reports $11.7 Million Net Income for 2nd Quarter;
Higher Uranium Prices Help Improve Gross Margin
Business Wire
August 03, 2004
http://home.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/index.jsp?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20040803005954&newsLang=en
BETHESDA, Md.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aug. 3, 2004--USEC Inc. (NYSE:USU) today reported financial results for the second quarter ended June 30, 2004, of net income of $11.7 million or $.14 per share compared to net income of $4.3 million or $.05 per share in the same quarter last year. The gross margin improved quarter over quarter due to higher prices for natural uranium sold. Quarterly earnings are higher than recent guidance due to the timing of additional uranium revenue recorded in the second quarter that had previously been expected in the third quarter. This order movement does not affect the Company's full-year earnings guidance of $14 to $16 million net income, or 17 to 19 cents per share.
For the six months ended June 30, 2004, USEC reported net income of $0.5 million or $.01 per share compared to net income of $6.4 million or $.08 per share in the same period last year. USEC's customers generally place orders under their long-term contracts tied to reactor refuelings that occur on a 12- to 24-month cycle. Therefore, short-term comparisons of USEC's financials are not necessarily indicative of the Company's longer-term results.
Additional natural uranium available for sale in 2004 is the result of underfeeding operations at the Paducah enrichment plant rather than accelerating the drawdown from USEC's uranium inventories. Underfeeding uses less uranium in the enrichment process but requires more Separative Work Units (SWU), which requires more electric power. The value of the uranium exceeds the incremental power cost.
"We operate the Paducah plant in a manner that optimizes the economic value of the two primary inputs of production - electricity and natural uranium. Accordingly, in today's market, we have the opportunity to sell additional natural uranium produced through underfeeding into a strong, attractively priced market," said William H. Timbers, president and chief executive officer.
"These sales also meet the needs of customers who have looked to us for natural uranium in what has been a volatile market. Improved uranium prices and the additional volume of uranium generated in our production process should improve the gross margin and boost net income for the year, in line with our updated earnings guidance," Timbers said.
Revenue and Cost of Sales
Revenue for the second quarter was $318.6 million, compared to $362.6 million for the same quarter a year ago. The volume of the SWU component of low-enriched uranium sold declined 27 percent compared to second quarter 2003, and the average SWU price billed to customers was about the same quarter over quarter. Uranium sales were $81 million, an increase of $29.3 million over the same quarter last year, reflecting higher volume and higher average prices. Revenue from U.S. government contracts was $1.2 million higher quarter over quarter, totaling $41.4 million.
For the six-month period ended June 30, 2004, revenue was $498.6 million compared to $689.7 million in the same period of 2003 on 37 percent lower SWU volume. As previously disclosed, the lower revenue in the first half of 2004 reflects significantly lower SWU volume and prices as customers take delivery of enriched uranium under low-priced contracts signed during the late 1990s and shift volume and higher-priced deliveries to later in 2004. The volume of natural uranium sold declined by 2 percent in the six-month period but the average price billed to customers increased by 28 percent.
The decline in SWU sales volume produced a corresponding reduction of $180.1 million or 34 percent in the cost of sales for SWU and uranium in the six-month period. The unit cost of SWU sales was 3 percent lower than in the same period of 2003, reflecting the impact of lower production and purchase costs in previous periods.
Unit production costs per SWU were 3 percent higher in the six-month period due to lower production volumes compared with the corresponding period in 2003. Electric power costs were lower but labor and benefit costs increased compared to 2003, a period when labor costs were reduced by a strike at the Paducah plant. The Company's purchase costs per SWU increased 3 percent under a market-based formula with Tenex, the Russian government's executive agent, which reflects the impact of higher SWU prices since 2001. Under the average inventory cost method, coupled with USEC's inventory position, an increase or decrease in costs will have an effect on cost of sales in future periods.
The gross profit margin for the quarter was 17.4 percent compared to 11.5 percent in the same period last year, due to improved margins on natural uranium. For the full year, USEC expects its gross margin to be approximately 13 percent.
Selling, general and administrative expenses totaled $15.9 million in the quarter, $1.1 million higher than in the same period last year due primarily to increased compensation and benefit costs, additional legal and consulting fees and higher insurance expense.
American Centrifuge Progress Continues
The Company continues to make steady progress toward its goal of demonstrating the American Centrifuge uranium enrichment technology. USEC expects the American Centrifuge to be the world's most efficient enrichment technology when the commercial plant is deployed later this decade. Expenses during the quarter were $10.6 million, about the same as the second quarter last year. Spending on demonstration activities had the effect of reducing after-tax income by approximately $7 million or $.08 per share during the quarter.
Under a contract with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), USEC has begun refurbishing the portion of the building where the American Centrifuge Demonstration Facility will be operated. USEC is removing centrifuge machines remaining from the DOE centrifuge program of the early 1980s at the Piketon, Ohio facility. Approximately one-third of the 1,400 DOE-era machines have been removed, making room for USEC to refurbish the area.
In June, USEC announced that it has teamed with Fluor Enterprises, a subsidiary of Fluor Corp., to provide engineering, procurement and construction management services for the American Centrifuge Plant. Fluor's responsibilities include design and detailed engineering over the next two years. USEC expects to agree on terms for a fixed-price contract in 2006 with Fluor covering all major aspects of building the commercial plant, apart from the centrifuge machines. In August, USEC plans to apply for an operating license for the commercial plant from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The review of that application is expected to take about two years.
Cash Flow
At June 30, 2004, USEC's cash balance was $32.4 million. Cash from SWU and uranium deliveries lag the sales by 30 to 60 days and are recorded as accounts receivable. Cash flow from operating activities for the six-month period, as anticipated in the Company's guidance, was negative $190.6 million, compared to positive $23.1 million in the same period a year ago. The $213.7 million difference between the two periods was primarily due to increasing SWU inventory in preparation for fourth quarter sales. Inventory levels fluctuate based on timing of anticipated deliveries and seasonal production schedules. Other factors affecting cash flow included a $33.2 million payment to settle issues related to the termination of a power contract in 2003, higher income tax payment, and decreased SWU deliveries. The Company currently has no short-term debt but expects to temporarily borrow under its bank credit agreement in coming months, repaying the loan before year's end. As previously reported, net cash flow from operating activities is expected to return to positive levels in 2005.
Outlook
The Company projects revenue for the full year will be almost $1.4 billion. USEC expects about half of its revenue to come in the fourth quarter due to the timing of customer orders. Total revenue is basically unchanged from earlier guidance, but revenue from natural uranium sales is now expected to be $40 million higher at $210 million due to higher volume and prices. The additional natural uranium available for sale is the result of underfeeding operations at the Paducah plant. Revenue from SWU sales is expected to decline on lower volume due to movement of customer orders but will benefit from modestly higher average prices billed to customers than originally projected. The Company now expects the average price billed to customers in 2004 to be about the same as in 2003 as the average price billed to customers begins improving in the second half of the year. SWU volume in 2004 is being negatively affected by the postponed refuelings due to the shutdown of a Japanese customer's reactors for special inspections and lower customer commitments. Fourteen of the 17 Japanese reactors have since been returned to service.
USEC expects to invest approximately $70 million in the American Centrifuge technology in 2004. Of this amount, approximately $50 million related to demonstration activities is being expensed, which will have the effect of reducing net income by about $30 million. Approximately $20 million related to the American Centrifuge Plant is being capitalized in 2004.
After the substantial investment in the American Centrifuge referenced above, USEC expects 2004 net income to be in a range of $14 to $16 million, or 17 to 19 cents per share. A small loss is anticipated in the third quarter followed by a strong fourth quarter. This is in line with the Company's typical cycle of stronger financial results in the second and fourth quarters.
USEC also expects that cash flow from operating activities will be in a range of negative $95 to $105 million in 2004 and that capital expenditures will be approximately $35 million, including expenditures related to the American Centrifuge Plant. The Company anticipates ending the year with a cash balance in a range of $55 to $70 million, after the purchase of NAC International, or about $15 million higher than earlier guidance.
Other Business Matters
-- As announced on July 29, USEC will purchase NAC International from Pinnacle West Capital Corporation. The acquisition will enable the Company to offer nuclear utility customers an expanded portfolio of products and services, including transportation and storage systems for spent nuclear fuel. The $16 million cash transaction is expected to close later this year, subject to customary closing conditions.
-- As of June 30, 2004, USEC had processed and cleaned 4,552 metric tons of out-of-specification uranium contaminated with technetium (Tc99), or 48 percent of the total. The remaining amount of uranium inventory to be replaced or remediated is 4,998 metric tons. Under the June 2002 DOE-USEC Agreement, DOE is obligated to replace or remediate the contaminated uranium. In June, DOE notified the Company that it is authorizing the transfer of 2,116 metric tons of uranium to USEC in exchange for 2,116 metric tons of out-of-specification uranium.
This news release contains forward-looking information that involves risks and uncertainty, including certain assumptions regarding the future performance of USEC. Actual results and trends may differ materially depending upon a variety of factors, including, without limitation, market demand for USEC's products, pricing trends in the uranium and enrichment markets, deliveries under the Russian Contract, the availability and cost of electric power, implementing agreements with the Department of Energy (DOE) regarding uranium inventory remediation and the use of centrifuge technology and facilities, satisfactory performance of the American Centrifuge technology at various stages of demonstration, USEC's ability to successfully execute its internal performance plans, the refueling cycles of USEC's customers, final determinations of environmental and other costs, the outcome of litigation and trade actions, performance under government contracts and audits of allowable costs on government contract work, and the impact of any government regulation. Revenue and operating results can fluctuate significantly from quarter to quarter, and in some cases, year to year.
Please refer to our SEC filings, which can be accessed through the Company's website www.usec.com, for a more complete discussion of these factors.
USEC Inc., a global energy company, is the world's leading supplier of enriched uranium fuel for commercial nuclear power plants.
--------
Anarchy and Occupation, the Epilogue To Genocide
Al-Jazeerah,
By Edward W Miller, MD
August 3, 2004
http://www.aljazeerah.info/Opinion%20editorials/2004%20opinions/August/3o/Anarchy%20and%20Occupation,%20the%20Epilogue%20To%20Genocide%20By%20Edward%20W%20Miller.htm
"They made a wasteland and called it "peace" - Tacitus (Roman historian55 -117AD)
Months ago as the Bush II " Shock and Awe "war against Saddam Hussein proceeded, American and British forces had bludgeoned their way across Iraq, trashing and killing at will, bombing public buildings, offices, telecommunications centers and whatever small concentrations of Saddam's forces threatened their progress. Despite all the Pentagon's talk about "Smart Bombs", Iraqi civilians by the thousands were bombed, ignored, swept aside or killed. Though Bush, on May 1st 2003, standing on the aircraft deck in his flight suit, had declared the "war was over" , the Iraqi's guerilla war against the occupiers continues to this day. The INDEPENDENT on February 7th, 2004 had reported: " The terrible human cost of Bush and Blair's military adventure to be "10,000 civilian deaths." By may 1st, 2004 At least 40 US helicopters have gone down between the Afghhan and Iraqi occupations, "shoulder-fired missiles" being the US' greatest concern. (Similar missiles had decimated the Soviet helicopter fleet in Afghanistan which lost 425 helicopters before their invasion forces left that country.) Recent reports (July 11, 2004) showed US military deaths in Iraq at 887, with another 129 of our troops lost in Afghanistan, where sporadic resistancce also contimnues. Despite the seizure of over 12,000 prisoners, most identified as " militants" by our military, and despite an increasingly brutal US military responses, in such cities as Fallujah, plus the isolation of some Iraqi towns using concrete barricades, razor, wire , military checkpoints and curfews to incarcerate the inhabitants, the Iraqi's violent resistance to occupation continues.
Over a year ago, as the anarchy resulting from Bush II's barbaric exercise in preemptive war was playing across the world's media screens, disorganized crowds in Iraqi cities were plundering at will, wounded children with amputated limbs cried softly in crowded, dirty and poorly-equipped hospital wards where exhausted physicians had armed themselves lest street mobs steal their equipment. Blasted and burned-out skeletons of Humvees with charred bodies were sprawled on Iraqi highways.
Though much of the destruction seen in Iraq's cities, with buildings reduced to rubble, garbage piled in bomb-excavated streets and a populace in despair, can be blamed on the Bush I DESERT STORM, the devastation visited on a people still recovering from their eight-year war with Iran was significantly increased by the UN-supervised 13 years of embargo. Initiated by the first Bush administration, and pursued throughout the Clinton years, this planned devastation has effectively destroyed the infrastructure of Iraq, killing its people, with a combination of starvation, biological (call it bacteriological) warfare, radiation from depleted uranium missiles plus tens of thousands of cluster bomblets, some of which even today are blasting off the hands of Iraqi kids who pick them up despite parental warnings.
Americans, isolated by our Washington-influenced media, have been missing one of the most egregious genocides in history. Since Gulf War I, almost two million Iraqis, mostly the elderly, and children, have been slaughtered by this US-British-UN program designed to sicken and to kill.
Bush I, along with our Gilf Allies, actually fought two "DESERT STORMS ", the first, to recall Saddam's troops from Kuwait, the second, largely hidden from the media, destroyed the infrastructure of Iraq, "bombing it back into the pre-industrial age," as our General Schwarzkopf so accurately put it. The destruction of Iraq's telecommunications, water supplies, sewage treatment plants, and oil facilities had little to do with removing Saddam's troops from Kuwait, but instead, represented the hidden US-British plan to destroy both the infrastructure and population of Iraq with those apocalyptic weapons of mass destruction: war, famine, pestilence, and death.
As ex-US Attorney-General Ramsey Clark recently described it: (Covert Action Quarterly spring 2004 pg. 28) "In 1991 Iraq was the victim of 85,000 tons of explosives (almost seven Hiroshimas) delivered by the Pentagon in 42 days that destroyed its infrastructure, water systems, power, transportation, communications, manufacturing, commercial properties, housing, mosques, churches, synagogues. Food production, processing, storage, distribution, fertilizer and insecticide production,were targeted for destruction. Nearly 150,000 defenseless people were killed outright in Iraq. The US claimed its casualties to be 156, 1/3 from friendly fire, the remainder, from accidents."
Noam Chomsky identified the thirteen-year siege that followed as "biological warfare." During DESERT STORM the Pentagon had conducted 110,000 aerial sorties in those 42 days, one every 30 seconds. In addition to the bombs there were those deadly 330 tons of depleted-uranium missiles. Iraqis were essentially defenseless. On March 3rd, 1991 the London Times had reported that Allied intelligence estimated 200,000 Iraqi soldiers killed., a number the Pentagon agreed with.
In March 2003, Ramsey Clark had reported: "Thousands died from direct bomb hits, but far more died from the destruction of those facilities essential to human life. Within hours of the first bomb there was no electricity anywhere in Iraq. After the first two days, pipes distributing water ran dry throughout the country. By February 1991, Iraq's Minister of Health estimated 3000 civilians had already died of water-born diseases: cholera, dysentery, hepatitis, strep. infections, plague, diarrhea.. Another 25,000 were being treated in poorly-supplied hospitals and clinics and another quarter of a million were sick at home without medicines or medical care." (Ramsey Clark America Online 9 Mar 2003)
In 2001, Professor Thomas J. Nagy of George Washington University reported a remarkable discovery: In a detailed article published in THE PROGRESSIVE, (September 2001), Nagy made public a seven-page document he had obtained, using the Freedom of Information Act.. This report, prepared by the US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and hidden by our government for ten long years, outlined the Gulf Allies' plan to set the stage for a water-born genocide in that country. Professor Nagy noted: "The primary document: "Iraq Water Treatment Vulnerabilities" is dated January 22, 1991 . The report reads: "Iraq had gone to considerable trouble to provide pure water for its population... importing specialized equipment and purification chemicals... a shortage of pure drinking water... could lead to increased incidents, if not epidemics of disease... Full degradation of the water treatment system will probably take at least six months." "The DIA report was circulated to all major Allied commands."
This bulletin from the US Defense Intelligence Agency identified not only bombing targets, but also those specific chemicals and specialized water purification equipment which the US and British then added to their list of UN-embargoed items, to make certain their genocide would succeed. Even the importation of chlorine had been embargoed by the sanctions. The Report also noted : "Iraq will suffer increasing shortages of purified water because of the lack of required chemicals and desalination membranes. Incidences of disease, including possible epidemics will become probable... Although Iraq is already experiencing a loss of water treatment capability, it will probably take at least six months (ie to June 1991) before the system is fully degraded.."
As intended, Allied bombing destroyed dams and reservoirs, wrecking Iraqi's flood control, irrigation projects and hydroelectric power. Pumping stations were crippled as were 31 municipal water and sewage treatment facilities as their electric power grids were destroyed by bombs. The huge electric grid supplying the southern city and suburbs of Basrah was bombed twelve times before it was completely shut down. As raw sewage poured into the Tigris River, the Iraqis only remaining source of water, people began to die by the thousands. The Fourth Geneva Convention which both the US and British have signed clearly states: "It is prohibited to attack or render useless objects indispensible to the civilian population."
By Desert Storm's end, the allies had also rendered 1.8 million Iraqis homeless. Adding to this carnage from DESERT STORM, those 330 tons of exploded "anti-tank" shells containing depleted uranium, which release free uranium 238 particles to blow about in the desert winds were already creating both an increase in childhood lymphomas, plus congenital birth deformities. Since the half-life of depleted uranium is 4.5 billion years, lethal radiation from these shells will continue killing the civilian population in Iraq for untold generations.
Americans may have forgotten that on Dec. 16, 1998, as sexual McCarthyism played out on the floor of Congress, President Clinton had ordered Patriot and Tomahawk missiles to again hail down on Baghdad. Operation "Desert Fox" (called "OPERATION MONICA" in the Mideast ) created extensive damage, killed over 25 civilians, and targeted one of the few oil refineries still able to function. Clinton, before he set this attack in motion, had carefully crafted Chief UN Inspector Butler's report to make it appear Saddam had been interfering with the UNSCOM Team.
By 1998, Rick McDowell, whose "Voices in the Wilderness" group had visited Iraq many times since 1991, reported: "As of 1995, over a million Iraqis have died, 576,000 of them children, and three million risk acute starvation... More children have died... than the total of the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan." McDowell also noted the Oil for Food program continued to be a failure, since reparations to Kuwait, payments for UNSCOM and financial support for the Kurds was eating up over 40 percent of the oil profits, often leaving less than 25 cents per day for the Iraqis. McDowell also pointed out that UN Security Council sanctions which embargoed pipes, pumps, filters, chlorine, everything necessary to reproduce potable water, represented a "war of collective punishment," also forbidden under the Geneva Conventions.
Americans may recall that in October 1998, Denis J. Halliday, Assistant Secretary-General of the UN and Chief of UNSCOM's "Oil for Food Program " had publicly resigned to express his disgust over US-British interference with his humanitarian activities in what he described as an "all-out effort to starve to death as many Iraqis as possible." Halliday added: "We see the member states... of the Security Council manipulating the Organization for their own national interests." Halliday reported the UN sanctions had reduced a once-proud civilization to Third World status, resulting in crime, prostitution, beggary, family breakdown and corruption. He said Iraqis "were selling their belongings for food." Under Saddam Hussein, Halliday noted: "Iraq experienced the best civilization in the Mideast with universal medical care, the finest hospitals, free university education and overseas grants for graduate students....I went to Iraq to administer the largest humanitarian challenge in history, I didn't realize the level of complicity in the suffering. It is to the point of madness. One day we will be called into account."
Along with Halliday, Ex-Attorney-General Ramsey Clark and others had repeatedly reported mass starvation, plus waterborne diseases previously unknown in Iraq: diarrhea, cholera, strep infections, hepatitis, typhoid and polio (which had earlier been eradicated). Animal plagues such as Hoof-and-Mouth-Disease for which the US embago forbade the importation of the vaccine to control this disease, is still killing one Iraqi source of protein. Screwworm, introduced by our CIA, was wiping out the sheep and goat population on which the people largely depended. No need to fire plague-bearing missiles into a country when you have already contaminated their drinking water with sewage, and, with a strict embargo, forbidden the import of every single item necessary to clean it up.
Right up to Bush II 's "SHOCK AND AWE" assault om Saddam's country, both the US and Britain with UN cooperation, had pursued this devastation despite rising world criticism. Those widely-advertised Us-British north and south overflights"(never authorized by the UN), with their associated bombing missions were still murdering Saddam's people (over 2000 civilians killed) while wrecking any attempts by the Iraqis to rebuild their infrastructure. Saddam's out-of-date antiaircraft batteries were never capable of reaching the high-flying US-British planes, so the repeated US media statement that "bombing was in retaliation because Iraqi radar locked on" was but another cheap US-British excuse for murder.
In pursuing this mayhem, the US and British consistently ignored their fellow members in the Security Council where Russia, China and France, amongst others, had frequently asked the US to quit the deadly sanctions and normalize trade. As far back as Aug. 1999, France's Interior Minister had stated his government "will not support a policy which victimizes innocent Iraqi citizens." The French government also noted that when UN's Butler, on Clinton's order, had tossed out the UNSCOM inspectors, who reported " they had already tracked down and destroyed all the existing nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons capacity they were ever going to find."
UN expert and author Phyllis Bennis reported the Security Council had consistently "prevented UNSCOM from making its findings public." In her recent book: BEFORE AND AFTER , Bennis (pg. 188) notes: "Under the UN imposed sanctions regieme, Iraq was allowed to export oil.. The money for the oil, however, was deposited in a UN-controlled escrow account in Paris rather than being sent directly to Iraq. When Iraq wanted to purchase hospital equipment or other supplies, the proposed contract was sent to the UN's "661 committee" so named for the UN Security Council Resolution which created it, which then examined the contract and either approved it or put it "on hold ". As a member of the Committee, the United States had veto power over every contract, and by the spring of 2002 over $5 Billion worth of contracts, were being held up, almost all of them by US decision."
Such organizations as Voices-In-The-Wilderness group, Amnesty International, the International Red Cross, and the Red Crescent as well as the Russian, French, Chinese and other UN Security-Council members, had repeatedly decried our ongoing genocide in Iraq.
The US media campaign to cover-up this genocide never ceased. Hans von Spondek, UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Iraq who ttaken over Halliday's position and likewise had resigned in protest over the genocide, in an interview May 6, 2000, stated: "in Boston to meet with the editor of the Boston Globe, I was told not to refer... to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, or the UN Charter, because they have no meaning in that paper." (The Boston Globe is owned by the NY Times) Von Spondek had earlier reported the death rate for Iraqi children tripling since 1991, and that much-needed electricity was often lacking in Baghdad, adding that the UN had allowed only $112 million for repairs of the system whereas Iraq's electric power rehabilitation had been estimated at well over $2.0 billion as a minimum. Saddam's people, once the best-educated in the Mideast with a 1989 school budget of $2.1 Billion, under UN sanctions was forced to struggle with only $229 million. The literacy rate soon fell from over 90 percent to barely 60 percent. Computers couldn't be imported, as the UN feared "military use." . Pencils needed for schools were denied because their lead "contained graphite" Forty-four Congressmen had sent Clinton a letter demanding the sanctions be lifted, to no avail.
Americans, often isolated from reality by our media, were both dismayed and puzzled when, on August 21, 2003 the UN headquarters in Baghdad was destroyed by bombs and its administrator, Sergio Vieira de Mello, and 17 of his staff killed. " Why would Iraqis wipe out an organization that had been their "Oil for Food" lifeline for 13 long years ? " many uninformed Americans asked.
Former UN Coordinator for Humanitarian Aid in Iraq, Denis Halliday, in a recent (2004) article (GLOBAL OUTLOOK Issue VI pg. 48) had answered the question: "I was initially shocked and horrified at the attack on the UN compound in Baghdad ..... the place where I worked. But the more I think about it, why am I surprised?. .... it was the UN that maintained sanctions on the Iraqi people for 13 years. .... and I would say...the United Nations killed more Iraqis through UN sanctions - probably a million people, particularly children - in those 13 years, than Mr. Bush The First, Mr. Clinton, and then Mr. Bush The Second did with bombs.... There wasn't a family in Iraq that wasn't hurt by the sanctions. Many, if not all families, lost a child, cousin, father or mother prematurely and unnecessarily, from bad water, lack of health care - all of the problems that the sanctions brought and sustained in Iraq for the last 13 years."
As I write, (.............2004)) OPERATION RESTORE FREEDOM is still in the questionable process of grinding down , despite Bush II's May 1st statement that the :"War is over". Tanks, troop patrols and military checkpoints are experiencing sporadic attacks almost every day, Iraqis as well as ex-patriots are returning to defend their country, along with uncounted mujahadeen from Muslim countries, to inflict daily damage on the US and British forces, and whatever foreign troops and hired mercenaries are assisting in Bush's Occupation.
The estimated costs to return Iraq to its pre-Gulf War status run between $300-$400 billion, and our President recently asked Congress for an additional $25 Billion just for the costs of occupation Robert Ebel, Director of the energy program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, recently stated that even if Iraq gets its oil production up to the $18 Billion/year pre-war level, "That's not going to go very far", and with the almost-weekly attacks on its US-run oil facilities, this is most unlikely. With unemployment running at 60% the entire Iraqi population is on edge.
Meanwhile Paul Bremer, Coalition Provisional Authority Chief, has quietlly exited that OK CORRAL in Baghdad, and Bremrt's Iraqi Governing Council has already been replaced after months of facing off with the Shiite's Ayatollah Sistani who was demanding immediate elections. Sistani obviously doesn't trust the Americans who sold his people down the river in the past. The Ayatollah also suspects Bush's real object is to collate a US-manipulated government to permit extended military bases in his Country. When Bremer had pointed to the absence of any "electoral roll" to qualify voters, Sistani's supporters said Iraqis could "use their UN Ration Cards" as identification.
Meanwhile, as UN reporter Ian Williams pointed out in January, Kofi Annan's uneasy return to Iraq to assay the electoral situation is made more difficult by a UN staff still unhappy over their Organization's role in the sanctions. Williams had also noted: " that hand-picking a transitional government to oversee a new constitution is not the way others, including Iraqis, see a genuine handover of power."
Our President's repeated statement that the US intent in invading Iraq and overthrowing Saddam has been to "establish a true democracy in the Mideast" reminds many Iraqis of their neighbor Iran's first experiment with democracy in the 1950's. Iran's nascent democracy, the first in the Mdeast, was brought to a violent end when the US and British, with CIA assistance paid students to riot in the streets of Teheran, driving the first duly-elected Prime Minister, Mohammed Mussaddig from his Country, and seating our dictator, the Shah Pavlavi on Iran's throne.
"...Winning a war is one thing. Succeeding in the ideological and economic project that lies behind this whole war is another. The "real" story for America's mastery over the Arab world starts now." Robert Fisk (April 10th 2003, THE INDEPENDENT)
Middle East International, 22 Jan 2004 pg. 6 The Eagle and the Lion by James A. Bill Edward Waite. Miller, MD
This article was first published by Coastalpost.com on May 2003 but the author submitted it to Al-Jazeerah on August 1, 2004 after updating.
-------- japan
Plutonium particles accumulating in Japanese bay
Tuesday, August 03, 2004
By Mari Yamaguchi,
Associated Press
http://www.enn.com/news/2004-08-03/s_26362.asp
TOKYO - Radioactive plutonium particles from U.S. nuclear weapons tests in the Pacific some 50 years ago have been detected for the first time in Japanese waters.
The particles were found in soil samples from Sagami Bay, about 50 kilometers (30 miles) southwest of Tokyo, researchers at the National Institute of Radiological Science said Monday.
The plutonium particles matched the fallout from the blasts at the Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands, but they pose no environmental risk, said research team leader Masatoshi Yamada.
Yamada said the particles - made of coral pulverized in the explosions - started accumulating in the bay soon after the weapons tests, which lasted from 1946 until 1958.
"We believe the plutonium was washed up toward Japanese waters by the ocean current," Yamada said.
The United States conducted 66 such tests as part of "Operation Crossroads." The atoll is part of the Marshall Islands, almost midway between Hawaii and Tokyo.
Yamada said his team plans to conduct similar surveys at other Japanese shorelines, including on the Japan Sea and East China Sea, to determine how plutonium from the Bikini Atoll traveled to Japan over the years.
"If we can determine how the plutonium particles traveled around the world, we can predict what may happen in case of an emergency, such as a nuclear accident," he added.
The Bikini tests are well-known in Japan because 23 Japanese fishers were contaminated by radiation when their tuna trawler was showered by fallout in the area in March 1954.
A radio operator of the boat died from the effects of radiation poisoning six months after the blast at age 40, followed by 11 others who died from liver ailments linked to the same cause.
-------- korea
New N. Korean Missiles Said to Threaten U.S.
By REUTERS
August 3, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-korea-north-missiles.html
BERLIN (Reuters) - North Korea is deploying new land- and sea-based ballistic missiles that can carry nuclear warheads and may have sufficient range to hit the United States, according to the authoritative Jane's Defense Weekly.
In an article due to appear Wednesday, Jane's said the two new systems appeared to be based on a decommissioned Soviet submarine-launched ballistic missile, the R-27.
It said communist North Korea had acquired the know-how during the 1990s from Russian missile specialists and by buying 12 former Soviet submarines which had been sold for scrap metal but retained key elements of their missile launch systems.
Jane's, which did not specify its sources, said the sea-based missile was potentially the more threatening of the two new weapons systems.
``It would fundamentally alter the missile threat posed by the DPRK (Democratic People's Republic of Korea) and could finally provide its leadership with something that it has long sought to obtain -- the ability to directly threaten the continental U.S.,'' the weekly said.
Apart from targeting the United States, South Korea or Japan, cash-strapped North Korea might seek to sell the technology to countries that have bought its missiles in the past, with Iran a prime candidate, the article added.
Ian Kemp, news editor of Jane's Defense Weekly, said North Korea would only spend the money and effort on developing such missiles if it intended to fit them with nuclear warheads.
``It's pretty certain the North Koreans would not be developing these unless they were intended for weapons of mass destruction warheads, and the nuclear warhead is far and away the most potent of those,'' he told Reuters.
NUCLEAR POTENTIAL UNCLEAR
North Korea pulled out of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in January 2003 and is locked in long-running crisis talks with the United States, China, Russia, Japan and South Korea over terms for scrapping its atomic weapons program.
The extent of that program remains unclear, although North Korea's deputy foreign minister was quoted as telling a senior U.S. official last year that Pyongyang possessed nuclear weapons.
Jane's said the new land-based system had an estimated range of 2,500 to 4,000 km (1,560 to 2,500 miles), and the sea-based system, launchable from a submarine or a ship, had a range of at least 2,500 km.
``If you can get a missile aboard a warship, in particular aboard a submarine...you can move your submarine to strike at targets such as Hawaii or the United States, just as examples. Whereas it would be much more difficult to actually develop a ground-launched missile to achieve that sort of a range,'' Kemp said.
Until now only the United States, Russia, Britain, France and China have been known to possess submarine-launched nuclear weapons, although there has been speculation that Israel has a similar capability.
Jane's said North Korea appeared to have acquired the R-27 technology from Russian missile experts based in the Urals city of Chelyabinsk. It said one such group was detained in 1992 when about to fly to North Korea, but others visited later.
It said Pyongyang was also helped by the purchase, through a Japanese trading company, of 12 decommissioned Russian Foxtrot-class and Golf II-class submarines which were sold for scrap in 1993.
It said the missiles and electronic firing systems had been removed, but the vessels retained their launch tubes and stabilization sub-systems.
----
Rev. Moon's submarines, sold to Kim Jong-Il, empower a nuke threat to the West Coast
Tuesday, August 03, 2004
by John Gorenfeld
http://www.gorenfeld.net/blog/2004/08/rev-moons-submarines-sold-to-kim-jong.html
North Korean propaganda poster http://i.cnn.net/cnn/2003/WORLD/asiapcf/east/02/19/nkorea.un/story.nkorea.poster.ap.jpg
Jane's Defense Weekly is reporting this week that Kim Jong-Il, unstable North Korean dictator (I wrote about him in the British Guardian) may be able to target California with sea-launched missiles. His know-how, the Reuters story relates, comes from 12 ex-Soviet submarines that fell into his hands. They came with their original launch tubes and stabilizing gear intact. Where does Kim get those wonderful toys?
Funny story: According to U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency documents (which you can browse here), they were furnished by Reverend Moon.
Robert Parry, the ace reporter who broke the Iran-Contra story, obtained these files through the Freedom of Information Act while writing his 2000 story, "Rev. Moon, North Korea and the Bushes," about Moon's gifts to the Communist regime. Read on, if you dare. (Glossary: KN = North Korea)
'5. IN JAN94, A JAPANESE TRADING COMPANY 'TOUEN SHOJI", IN SUGINAMI-KU, TOKYO, PURCHASED 12 F AND G CLASS SUBMARINES FROM THE RUSSIAN PACIFIC FLEET HEADQUARTERS. THESE SUBMARINES WERE THEN SOLD TO A KN TRADING COMPANY. ALTHOUGH THIS TRANSACTION GARNERED A GREAT DEAL OF COVERAGE IN THE JAPANESE PRESS, IT WAS NOT DISCLOSED AT THE TIME THAT TOUEN SHOJI IS AN AFFILIATE OF THE UNIFICATION CHURCH.
'6....A. INASMUCH AS KN IS BECOMING MORE ISOLATED FROM THE INTERNATIONA COMMUNITY DUE TO ITS SUSPECTED NUCLEAR WEAPON DEVELOPMENT PROGRAM, IT IS SPECULATED KN WILL TRY TO USE THE UNIFICATION CHURCH'S SIGNIFICANT WORLD WIDE NETWORK TO RESHAPE ITS IMAGE. USING THE UNIFICATION CHURCH'S PERCEIVED INFLUENCE IN SUCH NEWSPAPERS AS THE SEIL DAILY NEWS AND THE WASHINGTON TIMES, ALONG WITH CHURCH AFFILIATED LOBBYISTS AND OTHER PERSONNEL LINKAGE, KN WILL TRY TO DELIVER ITS OPINIONS TO THE GOVERNMENTS OF THE WEST. THE INTENTION IS TO CREATE A FAVORABLE PUBLIC OPINION OF KN WITH THE HOPE OF INFLUENCING WESTERN GOVERNMENTS' POLICY DECISIONS. IN ADDITION, KN WILL TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THE UNIFICATION CHURCH'S INVESTMENT IN THE FREE TRADE ZONE, DEVELOPMENT OF THE KIMKANGSAN TOURISM AND THE UNIFICATION CHURCH BELIEVERS' PILGRIMAGE TO THE HOLY LAND, WITH THE HOPE OF RECONSTRUCTING ITS DOMESTIC ECONOMY AND OBTRAINING WHAT HAS BECOME A CHRONIC SHORTAGE OF FOREIGN CURRENCY.
'B. FOR YEARS MUN SUN MYUNG HAS WANTED TO ESTABLISH A RELIGIOUS STATE SIMILAR TO THE VATICAN CITY. HIS DECISION TO BUILD IT IN CHONGCHU, KN, WAS PREDICATED ON A NUMBER ISSUES. IT IS HIS PLACE OF BIRTH AND IN UNIFICATION CHURCH DOCTRINE, THE MESSIAH WILL BE BORN ON THE KOREAN PENINSULA. HIS ACTIVITIES IN THE UNITED STATES AND SOUTH KOREA HAVE BECOME SUBJECT TO RESTRICTION AFTER HIS CONVICTION FOR TAX EVASION IN BOTH COUNTRIES. HIS ENTRY IN INTO JAPAN, WHERE UNIFICATION CHURCH ACTIVITIES HAVE BECOME THE MOST ACTIVE, HAS ALSO BEEN RESTRICTED. WITH THE CHURCH'S PROPOSED INVESTMENT IN KN, THE ESTABLISHMENT OF A HOLY LAND IN CHONGCHU, KN COULD BE EASILY REALIZED.'
So "it is speculated" that the Washington Times will be used by the North Koreans? Huh -- even the U.S. intelligence community doesn't buy editor Wes Pruden's claims that his paper is editorially independent. And a Times article, on May 24, 1994, downplayed the significance of the sale. Without disclosing that it was the newspaper owner's parent company that gave a Secret Santa gift of missile tech to the Kim empire, the Times reported that the subs were useless (as quoted here): A South Korean foreign ministry official states that the Russian submarines purchased by North Korea have had their weapon systems removed and are so obsolete that they are unusable for offensive purposes. The official indicates that the submarines were purchased for scrap and that of the 12 submarines contracted for, only one has been delivered.
More links to Moon and North Korea:
- Moon's auto company's monopoly with NK http://tinyurl.com/2zjhp
- Parry: "By supplying money at a time when North Korea was desperate for hard currency, Moon helped deliver the means for the communist state to advance exactly the strategic threat that Moon's newspaper now says will require billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars to thwart." http://www.consortiumnews.com/2000/101100a.html
- Moon describes his dreams for an underwater submarine community in this sermon. http://www.unification.net/1996/960102.html
...But at least the chairman of the Armed Services Committee is on top of this, right? http://www.gorenfeld.net/blog/2004/07/mystery-senator-comes-clean.html
If this is freaking you out, I suggest you go watch the trailer for Trey Parker and Matt Stone's Team America: World Police, which prominently features the cognac-swilling Axis of Evil dictator.
(Thanks to MW for finding the Parry documents and making the connection with the Reuters story. Post has been edited for accuracy.
----
North Korean Official To Attend N.Y. Seminar
Trip Builds on Contacts With the U.S.
By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, August 3, 2004; Page A12
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A35338-2004Aug2.html
A senior North Korean official who threatened last year that North Korea might test a nuclear weapon will attend a foreign policy seminar next week in New York, allowing him to cross paths with U.S. officials attending the same meeting, diplomats said.
This is the second year in a row that Li Gun, deputy head of U.S. affairs at North Korea's Foreign Ministry, will attend the meeting of scholars and experts hosted by the National Committee on American Foreign Policy, a nonpartisan organization that focuses on resolving conflicts that threaten U.S. interests.
Li's trip to New York follows a rare visit to Capitol Hill last month by the North Korean ambassador to the United Nations and other signs that the Bush administration's resolve to avoid bilateral meetings with the North Korea could be weakening. Because North Korea and the United States do not have diplomatic relations, travel by North Korean diplomats in the United States requires permission from the State Department.
Donald S. Zagoria, a professor at Hunter College in New York who helped organize the meeting, said Li was invited to attend the conference Aug. 10-11.
Since North Korea began reprocessing plutonium for use in nuclear weapons last year, the Bush administration has pushed for negotiations with North Korea that also include China, Russia, Japan and South Korea and has allowed formal talks with North Korean officials only on the sidelines of those talks.
Democratic presidential nominee John F. Kerry has criticized the administration for declining to meet directly with North Korean officials to resolve the impasse. Since he leveled his criticism, U.S. negotiators at six-nation talks in June met one-on-one for more than two hours with their North Korean counterparts. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell spoke with the North Korean foreign minister for 20 minutes in July in Jakarta, Indonesia, and the North Korean ambassador was permitted to make his trip to Washington.
Diplomats said that several State Department officials are expected to attend the New York conference, including Joseph R. DeTrani, special envoy for negotiations with North Korea. But State Department spokesman J. Adam Ereli said "there are no plans for bilateral meetings between him [Li Gun] and U.S. officials."
During talks in Beijing in April 2003 between the United States, North Korea and China -- when the White House had ordered Assistant Secretary of State James A. Kelly not to meet with North Korean officials alone -- Li cornered Kelly at a dinner anyway and announced that North Korea possessed nuclear weapons and might test or transfer them. His government might be willing to end its nuclear projects, Li added, if the United States would change its approach toward North Korea.
Since then, three more rounds of talks on North Korea's nuclear ambitions have been held in Beijing in the past year -- also including Russia, Japan and South Korea -- but none has produced a breakthrough. DeTrani last week traveled to Beijing for consultations with the Chinese on setting up a round of working-level talks later this month, in preparation for senior-level talks in September.
In June, the administration offered a more specific proposal for ending the impasse, which included a three-month window for verifying North Korea's disclosures about its nuclear programs. But last week North Korea issued a statement denouncing the U.S. proposal as "nothing but a sham offer."
-------- missile defense
Space invaders
The US is pushing ahead with its missile defence programme, which looks set to provoke a new arms race - and Britain is closely involved
Richard Norton-Taylor
Tuesday August 3, 2004
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1274941,00.html
Scarcely noticed, the US last month deployed its first ground-based missile interceptor at Fort Greely in Alaska. It was a significant step in the Bush administration's ambitious and hugely expensive missile defence system - a project the Blair administration says it supports but one that, in the view of its many critics, will provoke a new arms race leading to the weaponisation of space, a true "son of star wars" with profound implications for the rest of the world.
Deployment of the interceptor "marks the end of an era where we have not been able to defend our country against long-range ballistic missile attacks", said Major General John Holly, programme director for the Ground-Based Midcourse Defence system.
This has nothing to do with terrorists, repeatedly described by Bush and Blair as the greatest threat to the west. The al-Qaida network of terrorists may want to get their hands on biological or chemical weapons, or a dirty bomb, but they are unlikely to be able to launch a long-range intercontinental ballistic against the US, or anywhere else.
"This extraordinary emphasis on missile defence represents misplaced priorities," says the US Union of Concerned Scientists. "The administration's top priority should instead be combating the threat of nuclear terrorism."
Up to five more interceptors are due to be deployed at Fort Greely by the end of this year. By the end of 2005, the US plan is to deploy 10 ship-based intermediate-range interceptors, a sea-based tracking radar and an upgraded radar at Fylingdales in Yorkshire.
Bush wants to spend $10bn on missile defence in 2005, an increase of nearly $1bn over this year's expenditure on the system. His request has yet to be agreed by Congress, where there is a growing belief that the whole project is ideologically driven, a belief fuelled by widespread scepticism among Pentagon officials about whether it will work. That scepticism is not shared by their boss, Donald Rumsfeld, an enthusiastic supporter.
Rumsfeld is also a driving force behind US plans for weapons in space, the next step in America's still-limited missile defence programme. He has talked about a threat from a "space Pearl Harbor". As little-noticed as the missile deployment at Fort Greely, his Missile Defence Agency has now earmarked nearly $70m for Nfire - the acronym for the near field infrared experiment.
This project, due to have been launched this year but delayed because of rumblings in Congress, involves a series of test satellites in low-Earth orbit carrying infrared sensors. Initially, the idea is to enable the US military to distinguish between the rocket plume, or exhaust, of a missile fired by a potential enemy and the missile itself. But the system is also designed to carry a "kinetic kill-vehicle" that will intercept a missile after it has been tracked.
Nfire will in effect be the first space weapon. That is the warning in Fighting for Space, a paper written by the Yorkshire Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament to be published later this month. While Nfire is "being marketed as a defensive system playing a part in the missile defence infrastructure, it could also be effectively deployed as an anti-satellite weapon able to destroy the space assets of other countries", it says. It quotes a recent interview with an anonymous senior US government official who stated: "We're crossing the Rubicon into space weaponisation". Or as the US Space Command noted last year: "We cannot fully exploit space until we control it".
CND comments that, "given the widespread concerns that missile defence won't work effectively, the statements by the US administration and military about controlling space and the asat [anti-satellite] capabilities of the missile defence system, it is no wonder that many states and individuals believe the system is being developed primarily for offence rather than defence".
Russia has already developed a basic asat system. The Pentagon has expressed concern that China will be capable of launching asat weapons in two to six years. There are international agreements governing space, notably the 1967 outer space treaty. But these ban only "weapons of mass destruction" - nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. They would not prohibit the kind of satellite wars now in prospect.
Washington, meanwhile, is determined to push ahead with its missile defence project, with the help of its allies, old and new.
The British American Security Information Council notes that last month during a visit to the UN, Australian defence minister Robert Hill said that Australia planned to help the US develop a missile defence system, although it "faces no current threat from ballistic missiles".
The US was last month reported to be negotiating with Poland and the Czech Republic over its missile defence programme and the location of the largest missile defence site outside America. The US also says it wants Japan to jointly develop equipment for missile defence systems.
In Britain, there is little or no debate, although the expanding US satellite ground station at Menwith Hill in Yorkshire will play a key part, along with Fylingdales. Earlier this year, Geoff Hoon, the defence secretary, told Lindis Percy, the veteran campaigner against US bases in Britain: "We are keen to see how the US system evolves ... The agreement to the upgrade at Fylingdales and the close links between UK and US industry will give us close access to, and involvement in, the US missile defence programme."
It is for MPs to pick up the cudgel. Mr Hoon's senior military advisers are deeply concerned about the US's missile defence project and what it could lead to. The issues are far too important for decisions to be allowed to go by default.
· Richard Norton-Taylor is the Guardian's security affairs editor
richard.norton-taylor@guardian.co.uk
-------- treaties
Nuclear sword of Damocles
August 3, 2004
By BRAD GLOSSERMAN
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/geted.pl5?eo20040803bg.htm
NAGASAKI -- The end of the Cold War didn't end the threat of nuclear annihilation. An increasing number of experts worry that the dangers posed by those weapons of mass destruction are increasing as the nuclear nonproliferation regime is increasingly stretched and frayed. The 2005 Review Conference of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) provides an opportunity to rethink strategies to counter nuclear proliferation and to rejuvenate efforts to eliminate nuclear weapons worldwide.
That task is both daunting and pressing. Last week I attended the Second United Nations Conference on Disarmament in Sapporo, Hokkaido, and the mood there was grim. Tens of thousands of nuclear warheads and hundreds of tons of weapon-grade material (both highly enriched uranium and plutonium) are tempting targets for terrorists, yet officials in the United States and Russia don't seem to take that threat seriously. The technical know-how and the technology needed to make a bomb are now widespread.
In Sapporo, one speaker after another detailed the failures of the NPT. It's a long list:
- Three states -- India, Israel and Pakistan -- remain outside the NPT system despite possessing nuclear weapons, demonstrating that noncompliance has benefits.
- North Korea has threatened to withdraw from the NPT with a nuclear arsenal.
- Iran appears to be developing a clandestine nuclear program while professing to abide by IAEA protocols.
- Iraq and Libya developed nuclear programs without being detected by the international community (In Iraq's case, I refer to efforts uncovered after the 1991 Persian Gulf War, not the more recent allegations leveled against the regime).
- Nonstate actors remain outside the purview of a treaty designed to deal with states.
- Nuclear-weapons states have made precious little progress toward disarmament and eliminating their arsenals, as they promised in the treaty. Their failure to honor that obligation is eroding the willingness of nonnuclear-weapons states to hold up their end of the NPT bargain -- namely, to give up their nuclear weapons ambitions.
One U.S. expert, William Potter of the Monterey Institute of International Studies, warned that the world is at a crucial juncture: Decisions made in the next few months could determine whether nuclear weapons are used in his -- and our -- lifetime.
These flaws have not gone unnoticed. In response, governments have embraced a number of initiatives to plug the holes. They range from the Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI), which created a "coalition of the willing" to halt the illicit transfers of nuclear weapons and materials, to United Nations Security Council Resolution 1540, which calls on all member states to take action to halt the trafficking in weapons of mass destruction. Efforts have been made to secure nuclear materials and to find jobs for scientists who formerly worked in nuclear-weapons programs and who might be tempted to sell their services to the highest bidder.
All those programs have shortcomings of their own. Tighter controls on the trade in nuclear components and materials require the skills, know-how and technology that allows officials to identify suspect transactions. In many cases, they are lacking. Many states are unwilling to join programs that reinforce the "nuclear apartheid" that currently exists. As Sergio Duarte, the Brazilian diplomat who is the president designate of the 2005 NPT Review Conference, explained in Sapporo, "for many the crux of the question is the acceptability of further mandatory restrictions, with intrusive verification, in the absence of corresponding deeper commitments and further steps toward nuclear disarmament which are irreversible and verifiable."
This division exacerbates another problem: governments don't agree that nuclear proliferation is a shared concern. For most developing nations, nuclear proliferation is a problem for the developed world -- forgetting that they too can be threatened with such weapons and indeed, historically, terrorists have targeted the weak and made no distinction among their victims. Most nonnuclear states see their primary security challenge as related to problems of development and internal instability. When they think about nuclear weapons, their chief concern is disarmament, not proliferation: They argue that getting rid of all nuclear weapons is the most effective way to eliminate the threat of nuclear destruction.
That last charge underlines a final obstacle to efforts to counter nuclear proliferation: We still don't know why governments proliferate nuclear weapons. Several explanations have been offered -- to provide security, to establish international status, or as a result of internal political and bureaucratic dynamics -- but no single explanation convinces. Until we know why governments acquire nuclear weapons, it will be difficult to stop them from doing so.
That doesn't mean abandoning efforts to achieve disarmament. Divisions among governments make actions by nongovernmental organizations and other disarmament supporters (including governments) even more important. Efforts should focus on delegitimizing nuclear weapons, which would deny them the political and military utility that makes them part of security calculations, as well as the status that inspires governments to procure them. Make nuclear weapons unusable and governments won't try to acquire them.
To delegitimize nuclear weapons, disarmament advocates must make their case with unflagging energy, taking every opportunity to call for the elimination of nuclear weapons. Every meeting with security on the agenda, from the NPT Review Conference to the ASEAN-Plus-Three summits, should reiterate the call for a nuclear-weapons-free world. The failure to reach agreement on the best way to reach that goal doesn't mean the goal itself should be set aside. Each time the objective is repeated in an official context -- a statement, a declaration, a communique -- the norm is strengthened and advocates are reinforced as they push for a nuclear-weapons-free world.
The goal is to transform the prohibition against nuclear weapons from a treaty-based rule to a preemptory norm of international relations. Most of us instinctively recoil from the idea of using such weapons of mass destruction, but the emotional appreciation of those horrors is balanced by an intellectual understanding of the security context in which those weapons are deployed. (Every participant in security discussions in Japan, and especially those in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, feels that tremendous gap.)
There is no such divide when it comes, say, to slavery, even though pragmatic arguments were made on behalf of that heinous practice in the past. That is the goal for advocates of a nuclear-weapons-free world. The emotional and intellectual contexts should be reconciled. Pragmatic concerns should not mitigate the horror of nuclear weapons. The 2005 NPT Review Conference will be a key battleground in that effort and disarmament advocates should be redoubling their efforts as it approaches.
Brad Glosserman is director of research at Pacific Forum CSIS. He can be reached at bradg@hawaii.rr.com.
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Greenpeace urges UN to track down nuclear material looted in Iraq
VIENNA (AFP)
Aug 03, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040803163605.le5ksk5q.html
The environmental group Greenpeace has urged the UN nuclear watchdog to track radioactive material missing from the looted Tuwaitha facility in Iraq to ensure it does not fall into the hands of terrorists.
Greenpeace said in a letter to the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), acknowledged by the Vienna-based body on Tuesday, that a mission it sent to Iraq a year ago found radioactive material in communities living near Tuwaitha.
It was sent to IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei last week as UN inspectors were preparing to return to Iraq for the first time since the war, at the invitation of the new Iraqi government.
"During the upcoming inspection, the IAEA team must identify the radioisotopes and other dangerous materials still missing," Greenpeace said, adding that it should determine how much material could have found its way "onto the black market."
The United States revealed on July 6 that it had removed more than 1.7 tonnes of radioactive materials from Iraq that could be used to manufacture a "dirty" radiological bomb or support a nuclear weapons programme.
Greenpeace said the IAEA had to obtain an exhaustive list of what the United States airlifted from Iraq in the aftermath of the war, and compare that to pre-war inventories in order to see what could remain inside communities or have fallen into the wrong hands.
"When it comes to the possibility of loose nukes and terrorists building so-called dirty bombs, US assurances that 'roughly' 1,000 highly radioactive sources had been taken out of harms way are simply not good enough."
IAEA spokeswoman Melissa Fleming said Tuesday that ElBaradei was studying Greenpeace's requests.
She said the IAEA would for security reasons not give the exact date its inspectors, who left Iraq just before the US-led war in March 2003, were due to begin their mission.
Their work is not centred on Tuwaitha, which suffered extensive looting after the fall of Saddam Hussein, but rather meant to be a routine mission to check nuclear sites already under IAEA safeguards, she added.
ElBaradei has described the return of inspectors to Iraq as "an absolute necessity" to draft a final report on the failed search for weapons of mass destruction in order to allow the international community to lift remaining sanctions of Iraq.
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Part 3 of 3: Politics, science hold future of nuclear arms
August 3, 2004
The New Mexican
By JEFF TOLLEFSON
http://www.santafenewmexican.com/news/2573.html
The Energy Department under President Bush has broadened its desires for the nuclear-weapons complex , eyeing creative work The Energy Department under President Bush has broadened its desires for the nuclear-weapons complex , eyeing creative work for entrepreneuring young scientists and a revitalized infrastructure capable of producing whatever the nation might need in the future.
These ideas have been around for years but achieved prominent play among policy-makers in the Bush administration, according to Robert Norris , historian and author of Racing for the Bomb, a biography of Gen. Leslie R. Groves, Robert Oppenheimer's boss during the Manhattan Project.
"The underlying theme here is that we need a new generation of bomb designers for the next 10, 20, 40, 50 years," said Norris, who is also a researcher with the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Although opposition is rising, Congress initially went along with the administration's priorities on things such as research into bunker busters and other low-yield weapons.
The Energy Department saw a green light. Last December the head of DOE's nuclear-weapons branch wrote a rosy memorandum to lab directors, urging them to capitalize on the repeal of a ban on research into low-yield nuclear weapons.
"Repeal of the ... restriction on nuclear weapons research and development represents, in part, an endorsement by Congress of our efforts to begin to address the nuclear weapons stockpile in accordance with the recommendations of the administration's Nuclear Posture Review," wrote Linton Brooks, chief of the National Nuclear Security Administration. "We should not fail to take advantage of this opportunity ."
Submitted to Congress at the end of 2001, the Nuclear Posture Review is the foundation of the Bush administration's current nuclear policy. It advocates a new "triad" that includes defensive forces, including missile defense; expanded offensive forces that integrate nuclear and conventional weaponry; and a modern infrastructure capable of maintaining current nuclear weapons and building new ones.
John Immele, deputy director for national security at Los Alamos National Laboratory said the review serves as guidance for the national laboratories.
"Our job is to tell the truth and to give the country options," he says. "And the Bush administration is asking for more options than the Clinton administration. There's no doubt about that." Nuclear opposition
DOE is beginning to encounter some opposition from members of Congress who are skeptical of the need to ramp up the nuclear complex .
Some are questioning the department's justifications for designing new weapons, building a new nuclear-weapons manufacturing plant and shortening the time it would take to resume nuclear testing.
At the forefront is Rep. David Hobson, an Ohio Republican and chairman of the House Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee . Hobson, who has said the nuclear complex and DOE's new initiatives seem to be sized for the Cold War, wants to halt new initiatives altogether until DOE completes a thorough analysis of the complex and modern security threats.
His counterpart in the Senate is New Mexico Republican Pete Domenici, a supporter of the president's policies and an ardent advocate for LANL and the other nuclear labs.
The two battled it out in negotiations between the House and Senate during the last session and will likely do so again this year.
Last year Hobson succeeded in cutting money to some of the programs and requiring DOE to submit a report on the size of the nuclear stockpile as it relates to the need for a Modern Pit Facility, a manufacturing plant for nuclear pits, the primary component in a thermonuclear weapon.
This year he is taking a hard line again. His committee zeroed out appropriations for research on bunker busters and other new nuclear weapons as well as the Modern Pit Facility, while doubling the administration's request for nonproliferation funding.
The administration had requested almost $30 million for preliminary design work on the Modern Pit Facility, $27.5 million for bunker busters and an additional $9 million for weapons research under the heading "advanced concepts."
U.S. Sen. Jeff Bingaman, a New Mexico Democrat, said Hobson is unlikely to prevail. Nonetheless, Bingaman said he is raising questions that Congress in general, and the Republicans in particular, have failed to properly address since the Bush administration proposed significant overhauls to the nuclear-weapons complex.
"Congress has essentially abdicated its responsibility in this area in the last few years. There is very little effective oversight on these issues by the House or Senate," Bingaman said. "And I think there has been great reluctance on the part of Republican leadership ... to disagree with the administration."
As for Democrats, Bingaman said he and others have tried to defeat bunkerbuster research each year, only to have the votes fail largely along party lines. While the senator agrees with Hobson regarding the necessity and wisdom of new nuclear weapons, Bingaman said he will support the Modern Pit Facility if DOE demonstrates that a new manufacturing plant is necessary to maintain old weapons.
Although the DOE's longterm budgets reserve money for bunker-buster research and development well into the future, DOE officials have repeatedly stressed that no decision has been made to move forward with development of any new weapons. Such a decision would need the authorization of Congress.
Similarly, both administration and LANL officials say they have no plans or desires to restart testing, although DOE is working to shorten the time necessary to conduct a test if such a decision were made. Recasting the nuclear strategy
In testimony to Congress this June, National Nuclear Security Administration chief Brooks said all of these programs go hand-in-hand with plans to downsize the active stockpile.
Efforts to "restore a modern infrastructure" to the nuclear complex allow the United States to reduce the number of weapons, "secure in the knowledge that the nation has enhanced its capabilities to respond to possible future challenges to its security ," Brooks said in a prepared statement.
However, many believe the administration has every intention of moving forward with new weapons concepts. The concept of establishing an entirely different kind of nuclear arsenal has been laid out in plain language many times.
An advisory board to the Defense Department issued a report in February indicating that the nuclear-weapons program "as currently conceived ... will not meet the country's future needs." The board said the nation needs nuclear weapons that produce less collateral damage but more desirable damage and lend themselves to easy manufacturing .
In his December memo to the lab directors, Brooks also said the nuclear-weapons labs need to exercise their abilities to maintain technical superiority.
"We must ... close any gaps that may have opened this past decade in our understanding of the possible military applications of atomic energy - no novel nuclear weapons concept developed by any other nation should ever come as a technical surprise to us," Brooks wrote.
Stephen Young, senior analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said the administration is heading into dangerous territory by proposing such research into new weapons.
"In this current climate and current world situation, the pursuit of new nuclear weapons is not something that we need to be doing," he said. "Why do we need new kinds of nuclear weapons when we are trying to tell other countries that they don't need them at all?"
Although the bunker-buster debate has been alive in Congress for the past few years, Young said the House of Representatives is increasingly skeptical about other components of Bush's nuclear agenda as well. A proposal by Democrats to kill the bunker-buster program earned 160 votes three years ago; this May it was defeated by a ratio of 204-to-214 , six votes shy of passage.
Young credits that shift to people like Hobson. Young said the House Energy and Water Subcommittee used to deal mostly with the "water" side of the issues, leaving the "energy" policies to its Senate counterpart.
"Mr. Hobson just took control of the committee two years ago and decided that he was going to take a role in nuclear weapons," Young said. "He is more or less taking the precise line that we think the U.S. government should take." Bush, Kerry's policies
Steve Maaranen, a senior adviser for national security at Los Alamos lab who recently returned from the Pentagon, said the current Nuclear Posture Review represents a "fairly radical" departure from the past.
Whereas previous nuclear policy reserved nuclear weapons as a deterrent to other nuclear weapons, proponents of the new policy envision "full-spectrum deterrence," Maaranen told the Los Alamos Committee on Arms Control, a private group that analyzes various nonproliferation issues.
According to the new theory, the current bombs and missiles might be too powerful to use in a smaller conflict, and other nations know it.
A new, more diverse arsenal of smaller weapons would lend more credibility to the nuclear portion of deterrence, Maaranen said.
On the other hand, a deterrent is only credible if you are willing to use it, he said, which is why critics of the current policy say the Bush administration is taking nuclear weapons into dangerous territory.
Maaranen said this split between old and new policies divides fairly closely along party lines. The only thing the two parties agree on is nonproliferation and halting the spread of nuclear materials , although the Democratic nominee for president, Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass .), puts much more emphasis on nonproliferation than does the current administration.
"If Kerry wins, it's clear that his strong preference is going to be on nonproliferation ," Maaranen said. "If there's a budget crunch, the money is going to go to nonproliferation ."
Nonetheless, he said the Bush administration's policy is often misconstrued. The goal is to give conventional warfare more prominence in planning strategies that once focused primarily on nuclear weapons, not the opposite, as claimed by many of the administration's critics, he said.
"No matter how you look at it, nuclear weapons are not perceived as being nearly as important as nuclear weapons in the Cold War and are likely to be even less important in the future," Maaranen said. "The numbers are going to decline, no matter who is in power."
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Court Overrules Government's Lax Radiation Standards for Nuclear Waste at Yucca Dump
Eye On Energy:
August 2004
http://www.citizen.org/cmep/energy_enviro_nuclear/articles.cfm?ID=12119
On July 9, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) illegally set its radiation release standards for groundwater for the proposed high-level radioactive waste dump at Yucca Mountain, Nevada. This ruling marks a major victory for citizens of Nevada, for the environment, and for science over politics.
The EPA set 10,000 years as the period during which radiation in the groundwater cannot exceed drinking water standards at the site's boundary, but this time frame would not protect the health of future generations. The Energy Policy Act requires that the EPA determine public health and safety standards for Yucca Mountain "based upon and consistent with" the National Academy of Sciences' recommendations. The Academy's recommendation is that the compliance period should extend through the time of the peak risk for radiation doses from the dump, which studies show are likely to occur in 300,000 years or more.
Now, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) must show that it can prevent groundwater contamination above drinking water standards at the compliance boundary for 300,000 years - a standard that the DOE's own analysis shows the Yucca Mountain site cannot meet. To read the court's decision, go to http://pacer.cadc.uscourts.gov/docs/common/opinions/200407/01-1258a.pdf
In other Yucca news... in a July 28 letter to DOE, the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board (NWTRB) announced that DOE has convinced the Board that calcium chloride, which would corrode the metal waste packages containing the irradiated fuel, would not be present in the tunnels built in Yucca Mountain. But corrosion by calcium chloride is one of only several means that could cause deterioration of the waste packages. Many other issues related to the site, including hydrology and seismic hazards, also remain unanswered. According to the Board, "The extent to which the DOE has characterized accurately the likely waste package environments (i.e., temperature, relative humidity, and chemical species present) is unclear at this point."
Government Affirms Role of Citizens' Groups in Licensing Hearing of Nuclear Plant
On July 19, a federal judicial board affirmed the participatory role of Public Citizen and the Nuclear Information and Resource Service (NIRS) in the upcoming licensing hearing for a proposed nuclear fuel plant in southeastern New Mexico. The board accepted all but one of the groups' complaints (called "contentions") about the application of Louisiana Energy Services (LES), the multinational company seeking to build a uranium enrichment facility near Eunice, N.M. The plant would process uranium fuel for sale to operators of commercial nuclear power reactors.
The ruling came from the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board (ASLB) appointed by the NRC. Now, the citizens' groups will be able to formally participate in the licensing hearing by presenting their disputes regarding such issues as the need for the proposed plant, its possible impact on local water resources, LES's uranium waste storage and disposal plan, and the company's financial plan for dealing with hazardous radioactive material. To read the ASLB's ruling, please go to: http://www.citizen.org/documents/LESContentions.pdf
Public Citizen Urges Maryland to Strengthen Licensing Process for Power Providers
On July 28, Public Citizen sent a letter to Maryland's Public Service Commission (PSC) urging the agency to strengthen its licensing and approval process to better protect consumers from energy companies with questionable ethical practices. Case in point: Reliant Energy - whose subsidiary recently won $88.5 million in contracts to provide electricity to Maryland state and local government facilities - may not have fully disclosed the long list of federal and state investigations into affiliates of the company for energy market manipulation.
The PSC regulates public utilities doing business in Maryland, including electric, telephone, water and sewage disposal companies. On May 21, 2003, the PSC granted a license to Reliant Energy Solutions East, LLC to sell power in the state. But less than a year after approving the license, an affiliate of the company that it relies on to provide power, Reliant Energy Services, Inc., was indicted for alleged manipulation of electricity markets in the California energy crisis of 2000-2001. To read more about Reliant Energy, please go to www.citizen.org/cmep/reliantenergy.
Public Citizen Challenges FERC's Authority to Let the "Market" Set Rates
On July 16, Public Citizen filed a court appeal challenging the legal authority of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to allow utilities, in the guise of "the market," to set electricity rates under the Federal Power Act. The filing was made jointly with the Attorneys General of Colorado, New Mexico and Rhode Island, a Utah consumers group, a representative of low income utility users in New York and the National Consumer Law Center.
The petition states that FERC is not only failing to satisfy the goal of the Federal Power Act-- to protect consumers by requiring that all rates charged for wholesale electricity must be "just and reasonable"--but is also failing to satisfy the means by which Congress has directed FERC to meet that goal. The statute requires rates to be filed in advance for FERC review, with notice to the public, and that FERC can suspend rate changes and make their collection subject to refund, with interest, if it cannot determine within 60 days that the filed rates are just and reasonable.
Instead, FERC has gradually developed an experimental scheme of rate deregulation, inconsistent with the statute, which allows sellers of electricity to simply file a statement that the rates will be set by "agreement" with buyers. As long as such sellers are not caught deliberately manipulating bidding auctions (as in the case of the infamous Enron trader tapes) or in outright fraud in making contracts, whatever they agree upon is simply accepted by FERC. FERC-accepted wholesale rates are required by federal law to be passed through by state utility commissions to retail consumers, since the statute assumes that FERC will have ensured that all such rates are lawful.
Public Citizen and the other consumer advocates argue that FERC's abdication of its rate-setting responsibilities to "the market" is contrary to its authorizing statute and must be reversed by the court.
Our Two Cents: Revisiting the Blackout
Aug. 14 will mark the one year anniversary of the power blackout that affected much of the northeast and midwest U.S. Despite the billion dollar hit to the economy from the extended outage, the Bush administration and Congress have failed to implement the reforms necessary to prevent another blackout. Electricity deregulation is the primary culprit that has weakened reliability. The U.S. transmission system was designed to accommodate local electricity markets, not deregulation's large, freewheeling trading of electricity that moves power over long distances.
Short of ending America's failed deregulation experiment, Congress can pass mandatory electric reliability standards, forcing power companies to comply with enforceable reliability rules. Two congressional bills, one co‑sponsored by Rep. John Dingell and the other by Sen. Maria Cantwell, are an effective first step in holding energy companies accountable and improving our nation's electric reliability. While these two bills lift language included in the still‑stalled energy bill, the Bush Administration and leaders in Congress are refusing to separate this needed reliability language from the rest of the huge energy bill. That's because energy industry lobbyists don't want the sole, useful part of the energy bill to be separated from the rest of the 1,000 pages designating billions of dollars in pork to energy corporations.
Corporate Corner
$3.2 million: What Bush received from the oil, gas, power, nuclear and mining industries in the 2004 campaign.
$0.2 million: What Kerry received from the same industries in the 2004 campaign.
Quick Quote
"If this country is going to have a new nuclear power plant, the federal government is going to have to subsidize it."
DID YOU KNOW...? The Power of the Public Utility Holding Company Act
One of the abuses that led to the Public Utility Holding Company Act in 1935 was the repeated buying and selling of the same utility assets, raising the price each time. This, in turn, raised utility rates in order to cover utility costs. In 1992, Congress exempted many electric generating plants from PUHCA, and FERC has allowed them to charge "market" rates. Investment firms are now buying up power plants and reselling them at huge profits. Goldman Sachs is said to have paid $370 million for the Orion plants, reselling them only three years later to Reliant Energy for $4.6 billion. Goldman made a reported one billion dollar profit. Who will ultimately pay for the billions in debt piled on these plants? Electricity consumers, of course. So much for the "efficiency" of the marketplace as a "regulator" of electric rates!
[Info about Public Citizen, Inc., a 501(c)(4) lobbying organization and Public Citizen Foundation, Inc., the companion 501(c)(3) group's 2000 funding is here: http://www.undueinfluence.com/public_citizen.htm - JH]
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ESSAY
Los Alamos's Super-Secret Heritage Shows Some Cracks
August 3, 2004
By GEORGE JOHNSON
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/03/science/03essa.html?pagewanted=all&position=
LOS ALAMOS, N.M., July 30 - On a back road near Los Alamos, just past the turnoff to the weapons lab, visitors are greeted by a sign recognizing one of the volunteer groups that helps keep the highway clean: Our Lady of the Woods coven of Wicca, a New Age religion based on witchcraft.
These are what Dorothy called good witches. Their most recent ritual, an early harvest celebration called the Sabbat of Lughnassad, took place in a city park. Even so, the fantasy is hard to resist: a band of Halloween hags wearing tall pointy hats, using their brooms to sweep away the roadside litter.
With Los Alamos National Laboratory's recent troubles over lost computer disks, errant e-mail and other security breaches, an even wilder fantasy comes to mind: laboratory officials, robed and hooded in black, sitting around a cauldron chanting the mathematical incantations that invoke the rawest forces of nature.
When science is conducted in secrecy it takes on the air of magic.
From its beginnings as an outpost of the Manhattan Project, Los Alamos has operated in a state where the ideal of science as the free exchange of information has been indefinitely suspended, replaced by a conviction that there is safety in ignorance, that life is more secure when certain powerful ideas are kept among a few.
Peace through the nonproliferation of knowledge, another of the ingrained absurdities of the nuclear age.
With its isolated valleys and mesa tops, northern New Mexico is a fine place for keeping secrets. Just down the hill from the lab, the religious societies of San Ildefonso, a Tewa Indian pueblo, chant secret anthems in the ceremonial chambers called kivas. To the east, in the Sangre de Cristo (Blood of Christ) Mountains, small groups of Catholic Penitentes, spiritual descendants of the flagellant sects of medieval Europe, gather in adobe chapels, or moradas, to practice their own clandestine rituals.
No one outside these societies, even the anthropologists, knows with any certainty what goes on inside the makeshift temples. The information is considered classified. It is the way things have always been done. Along the highway where witches pick up trash, blue-and-white signs mark the way to the scientists' own kivas and moradas: the "Tech Areas," outposts of the main lab, where some of the research is done.
Not all of the science is secret. Walk into the post office near Fuller Lodge, the log-cabin structure that once served as a dining hall for the Manhattan Project, and you might overhear local scientists talking excitedly about their work - on cosmology, complex systems, H.I.V., anything but weaponry. These are the people who do the unclassified research, who work "outside the fence," an expression from the days of the lab's first director, J. Robert Oppenheimer, that refers quite literally to barbed wire.
Frequently some of these free agents will head down the hill to the Santa Fe Institute, an interdisciplinary think tank, to trade information and ideas, or take to the road to speak at university seminars, disseminating information, spreading seeds of knowledge. Intellectual husbandry. It requires copious amounts of sunlight.
The scientists inside the fence are expected to grow things in the darkness. "Boys! Raise Giant Mushrooms in Your Cellar!" promised the title of a 1962 science fiction story by Ray Bradbury. In a plot to spread its spores across the earth, a race of alien fungus places mail-order ads, enticing unwitting young hobbyists into its cause.
When looking for a place to raise giant mushroom clouds, Oppenheimer settled on Los Alamos. From the beginning some of the scientists chafed at the unfamiliar burden of working inside a guarded compound. For all the bunker camaraderie, Laura Fermi, the physicist Enrico Fermi's wife, wrote that the military ambience reminded some of a concentration camp.
The idea was indeed to concentrate, focus for a few years on the problem of making a nuclear bomb. The secrecy would be temporary. When the war was won, information would flow again. That is how science is supposed to work. In the short run, protecting a new experiment or theory may confer an advantage - a published paper, a patent, a scientific prize. But ideas aren't known to breed in captivity.
After Hiroshima, some of the Manhattan Project scientists were surprised to hear their discoveries increasingly being referred to as nuclear secrets. They were accustomed to believing that a natural part of science was allowing its ideas to spread.
"It is not possible to be a scientist unless you believe that the knowledge of the world, and the power which this gives, is a thing which is of intrinsic value to humanity," Oppenheimer said.
His colleague Niels Bohr, with his love for paradox, spoke of the "complementarity of the bomb." Just as light can simultaneously consist of particles and waves, so can nuclear weapons be both a curse and a blessing. "The very fact that knowledge is itself the basis of civilization," he said, "points directly to openness as the way to overcome the present crisis."
The world would scare itself into submission. War would be abandoned as a means of solving disputes. The idealism - or naïveté - didn't last long. World War II was followed by the cold war, then the smoldering war on terrorism. At Los Alamos the fence has remained intact, if not impermeable.
There has been no hint that the security violations leading to last month's crackdown were the work of idealistic scientists driven by the notion that information yearns to be free. As described by the lab's director, the acerbic Dr. G. Peter Nanos, the problem involved careless, arrogant "cowboys" engaging in a "willful flouting of the rules." Others blamed politics and the intense scrutiny the lab has come under since the curious case of Wen Ho Lee.
Nor is there any sign that the missing bits and bytes of information might have fallen into the wrong minds. Some of the lab's critics say security has gone from tight to perfunctory. Maybe the word is ritualistic.
In the midst of last month's crisis, or whatever it was, F.B.I. agents showed up at a local institution called the Black Hole, a scrap yard of Los Alamos laboratory surplus run by "Atomic Ed" Grothus, a lab machinist turned antinuclear activist. The shop of curiosities serves as both a recycler and what Mr. Grothus sees as a monument to the excesses of the nuclear age.
He explained to the agents that the hard drive and tapes that had piqued their interest were harmless, that he had attached the "secret" stickers himself, another of his practical jokes. Just to be certain, they seized some items anyway.
"Security has gotten totally out of hand," Mr. Grothus grumbled to a visitor last week. Looking around at the precarious piles of castoff electronics and other white elephants of the Cold War, he offered his philosophy of life: "In the end, whoever has the most toys wins."
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Nuclear Lab Shutdown Puts Pluto Mission In Jeopardy
Space News
By Brian Berger
03 August 2004
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/pluto_losalamos_040803.html
WASHINGTON -- NASA officials are worried that a work stoppage at Los Alamos National Laboratory could delay the launch of a nuclear-powered Pluto mission by a year and postpone the spacecraft's arrival at its destination by two and a half years.
The U.S. Department of Energy's Los Alamos lab halted all classified work July 15 after two computer disks containing classified information were discovered missing. The following day the director of the lab expanded the shutdown to nearly all activities. Some routine administrative work had resumed at the lab by July 29, but a NASA official said it remains unclear how soon lab employees would get back to doing the kind of sensitive work the space agency is counting on for its Pluto mission. Orlando Figueroa, director of NASA's solar system exploration division, told Space News on Monday that the latest Los Alamos shutdown is making it increasingly likely that the New Horizon Pluto probe will not be able to make a two- to three-week launch window set for January 2006. Figueroa said Los Alamos was already scrambling to make up schedule lost during previous security-related stand down.
"Getting past the first shutdown took a tremendous effort," Figueroa said. "The latest shutdown took the threat from Code Orange to Code Red real quick."
NASA is counting on Los Alamos to transform by December raw plutonium-238 bought from Russia into tiny pellets that power long-lasting spacecraft batteries known as radioisotope thermal generators (RTGs). The plutonium must then be certified and delivered to Argonne National Laboratory's nuclear facility outside Idaho Falls, Idaho by February if NASA and the Department of Energy hope to keep the project on schedule.
Los Alamos officials have not said when nuclear work will resume at the lab. Figueroa said he has been in contact with his Department of Energy contacts frequently since the shutdown was announced. He said he hopes to have a better idea by mid-August of when the NASA related work would be permitted to resume and whether the Department of Energy will be able to make up the lost time.
Figueroa said the lab shutdown is not the only thing putting the January 2006 launch window in jeopardy. NASA's officials at Kennedy Space Center in Florida are also facing a very tight schedule for flight qualifying solid rocket boosters the Altas 5 rocket needs to boost the Pluto spacecraft. The spacecraft itself, still in development, is also encountering the usual hiccups, Figueroa said.
"From the get go we knew that making 2006 was going to be very tight," he said. "Across the board we knew this was going to be a heck of a challenge and has proven to be so every step of the way."
Even if NASA and its teammates manage to launch the New Horizons probe in January 2006, it will still be 2015 before the spacecraft reaches Pluto. Figueroa said slipping the launch until January 2007 -- the next available window -- would add two and a half years to the travel time and millions of dollars to the cost of the mission.
-------- south carolina
Catawba plant may test MOX
Federal regulators give initial OK to allow trials at nuclear station
The Herald
August 3‚ 2004
http://www.heraldonline.com/local/story/3721556p-3329014c.html
CHARLOTTE -- The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has issued a preliminary finding in favor of allowing Duke Power to test a new fuel at its Catawba Nuclear Station on Lake Wylie in York County.
Duke wants to test mixed-oxide, or MOX, fuel as early as next spring. The fuel is made by mixing uranium oxide and plutonium oxide from older nuclear weapons and placing the material in fuel rods.
The tests won't make an accident at the plant much more likely or worsen the results if an accident happens, the commission determined.
"It is, in our minds, a significant hurdle to have overcome," said Duke spokeswoman Rose Cummings. "NRC is essentially confirming our analyses."
The Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League hasn't decided how to respond to the finding, said Diane Curran, a Washington attorney representing the group. The league opposes the tests and says MOX fuel is dangerous. A decision could come this week, she said Monday.
The commission analyzed two possible accidents that MOX might influence.
The first looked at defects in the metal cladding that encases fuel rods. Under high pressure and high temperatures inside the reactor, failed cladding could release radioactive material into cooling water. The second examined the likelihood of an accident in handling MOX assemblies.
In neither case would MOX increase the odds of those accidents occurring nor would it make the consequences significantly worse, the commission said.
The NRC must wait until a comment period ends Aug. 12 before making the finding official. After that, the commission could issue the license to start tests.
In the meantime, an Atomic Safety and Licensing Board is studying objections raised by the environmental defense league, which claims that MOX behaves differently from uranium fuel and would make a nuclear accident at Catawba worse than it would have been otherwise. The league also challenged Duke's security precautions during the tests.
A final decision on the MOX tests could come before the environmental defense league issues are resolved in the fall.
MOX fuel contains 5 percent plutonium oxide, which is used in nuclear weapons. Duke's project is part of a $4 billion initiative to reduce up to 34 tons of weapons-grade plutonium in the United States and Russia.
-------- washington
100 tons of fuel still in K Basins
tri-cityherald
By Annette Cary
August 3rd, 2004
http://www.tri-cityherald.com/tch/local/story/5379458p-5317709c.html
About 100 tons of spent nuclear fuel remained in the K Basins at Hanford after the deadline passed this weekend for all the fuel to be removed.
But regulators are not complaining.
Fluor Hanford, the contractor on the project, expects to have the last of what once was 2,300 tons of fuel removed by mid-September.
"They've had some legitimate technical problems," said Larry Gadbois, environmental scientist for the federal Environmental Protection Agency. "Coming in a month or two late is not a problem for us."
The uranium fuel was irradiated at the N Reactor but never processed to extract its plutonium. Instead, it sat underwater in the K Basins for more than two decades.
That's been a major environmental concern because of the potential of contaminating the Columbia River. The two basins, large indoor pools of water, were built in the early 1950s about 400 yards from the river. The pools are well past their design life of 20 years, and at least one of them has leaked.
Earlier this year, Fluor said it would have trouble meeting the July 31 deadline.
Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham notified the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board in late July that the deadline would be missed. The board was created by Congress to provide independent oversight of DOE nuclear sites.
"The primary cause is the fuel is more degraded than anticipated," he wrote. "This has slowed the packaging operations and caused water system filter plugging."
Degraded fuel also added fuel particulates to the basin water, which led to airborne radioactivity, further slowing work.
The work will be completed by Oct. 29, Abraham told the defense board. The goal is to complete work sooner, however, said Colleen Clark, Richland spokeswoman for DOE.
Work has been under way since December 2000 to remove fuel. Last month, all the fuel was removed from the more contaminated K East Basin. The remaining fuel is in the K West Basin.
With fuel out of the K East Basin, work has started to remove sludge there.
Much of the fuel in that basin was stored in open-topped canisters exposed to the water. Some of the fuel had corroded, fallen apart and collected on the bottom to mix with desert dust and concrete sloughed off the basin walls. They've combined to form a radioactive sludge.
Work started in June to remove six cubic yards of sludge from a section of the pool that's less contaminated, the North Load-Out Pit.
Progress has been slow. The sludge and water is being vacuumed into the first of three or four containers equipped with filters to trap the sludge but let water drain.
The filters have tended to clog, however. Work is continuing, but Fluor has asked DOE for permission to change the process. That could include installing a new filter system or using the containers as settling tanks and removing the water from the top of the tanks once sludge settles.
Fluor also is considering filling the containers at a slower rate or vacuuming sludge from areas where it is more concentrated.
"Like many projects during start up, you have kinks to work out," said Fluor spokesman Geoff Tyree.
Work also has started to prepare to remove the more contaminated sludge from the rest of the K East Basin, he said. Two cubic meters of sludge have been moved to make way for underwater containers to hold the sludge in the main part of the basin.
The basins hold a total of 50 cubic meters of sludge.
"We'll continue to build on our momentum," Tyree said. "The focus is on reducing the risk the materials pose to our work force, the public and the environment."
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
Up to 50 militants believed killed in Afghan border clash: US
Aug 03, 2004
KABUL (AFP)
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040803134525.5vku4061.html
Afghan troops backed by American soldiers and warplanes may have killed up to 50 militants in a day-long pitched battle at a southeastern border post near Pakistan, the US military said in a statement.
"The exact number of enemy casualties is unknown but pilots flying overhead estimated that approximately 40 to 50 insurgents were killed," the statement said.
One Afghan soldier was killed and three were wounded, it added.
The battle was among the heaviest since the hardline Taliban regime was ousted by US-led forces in late 2001.
Clashes erupted before dawn Monday at a border post between Khost province and Pakistan's rugged western tribal region, where Al-Qaeda fighters have taken sanctuary and run militant training camps following the defeat of their Taliban hosts.
About 50 suspected Taliban insurgents attacked the post at 2:00 am Monday (2130 GMT Sunday) with rocket-propelled grenades, machineguns and mortars.
US air forces flew in B-1 bomber, A-10 Thunderbolt aircraft and attack helicopters to repel the insurgents, who "retreated in panic" at the sight of the fighter craft, the military said.
Five hours later the fighting broke out again and raged into Monday night.
An Afghan army commander and an interior ministry official revealed the border battle to AFP on Monday and said "dozens of Taliban" were killed but only four Afghan soldiers injured.
However, a purported Taliban spokesman Abdul Latif Hakimi denied the US claim, saying the Taliban had sustained no deaths and only two of their fighters had been wounded.
"Martyrdom and being wounded or disabled in jihad (holy war) is our pride. If we had anyone martyred we would announce that with pride. Why would we need to lie?" he told AFP by phone from an undisclosed location.
Attacks by militants have risen sharply in recent months as Taliban and other anti-government militia attempt to derail Afghanistan's first presidential election.
Aid workers, election officials and civilians have also come under fire in addition to US-led troops and Afghan government forces.
Last week, two people, including one election worker, were killed in a blast at a mosque in southeastern Ghazni province, bringing to five the number of election workers murdered so far this year.
In the same week, Nobel prize-winning aid agency Medecins Sans Frontieres announced its decision to pull out of the war-torn country after 24 years, saying deteriorating security had rendered it impossible to operate.
Loyalists of the ousted militia have vowed to disrupt the lead-up to country's first presidential elections on October 9.
Afghan and US military officials complain that the insurgents slip over the border from Pakistan to stage attacks and retreat back into the neighbour's tribal zone, thwarting pursuit by Afghan and US forces.
-------- arms
First made in India battle tank set to roll out
Aug 03, 2004
MADRAS, India (AFP)
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040803152545.5ylcd6ko.html
India's first indigenously produced main battle tank will roll out of its production hub in southern India on Saturday, the defence ministry said.
The Arjun tank, which was conceived in 1983 but has faced many hurdles, will be officially handed over to the army by Defence Minister Pranab Mukherjee, the ministry said in a press release Tuesday.
Designed and developed by India's Combat Vehicle Research and Development Establishment, the 3.5 billion dollar project is the most prestigious conceived by the Indian defence establishment.
However, the project had been mired in one controversy after another as many experts questioned its viability. The army also found that Arjun lacked many vital features during tests in Rajasthan in 1994.
Announcing Arjun's official launch, the ministry said the tank has a "high degree of mobility, superior firepower and excellent protection."
It said the tank's computer-controlled fire control system provides accurate and faster target acquisition capability day and night and in all weather.
-----
US will not back down from arms sales to Taiwan, senators say in China
Aug 3, 2004
BEIJING (AFP)
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=1521&ncid=731&e=6&u=/afp/20040803/pl_afp/china_taiwan_us
- A US senate delegation has had "strong words and very forceful discussions" with China over Taiwan, telling Beijing that Washington would not back down from selling arms to the island, a leading American lawmaker said.
"We believe we are still following the 1979 policy set down by China itself to recognize (the) One China (policy) but at the same time opposing any attempt by either side to change the relationship between Taiwan and the mainland by force," Senate leader Ted Stevens told reporters.
He rejected China's protest that US military exchanges and arms sales to Taiwan constituted a breach of the accord.
Later in the day, Chinese President Hu Jintao told Stevens the United States should not send "wrong signals" to Taiwan, according to state-run Xinhua news agency.
"China hopes the US side will keep its promises on the issue, translate its commitments into concrete actions, and send no wrong signals to the Taiwan independence forces," Hu was quoted as saying.
Despite switching diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing in 1979, Washington has remained the leading arms supplier to Taiwan.
Taipei has been considering a plan to spend 18 billion dollars on the purchase of military weapons from the US -- including eight conventional submarines, modified Patriot anti-missile systems and anti-submarine aircraft over a 15-year period from 2005.
The US Congress passed the Taiwan Relations Act in 1979, which pledges that the United States would defend Taiwan should it be attacked and provide arms "of a defensive nature" to Taiwan so it can "maintain a self-sufficient defence capacity."
Stevens' visit came just days after President Hu told his US counterpart George W. Bush by telephone that the United States should not sell sophisticated weapons to Taiwan.
Chinese Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing also told the commander of US forces in the Pacific earlier this month that arms sales to Taiwan and military exchanges with the island must be stopped.
Stevens said there was a "misunderstanding" on the issue, saying that although the sale of new radars to Taiwan had been authorised, none had been manufactured, delivered or even ordered.
"We are still maintaining the position that Taiwan should be able to defend itself against a military attack," Stevens said.
Given the growing economic dependency and exchanges between China and Taiwan, "we believe that time will erase the differences and we still maintain that we are following the One China policy," he said.
On the Taiwan Relations Acts, Stevens said: "They (China) seek to have us repeal that act, which I do not think will happen in the near future."
China has regarded Taiwan as a renegade province that must be reunified, by force if necessary, ever since the Communists won a civil war and drove the Nationalists into exile on the island in 1949.
-------- asia
Russian, Central Asian militaries launch joint exercise in Kyrgyzstan
Aug 03, 2004
BISHKEK (AFP)
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040803164217.u3c9h2vk.html
Russia's airforce and the militaries of three Central Asian countries launched a joint exercise in Kyrgyzstan on Tuesday, Kyrgyzstan's defence ministry said.
The exercise will involve more than 2,000 personnel as well as military aircraft from southern Russia and from a Russian air force base near the Kyrgyz capital Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan's defence ministry said in a written statement.
The exercise marks a stepping up of defence cooperation between Moscow and the Central Asian republics that broke from Soviet rule in 1991.
In addition to Russian and Kyrgyz forces, Kazakhstan and Tajikistan would also participate in the exercise in the north of this mountain republic, the statement said.
After an initial planning phase, field exercises were scheduled to take place on Friday with Kyrgyz President Askar Akayev and the four countries' defence ministers in attendance, it added.
Russia opened a new air base at Kant in Kyrgyzstan last autumn, just a few kilometres (miles) from another used by US-led forces to support operations in nearby Afghanistan.
-------- business
Halliburton Sues Retired Executives
HOUSTON (AP)
August 3, 2004
http://ap.washingtontimes.com/dynamic/stories/H/HALLIBURTON_LAWSUIT?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
-- Halliburton Co. is suing three retired executives who complained about a company plan to stop providing health insurance for retirees eligible for Medicare.
The lawsuit was filed after the retirees, including former Halliburton vice president of human resources Paul Bryant, sent a letter to company officials to complain about the change. Bryant, 58, retired from the oil services conglomerate in 1999.
Halliburton spokeswoman Zelma Branch said the company sued so the dispute would be resolved quickly, allowing the retirees to arrange for their own medical coverage.
The retirees and Halliburton officials both want a judge to certify the case as a class-action lawsuit. The case hinges on whether the 1998 merger agreement between Halliburton and Dresser Industries required Halliburton to keep paying benefits to 4,000 salaried retirees. Bryant and the two other retired executives argue it does.
But Halliburton contends in the lawsuit, filed Jan. 21, that it repeatedly stated in merger documents that it retained the right to change or terminate its health insurance plans. The change is scheduled to take effect Jan. 1.
Employment attorney Joe Ahmad, who is not connected to the case, said Halliburton's decision to sue was unusual, but it meant Halliburton could choose where the case was filed and present its side first.
"A lot of times, you can win before the other side can even speak," Ahmad told the Houston Chronicle in Saturday's editions.
Congress is investigating allegations that Halliburton overcharged the government on contracts related to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. The company denies any wrongdoing.
Vice President Dick Cheney was chief executive of Halliburton from 1995-2000. Cheney left the company in 2000 to be President Bush's running mate.
--------
Cheney Not Charged in Halliburton Investigation
August 3, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/03/business/03WIRE-HALL.html
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Halliburton Co. will pay $7.5 million to settle charges that it failed to disclose a 1998 accounting change at a time when U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney headed the company, authorities said Tuesday.
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission did not charge Cheney in the case, but brought charges against the Houston-based oil services company, former Chief Financial Officer Gary Morris and former Controller Robert Muchmore.
The case centers on Halliburton's failure to tell investors about a change in how it accounted for revenue from claims against customers for construction project cost overruns, said the SEC, which took testimony from Cheney in its inquiry.
By failing to disclose the change, Halliburton issued misleading profit statements in 1998 and 1999, the SEC said.
Cheney served as CEO of Halliburton from 1995 to 2000. He "provided sworn testimony and cooperated willingly and fully in the investigation," the SEC said in a statement.
The SEC concluded Cheney was not involved in the accounting practice change, nor in the decision on whether to disclose it, said a lawyer for Cheney who asked not to be named.
Halliburton and Muchmore have agreed to a settlement, with Muchmore paying a penalty of $50,000 and the company a penalty of $7.5 million. Neither admitted nor denied wrongdoing, as is customary in SEC settlement agreements.
The enforcement action against Morris is unsettled and has been filed in U.S. District Court in Houston, the SEC said.
"We think it's unfortunate the commission chose to file suit against Mr. Morris on a matter concerning events which occurred a number of years ago ... Mr. Morris intends to defend himself vigorously," said Tim McCormick, Morris' lawyer.
Halliburton said in a statement it is adjusting its second-quarter results to account for the settlement. It said there will be no restatement of prior financial disclosures.
Its stock price was up slightly at $31.38 per share on the New York Stock Exchange in light trading volume.
"We are pleased to bring closure to this matter," said Halliburton Chairman Dave Lesar in a statement.
The company added that the size of the SEC penalty reflected "the SEC's view that there were lapses in the company's cooperation with the SEC staff."
The SEC launched an investigation of Halliburton in late May 2002. It said in its statement that it had reviewed 340,000 documents and sworn testimony from 23 people.
From 1993 to 1997, the SEC said, Halliburton explained in SEC filings that claims against customers for cost overruns on construction projects were not recognized as company income until the quarter in which they were resolved.
But in the second quarter of 1998, that practice changed and Halliburton began booking revenues based on "probable recoveries" of claims not yet resolved, the SEC said.
The change cut losses on several large construction projects, boosting Halliburton's reported profit, the SEC said. But over 18 months in 1998 and 1999, Halliburton failed to disclose this change, misleading investors, the agency said.
The company disclosed the change in March 2000.
"The SEC's action today emphasizes the importance of complete transparency in a company's financial disclosures," said Harold Degenhardt, SEC Fort Worth office administrator.
Morris and Muchmore were responsible for the failure to disclose the change and helped prepare and review Halliburton statements to investors over the period, the SEC alleged.
But McCormick, the lawyer for Morris, said: "We believe the commission is using a rather novel theory of disclosure, which is not supported by the precedent of the time.
He said the SEC "has acknowledged that Halliburton complied with Generally Accepted Accounting Principles. As history will confirm, there were no investors who were misled. There was no investor loss."
--------
Lockheed Wins Contract for New Spy Plane
Job Could Be Worth As Much as $6 Billion
By Renae Merle
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, August 3, 2004; Page E01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A35484-2004Aug2.html
The Army awarded Lockheed Martin Corp. a contract yesterday that could be worth as much as $6 billion to develop spy planes that can detect enemy signals and track troop movements.
The unarmed plane, known as the Aerial Common Sensor, will fly 37,000 feet over the battlefield at 400 mph searching for enemy radio and radar signals. The new aircraft will replace two Army planes, Guardrail Common Sensor and Airborne Reconnaissance Low, and the Navy's EP-3E.
The initial contract to design and develop the plane is worth about $879 million, but the program is expected to generate billions more once production begins. The Army and Navy are expected to order 38 and 19 of the planes, respectively, Army spokesman Timothy Rider said. It is unclear when the first plane will enter operation.
The Army has outgrown the existing airplanes, said John E. Pike, director of Globalsecurity.org, a research organization. "This would provide some of the earliest warnings of a surprise attack," Pike said. "The bigger airplanes get more notice, but these are really the backbone of the Army's signal intelligence."
The program signifies a "whole generation leap forward," said Stanton D. Sloane, Lockheed's executive vice president for integrated systems and solutions. "It's going to do great things."
The contract is considered a significant win for Lockheed, the Pentagon's largest contractor, in part because it based its proposed design on a foreign regional jet from Brazilian-based Embraer, which analysts said could have put it at a disadvantage. Lockheed's competitor, Northrop Grumman Corp., used a Gulfstream from General Dynamics Corp. of Falls Church for its bid.
Anticipating questions about foreign involvement in the project, Embraer has said it would lease a 71,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in Jacksonville, Fla., and plans to hire up to 200 employees. Major sections of the planes, including the wings, will be built overseas in countries such as Brazil and Chile, but the final product will be assembled in the United States, company officials have said. The jet program is Embraer's first Pentagon contract.
"We're happy to be part of the Lockheed team and to be providing our products now for the U.S. government," said Doug Oliver, Embraer's spokesman.
--------
IBM to Build Army Supercomputer
By Bill Brubaker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, August 3, 2004; Page E05
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A35275-2004Aug2.html
The Army will announce today it has contracted with International Business Machines Corp. to build one of the world's fastest supercomputers to help develop more effective weapons systems.
The Defense Department will spend about $15 million on the supercomputer, which will be housed at the Army Research Laboratory's Major Shared Resource Center in Aberdeen, according to Dave Turek, an IBM vice president.
The supercomputer will perform at a peak speed of 10 teraflops, or 10 trillion mathematical operations per second, Turek said. A person with a calculator would need 8 million years to finish calculations the supercomputer can make in one second, he said.
Last week, the Navy selected IBM to build an even faster computer, at a cost estimated at less than $100 million, to produce weather forecasts for fleets at sea.
The Army's new supercomputer -- nicknamed "Stryker," after an armored Army combat vehicle -- will run on Linux, a free, "open source" operating system that is a rival to Microsoft Windows.
"These high-performing computing systems allow us to understand the physics behind" how weapons systems work, said Charles J. Nietubicz, director of the Army's research lab in Aberdeen.
For example, Nietubicz said, the Army may seek a lighter substitute for a 70-ton tank but "we can't make it more vulnerable."
"We can use composite materials, which may be stronger than steel in some cases. But how do we know it's going to work? Well, you use supercomputers to give the engineers and scientists a handle on whether it's even practical."
--------
Access to Contract Data Questioned
New Private Database on Procurement Worries Researchers
August 3, 2004
Washington Post
By Christopher Lee
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A35339-2004Aug2?language=printer
A new program that consolidates public information about federal contracts in the hands of a private company has some researchers worried that keeping tabs on government deals with corporations will be harder than ever.
Last year the General Services Administration turned over operation of the Federal Procurement Data System, a central database of information about federal contracts, to Global Computer Enterprises (GCE) of Reston.
The company, which could earn more than $24 million over seven years, will design and operate a new electronic data repository that GSA officials say will be more accurate, more timely and easier to search than the GSA-run system in place since 1979.
The database is an important tool for journalists and academics who use it to track the billions of tax dollars the government spends annually on deals with companies. Businesses turn to it to keep an eye on competitors.
The new system, scheduled to begin in October, represents "the most advantageous solution for the taxpayer," said David A. Drabkin, GSA deputy chief acquisition officer. "You'll be able to get more information, you'll be able to get it quickly, and you can rely on the accuracy of the information."
One big improvement is that fiscal 2004 contracting data should be available by December; last year's data were not ready until May, Drabkin said. The database also will contain fewer errors because information will be entered at the same time a contract is awarded or updated, rather than days or weeks later, he said.
In some cases, the information will come at a higher cost, Drabkin conceded. Although prices still are being negotiated, the contractor will almost certainly charge more than the government did for tailored searches, he said.
It is the predictions of higher cost and fears of reduced access that have made some regular users anxious. A few are already chafing at reports -- which Drabkin calls unfounded -- that a year's worth of contracting data, formerly available for less than $2,000, could cost tens of thousands of dollars.
"How much is this going to cost?" said Aron Pilhofer, database editor for the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit watchdog group. "We just don't know. . . . All I want is the raw data."
Under the new system, the raw contracting data will bypass GSA and go directly from each federal agency to GCE, Drabkin said. It will no longer be available publicly, although a formatted version can be bought from the contractor.
"I've seen reports that somebody claims that it's going to cost them $35,000," Drabkin said. "That's crap. . . . I don't know what we'll ultimately negotiate, but it's a tenth of that or less."
Ray Muslimani, president of GCE, said the firm makes its money designing computer systems, not selling data. "The costs will be very similar to the costs that were charged in the past," he said.
Drabkin said fees will be based on costs of producing the information and the contractor will not share the revenue with the GSA.
Stan Z. Soloway, president of the Professional Services Council, a contractors association, said businesses will not object to paying more as long as they get better information.
Forty types of reports, including compilations of contracts awarded to small or minority-owned businesses, will continue to be free, Drabkin said. Federal agencies and members of Congress can search the entire database at no charge.
Still, some government contracting experts say the GSA effectively has exempted the centralized data from the Freedom of Information Act by allowing a private contractor to control it. Gathering the data through FOIA requests to each federal agency is impractical, they say.
"It seems to me to be wrongheaded for the government to intentionally take data that they have been generating and give it to a contractor for the purposes of not disclosing it," said Steven L. Schooner, a professor at George Washington University Law School. "That sounds like they are hiding it."
Angela B. Styles, a former Office of Management and Budget official who oversaw federal procurement policy, said the new system may not conform to federal law that says, in part, that the contracting information "shall be transmitted to the General Services Administration."
Drabkin said Styles was misreading the statute. In any case, she approved the new system when she was still at the OMB, he said.
"Right now people are talking about something they haven't seen yet," he said. "This is an elegant solution and once we field it, people are going to be thrilled, not disgusted and not angry."
-------- colombia
Haven Offered to 2 Militias in Colombia, if They Disarm
August 3, 2004
By JUAN FORERO
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/03/international/americas/03colo.html
BOGOTÁ, Colombia, Aug. 2 -- President Álvaro Uribe is prepared to cede a second safe haven to two paramilitary factions in southern Colombia as long as the groups declare an immediate cease-fire and begin disarming, his office announced today.
The offer came six days after three top paramilitary commanders, who are involved in fragile talks with the government in a northern haven created in May, vowed in an extraordinary visit to Colombia's Congress that they would never go to jail as part of negotiations.
Mr. Uribe, whose two-pronged strategy for pacifying the country calls for co-opting right-wing death squads and battling Marxist rebels, called on two rival factions to end a bloody, internecine conflict over cocaine or face an end to troubled talks with his government.
As an incentive, the government is prepared to create a second haven and possibly a third, so that the two groups have a secure zone to disarm and hold talks, said Martha Martínez, a spokeswoman for Mr. Uribe's peace commissioner, Luis Carlos Restrepo.
The government's announcement drew admonishment from some political analysts, who say the peace talks are deeply troubled because the government cedes ground but has not pushed the paramilitaries to stop their violence or admit to their crimes.
"This process is in a crisis of credibility," said Daniel García-Peña, a former peace commissioner here. "The president has time to rescue the process if the conditions are well established and they make them comply. But the government has hard rhetoric one day, and they make concessions the next."
One of the groups, the Centauros Bloc, led by Miguel Arroyave, has had a role in peace talks now being held in Santa Fe de Ralito in northern Colombia, where 10 commanders from the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia are discussing demobilizing if the government extends leniency for mass murders and drug trafficking. The second group, the Peasant Self-Defense Forces of Casanare, led by Martin Llanos, has embarked on its own talks with the government.
"We're talking about two more zones or that the Centauros group will concentrate in Santa Fe de Ralito," said Ms. Martínez. "It is a given there will be at least a zone for Llanos."
On Friday, Mr. Llanos met with Mr. Restrepo, the peace commissioner, and told him that a zone was needed for talks to take place. In their visit to Congress last Wednesday, Salvatore Mancuso, a leading commander, also called for more safe havens around Colombia, where paramilitary commanders and troops would be shielded from arrest and extradition to the United States on drug-trafficking charges while they negotiate.
Mr. Uribe is clearly open to creating the zones to further talks, but under the condition that paramilitary groups cease hostilities. Though informal talks with various factions have been going on all year, the groups have not stopped assassinating labor leaders and human rights workers, killing peasants and trafficking in cocaine.
In the government's statement today, Mr. Uribe directed his ire at Mr. Llanos and Mr. Arroyave, saying, "If these conditions are not met in the coming days, the national government will end the peace process with these two groups."
The paramilitaries were started more than 20 years ago by rogue military officers, landowners and drug traffickers to erode support for leftist rebels by killing their supporters and taking back territory. They quickly morphed into drug-running outfits, and several paramilitary commanders are now wanted in the United States on drug-trafficking charges.
Mónica Trujillo contributed reporting for this article.
-------- iraq
Church Bombings Outrage Iraqis of All Faiths
Neighbors Express a Sense of Collective Injury
By Pamela Constable
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, August 3, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A35361-2004Aug2.html
BAGHDAD, Aug. 2 -- Two teenage sisters picked disconsolately through the wreckage of their bedroom Monday: Barbie dolls, movie magazines and a jumble of lingerie half-buried in the dust and debris from a car bomb that had exploded in the street below their window Sunday evening.
"What am I going to wear now?" wailed Rana, 16, lifting a ruined blouse from her bed and letting it drop.
In the parlor downstairs, the girls' father, Majid Shammari, shook his head in anger. It was not the damage to his stately home that outraged him, said the graying Muslim engineer. It was the terrorists' cynical targeting of the Assyrian church next door, a community he said he had always been proud to know as a neighbor and friend.
"From the time of my birth, there has never been a question of whether you are Christian or Muslim," Shammari said, sweeping up shards of glass from a shattered fish tank. "We rent our upstairs to a Christian family, we share food with each other. The bonds between all of us are very strong. What cowards are these terrorists to hurt the innocent, to try and break those bonds? If that is their aim, I swear they will never, never succeed."
Shammari's determination was echoed by other residents who live near Lady of Salvation Church in Baghdad's Karrada district. It was one of four Baghdad churches attacked in coordinated car bombings Sunday, including an Armenian church a few blocks away. A fifth church was bombed in the northern city of Mosul. U.S. military officials said at least 11 people were killed and 47 wounded.
The neighborhood is home to a diverse mix of Christian Arabs and Muslim Kurds, and Shiite and Sunni Muslims. Many have lived for years near the sand-colored stone church, built in 1961, that rises to a soaring double arch around an abstract cross. Above the wooden doors, an Arabic inscription reads, "Glory to God in heaven, and on Earth, peace."
A day after the bombing, neighbors of all faiths came out to inspect the tableau of charred vehicles, dangling power cables and sprays of broken glass surrounding a deep crater in the road between the church and Shammari's house. Many people peered through the locked church gates, and some paused to say a prayer.
Although the bomb was clearly aimed at the church and its congregation, a dozen houses and apartments nearby were damaged in the blast, and Muslims at home or in the street were wounded by the same shrapnel and flying glass that bloodied the fleeing worshipers, adding to a sense of collective victimization.
"We helped protect this church from looters during the war. It is a house of God, just like a mosque," said Khadima Wadi, 54, a Shiite woman who lives with nine relatives in a one-room house behind the church. The blast broke all the windows in her house and blew off part of the roof.
"We slaughtered a sheep to the Virgin Mary and prayed for our sons to be safe during the war," Wadi said. "Now we ask her to take revenge on these criminals."
Christians in the neighborhood emphasized that they had never felt any threat from Iraqi Muslims, and that the atmosphere in the community had been peaceful until Sunday's attacks. Some made a point of visiting their Muslim neighbors whose houses had been damaged, and the Rev. Rafael Kotaimi, the priest at Lady of Salvation, paid a personal call on the Shammari house.
Maryam and Sarah, two sisters who live across the street from Lady of Salvation and did not want to give their surname, were attending evening Mass when the bomb exploded outside. Within seconds, they said, the crowded sanctuary became a black, smoke-filled pit, filled with panicked screams and showered with deadly window glass.
"We've been going to that church for 17 years and nothing ever happened. After all, our religion is from ancient times in Babylon," said Sarah, sitting with her parents in an immaculate parlor with a small crucifix by the front door. "But now we are living in fear. We just want to live in peace with our neighbors, but now the terror has touched everything, even churches."
Despite most residents' insistence that the bombings would not drive a wedge between Muslims and Christians, there was an edgy, bitter tone to some of their comments. Several also cast blame on the U.S.-led forces who have occupied the country for months, saying they had permitted chaos and lawlessness to flourish.
Outside the church, Fadi, 26, a young engineer, stood staring at a wrecked car that had melted into the pavement. Then he looked up angrily.
"Before the Americans came, everything was fine," he said. "We all celebrated Easter and Christmas and Eid," a Muslim holiday. "We were out in the streets until midnight. Now there is no army, no police, no security on the borders. They say they brought us freedom, but look what this freedom has brought us."
A block away, at the Shammari home, a stream of sober-faced well-wishers picked their way among bloodstained rubble strewn across the front yard. A few feet beyond the collapsed wall, American soldiers impassively guarded the bomb site.
The engineer greeted each visitor gratefully, repeating the story of how he had heard the first bomb explode at the Armenian church and was rushing down the street to help when the second bomb went off next to his home.
His wife hung back in the shadows, her eyes red and her shirt still bloodstained from carrying a wounded child out of the church. The couple's two daughters came downstairs, dazed and dirt-streaked. They were lugging a plastic sack full of stuffed animals and singed clothing salvaged from their room.
"I guess we'll have to tear down the house and build another one," the father said matter-of-factly, gesturing at the devastation around him. The teenagers glanced at each other and burst into tears.
--------
Turkish Hostage Executed As Iraqis Condemn Violence
U.S. Troops Battle Radical Cleric's Militia in Najaf
By Jackie Spinner and Karl Vick
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, August 3, 2004; Page A10
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A35362-2004Aug2?language=printer
BAGHDAD, Aug. 2 -- A kidnapped Turkish truck driver was executed Monday by his captors, while Muslim clerics and Christian leaders condemned the deadly church bombings in their shared homeland the night before.
Religious leaders vowed to stand together to fight the violence that has raked Iraq since the U.S. invasion 15 months ago. But the execution of the hostage, along with new clashes in the Shiite holy city of Najaf between U.S. Marines and the militia of Moqtada Sadr, a firebrand cleric, highlighted the difficulties in restoring stability to Iraq.
Witnesses in Najaf said the Marines battled members of Sadr's Mahdi Army after attempting to approach the house of Sadr, whose followers waged a violent uprising against the U.S.-led occupation in April and May until a fragile truce was negotiated.
Marines surrounded Sadr's house with 10 Humvees and three tanks at 5:30 p.m., witnesses said. A gun battle broke out, they said, in which one woman was killed, and six militiamen and seven civilians, including children, were wounded.
Meanwhile, a video posted on the Internet showed the killing of Murat Yuce, the first Turk among the more than 70 foreigners abducted since spring to be executed. In the video, three men dressed in black, with their faces covered by white-and-red checkered scarves, stood behind a hostage, whose eyes were covered with a dark blue cloth. The man in the middle of the trio of captors twice shouted, "Allahu akbar!" or "God is great," then shot the hostage once in the head with a pistol. The man crumpled to the floor. Then the shooter repeated, "Allahu akbar!" and shot the hostage two more times in the head.
The captors, who call themselves the Monotheism and Jihad Group, said on Monday that they would release a Somali truck driver whose Kuwaiti employers agreed to stop operating in Iraq, according to al-Jazeera, the Arab satellite television network. The group has asserted responsibility for the beheadings of American businessman Nicholas Berg, South Korean translator Kim Sun Il and Bulgarian truck driver Georgi Lazov.
Edited footage of Yuce's killing was broadcast repeatedly on Turkish news channels on Monday. Within moments of the news of his death, the association representing Turkey's trucking industry announced it was halting deliveries to the U.S. military and other American clients in Iraq. Cahit Soysal, who heads the International Transportation Association, said the suspension would affect 200 to 300 trucks daily.
Turkish trucking is crucial to Iraq's fragile economy. More than 2,000 commercial vehicles a day enter the country from Turkey's Habur gate on Iraq's northern border, the vast majority of them importing goods that represented $800 million in trade during the first six months of this year, according to Ercument Aksoy, chairman of the Turkish-Iraqi Business Council.
Only convoys delivering goods to U.S. bases -- or gasoline and liquid propane to the Iraqi Oil Ministry -- are given military escorts from the border. The escorts take the form of two U.S. Humvees, one at the front of the convoy and another bringing up the rear, and are provided only to inbound shipments. Aksoy, who heads a company doing business in Iraq, said Yuce apparently was captured while returning to Turkey after leaving a U.S. base.
The only Muslim member of NATO, Turkey allows U.S. military flights through bases in its southeast and last year offered to supply troops to the U.S.-led force in Iraq. But only 9 percent of the Turkish population favors Turkey cooperating with the United States in Iraq, according to a July public opinion survey by Middle Eastern Technical University in Ankara, the capital. In fact, the poll found that 42 percent of those responding to the poll supported attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq.
"Nobody can predict what is going to happen in Iraq," Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul said Monday after Yuce's execution. "I hope that we can rescue the remaining Turkish hostages."
In Iraq, religious and government leaders condemned the bombings of five crowded churches on Sunday night, the first significant attacks against the country's Christian minority in recent memory. The bomb blasts outside four churches in Baghdad and one in the northern city of Mosul killed at least 11 people and wounded 47, according to the U.S. military.
Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, Iraq's most influential Shiite Muslim cleric, called the attacks "terrible crimes." In a statement, Sistani said the bombings "target the unity, stability and independence of Iraq."
"We think it's very important for our people to unite and cooperate among themselves, government and people, to stop the attacks on Iraqis and defeat the attackers," he said. "We stress the necessity of respecting the rights of Christian citizens as well as other minorities, including their right to live in peace in their country."
Iraq's interim government pledged money to help repair the churches, said Georges Sada, spokesman for the interim prime minister, Ayad Allawi. Sada said that Deputy Prime Minister Barham Salih had met with leaders of the Christian denominations on Monday and "expressed his deep condemnation" of the "terrorist incidents."
Iraq's interim president, Ghazi Yawar, also protested attacks against "any holy site, of any religion." In a statement, he said such acts showed "disrespect to the religious doctrine, and it is against all religions' traditions, especially Islam."
On a trash-strewn street off a main commercial thoroughfare in downtown Baghdad, Muslim neighbors of a Catholic convent tried to make sense of the blasts on Sunday night.
The women of the St. Anne Church for Nuns and Orphans have lived on the unmarked street since 1927, quietly worshiping in their small chapel and caring for orphans and elderly priests.
A sign near their sky-blue tin gate warns that visitors are not accepted after 8 p.m. The gate opens into a lush, green garden with a towering cross. Patio umbrellas advertising Pilsner beer provide shade for carefully tended plants.
Ekhlish Mansoor, 35, a nun, said the blasts did not deter her from going shopping Sunday night. "I don't feel afraid, because I have faith in God," said Mansoor, who ran away to a convent in her home town of Mosul when she was 10. "Life cannot be stopped."
Pauline Jimaa, 72, the mother superior at the convent, said she had been praying that God would bless the insurgents who attacked the churches. She said she wanted the bombers "to repent what they did" and God to "help them know their religion."
"It seems they don't follow their religion, because any religion doesn't accept what happened yesterday," Jimaa said.
Jimaa said six or seven families from the neighborhood came to offer support after the bombings. "They told me they will protect us, and they will be human shields to our building," she said.
Vick reported from Istanbul. Special correspondents Saad Sarhan in Najaf and Omar Fekeiki in Baghdad contributed to this report.
--------
Car Bomb Kills 6 Iraqis as New Round of Violence Breaks Out
August 3, 2004
By IAN FISHER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/03/international/middleeast/03CND-IRAQ.html?hp
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Aug. 3 - A car bomb exploded today in the restive city of Baquba, killing at least three Iraqi national guardsmen, and the American military reported the battle deaths of four American service members during the previous 24 hours.
The car bomb exploded about 2:30 p.m. at a checkpoint in Baquba, about 45 miles north of Baghdad and the site of frequent insurgent attacks in recent months. Last week, a powerful car bomb there killed 70 people, many of them prospective recruits lining up outside a police station there.
The American military said in a statement that three Iraqi guardsmen had died in Baquba bombing, though the Iraqi Health Ministry reported four dead and six more injured. Other reports put the death toll as high as six.
The American deaths resulted from two incidents on Monday, the military said today. One marine was killed in western Anbar Province, the center of the violent insurgency in Iraq, "while conducting security and stability operations," a statement said. A second marine died later of wounds suffered in the same incident, which was not discussed in any detail in the statement.
At 11 p.m. on Monday, two American soldiers were killed in Baghdad when their convoy was hit by a roadside bomb - the biggest killer of American soldiers in Iraq.
Insurgents also attacked two Iraqi officials in what has been regular spate of attacks on the new government here.
In Baghdad this morning, a roadside bomb killed a police chief, Col. Mouyad Mohammed Bashar, and wounded three bodyguards in the upscale neighborhood of Mansour. In the northern city of Mosul, kidnappers abducted the sister of city's police chief, Mohammad al-Barhawi. He said he would step down if the kidnappers released her unharmed.
On the diplomatic front, the new interim prime minister of Iraq, Ayad Allawi, returned from a 10-day trip around the Middle East intended to restore diplomatic ties and seek help in stopping foreign fighters from entering Iraq. He said that he sought not to blame neighboring countries like Syria and Iraq, the main routes for foreign terrorists into Iraq, but asked for - and received - pledges of greater cooperation and information sharing on possible militants.
"We were trying to make our neighboring countries understand this, that we are not targeting them," he said at a news conference after arriving home. "It is just there are bad forces and they need to help us get rid of this issue. They need to give us more information on terrorists who are citizens of their countries."
Stops on Mr. Allawi's tour included its neighbors, Jordan, Syria and Saudi Arabia, as well Egypt and Bahrain.
At the news conference, Mr. Allawi deflected a question suggesting that the pace of change since his government took over on June 28 had been too slow, amid a recent surge of kidnappings and deadly car bombings.
He noted that he had only been in office for a month, and that the challenges after 35 years of dictatorship, including a devastated infrastructure, government and army, were enormous.
"Of course, you would expect a slow improvement," he said. "We are rebuilding."
"Iraqis need to regain their confidence and take control and initiative themselves," he added. "The faster we do that, the faster we will be able to get back on our feet."
-------- israel / palestine
Secular Party Bends to Help Sharon
Associated Press Writer
By LAURIE COPANS
August 3, 2004
http://ap.washingtontimes.com/dynamic/stories/I/ISRAEL_PALESTINIANS?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
JERUSALEM (AP) -- Prime Minister Ariel Sharon moved closer to solid Cabinet support for his Gaza pullout plan on Tuesday when a secular party dropped its longtime opposition to bringing in an ultra-Orthodox Jewish faction to boost his shaky ruling coalition.
In the Gaza Strip, a roadside bomb planted by Palestinian militants and meant for an Israeli bulldozer operating in the Rafah refugee camp took three Palestinian lives instead.
Also, in a video that seemed modeled on taped warnings issued by the al-Qaida terrorist network, the violent Islamic Hamas threatened to bombard an Israeli town with rockets.
Sharon lost his parliamentary majority over his plan to pull all Israeli settlers and soldiers out of Gaza and remove four small West Bank enclaves, a stark turnaround for a politician who spent decades boosting expansion of Jewish settlements.
Several Cabinet ministers from his own Likud Party also oppose the Gaza plan, further endangering his hold on power.
Trying to prop up his government, Sharon has been negotiating with the moderate opposition Labor Party and the small ultra-Orthodox United Torah Judaism faction.
That created problems for Shinui, Sharon's main current partner. Shinui ran on a platform of opposing the ultra-Orthodox factions, pledging to keep them out of the Cabinet.
Shinui more than doubled its strength in the 2001 elections on a one-issue platform of reducing special privileges enjoyed by ultra-Orthodox Jews, such as exemption from military service and extra state funding for schools and seminaries.
Now Shinui has softened its stand, saying it's prepared to serve with UTJ under certain conditions, as long as Labor is brought in to the coalition and the larger ultra-Orthodox party, Shas, is left out.
However, Israeli media reported that Sharon rejected Shinui's conditions. Negotiations are expected to continue.
Shinui's change made it a target for Israeli pundits. "They folded," screamed a huge front page headline in the Yediot Ahronot daily. "Lapid's lost virginity" was the title of a commentary in the Haaretz daily, referring to Shinui leader Joseph Lapid.
"There are times in life when you must understand the requirements of the moment," said Lapid, explaining his reversal.
United Torah Judaism officials said they were not opposed to joining a coalition with Shinui, but their final agreement was not guaranteed.
An alliance of Likud, Labor, Shinui and United Torah Judaism would have the support of 79 seats in the 120-member parliament - reducing the leverage of the Likud rebels.
Labor negotiators say they are close to agreement with Likud over the Gaza pullout plan, but gaps remain over domestic issues. A Likud-Shinui-UTJ or Likud-Labor-UTJ team would command a small majority but would be vulnerable to defections by Likud rebels.
In the Rafah camp, meanwhile, Palestinian militants tried to blow up an armored Israeli bulldozer with a roadside bomb, but the device sent shrapnel flying hundreds of yards and killed three Palestinians instead. At least 10 other people were wounded. No Israelis were hurt.
The dead included two members of Hamas and one from the Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, butwitnesses said they were not among the militants who planted the bomb.
The Israeli army was operating in the area near the Egyptian border to uncover tunnels used to smuggle arms into the Gaza Strip.
Associated Press Television News footage showed masked militants putting a detonator in an alley near the road moments before the explosion.
The bomb was one of at least four directed overnight against Israeli troops in the area, known as a flashpoint in the nearly four years of Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the army said.
The Hamas video, aired Tuesday on the al-Arabiya satellite TV channel, showed three masked men surrounded by weapons. One of the men read a statement threatening to rain rockets from the Gaza Strip on the Israeli town of Sderot.
"We have decided to send you Qassam rockets to every place you think is safe," said the man. "We will launch rockets from among your tanks and your soldiers and in front of your planes. We have prepared for you rockets that can reach wherever we want."
Many residents have left Sderot in recent weeks, and residents say they live in constant fear of attacks. The highly inaccurate rockets have caused deaths on one occasion - killing two people in June - and a rocket scored a direct hit on a house Monday.
--------
3 Palestinians Are Killed in Gaza Explosion
August 3, 2004
By GREG MYRE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/03/international/middleeast/02CND-MIDE.html
JERUSALEM, Aug. 3 - Three Palestinians were killed and more than a dozen wounded today in a large explosion that was apparently set off by Palestinian militants in the southern Gaza Strip.
The blast occurred during early morning clashes between the militants and the Israeli military. Troops entered the Rafah refugee camp in armored vehicles as part of a search for tunnels used to smuggle weapons.
The Israelis and the militants exchanged fire, but the military said it had nothing to do with the explosion.
Video footage taken by Associated Press Television News showed a group of Palestinians placing a detonator in an alley. A few minutes later, the powerful blast occurred on a nearby road in the crowded neighborhood. The target appeared to be an armored Israeli bulldozer, but all the casualties were Palestinian.
All three of the Palestinians killed were young men, while the injured included several children, according to workers at Rafah's hospital.
The Israelis destroyed at least 10 houses in the refugee camp, according to Palestinian witnesses and security officials. The military said it demolished buildings that had been used as cover by militants firing on soldiers.
The military said it had not found any tunnels and that the operation was ongoing as of Tuesday evening. Palestinians use the tunnels to bring weapons from neighboring Egypt, the military says.
In another development, Hamas took the unusual step of issuing a videotape saying it would step up rocket attacks on the Israeli town of Sederot if the Israeli military did not withdraw from the northern Gaza town of Beit Hanun.
"Residents of Sederot, stop your army's crimes and get it out of Beit Hanun, or else you will be the ones paying the price," a masked gunman said in the video shown on Al-Arabiya, the pan-Arab satellite channel.
The Israeli troops entered Beit Hanun at the end of June, after rockets killed two Israelis in Sederot, a town just outside Gaza's perimeter fence.
Despite the Israeli incursion, the militants have managed to fire about 40 Qassam rockets over the past month. Palestinians have unleashed more than 300 Qassam rockets in recent years, but they are inaccurate and rarely cause serious damage or casualties.
Palestinian factions previously issued videotapes made by suicide bombers shortly before they carried out their attacks. But the factions halted the practice when Israel stepped up its retaliatory measures, including tearing down the houses of the bombers.
Today's broadcast was believed to be the first time that Hamas has issued a video warning of future attacks. Hamas has carried out dozens of suicide bombings against Israel and is responsible for most of the rocket fire.
Meanwhile, Jordan's King Abdullah II criticized the Palestinian leadership for what he described as changing demands, and he urged the Palestinians to carry out reforms.
"We want the Palestinian leadership to declare clearly what it wants and not surprise us every now and then with some decisions or by accepting things that it did not accept before," the king said on Al-Arabiya.
The Palestinian prime minister, Ahmed Qurei, said the statement by the king "concerns us greatly" and that a Palestinian delegation would be dispatched to Jordan to discuss it further.
--------
3 Palestinians Who Spied for Israel Are Killed in Gaza
August 3, 2004
By GREG MYRE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/03/international/middleeast/03mide.html?pagewanted=all
JERUSALEM, Aug. 2 - Three Palestinians convicted of collaborating with Israel were killed Monday by fellow Palestinians in attacks that began in their prison cell and concluded in a hospital's intensive care ward, Palestinian officials said.
The first one died after a Palestinian policeman threw a pair of grenades into a Gaza City prison cell filled with Palestinians imprisoned for spying for Israel. Two other prisoners wounded in that attack were later killed by masked gunmen who stormed into the hospital where they had been taken for treatment.
During the past four years of violence, Palestinian militants have killed dozens of fellow Palestinians suspected of working as Israeli informants. But the attacks on Monday were particularly brazen and reflected the growing lawlessness in Palestinian areas.
"There was chaos when the shooting began," said Jomah al-Saka, a spokesman for Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. "The patients were scared, and the hospital stopped functioning."
In the Israeli-Palestinian fighting, Palestinian casualties in the Gaza City area are usually brought to Shifa Hospital, and the emergency room is often a scene of bedlam. Militants lugging automatic rifles walk across the bloodstained floors searching for wounded comrades.
But Monday saw the first shooting inside the hospital, Mr. Saka said.
The attacks began when a policeman who works at the Gaza Central Jail tossed two grenades into a cell holding Palestinians convicted of spying for Israel's security services, Palestinian security officials said.
Seven prisoners were wounded. One of them, Musa Awda, died shortly afterward at Shifa Hospital.
A little later, several masked gunmen entered the hospital and shot another wounded prisoner, Mahmoud al-Sharif, in his bed. Mr. Sharif had been convicted by a Palestinian court of assisting Israel in the killing in 1995 of his cousin, Mahmoud al-Khawaja, a leading figure in the Islamic Jihad faction.
Mr. Sharif was raised in Mr. Khawaja's family, and relatives praised the vigilante killing on Monday.
"I am happy from the bottom of my heart that revenge has been taken for my son," said Naemah Khawaja, 60, Mr. Khawaja's mother.
Hours later in the same hospital, a second wounded prisoner, Walid Hamdiya, was shot to death in the intensive care ward, according to hospital officials. He had been convicted of helping Israel kill several senior figures in the Hamas faction during the 1990's. The Palestinians regarded Mr. Hamdiya as one of the most important captured Israeli spies.
The Islamic militant group Hamas claimed responsibility for the hospital shootings in a statement to Reuters. The Palestinian authorities did not announce any arrests related to the violence.
Palestinian leaders have been calling for an end to the recent surge in internal Palestinian fighting, though they did not comment on the deaths of the collaborators. Much of the recent unrest has involved Palestinian militants attacking Palestinian security forces and calling for an end to corruption.
"We will not allow anyone, whoever they are, to attack our security forces," the Palestinian prime minister, Ahmed Qurei, said Monday after a cabinet meeting in the West Bank city of Ramallah.
Elsewhere in Gaza, Israeli troops shot and killed three Palestinians who were armed with rifles and explosives and were approaching the Jewish settlement of Alei Sinai on the northern edge of the territory. One of the men belonged to Islamic Jihad, and the two others were part of Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades, according to an Islamic Jihad statement.
In addition, Palestinian security officials said a 45-year-old woman, Nema Abu Sahloul, was fatally shot in the chest during a nighttime Israeli military incursion on the edge of Khan Yunis, in southern Gaza.
Israel's military said troops had torn down several buildings that Palestinians had used for cover when firing on Israeli soldiers and settlers. The military said it was not aware of any Palestinian casualties.
In a separate development, Israel's Defense Ministry said plans had been approved to build 600 homes in the largest Jewish settlement, Maale Adumim, which is in the West Bank, just east of Jerusalem.
The stalled Middle East peace plan, known as the road map, calls on Israel to freeze settlement activity. In Washington, a State Department spokesman, Adam Ereli, said that Israel "has made a commitment'' to adhere to the plan and that the United States expected the Israeli government to live up to that commitment, including "not expanding settlements.'' But the Israeli government says it interprets the provision to mean that it can continue building in existing settlements.
Taghreed ElKhodary contributed reporting from Gaza for this article.
--------
Israelis Wonder if Corruption Is Soiling the Zionist Dream
August 3, 2004
By JOSEPH BERGER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/03/international/middleeast/03corrupt.html?pagewanted=all
JERUSALEM, Aug. 1 - The never-ending Palestinian conflict dominates the news in Israel, but the other big story has long been corruption among the country's politicians, and many experts think the two stories may not be unrelated.
The front pages of Israel's papers have been bristling with the so-called Paritzky affair, in which Joseph Paritzky, the minister for infrastructure, was heard on tape plotting with a private detective on how he might defame a rival in the Shinui Party, part of the governing coalition. The intrigue attracted more than passing interest because Mr. Paritzky, who has since resigned, had been in charge of picking the winner in a fierce battle over a $2.5 billion contract to tap natural gas in waters off the Gaza Strip.
The Paritzky scandal seemed to sneak up just as the book was closing on a bribery investigation of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. The inquiry showed that Mr. Sharon's son Gilad had been paid $700,000 from an Israeli developer to help promote the building of a Greek island gambling resort despite a lack of "professional skills.'' The attorney general said there was insufficient evidence to indict Mr. Sharon or his son.
In recent weeks, too, the public has been grappling with a "Sopranos"-style killing of a Tel Aviv judge. Even though investigators are looking at personal and judicial motives rather than corruption, the country's first killing of a judge seemed to be one more indication, to use Daniel Patrick Moynihan's expression, that national deviancy keeps being "defined down."
The long chain of scandal - four of the last five prime ministers have been tainted - produces chronic soul-searching here. The Jerusalem Post published a recent examination of Israel's history of scandals under the headline "The Decline of Shame." Such articles have struck a nerve here, even among those who believe that the press blows these scandals out of proportion.
The media attention to the issue was buttressed last year when Israel finished 21st on an annual survey of perceptions of corruption maintained by Transparency International, based in Berlin.
"A normal corrupt state is not something that the whole idea of Zionism was about," said Itzhak Galnoor, a political science professor at Hebrew University who, during the early 1990's, ran the Israeli civil service. "Zionism was about a shelter for Jews, but it was also about a place where we could build something better than other places. And now, I'm sorry to say, we're struggling to keep our standards on the same level."
Still, many people think corruption here is no worse than in other developed countries and no greater than it has been historically. Sharon Shenhav, a women's rights lawyer who lived in Washington during the Watergate scandal and now lives near Jerusalem, said, "To assume that the early Zionist movement had no corruption is naïve."
Nevertheless, some political scientists who study the matter say corruption appears indeed to have spread, partly because the Israeli legal system and press no longer tolerate behavior they once considered acceptable, and partly because of trends that would be familiar to Americans. Big money has played an increasing role in political campaigning as Israeli candidates are chosen not in smoke-filled rooms but by more democratic - and expensive - party primaries requiring mailings and television advertisements. Yaron Ezrahi, a political scientist at Hebrew University, said, "The paradox is that what in the textbooks appears as democratization of the Israeli party system" has put such financial pressure on candidates "that it has encouraged them to engage in much larger-scale briberies."
As a once socialized state turns toward privatization, opportunities for corruption are rife in the contracts and licenses officials increasingly hand out.
Some of the country's intellectuals also believe that the nation's moral compass has been thrown off kilter by 37 years of problems with the Palestinians, who now number 3.5 million. The occupation has damaged the occupier as well as the occupied, they say. Mr. Ezrahi condemns a succession of governments for funneling money to Jewish settlements through incongruous channels, like the Tourism Ministry, "as if the settlements were a tourist attraction." Professor Galnoor and others argue that the moral ambiguity of the occupation has created a national cynicism that plays itself out in morally tainted private dealings.
Israelis are not panicking. "This is not Latin America yet," said Dr. Eran Lerman, who runs the Israeli office of the American Jewish Committee. "We have very aggressive media, and the courts are still incorruptible."
Still, Professor Galnoor, citing the Sharon affair, thinks "something very disturbing has happened to our political culture."
"A political culture is all those unwritten things you don't do," he said. "Why? Because you are ashamed to do it. As a politician you are ashamed to have your son take money from somebody you have political or business connections with."
"I'm one of those," Professor Galnoor added, "who says Israeli democracy is facing its greatest danger ever, and the danger is from within rather than from without."
-------- mideast
Islamic group warns Saudi Arabia not to send troops to Iraq
DUBAI (AFP)
Aug 03, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040803154913.csiyw1kk.html
A shadowy Islamic group warned Saudi Arabia Tuesday not to bend to "Crusader" requests for Arab and Muslim forces to be sent to Iraq to replace US-led forces in the troubled country.
"We are addressing this message to King Fahd bin Abdel Aziz and his Saudi government: do not obey the Crusaders by sending Arab and Muslim troops to Iraq, under your supervision," said a statement by the Islamic Tawhid Group posted at the website http://www.ansarnet.ws/vb. Tawhid means unification.
"If you do not respond favorably to our call, we swear by God that you will not know security as long as our brothers in Iraq and in Afghanistan do not know it," warned the previously unknown group.
"If you respond favorably to our appeal, your security will be ours. We pledge not to harm your security and your interests," said the text, signed by "the brigade of martyr Sheikh (Ahmad) Yassin," the Palestinian Islamic leader assassinated by Israeli forces earlier this year.
"We do not want bloodshed. We do not want discord between Muslims," although "if Muslim troops are sent to Iraq, we will not remain idle," it said.
"On the contrary, our response will be in every country, Arab or Islamic, which has sent soldiers to Iraq."
The statement also threatened to strike "foreign countries which have sent forces to Iraq" since the US-led invasion in April 2003 that ousted the Saddam Hussein regime.
"Expect hurricanes and storms by the mujahedeens," or holy fighters.
On Sunday, Arab League Secretary General Amr Mussa said that Arab and Muslim states did not at present want to send troops to Iraq.
He was speaking following talks with Saudi leaders who have proposed sending an Arab or Muslim force to replace the US-led troops in Iraq, at Baghdad's request and under the auspices of the United Nations.
Riyadh stressed on Sunday that any Muslim troops dispatched to Iraq would be sent to replace US-led multinational forces and not to supplement them -- as US officials had said earlier.
Earlier Tuesday, Jordanian King Abdullah II told Al-Arabiya satellite channel that Amman would consider sending troops to troubled Iraq if Baghdad made a request for an Arab force to replace the US-led multinational force.
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Egypt denies it told US general that Saddam Hussein had WMDs
AFP
August 3, 2000
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/040803/1/3m5t3.html
Egypt has strongly denied that President Hosni Mubarak told a top US general before the US-led war against Iraq in March 2003 that Baghdad had weapons of mass destruction.
General Tommy Franks, former commander of US Central Command, was reported as saying in an intervew that Mubarak was among Arab leaders who had told him Saddam Hussein had such weapons.
"This allegation is absolutely devoid of any truth," the semi-official al-Ahram daily quoted Egyptian presidential spokesman, Maged Abdul Fatah, as saying.
Franks reportedly made the comment to the US magazine, Parade, which appeared on Sunday and roughly coincided with the release of his new book, "American Soldier".
In the interview, Franks, 59, who commanded US forces during the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, and retired in July 2003, said that the biggest surprise for him was that they found no weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq, the "reason we went to war."
He added that multiple Middle Eastern leaders, including Jordan's King Abdullah and Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, told him that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
According to an extract from the Parade interview, Mubarak in January 2003, told Franks, "Saddam has WMD -- biologicals, actually -- and he will use them on your troops."
Abbul Fatah said Mubarak never made such an assertion.
The presidential spokesman said that during a meeting with the Egyptian leader, Franks asked Mubarak's assessment of reports about the existence of WMDs in Iraq, especially biological weapons, and if Mubarak thought Iraq would use them against US soldiers in the event of a military invasion.
"Mubarak's response was clear: Egypt is following all that is being said about this issue, but it cannot confirm that Iraq possess WMDs and it does not have any information about the possibility of Iraq using these weapons, if they exist, against US forces," Abdul Fatah quoted Mubarak as telling Franks.
-------- nato
Germany, UAE in joint project to help rebuild Iraqi army: press
BERLIN (AFP)
Aug 03, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040803165725.hhn2719a.html
Germany and the United Arab Emirates will work together to help train hundreds of soldiers in the new Iraqi army, the daily Die Welt said in an early release of its Wednesday edition.
The newspaper quoted a UAE foreign ministry spokesman as saying that Germany would send around 100 five-tonne trucks and personnel to the UAE so that the soldiers could train with the vehicles.
The spokesman, who was not named, said the agreement was reached last week during a visit to UAE by Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi.
The costs of the project are to be divided with Germany paying for the vehicles and trainers, while the UAE will meet the travel and accomodation costs of the Iraqi soldiers, Die Welt said.
A German government spokesman confirmed that talks had been taking place and that Berlin would probably make around 100 vehicles available for use by the Iraqi army, without providing further details.
Germany said at a NATO summit a month ago that it would not send troops to Iraq to help it rebuild its nascent and overburdened military, but it also said that it would not block any attempts by the Alliance to do so.
Under heavy pressure to play a role from the United States, whose troops are under daily attack in Iraq, Berlin had been expected to help train higher-ranking Iraqi officers on German soil.
Germany and the UAE began working together in March to train around 130 Iraqi police officers and the move, if confirmed, would mark an increase in their cooperation.
-------- pakistan / india
Pakistan Sweep Against Al Qaeda Widens
August 3, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Pakistan-al-Qaida.html
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (AP) -- Pakistan has arrested two ``high-level'' al-Qaida terrorists, one with a multimillion dollar U.S. bounty on his head, widening a sweep against al-Qaida's vast web of operatives that has netted at least six suspects, officials said Tuesday.
Among those detained in the past two days were a policeman accused of passing information to al-Qaida militants, a Syrian arrested at a bus stop, and a man carrying suspicious documents who was seized trying to fly out of the country.
Officials said the suspects are believed to be linked to a militant already in custody who provided crucial intelligence leading to the arrest of a top fugitive last week and to Washington's issuing a warning Sunday of terror threats to U.S. financial institutions.
Pakistan's interior minister said the arrest of the high-ranking targets in eastern Punjab province was a major break only days after intelligence agents caught Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, the Tanzanian sought by U.S. officials for the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in East Africa.
``In addition to Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, whose bounty was $25 million, we have captured another most-wanted suspect with a bounty on him running into the millions of dollars,'' Faisal Saleh Hayyat told reporters in the capital.
He said both men were of African origin but refused to identify them or their nationalities.
Four Egyptians and a Libyan on the FBI's list of 22 most-wanted terrorists are believed to be in Pakistan or Afghanistan. Each has a $5 million bounty on his head in connection with the embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, which killed more than 200 people, including 12 Americans. There are two Kenyans on the list, though they were not believed to be hiding in the region.
Osama bin Laden's No. 2, Ayman al-Zawahri, is from Egypt. He and the al-Qaida chief are believed to be hiding along the Pakistan-Afghan border, far from Punjab province.
The arrests have come with stunning swiftness since the capture in Karachi on July 13 of an al-Qaida computer expert identified as Mohammad Naeem Noor Khan, who was allegedly sending coded e-mails to other operatives. An intelligence official said Khan led authorities to Ghailani, who was captured after a 12-hour gunbattle in the eastern city of Gujrat.
Information Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed said Ghailani's home computers contained e-mails with instructions for attacks in the United States and Britain.
Intelligence gained from Khan's and other arrests was a major factor in U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge's decision to issue a warning Sunday about a possible al-Qaida attack on prominent financial institutions in New York, Washington and Newark, N.J.
Pakistani officials are also pointing to the arrest in June of Masrab Arochi, the nephew of former al-Qaida No. 3 Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, as providing useful intelligence. Arochi was arrested along with nine others in raids in Karachi.
An intelligence official in the capital, Islamabad, said Arochi led police to a network of other operatives and that several as yet undisclosed arrests have been made. He said Arochi has been made available to U.S. intelligence agents, though Pakistan has promised not to turn him over to the United States.
Meanwhile, the police chief who led the raid that caught Ghailani told The Associated Press he received several threatening calls in on his cell phone warning him not to take action against the al-Qaida suspect -- even as his men were storming the building.
``They said 'The people inside the house are serving Islam and any harm to them will be dangerous for you,''' Police Chief Raja Munawar Hussain said the caller warned. ``They were highly organized terrorists. They were so well informed that they remained in touch with their men (on the outside) during the raid.''
Hussain said police also arrested a Pakistani who acted as a front man for Ghailani, leasing a car and opening a bank account for him.
The announcement that two top terror operatives were in custody came within hours of news that at least six al-Qaida suspects have been arrested in separate raids:
--Two Pakistanis and a foreigner were arrested on a road near Lahore. Police found five grenades and two AK-47 rifles in their sports utility vehicle, a high-ranking intelligence official told AP.
--Mohammed Salman Eisa, alias Ibrahim, was captured at Lahore airport Monday night while boarding a flight to the United Arab Emirates, a senior intelligence official in the eastern city told AP. The official said Eisa was believed to be Nigerian, but it was not clear if he was one of the top suspects. There are no Nigerians on the FBI most-wanted list.
--Raja Waqar, a policeman assigned to the office of Punjab province's top politician, is suspected of passing al-Qaida linked groups information on the whereabouts of top government officials, Lahore police chief Tariq Salim Dogar told the AP.
``The previous record of the policeman shows that he has been involved in jihadi activities and had links with al-Qaida. We have initiated a probe to find out how he managed to get posted to such a sensitive place,'' Dogar said.
--Another suspect, arrested Sunday at a bus station in a town near Lahore, identified himself as Juma Ibrahim, a Syrian, said district police chief Aslam Ghauri. He said Ibrahim was turned over to Pakistan's spy agency.
It was not immediately clear if any of the six militants described by Pakistani officials included the two senior al-Qaida men that Hayyat said were wanted by the United States.
Munir Ahmad in Islamabad and Asif Shahzad in Lahore contributed to this report.
-------- spies
Paramilitary role for Pentagon meets resistance
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
By Rowan Scarborough
August 03, 2004
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20040802-111047-2365r.htm
The Bush administration is cool toward a September 11 commission recommendation to give more power to American special-operations forces, in addition to clout and money already delivered to covert warriors by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.
Modernizing U.S. Special Operations Command (SoCom) and giving it a license to hunt terrorists has been a hallmark of Mr. Rumsfeld's response to the attacks of September 11, 2001.
Now, the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States is urging the Bush administration to go even further. Among its recommendations is a policy shift that would put the Pentagon - and thus the Tampa, Fla.-based SoCom - in charge of all paramilitary operations, a task now primarily directed by the CIA.
"Lead responsibility for directing and executing paramilitary operations, whether clandestine or covert, should shift to the Defense Department," says the commission's 567-page report completed two weeks ago.
The commission justified its recommendation on grounds that the government needs a single agency to carry out secret military operations. "The United States cannot afford to build two separate capabilities for carrying out secret military operations, secretly operating standoff missiles, and secretly training foreign military or paramilitary forces," the commission said.
But Bush policy-makers are said to be cool at best toward the idea and are described as "hard-pressed to see the benefits." Officials say that SoCom and CIA offer "unique capabilities" - a signal that the two agencies should be allowed to do what they do best separately.
A Pentagon spokesman said the recommendation is still being studied.
The commission criticized the CIA for mounting unimpressive paramilitary operations that often relied on "proxies" who lacked military training. "Before 9-11, the CIA did not invest in developing a robust capability to conduct paramilitary operations with U.S. personnel," the report said. "The results were unsatisfactory."
Some authorities on special operations say the Pentagon and CIA should accept the recommendation. They say paramilitary operations - like those mounted against the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan using a mix of CIA officers, military troops and indigenous fighters - are a prime weapon against terrorist fighters.
"I think it's a great idea," said Robert Andrews, a former Army Green Beret and CIA officer. "In some cases, it's a good idea to put all your eggs in one basket and watch it like a hawk. There is no sense in dividing up responsibility for something as sensitive as this."
Added Mr. Andrews, a top special-operations policy-maker in the Pentagon before and after September 11: "You're facing enemies that are better organized. These are guys who don't mind dying for what they believe. With the rise of Islamic terrorists, you need a standing special-operations force that can do these things, instead of a pickup [team]. That kind of mission is a main mission for SoCom. It's a secondary mission for CIA."
The Washington Times has reported that as war plans were being drawn up and executed for Afghanistan in 2001 and 2002, planners discovered that the CIA's standing paramilitary army was depleted and aging. The Pentagon tried to overcome the shortfall by transferring special-operations forces, including Army Green Berets and Navy Seals, to the CIA.
During the Afghan war, CIA officers would team up with special-operations forces, including the elite Delta Force, to mount missions. Currently, CIA paramilitaries participate in joint military task forces that are hunting high-value terrorists targets, including Osama bin Laden.
"The history of CIA paramilitary operations has been very mixed because the CIA itself places varying degrees of emphasis on it," Mr. Andrews said. "They ignored it for a number of years. Then they picked it up. You can't run special paramilitary operations with a pickup team. You've got to be consistent. You've got to have a consistent doctrine. You've got to have an institutional memory."
In the commission's scenario, the CIA would continue organizing paramilitary units, but the final planning and execution would be directed from the Pentagon.
"Each agency would concentrate on its comparative advantages in building capabilities for joint missions," said the commission report. "The operation itself would be planned in common."
-------- un
Victor Bout's American Connection
August 3, 2004
The Center for Public Integrity
http://www.publicintegrity.org/bow/report.aspx?aid=159
Richard Ammar Chichakli is the nephew of a former president of Syria and a veteran of the U.S. Army, a family friend of the bin Ladens who hung out with a youthful Osama and ran a free-trade zone in the United Arab Emirates. According to the United Nations, Chichakli also served as the financial overseer of arms trader Victor Bout's far-flung network of air cargo operations.
Chichakli was born in Syria in 1959 to a politically prominent family. His father Mandour was once commander of the country's armed forces, and his uncle, Adib Shishakli, ruled the country for three years after seizing power in a military coup in 1951; he, in turn, was overthrown in a 1954 coup. Shishakli, who had served in the French army while Syria was under a French mandate, maintained a pro-Western orientation as the ruler of the country. He was so close to Miles Copeland, a long-time Central Intelligence Agency operative in the Middle East, that Copeland asked Adib Shishakli to become the godfather to one of his children. Following the 1954 coup, Shishakli fled to Brazil. Most of Richard Chichakli's family was driven out as well. In 1979, those relatives who did not leave Syria were imprisoned or killed in a massacre in Hama.
From 1979 to 1986, Chichakli lived most of the time in Saudi Arabia, first studying at Riyadh University, and later working for a variety of businesses. During his university days, he told the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists that he used to "sit around and eat sandwiches and sing songs" with Osama bin Laden and his siblings, back when "Osama was OK." He added that he probably knew about 40 bin Laden family members and that most of them were nice people.
In the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States, Chichakli claims he was contacted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation to assist bin Laden family members living in the United States. "FBI acted absolutely wonderfully," he said, then remarked of the bin Laden family that that's how it goes when one has friends in high places.
Richard Chichakli inthe military(www.txcpa.net)
Chichakli moved to Texas in 1986 and married; at some point obtaining U.S. citizenship. According his military service record and résumé, both of which were obtained by ICIJ, Chichakli served in the U.S. Army from 1990 to 1993, specializing in fields such as aviation, first aid, interrogation and intelligence. He also earned FAA certification as an air traffic controller with military control-tower rating. He took courses at the Defense Language Institute and the Army's academy for non-commissioned officers, in addition to receiving training in conventional and unconventional warfare. He left the military as a decorated veteran.
Chichakli claimed in an interview with ICIJ that his service to the United States was not limited to his three-year tour in the military. He said he spent some 18 years working in intelligence.
After his honorable discharge from the Army, Chichakli returned to the Gulf States, specifically the United Arab Emirates, and became the commercial manager of the free zone in Sharjah. From 1993 to 1996, he was responsible for much of the liaison and commercial activity at the airport where, according to the United Nations, most of Victor Bout's companies had their operations base.
Chichakli has held several senior positions in companies owned by Bout, U.N. documents say, including chief financial manager with responsibilities such as accounting, financial and reporting activities, and overall responsibility for the financial systems.
Chichakli downplayed his role. "I did provide some accounting advice here and there," he said. "Making companies public, prepare business plan etc. ... I helped him advance his cargo business." He also denied any involvement in the arms trade.
But he did say that Bout had taken part in at least one operation with a military purpose. After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, Chichakli told ICIJ, Bout organized three flights ferrying U.S. personnel to Afghanistan, but he refused to elaborate.
Richard Chichakli (www.txcpa.net)
Chichakli is the agent for several companies registered in Texas. San Air General Trading, which is run by associates of Bout, has Chichakli listed as president and director, while the two other names that appear on the registration form are Serguei Denissenko and Vladimir Kviazeo. Denissenko, in addition to being general manager of San Air in the United Arab Emirates, is also the commercial manager for Bout's Centrafrican Airlines. San Air owns some of the aircraft operated by Centrafrican Airlines.
San Air, which mainly uses Boeing 707 and Ilyushin-76 aircraft, also "supplies arms from Bulgaria to the DRC [Democratic Republic of the Congo] government," according to an intelligence document obtained by ICIJ. In addition, the company "transport [sic] commodities for the Angolan government," says the same document.
"San Air is a company in the free zone," Chichakli said. "It registered in Texas too. It wanted to have a maintenance facility for aircraft here, but it didn't work out." A U.S. branch gives the company more respectability, he added. Chichakli denied the company had any connection to arms trafficking. The other two officers of the company, Denissenko and Serguei Bout, Victor's older brother, came to the United States in the late 1990s. "It is a shell company, no activity, no liability, not in business, no employees," Chichakli said about San Air in Texas.
Bout also had a company, Air Cess Incorporated, in Miami, Florida. According to Florida state records, incorporation papers were filed in September 1997, and the company was dissolved in September 2001. Air Cess Incorporated, which like San Air in Texas existed mostly on paper, gave Bout the right to use the "N" number given to aircraft registered in North America.
For Chichakli, the U.N. reports naming Bout as one of the largest arms traffickers in the world do not make sense. "How can this guy suddenly become 'A god of Africa,'" he asked. "Here's this 27 year-old guy with the wrong tie, the wrong acceptance, going to Africa and suddenly he is king of kings. ... I don't think he is a Superman. He is a cargo man."
Chichakli suggested that the reports identifying Bout as an arms trader are likely a smear campaign from countries like Britain and Belgium. According to him, Belgium is still desperately trying to get control over the Congo, which it once ruled, while most of the air cargo companies operating in Africa are British. "Bout attempted to break that monopoly on air cargo in Africa," he said.
"In Africa, you are either supported or you are screwed. Victor was one, a Russian, two, he was not British, so three, he became the ugly duckling."
-------- us
Accused Army Chaplain Resigning Muslim's Case Had Been Dropped
By Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, August 3, 2004; Page A02
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A35329-2004Aug2.html
The Muslim chaplain who once was accused of mishandling classified material and other charges, only to have the case against him fall apart, said yesterday that he is resigning from the Army.
Capt. James J. Yee, who was arrested while posted to the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to minister to suspected al Qaeda and Taliban fighters held there, said the Army's handling of its case against him "irreparably injured my personal and professional reputation and destroyed my prospects for a career" in the Army.
Yee, a 1990 graduate of West Point, said in a statement released by his lawyer that he had asked to be discharged next January.
Yee was arrested after several hours of interrogation on Sept. 10, 2003, at the Naval Air Station in Jacksonville, Fla., after flying from the Guantanamo Bay Navy base, where he had been assigned for the previous 10 months. The next month he was charged with mishandling classified information after authorities found maps of the Guantanamo prison and information about detainees in his possession. FBI and Defense Department officials indicated that they were investigating whether Yee also had committed more serious offenses, and court documents included a variety of serious accusations of espionage. Yee was held in solitary confinement at the Navy brig in Charleston, S.C., for more than two months.
But the case against Yee soon began to fall apart. Eventually the military dropped all criminal charges against him, but it still pursued accusations growing out of the investigation that he had committed adultery and stored pornographic images on a government computer. He was reprimanded for those lesser offenses, but that ruling was thrown out on appeal.
"I have waited for months for an apology for the treatment to which I have been subjected, but none has been forthcoming," Yee said in the statement released by his attorney, Eugene R. Fidell. The Army has given no indication that it will apologize to Yee, Fidell said.
The Army had no comment on Yee's case. A spokesman for the U.S. Southern Command, which oversees the base at Guantanamo Bay, referred questions to the Army base at Fort Lewis, Wash., where Yee is now posted. An Army spokesman there said he could not comment because he had not received confirmation that Yee had submitted a letter of resignation.
Yee grew up a Lutheran in New Jersey and after graduating from West Point commanded a Patriot missile battery. He converted to Islam after serving in Saudi Arabia after the 1991 Persian Gulf War. He then left active duty and studied Islam in Syria. In the late 1990s, he rejoined the Army as a Muslim cleric.
Yee intends to finish a master's degree in international relations at Troy State University and may then pursue a doctorate, Fidell said.
"I think his case is going to resonate with people for a long time, because the basis for his 76 days of solitary confinement remains unexplained," Fidell said when asked about the impact of the case. "This case leaves you scratching your head. How could an officer be put in solitary confinement for 76 days, and then the case crumbles?"
Scott Silliman, a specialist in national security law at Duke University, essentially agreed with that summary, saying the Yee case will be remembered as an instance of the military bringing charges without adequately investigating the matter. He said he worries that such premature action may be characteristic of some military lawyers during wartime.
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Old Vietnam Hands in Charge in Iraq
Some See War Experiences Affecting Policy
By Robin Wright
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, August 3, 2004; Page A15
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A35340-2004Aug2?language=printer
BAGHDAD -- A reunion of old hands from the Vietnam War is underway at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. It's almost become Saigon on the Tigris.
The new crowd running U.S. policy on post-occupation Iraq, in Baghdad and in Washington, all cut their teeth in Vietnam. The four top officials at the new U.S. Embassy in Baghdad are military or diplomatic veterans of the Vietnam War: Ambassador John D. Negroponte; James F. Jeffrey, the embassy's second in command; Ronald E. Neumann, an Arabic speaker who gave up an ambassadorship in Bahrain to take charge of political-military affairs; and William B. Taylor Jr., head of the new Iraqi Reconstruction Management Office.
Negroponte's second posting was to Saigon, where he was political officer and resident expert on Vietnam's constituent assembly in the early 1960s. It was good preparation for Baghdad, because Iraq's first election in January will be for a national assembly. The performance of that body, which is to craft a new constitution, will be a pivotal test for Iraq's transition.
Jeffrey was an Army platoon leader with the group advising Vietnam's special forces in the early 1970s. After the Army, Jeffrey joined the Foreign Service and specialized in conflict management and prevention, especially in the Middle East and the Balkans.
"Over these past 33 years, in and out of uniform, I have tried . . . to ensure that diplomatic action and military options were fully balanced, coordinated and complementary," he said in 2002 Senate confirmation hearings to become ambassador to Albania.
Neumann was awarded a Bronze Star as a young infantry officer in the late 1960s.
Taylor was a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point who served with the 101st Airborne in Vietnam. The Iraqi Reconstruction Management Office that he now heads is responsible for distribution of $18.4 billion in U.S. aid.
At home, the State Department's top two officials, who assumed control of U.S. policy on Iraq from the Pentagon after the June 28 transfer of political power, had their first jobs in Vietnam. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell served two tours in Vietnam as a young lieutenant. His deputy, Richard L. Armitage, became a counterinsurgency specialist after graduating from the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis. He served three combat tours in Vietnam.
In an interview with PBS's "Frontline," Powell reflected on the "Vietnam syndrome" in the U.S. military. "Does it affect our thinking? Sure, it was the most definitive military event in our lives and in our careers. But it is not a syndrome, as if it's some sort of mental disease we have. It's the right way to go about dealing with war: Have a clear objective, know what you're doing . . . know what you're trying to achieve," he said.
Some Vietnam veterans and analysts say the Vietnam experience of the post-Iraq occupation policy team is in marked contrast to the major Pentagon policymakers in charge during the war and yearlong occupation. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld; Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz; Douglas J. Feith, undersecretary for policy; and Stephen A. Cambone, undersecretary for intelligence, have not served in a conflict environment. Rumsfeld served as a naval aviator in the 1950s.
The contrast has some policy insiders, Vietnam veterans and analysts abuzz over what difference it might make in Iraq.
"What the Vietnam experience brings is a realistic appreciation of the fact that war and the peacemaking process after a war are a messy, uncertain, chaotic process," said John F. Guilmartin Jr., an Ohio State University military historian who flew 120 combat missions in Vietnam, as well as a helicopter evacuation flight during the fall of Saigon.
"They go in with a certain caution -- it's instinctive -- and they'll be much more inclined to look at the worst-case scenario and plan around it," he added.
Retired Army Gen. Barry McCaffrey, West Point's distinguished professor of international security, who was awarded three Purple Hearts in Vietnam, said: "Part of the story is who didn't serve in Vietnam and wasn't affected by that great policy tragedy, namely Rumsfeld. He never saw the confusion, bloodshed and lack of a clear national objective involved in ground combat operations in a foreign country."
McCaffrey added: "Whereas when you look at Powell and Armitage and others, as young men they saw firsthand the results in shattered lives and failed policies of the Washington elite who couldn't listen to their own internal feedback mechanisms. That provides astonishing insight."
Asked about the contrasting lack of combat experience at the top of the Pentagon's civilian leadership, Bryan Whitman, a senior Defense Department spokesman, said: "It is a curious observation that doesn't seem to be particularly relevant.
"Everyone has brought their experiences to the table in the execution of U.S. government policies in Iraq. It would be inappropriate to view operations in Iraq as anything other than a government-wide effort."
The specter of Vietnam, nonetheless, could make the next phase of U.S. involvement in Iraq look significantly different, some U.S. military analysts say.
"From Vietnam, one thing burned into our souls is that just winning the battles is not enough. We did that in Vietnam. We could take any piece of terrain and defeat the forces in the field. But it wasn't enough," said retired Marine Gen. Anthony C. Zinni, former head of Central Command. "In Iraq, it's exactly the same problem. It's: Are we improving our environment, and are we providing security and protection for the people and infrastructure?"
The emergence of a generation of Vietnam veterans as important players in Iraq comes as the Vietnam War has emerged as a major issue in U.S. politics, partly because of Iraq but also because it defines a personal difference between the two major presidential candidates. President Bush did not serve in Vietnam; Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) did.
The Bush administration is intent on avoiding comparisons of U.S. policy in Iraq with Vietnam, in part to avoid the implication that Iraq also will become an unwinnable quagmire. "Neither Ambassador Negroponte nor Jim Jeffrey has the time to discuss, or sees any connection between, their experience of 30 to 40 years ago in Vietnam and what they are doing today," embassy spokesman Robert Callahan said in an e-mail.
But State Department officials acknowledge that they looked closely at the Vietnam era in creating and staffing the new embassy, the largest in U.S. history.
"In preparing the new embassy, we looked at historic cases in which we had both a large military presence and a large embassy for lessons learned about how you can manage the two in a productive way and avoid conflict. Vietnam was definitely an important example," said a senior State Department official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Vietnam experience will also be valuable in avoiding some of the fatal aspects of U.S. policy in that war, particularly Washington's relationship with the South Vietnamese government, U.S. officials say.
"Maybe it's Vietnam, maybe it's just common sense, but Negroponte has been outspoken about giving the new Iraqi interim government space to do its thing and not suffocating it with too strong an embrace," the State Department official added. "In South Vietnam, the question was whether the government was just a puppet of the United States. In contrast, Negroponte is saying we're not in Iraq to be an imperial overlord."
U.S. officials also hope the diplomats' Vietnam experience will ease the tensions that often characterized relations between U.S. commanders and the Coalition Provisional Authority during the occupation. Citing his Vietnam stint, Negroponte said during his April confirmation hearings before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that he is "no stranger to the question of working on a teamwork basis with our colleagues in uniform."
"One of the lessons in looking at past experiences was that you have to have close and good personal relations between the embassy and the military," added the State Department official. "You have to be communicating well and understanding their mission and coordinating all the time. This is where this group's experience is really going to pay off, in that they understand the constraints and imperatives of the military. That sensibility, that sensitivity will go a long way to ensure smoothness and synchronicity."
Staff writer Thomas E. Ricks contributed to this report.
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U.S. Military Holds Hearing on Guard in Prison Abuse Photos
August 3, 2004
By KATE ZERNIKE and CHRISTINE HAUSER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/03/national/03CND-ABUS.html?hp
FORT BRAGG, N.C., Aug. 3 - The United States military held a hearing today to determine whether a young, pregnant American soldier should be court-martialed on charges of abusing detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, where she was photographed holding a strap attached to the neck of a man lying on the floor.
The soldier, Pfc. Lynndie England, 21, was dressed in a camouflage uniform and beret when she entered the building for the court hearing at Fort Bragg, N.C. She sat expressionless as she listened to testimony in the Article 32 hearing. Her mother watched from the observation section of the courtroom.
Private England, who has been the most public face of the scandal, jauntily giving a thumbs up over a pile of naked prisoners in another widely publicized picture, did not speak to reporters before the hearing.
She was charged in May by the military with assaulting detainees at the prison and conspiring to mistreat them and with committing acts that were "prejudicial to good order and discipline and were of nature to bring discredit upon the armed forces."
There are 13 counts of abusing detainees and 6 counts stemming from possession of sexually explicit photos that the Army has said do not depict Iraqis.
Her lawyer, Richard Hernandez, told CNN in a report broadcast today that the behavior had not occurred only at Abu Ghraib, a prison west of Baghdad, and that soldiers had been carrying out orders.
"It occurred all over Iraq," he said.
The government knows "that this goes through M.I.," Mr. Hernandez said, using the acronym for military intelligence.
In a sworn statement to investigators on May 5, Private England narrated details about the graphic photographs at the center of the prison abuse scandal, describing the abuse as routine and sometimes amusing, but almost never, to her mind, out of bounds.
She said prisoners were put on leashes to intimidate them, trying to get them to confess to raping a 15-year-old Iraqi boy.
In a KCNC television interview in May, Private England said, "I was instructed by persons in higher ranks to stand there and hold this leash."
She explained in the statement to investigators in May how she put a strap around a detainee's neck and forced him and others to run and crawl down a hallway for "approximately four to six hours"; how one soldier would regularly throw a Nerf football at detainees with bags over their heads "to scare them"; how one soldier would kick detainees and cause open wounds, then "would personally stitch detainees if the wound weren't too bad," according to a copy of her statement given to The New York Times.
Asked if she ever physically abused a detainee, Private England said, "Yes, I stepped on some of them, push them or pull them, but nothing extreme."
Throughout the statement, she repeated that she and other soldiers were ordered to do the things they did, which has been the defense made by lawyers for the soldiers and the soldiers themselves. She has said military intelligence soldiers and others would tell them they were doing a good job and aiding the interrogations.
The hearing at Fort Bragg today is called an Article 32 hearing, which requires a thorough investigation of the charges before the case may be referred to a court-martial. It is similar in function to a civilian grand jury proceeding.
The pretrial investigation involves witnesses, their testimony and cross-examination.
A Fort Bragg spokesman, Col. Billy Buckner, said the prosecution had 25 potential witnesses.
An Army investigator, Paul D. Arthur, testified at the hearing today that he believed the reservists from the 372nd Military Police Company, based in Cresaptown, Md., were responding to the stress of being in a war zone.
"It was just for fun, kind of venting their frustration," Mr. Arthur said.
Another investigator, Warren Worth, testified that they had seen about 1,000 photographs and some videos, of which about 280 contained images of abuse or soldiers engaging in sexual misconduct or other misconduct.
Testimony is expected to continue through Friday and possibly over the weekend in the hearing, the last of the series conducted for the seven soldiers charged in the Abu Ghraib case.
Kate Zernike reported from Fort Bragg for this article and Christine Hauser contributed reporting from New York.
--------
TROOPS
Former Abu Ghraib Reserve Unit Returns Home
August 3, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/03/national/03sold.html?pagewanted=all
PETERSBURG, Va., Aug. 2 (AP) - Nearly a year and a half after leaving home, the 372nd Military Police Company returned Monday from Iraq and the Abu Ghraib prison scandal that left seven members of the Reserve unit accused of abusing prisoners.
More than 100 of the reservists, based in Cresaptown, Md., were reunited with their families at the Fort Lee Army base in Petersburg. The unit was called up in February 2003 and mobilized at Fort Lee three months later.
None of the seven charged with abusing detainees returned home with their unit. One reservist, Pfc. Lynndie England, is awaiting trial at Fort Bragg, N.C., and the others are still in Iraq.
One of the seven soldiers, Specialist Jeremy C. Sivits, has pleaded guilty and has been sentenced to a year in prison.
At the request of the unit, the other members of the 372nd Military Police Company had a private welcome ceremony with family members, said a Fort Lee spokeswoman, Sandra Ellis. The celebration also included several speakers, among them Maj. Gen. Karol A. Kennedy, commander of the Army Reserve's 99th Regional Readiness Command.
The unit was sent to Kuwait on May 15, 2003, and began by training new Iraqi police officers and helping to set up a local police academy, Army officials said. The unit was transferred to Abu Ghraib prison, outside Baghdad, in October 2003, with some working in the detention center and others helping rebuild police stations, courts and schools.
The prisoner abuse scandal burst into public view this spring, when photographs surfaced showing beatings and humiliations of Iraqis held at Abu Ghraib.
In an investigative hearing set to start Tuesday at Fort Bragg, Private England's lawyers will get their chance to make the case that she was following orders when she was photographed mocking naked detainees in Abu Ghraib. She became a central figure in the scandal when she turned up in many photographs, smiling and giving the thumbs-up sign near naked, hooded Iraqi detainees.
Private England, 21, is charged with 13 counts of abusing detainees and 6 counts stemming from possession of sexually explicit photos that the Army has said do not depict Iraqis. The maximum possible sentence is 38 years in prison.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- courts
Supreme Court to Review Federal Sentencing Rules
Associated Press
Tuesday, August 3, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A35331-2004Aug2.html
The Supreme Court agreed yesterday to settle whether federal rules for sentencing criminals violate the Constitution, a question that has thrown federal courthouses into disarray this summer.
The court said it will hear two cases suggested by the Bush administration just weeks after the court ruled major portions of a state sentencing system unconstitutional.
That system in Washington state, like the federal sentencing system, relied on judges to make many decisions that can affect the length of a defendant's sentence. The Supreme Court ruled 5 to 4 in June that juries must decide any matter that can lengthen a sentence beyond the maximum set out in state sentencing guidelines, or the defendant must admit it.
Federal trial judges routinely make such findings as the quantity of drugs involved in a crime or whether a gun was used. Trial judges and appeals courts have divided over whether the Supreme Court's ruling in Blakely v. Washington invalidates the federal sentencing system.
The court is on its summer hiatus, but it issued a brief order to add both cases to its calendar. The court said it will hear the cases, both involving federal drug defendants, on Oct. 4, the first day of the new court term.
The Bush administration is defending the federal sentencing system. Congress authorized it two decades ago to reduce disparities among punishments handed out by different judges.
The high court has found the federal system constitutional, but that was long before the justices began to reexamine the role of judges and juries in determining facts.
A ruling four years ago overturned New Jersey rules that allowed a judge to lengthen a criminal sentence based on facts not presented to a jury. The court said then, and has since repeated, that the Constitution's guarantee of a jury trial means judges alone cannot do the work of juries.
In one of the appeals at issue yesterday, a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit in Chicago threw out a Wisconsin man's sentence because a federal judge decided the amount of drugs that were involved and that the man had obstructed justice.
The second case involves a Massachusetts man convicted in Maine of conspiracy to distribute cocaine and set for sentencing four days after the Blakely ruling was issued. The judge in Ducan Fanfan's case was prepared to impose a sentence of from 15 to 16 years, based in part on facts not part of the jury trial.
The judge reconsidered because of the Supreme Court case, and Fanfan was sentenced instead to about six years in prison.
The case is on appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit in Boston, but the administration asked the high court to skip the appeals court step and simply review the case now.
The cases are United States v. Booker, No. 04-104, and United States v. Fanfan, No. 04-105.
--------
Lawyers Seek to Block Guantanamo Hearings
Associated Press By GINA HOLLAND August 3, 2004 http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,1280,-4381623,00.html
WASHINGTON (AP) - A federal court has been asked to stop military hearings that will decide if the Pentagon can continue holding hundreds of terror suspects at a Navy base in Cuba.
Last week the Pentagon held the first hearing for a detainee at Guantanamo Bay. The administrative hearings are to determine whether the prisoners are being held properly. More are expected this week in a process that is expected to take up to four months.
Human rights lawyers said Monday that the prisoners are not getting a chance to defend themselves.
``These tribunals are a sham,'' said Jeff Fogel, legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which asked a federal court in Washington for an emergency stay. The center represents 53 of the nearly 600 prisoners at Guantanamo. ``The so-called personal representatives assigned to them have no legal background and are not advocates.''
The military has said the panels - called Combatant Status Review Tribunals - will be neutral and detainees will be freed if found to be wrongly held. The panels were set up shortly after the Supreme Court ruled in June that the detainees have a right to challenge their detentions in U.S. courts.
On Monday, requests to block the panels were filed on behalf of multiple detainees whose cases are already pending in federal court in Washington.
``These hearings are designed to prevent this court and other district courts from conducting the ... proceedings envisioned by the Supreme Court,'' Fogel and other attorneys wrote.
Fogel also asked to see the men's medical records. He noted concerns that one detainee, Jamil El Banna, a Jordanian Palestinian refugee, has lost 70 to 80 pounds while being held.
Nearly 600 men from more than 40 countries are being held on suspicion of links to al-Qaida or the fallen Taliban regime of Afghanistan. Some of them have been at the prison for more than two years, with little or no contact with the outside world.
-------- homeland security
Street Closing Irks D.C. Leaders
Checkpoints Set Up Near World Bank, IMF and Capitol
By Lyndsey Layton and Manny Fernandez
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, August 3, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A33730-2004Aug2?language=printer
Police officers carrying automatic weapons patrolled streets around the Capitol last night as they prepared to close a major thoroughfare on Capitol Hill and to set up 14 vehicle checkpoints, creating a huge security perimeter around powerful symbols of American democracy.
Amid objections from city leaders, U.S. Capitol Police Chief Terrance W. Gainer said last night that First Street NE between Constitution Avenue and D Street NE -- which runs between two of the Senate office buildings -- would be shut down indefinitely, starting this morning.
In addition, Gainer said Capitol police would set up checkpoints at several key spots around the Capitol and Supreme Court buildings, inspecting vehicles that cross Independence and Constitution avenues near Capitol Hill, as well as several other streets in the area.
D.C. police, meanwhile, said they would set up checkpoints near the World Bank and International Monetary Fund headquarters to scan traffic and pick out cars and trucks for inspection. Those checkpoints will be on 18th Street NW between F and G streets and on 19th Street NW near I Street, police officials said.
Squads of officers from different agencies patrolled the Foggy Bottom headquarters of the IMF and World Bank and the Capitol yesterday and concentrated bomb-sniffing dogs in the subway stations around Foggy Bottom and the White House. Workers tried to go about their business and ignore the threat.
The announcement by Capitol police came as some government officials acknowledged that most, if not all, of the al Qaeda surveillance that led to Sunday's new terror alert occurred about three years ago or possibly longer.
D.C. officials blasted the Capitol Hill action, saying the closure and checkpoints would lead to gridlock and send the wrong message to tourists and residents. Several pointed out that the Capitol and Supreme Court were not mentioned in the announcement Sunday by Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge that raised the threat level in the District, New York and Newark. Ridge singled out the financial districts in those locations, including the IMF and World Bank.
But Gainer said the threat level is increased across the city, not just at the financial centers.
"There has been ongoing concern about the Capitol," Gainer said. "The 9/11 Commission report indicated the great likelihood that the Capitol was a target. We see the intelligence that terrorists would like to strike the United States and the Capitol of the United States."
The Capitol Hill closure brought a swift and sharp rebuke from D.C. Mayor Anthony A. Williams (D), whose spokesman said city officials learned late yesterday that "the nervous nellies in Congress" were closing the street near the Capitol.
The spokesman, Tony Bullock, said the mayor and other D.C. officials would try to persuade security officials to reopen the street. City officials also are concerned that if Congress is permitted to close streets, other federal agencies could follow suit, as has happened in the past. "It scares people," Bullock said, referring to the security zone. "This is not Beirut."
Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) said she was outraged. "The arrogance of it is mind-boggling," said Norton, who has called a news conference this morning to discuss alternatives. "Closing down a main thoroughfare must be the last option, and it has become the first option here."
Gainer said he took the action after reanalyzing data about the effect a car or truck bomb would have on the Capitol, the House and Senate buildings and people in the area. Gainer said that he has also placed his officers on 12-hour shifts and required them to work six days a week. "We feel that a threat to one section of the city is a threat to all of the city," Gainer said.
He said his police force will also be carrying more automatic weapons and shotguns when they patrol the Capitol. He said he understood concerns about road congestion. "We will work with the city to alleviate the traffic as best we can," he said.
"It's tough," he said. "It's discombobulating. But I think the reaction is similar to what it would have been in August 2001 if we said we are going to screen everyone at the airport and there may be two-hour waiting lines."
Gainer's plan requires 300 officers to work six days a week and is expected to cost as much as $3 million a month in overtime. He said it would probably be in place until November and possibly beyond.
D.C. police also plan to ban street parking between F and H streets NW from 18th to 20th streets and from the south side of Pennsylvania Avenue in that area. Officials also are considering ways to limit the routes trucks can take into and through the District. D.C. Police Chief Charles H. Ramsey said the precautions probably would be in place through November.
At the World Bank and IMF, iconic financial institutions two blocks from the White House and across from each other on 19th Street NW, thousands who reported to work yesterday were checked by security guards.
Damian Milverton, a spokesman for the World Bank, said more than 1,200 employees attended a staff meeting at which World Bank President James D. Wolfensohn said they could expect increased security measures.
Milverton said Wolfensohn told employees that "the information that the U.S. authorities picked up was from 2001 and there was no evidence to suggest an imminent threat to the bank."
Cars trying to enter the underground parking garages at either high-rise building were lined up along G Street and searched by guards who inspected their trunks and used mirrors to check their undercarriages. One IMF worker who bicycled to work hopped off to let a guard peer into the bag on the back of her bike. D.C. police officers, some with bomb-sniffing dogs, patrolled virtually every corner.
Metro Transit Police focused on the three stations close to the World Bank and the IMF: Farragut West and Foggy Bottom on the Blue and Orange lines and Farragut North on the Red Line. A special unit of transit officers with automatic weapons was dispatched to the area, and police dogs roamed the stations.
Still, the streets surrounding the World Bank and IMF appeared just as busy with vehicle and pedestrian traffic as on any other August workday. Employees at a few shops near the IMF and World Bank said business was booming. A bank spokesman said that employee turnout was typical, although no official tally was available. And office and blue-collar workers in and around the Foggy Bottom buildings said they were not afraid, in part because of a heavy police presence and nerves hardened by three years of terror warnings.
The terror threat did not stop office workers from enjoying lunch on benches in a small park across Pennsylvania Avenue and H Street from the World Bank. "I was actually more worried about traffic than anything," said Patrick McDonough, 31, who works at a nearby medical services provider and was eating with a colleague in the park.
Arthur Foy didn't think twice about making a delivery just a few dozen paces from a potential terrorist target. Duty -- and a truck full of pre-cut french fries -- beckoned.
"I'm more concerned about the weather than the terrorists, to be honest," said Foy, 53, a shorts-clad, sweat-drenched worker for U.S. Foodservice, as he unloaded boxes from a truck parked at 18th and H streets.
Staff writers Michael Barbaro, Karin Brulliard, Cameron W. Barr, Sari Horwitz, Theola Labbé, Allan Lengel, Lori Montgomery, Matthew Mosk, Monte Reel, Ian Shapira, Michael D. Shear, David Snyder, Martin Weil and Del Quentin Wilber contributed to this report.
--------
Pre-9/11 Acts Led To Alerts
Officials Not Sure Al Qaeda Continued To Spy on Buildings
By Dan Eggen and Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, August 3, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A35466-2004Aug2?language=printer
Most of the al Qaeda surveillance of five financial institutions that led to a new terrorism alert Sunday was conducted before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and authorities are not sure whether the casing of the buildings has continued, numerous intelligence and law enforcement officials said yesterday.
More than half a dozen government officials interviewed yesterday, who declined to be identified because classified information is involved, said that most, if not all, of the information about the buildings seized by authorities in a raid in Pakistan last week was about three years old, and possibly older.
"There is nothing right now that we're hearing that is new," said one senior law enforcement official who was briefed on the alert. "Why did we go to this level? . . . I still don't know that."
One piece of information on one building, which intelligence officials would not name, appears to have been updated in a computer file as late as January 2004, according to a senior intelligence official. But officials could not say yesterday whether that piece of data was the result of active surveillance by al Qaeda or came instead from information about the buildings that is publicly available.
Many administration officials stressed yesterday that even three-year-old intelligence, when coupled with other information about al Qaeda's plans to attack the United States, justified the massive security response in the three cities. Police and other security teams have been assigned to provide extra protection for the surveilled buildings, identified as the International Monetary Fund and World Bank headquarters in Washington; the New York Stock Exchange and Citigroup Center in New York; and the Prudential Financial building in Newark.
Intelligence officials said that the remarkably detailed information about the surveillance -- which included logs of pedestrian traffic and notes on the types of explosives that might work best against each target -- was evaluated in light of general intelligence reports received this summer indicating that al Qaeda hopes to strike a U.S. target before the November presidential elections.
Several officials also said that much of the information compiled by terrorist operatives about the buildings in Washington, New York and Newark was obtained through the Internet or other "open sources" available to the general public, including some floor plans.
The characterization of the age of the intelligence yesterday cast a new light on Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge's announcement Sunday that the terrorism threat alert for the financial services sectors in the three cities had been raised. Ridge and other officials stressed Sunday the urgency of acting on the newly obtained information, but yesterday a range of officials made clear how dated much of the intelligence was.
One senior intelligence official said the information is still being evaluated.
A number of other buildings were mentioned in the seized computer files, but only in vague references, so officials decided not to issue alerts about them, an intelligence official said. They included the Bank of America building in San Francisco; the Nasdaq and American Stock Exchange buildings in New York, as well as two other sites in that city; and an undisclosed building in Washington and another in New Jersey.
"We chose not to release it because we decided they weren't anywhere near the same level of danger as the others," the official said.
President Bush and Vice President Cheney said in separate appearances yesterday that the new alert underscores the continuing threat posed by al Qaeda. At a news conference announcing his proposed intelligence reforms, Bush said the alert shows "there's an enemy which hates what we stand for."
"It's serious business," Bush said. "I mean, we wouldn't be, you know, contacting authorities at the local level unless something was real."
Employees at announced targets in New York and New Jersey arrived at work yesterday with a mix of defiance and jitters. Some said they wanted to send a message that terrorists could not deter them from living their lives as usual. Others were visibly shaken by the presence of heavily armed police officers and new barricades.
At the New York Stock Exchange, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg rang the opening bell. Exchange chief executive John A. Thain and Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) greeted arriving workers. "I wouldn't be surprised if attendance weren't higher today," Schumer said. "We are winning the war of nerves."
Much of the information about the targeted buildings is contained on a laptop computer and computer disks recovered during recent raids in Pakistan. A senior intelligence official said the cache also includes about 500 photographs, diagrams and drawings, some of them digital.
Two senior intelligence officials who briefed reporters on Sunday said the material showed al Qaeda operatives had cased the buildings both before and after the Sept. 11 attacks.
"I think the indications are that this has been a very longstanding effort on the part of al Qaeda," one official said Sunday, "that it dates from before 9/11, it continued after 9/11 and based on what it is that we are concerned about, we know about in terms of al Qaeda's plans and intentions that it probably continues even today."
Speaking about the five buildings, one official said, "I believe that since 9/11 they have been able to acquire additional information on these targets here in the United States, yes, I do."
Numerous officials said yesterday, however, that most of the information was compiled prior to the Sept. 11 attacks and that there are serious doubts about the age of other, undated files. One senior counterterrorism official said many of the documents include dates prior to Sept. 11, 2001, but there are no dates after that.
"Most of the information is very dated but you clearly have targets with enough specificity, and that pushed it over the edge," the counterterrorism official said. "You've got the Republican convention coming up, the Olympics, the elections. . . . I think there was a feeling that we should err on the side of caution even if it's not clear that anything is new."
One federal law enforcement source said his understanding from reviewing the reports was that the material predated Sept. 11 and included photos that can be obtained from brochures and some actual snapshots. There also were some interior diagrams that appear to be publicly available.
Other officials also stressed that, however long ago al Qaeda operatives compiled the surveillance details, the information was new to U.S. intelligence agencies and was almost unprecedented in the depth of its details. "All this stuff was fresh to us," one official said.
At the CIA's daily 5 p.m. counterterrorism meeting Thursday, the first information about the detailed al Qaeda surveillance of the five financial buildings was discussed among senior CIA, FBI and military officials. They decided to launch a number of worldwide operations, including the deployment of increased law enforcement around the five buildings.
A senior intelligence official said translations of the computer documents and other intelligence started arriving on Friday. "We worked on it late, and through that night," he said. "We had very specific, credible information, and when we laid it in on the threat environment we're in," officials decided they had to announce it.
"It's not known whether the plot was active and ongoing," the official added. "It could have been planned for tomorrow, or it could have been scrapped. Maybe there were other iterations of it. In this environment, this was seen as pertinent information to get out to the public. There was discussion over the weekend, should we wait until Monday?"
Initially, top administration officials had decided to wait until yesterday to announce the alert, but more intelligence information was coming in -- both new translations of the documents, and analysis of other sources' statements -- that deepened their concern about the information, and persuaded them to move ahead swiftly. "There was a serious sense of urgency to get it out," the senior intelligence official said.
On Saturday, officials from the CIA, the FBI, the Homeland Security and Justice departments, the White House, and other agencies agreed with Ridge to recommend that the financial sectors in New York, Washington and North Jersey be placed on orange, or "high," alert. Ridge made the recommendation to Bush on Sunday morning, and Bush signed off on it at 10 a.m.
In a signal of how seriously the administration took the information, officials briefed senior media executives, including network anchors, before a Sunday news conference and briefing for reporters.
In New York yesterday, traffic backed up at tunnels and bridges into the city, Hercules and Atlas police teams toting rifles and machine guns checked vehicles, police helicopters crisscrossed the skies, and employees throughout the financial district stood in long security queues, showing their corporate identifications and bags to guards.
Around the NYSE in Lower Manhattan, rows of concrete and metal barricades were in place and side streets were blocked off.
In Newark, officials set up concrete barriers and police teams around the 24-story Prudential building, where about 1,000 employees work. "I'm a little nervous," analyst Tracy Swistak, 27, told the Associated Press. "But I'm confident Prudential's doing everything they can to ensure our safety."
Staff writers John Mintz, Allan Lengel and Spencer S. Hsu in Washington and Michael Powell, Michelle Garcia and Ben White in New York contributed to this report.
--------
U.S. Officials Defend Warning of Possible Terror Attacks
August 3, 2004
By BRIAN KNOWLTON
International Herald Tribune
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/03/politics/03CND-TERROR.html
WASHINGTON, Aug. 3 - American officials defended today their stark warning of possible terror attacks on five East Coast financial institutions, saying that even though militants might have conducted much of their surveillance some years ago, the threat was no less real.
"I don't want anyone to disabuse themselves of the seriousness of this information simply because there are some reports that much of it is dated, it might be two or three years old," Tom Ridge, secretary of homeland security, told reporters in New York today. "This is a resilient organization that does its homework," he said of Al Qaeda.
While there was "no evidence of recent surveillance," Mr. Ridge said, terrorists have amassed "volumes of information" and have updated their data. "When you see this kind of detailed planning, you have to take preemptive action."
Nonetheless, the reports that the terrorist surveillance of five financial-sector buildings occurred largely in past years raised questions.
Foremost was the question of whether the government, thanks to information seized from terror suspects in Pakistan, had uncovered active attack plans or less specific preparations for a plot that might never have been fully conceived.
That raised the question of whether the administration overreacted in issuing its dire-sounding warning on Sunday, when briefers were vague about the freshness of the information even while acknowledging that some of it predated the Sept. 11 attacks.
Another was whether the security measures now being put in place - which are extremely costly, and have already caused some economic disruption in the target areas of New York, Washington and Newark - might be rolled back anytime soon. The timing of doing so will involve delicate considerations.
With trucks being diverted from lower Manhattan, and roads blocked or vehicles being stopped for random checks in large sections of Washington - around the World Bank and International Monetary Fund buildings just west of the White House, and in a several-block area surrounding the Capitol - some damaging economic impact seemed increasingly unavoidable.
Some Washington officials have complained that security measures on Capitol Hill were excessive, and could discourage tourism.
Mayor Anthony A. Williams, eager to avoid the calamitous drop in tourism that followed the Sept. 11 attacks went out of his way to reassure residents and visitors. He gave interviews on Monday seated at Kinkeads, a restaurant on Pennsylvania Avenue near the World Bank, saying Washington is a "safe city."
Although American officials have warned that terrorists appear particularly intent on attacking United States targets in this election year, Mr. Ridge said today that people should not assume the threat will recede after the Nov. 2 election. "When they're ready to move, they'll move," he said of Al Qaeda.
Maintaining heightened security is costly, in overtime pay to police and other security personnel, in added equipment and in lost business.
Mayor Williams said that Washington might soon need federal help if it is to sustain the heightened levels of security. After the Sept. 11 attacks, police officers were diverted from some neighborhoods, something Mr. Williams does not want to repeat.
New York has been at a high alert level since Sept. 11, and recently has further bolstered security ahead of the Aug. 30 opening of the Republican National Convention. Two of the reported targets - the New York Stock Exchange and Citigroup - are there. Nearby in Newark, the Prudential Financial building is another of the five targets.
Mr. Ridge insisted today that the raising of the terror alert for the three areas was essential.
"We have made it much more difficult for the terrorists to achieve their broad objectives," he said.
Mr. Ridge and other American officials took unusual measures to call attention to the threat, which flowed from the seizure of a trove of documents after the mid-July arrest of a Qaeda suspect in Pakistan, named by American officials as Mohammad Naeem Noor Khan. Further information is reported to have come from the arrest in Pakistan of a senior Qaeda operative, identified as Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani.
Mr. Ridge's department telephoned news executives shortly after noon Sunday to alert them, in a conference call with Mr. Ridge and a deputy, to the importance of the story. Their warnings were then repeated in a news conference.
On Sunday, Mr. Ridge said little about the timing of the building surveillance. He said the warnings were based on unusually specific information about where Al Qaeda would like to attack. He added that there was no information that indicates a specific time for these attacks beyond the period leading up to our national elections. Mr. Ridge said it was fair to deduce that the five buildings may be the subject of a particular plot.
In response to a question today about the presence of Al Qaeda militants in the United States, he said, "I think around the country we just assume that there are operatives here."
He said there was no information, however, to suggest that the five corporate entities targeted had themselves been infiltrated. Separately, a World Bank spokesman, Damian Sean Milverton, said there had been no suggestion that Al Qaeda had penetrated the building here at all.
--------
PRECAUTIONS
Few Measures Exist to Avert Truck Bombs, Experts Say
August 3, 2004
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/03/national/03truck.html
The next terror attacks in the United States, experts say, could very well involve a mixture of two ingredients that are ubiquitous and hard to control: big vehicles and explosive materials as mundane as gasoline or fertilizer.
In the chemical and trucking industries, the offices of law enforcement agencies and the ranks of antiterrorism experts inside and outside government, there is a widespread sense that little can be done to keep potential terrorists away from trucks, buses and the materials that can turn them into weapons.
"The cow has definitely left the barn," said James Jay Carafano, a senior fellow for domestic security at the Heritage Foundation. Explosive substances like ammonium nitrate fertilizers are so widely used and so easily stolen and stockpiled, he said, that any restrictions imposed now would have little effect.
An atmosphere of stepped-up vigilance permeated the country's big cities yesterday. In New York, trucks and other vehicles were stopped and searched on highways, on bridges and in tunnels. In Los Angeles, the authorities said they had ordered searches of trucks and any other vehicles that "look suspicious" in the downtown business district and in Century City, a neighborhood of high-rise office buildings.
Police Chief William J. Bratton said that while the threat apparently was aimed at financial institutions in New York, Newark and Washington, it was imperative to safeguard their counterparts in Los Angeles.
On Friday, the F.B.I. and the Department of Homeland Security distributed a seven-page bulletin, titled "Potential Threat to Homeland Using Heavy Transport Vehicles," to state agencies and other organizations dealing with security.
"There have been multiple suspicious incidents over the last six months that heighten concern over the potential terrorist acquisition of large trucks and commercial buses," the bulletin said.
It described an incident in early May in which "there was a suspicious attempt to purchase a tractor-trailer in Arkansas for approximately $20,000 by an individual who did not know how to operate the vehicle but did possess a temporary paper California commercial driver's license." He visited two dealerships but left the second after receiving a cellphone call, it said.
Such incidents, combined with truck-bomb attacks in Iraq and a disrupted plot involving ammonium nitrate fertilizer in Britain in March, have led to greater concern. But beyond calling for random patrols around potential targets and urging truckers and fertilizer sellers to be vigilant, federal officials have not done much, terrorism experts say.
Last week the fertilizer industry, in concert with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, began urging sellers of ammonium nitrate - which has been the main ingredient of the bombs used in at least half a dozen major terror attacks here and abroad - to track sales and require buyers to show identification.
But only Nevada and South Carolina have passed laws requiring such tracking. Congress has never pursued similar requirements at the federal level, partly because lawmakers from agricultural states have said it would inconvenience farmers without deterring terrorists.
The Fertilizer Institute, the trade group for the industry, had moved to increase watchfulness among retailers after the 1993 World Trade Center attack and 1995 bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City. Both attacks involved truck-size batches of ammonium nitrate. But last week, before the Bush administration announced the elevated threat against financial institutions, the institute conceded that more needed to be done.
"In the past we said we know our customers and know how to protect our product, but we also recognize that things have changed," Kathy Mathers, a spokeswoman for the institute, said yesterday.
The group said it would not oppose a federal law requiring tracking of customers for the fertilizer.
Such a law is long overdue, said Dr. Edward Arnett, a professor emeritus of chemistry at Duke University. He was co-chairman of a 1998 National Academy of Sciences panel on bomb threats, which called for, among other actions, registering buyers of the fertilizer.
"If you want to get drugs from a drugstore you sign for them," Dr. Arnett said. "For many things there's a paper trail, but for this threat, which has been clearly proved, so far there's essentially nothing required."
Nick Madigan contributed reportingfor this article.
--------
NEWS ANALYSIS
Intelligence Chief Without Power? Support Leaves Questions
August 3, 2004
By ELISABETH BUMILLER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/03/politics/03terror.html?hp
WASHINGTON, Aug. 2 - President Bush on Monday cast his support for a new post of national intelligence director as an historic overhaul of the nation's major spy agencies. But White House officials left vague the authority that the new director would wield over personnel and spending, raising doubts among some experts about the real power of the new position.
Mr. Bush said the new director would "coordinate" the budgets for the nation's 15 major intelligence agencies, while Andrew H. Card Jr., the White House chief of staff, said the director would have a "coordinating role" in hiring. But neither the president nor Mr. Card said that the director should directly hire and fire or have authority over the estimated $40 billion that the government spends each year on intelligence. Right now, the Pentagon controls about 80 percent of the money.
"If the national intelligence director has no real budgetary authority, he or she will have no real power," said Representative Jane Harman of California, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee.
Senator John W. Warner, the Virginia Republican who is chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, strongly praised Mr. Bush in a statement for proposing "wise changes" in the intelligence community. But Mr. Warner left unclear whether he supported giving the new intelligence director budgetary control, and said his committee would hold hearings on the matter in two weeks. The commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks recommended that a national intelligence director should submit nominations to the president for people to run the intelligence agencies and also have ultimate control over spending.
The White House gave no indication on Monday of power struggles with the Pentagon, but Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld made his views clear in testimony before the commission in March. Mr. Rumsfeld said then that an intelligence czar would do the nation "a great disservice" by creating reliance on a single, centralized source of information.
"In fact, fostering multiple centers of information has proven to be better at promoting creativity and challenging conventional thinking," he said. "There may be ways we can strengthen intelligence, but centralization is most certainly not one of them."
William Perry, who was former President Bill Clinton's defense secretary, said it was unrealistic to expect the Pentagon to give up control of some $32 billion - particularly when it is paying for highly sophisticated and clandestine weaponry - without an Olympian struggle.
"I think it's extremely important for this new director to have complete control over the analysis," Mr. Perry said. "But I can't see the secretary of defense giving up control of tactical intelligence systems."
The Defense Department controls some of the nation's biggest spy agencies, including the National Security Agency, which has an estimated budget of at least $7 billion, 32,000 employees and the responsibility for intercepting the communications of enemies of the United States. The Pentagon also has authority over the National Reconnaissance Office, which builds and operates spy satellites.
Democrats said that in keeping the authority of the new intelligence chief vague, Mr. Bush was seeking to avoid a major blowup with Congress and the Pentagon before the election, and was most of all eager to be seen as proactive after the devastating findings of the Sept. 11 commission and weeks of attacks from his Democratic opponent, Senator John Kerry.
"All he's trying to do is get through the next three months and work out the details later," said Gary Hart, a former Democratic senator from Colorado who is a national security expert. "He just wants to be seen as doing something right now."
National security experts noted that much of the new intelligence chief's authority would depend on the kind of person the president chose for the job, and for that matter whether it was Mr. Bush or Mr. Kerry who did the choosing.
Mr. Bush gave no specific timetable for when he might name someone to the position, and the White House did not answer questions on whether the legislation creating the job could be completed before November. But White House and Bush campaign officials have long said that the details matter far less than the pictures and sounds of Mr. Bush talking in any way about his campaign against terrorism, which polls show is still his strongest card against Mr. Kerry.
On Sunday, the homeland security secretary, Tom Ridge, appeared to promote that strategy when, announcing a high risk of terrorist attacks against American financial institutions, he repeatedly praised Mr. Bush's leadership. "We must understand that the kind of information available to us today is the result of the president's leadership in the war against terror," Mr. Ridge said.
National security experts also noted that any misgivings Mr. Bush had about re-engineering the intelligence apparatus while it is under extreme pressure to deal with terrorism had apparently been overcome.
"There is no right time to do it," Mr. Perry said. "We're going to be vulnerable for years to come."
--------
PREPARATIONS
Federal, State and Local Officials Step Up Security Efforts in Wake of New Threats
August 3, 2004
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/03/politics/03prepare.html
WASHINGTON, Aug. 3 - Federal officials moved to step up security at financial centers and federal buildings in Washington and the New York City area this week in response to new intelligence about possible threats by Al Qaeda, even as some terrorism experts worried that the increased security might simply prompt terrorists to choose other targets.
"You harden one target, you soften another," said John Gannon, the former deputy director for intelligence at the Central Intelligence Agency who is staff director for the House Homeland Security Committee.
"We've got our finger in the dike in the right places on this one, but we have to look for other holes that the terrorists might come through," said Mr. Gannon, who was briefed over the weekend on the increased terror threat.
Tom Ridge, secretary of homeland security, met today at the Citigroup Center in midtown Manhattan with Gov. George E. Pataki, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly, as well as chief executives from leading companies, and reviewed new measures put in place to guard financial institutions.
On Sunday, Mr. Ridge raised the threat level to the second highest, orange, or "high risk," for the financial sectors in New York City, northern New Jersey and Washington because of intelligence pointing to Qaeda reconnaissance missions aimed at the financial industry. Mr. Ridge listed five potential targets, including the New York Stock Exchange and Citigroup buildings in Manhattan.
"The secretary wants to see firsthand the new protective measures that have been put in place and offer employees a message of reassurance," said Brian Roehrkasse, the department's spokesman.
Domestic security officials continued working with local law enforcement agencies and private institutions in Washington and the New York area on Monday to bolster security in and around the financial institutions by increasing visitor inspections, camera surveillance, armed patrols, canine teams and other measures, officials said.
Even before the latest threat information, federal officials were using sophisticated air-monitoring devices at sites in Manhattan, Newark and Washington to help avert biological attacks. The air monitoring will continue, but there is no plan to expand the use of the devices, officials said.
At the same time, federal officials expanded security measures for possible targets beyond the financial sector. Some security personnel who guard federal buildings in New York City and Washington were told to expect increased workloads, officials said. And the Capitol Police said cars traveling through the Capitol complex - including on Independence and Constitution Avenues - would have to pass through a cordon of traffic barriers and police officers.
Chief Terrance W. Gainer of the United States Capitol Police said at a news conference on Monday that most vehicles would be allowed to pass slowly but that some could be pulled aside to be searched. One section of First Street on the Senate side of the Capitol will be closed north of Constitution to D Street.
Chief Gainer said 300 officers would be involved in the new security steps, which also include 14 vehicle checkpoints around the Capitol, and the costs could reach $3 million a month. Officials said the moves were long overdue but not directly related to Sunday's raised threat level.
A principal goal, officials said, is visibility.
"It's important to send the message out to the public and to the terrorists that these are not soft targets," said one homeland security official who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "These are hardened targets, and that acts as a deterrent."
Officials said they believe that increased visibility and public awareness could help to disrupt a terrorist plot or to discourage terrorists from carrying one out, as officials think happened when a suspected Qaeda operative believed to be studying the Brooklyn Bridge in 2003 reported that security was "too hot."
But with increased security at financial centers like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in Washington, there comes the risk that plotters could switch plans and pick a new target.
In the past, security and intelligence experts said, Al Qaeda has proved adept at shifting its targets in response to tightened security.
"The problem is that they will take whatever time is necessary to get their operatives in place," said Brian Levin, a professor at California State University at San Bernardino who studies terrorism and consults with the federal government on the issue.
"Half this battle is psychological, and the mere show of force by the government at these locations will put people temporarily at ease," Professor Levin said. "But in the long term, the difficulty you face is that people get complacent and things go back to business as usual, and that's what the terrorists want."
Domestic security officials said they had no clear indication how long the code-orange alert would remain in place because the intelligence - gathered from a recent arrest of a suspected Qaeda computer engineer in Pakistan - did not indicate when a plot might be carried out.
"We'll continue to assess the threats, and we'll see where it leads us," Mr. Roehrkasse said.
Carl Hulse contributed reporting for this article.
--------
TERROR ALERT PUMPED UP
Ridge on defensive after terror alert
USA TODAY
by Mimi Hall and Kevin Johnson,
8/3/2004
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2004-08-03-terror-analysis_x.htm
WASHINGTON - Ever since Tom Ridge developed the color-coded terrorist threat advisory system and first put the nation at orange alert on Sept. 10, 2002, he has faced questions and criticism about the warnings he's issued.
Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge, right, is joined by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg during a news conference.
Mary Altaffer, AP
Some have called them too vague; others have said they require too many expensive security upgrades in too many places unlikely to be targets of an attack.
On Sunday, however, the Homeland Security secretary stood before the TV cameras and issued a warning that could hardly have been more specific.
WHAT LED TO WARNINGS
Al-Qaeda operatives began sizing up financial buildings in New York City, New Jersey and Washington, D.C., as bombing targets as early as 2000, but U.S. officials learned of it just recently. Based on accounts from the White House and U.S. intelligence, these events led to the terror alerts issued Sunday:
2000-2001
Sometime before the Sept. 11 attacks, al-Qaeda operatives begin casing several U.S. buildings as targets.
2004
January: Al-Qaeda operatives in Pakistan access computer files with surveillance information about the buildings, suggesting renewed interest in those targets.
June 12: Alleged al-Qaeda operative Abu Mus'ab al Baluchi, a nephew of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, is arrested in Karachi, Pakistan. Baluchi is said to be a terrorist "facilitator" who helps others move and plan their attacks.
July 13: Alleged al-Qaeda operative and computer specialist Mohammad Naeem Noor Khan is arrested in Lahore, Pakistan. Documents seized in connection with his arrest contain detailed information about the surveillance of the buildings.
July 25: Alleged al-Qaeda operative Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani is arrested in Gujrat, Pakistan. He is wanted in the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
Thursday: U.S. intelligence gets specific information on locations cased by al-Qaeda.
Friday: CIA analyzes the information; President Bush is briefed.
Saturday, 4 p.m.: A White House meeting of top homeland security officials considers new warnings.
Sunday, 10 a. m.: White House meeting of security officials decides to recommend warnings.
Sunday, noon: Bush is notified of recommendation and agrees with it.
Sunday, 2 p.m.: Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge announces terrorism warnings.
New intelligence showed al-Qaeda had conducted extensive surveillance on five financial centers in New York City, New Jersey and Washington, D.C., Ridge said. He named the buildings. He and other intelligence officials briefed reporters on details of what they'd uncovered.
The only thing they didn't know, Ridge said, was when an attack might come.
"We have no specific information that says an attack is imminent," he said.
But three days later, Ridge once again found himself on the defensive amid questions about whether he had needlessly panicked the public, using a terrorism alert based on outdated intelligence to shift attention back to President Bush after the Democratic National Convention.
To those who would impugn his timing or motives, Ridge said: "I wish I could give them all Top Secret clearances and let them review the information that some of us have the responsibility to review."
Speaking to reporters at the Citigroup Center in Manhattan, one of the financial buildings he says has been under surveillance by al-Qaeda, Ridge acknowledged that deciding whether, when and how to inform the public about new terror threats is always "a judgment call."
But aides say he and other government officials decided after 9/11 that they have to go public with threat information because:
• An alert public can help thwart an attack.
• People will know something is up when they see new barricades, more police on street corners and other signs of increased security; if they don't have the facts, they might panic.
• The information will leak to the news media anyway, spawning rumors and incorrect reports.
• If the government withheld information and an attack occurred, the criticism would be devastating.
Still, because intelligence is often imprecise and continued warnings without attacks can begin to look like officials are crying wolf, Ridge is in a "damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't" position when he publicizes alerts, says Randall Larsen, a leading homeland security expert.
"I think that Ridge did the right thing," he says. "And it's something we're all going to have to get used to, because we'd all complain if we didn't get the information."
But some questioned the timing and tone of Ridge's Sunday news conference. Former Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean suggested it might have been an effort to bump Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry from the headlines after a convention in Boston that focused heavily on his credentials to be commander in chief.
"I am concerned that every time something happens that's not good for President Bush, he plays this trump card, which is terrorism," Dean told CNN.
Kerry's aides have said they do not believe the timing was politically motivated.
But other Democrats have been quietly grumbling. And that prompted Ridge to proclaim Tuesday, for the second time in less than a month, that "we don't do politics in the Department of Homeland Security."
The last time he said that, he was standing on the Boston waterfront, just days before Kerry's political convention, answering charges he was hyping the possibility of terrorism around the convention to grab attention from Kerry.
Some law enforcement officials worry that disclosing detailed information would tip off terrorists and dry up intelligence sources. But Ridge said the public has a right to know. "The detail, the sophistication, the thoroughness of this information, if you had access to it, you'd say we did the right thing," he said Tuesday. "It's not about politics. It's about confidence in government telling you when they get the information."
Contributing: Jill Lawrence
-------- immigration / refugees
Evicted From Camp, Sudan Refugees Suffer in Limbo
August 3, 2004
By MARC LACEY
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/03/international/africa/03darf.html
EL FASHER, Sudan, Aug. 2 - Aid workers call them "Kofi Annan's group.''
When Mr. Annan, the United Nations secretary general, pulled up at the dismal Meshtel refugee camp during a visit to Darfur on the afternoon of July 1, to his surprise every last person was gone. "Where are the people?" he was heard to ask.
A month later, he and other dignitaries have come and gone, but some 1,500 people from Meshtel remain in limbo. They were sent to another camp, Abushouk, but have not been completely welcomed and live a few degrees of destitution below the rest of the 50,000 displaced people there.
The new residents have yet to be formally registered, despite a month of waiting. That means they have not been entitled to plastic sheeting, free blankets or food rations from aid agencies, no matter what tragedies they may have endured.
Among the others in Abushouk, these down-and-out people are referred to with the same Arabic word given to used clothes. The nickname, Abu Janguer, comes from their hovels, many of which feature garments as roofs.
"We feel awful when they call us that," said Sara Abubakar Musa, 24, who was displaced by armed militias from her village several hours north of El Fasher. "How can they give us such a name?"
Ms. Musa was among those whom Mr. Annan never got to meet. On the eve of his visit, she recalled, government trucks showed up at Meshtel, a camp generally more squalid and unsightly. She said people had been ordered to grab their possessions and go - not home, but to Abushouk, on the outskirts of town, ensuring that Mr. Annan would not see their severe hardship.
Such forced relocations have occurred here and in other parts of Darfur, Sudan's troubled western region, where more than a million people have been driven from their homes. As recently as this week, government officials were offering cash, food and other incentives to lure people living in resettlement camps back to their villages. Then there are those like Ms. Musa who are simply made to move.
The aid workers condemn the government practice of trying to lure the displaced people back to their villages, but it is the residents themselves who typically speak out the loudest. Most say they will not go home until they are assured that Darfur is safe.
By nearly all accounts, a month after the high-profile visits from Mr. Annan and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, it is not. This is so despite increasing pressure - including a United Nations Security Council resolution implying sanctions - on Sudan's government to rein in marauding militias, known as the Janjaweed. The United States Congress and others have called the killings in Darfur genocide.
This vast region of scrub and sand is still marked by tension, insecurity and lawlessness, driven either by run-of-the-mill bandits or the Janjaweed militias, which the government has armed and backed in its conflict with two rebel groups.
The rebels have fought since early 2003 for more resources for the black African majority in Darfur, which they say has been neglected by a government in Khartoum dominated by Arabs.
Camps like Abushouk are where the thousands caught in the middle of the conflict find refuge in neat rows of huts, each covered with plastic sheeting to keep out the rains.
Mr. Powell came to Abushouk in late June and suggested afterward that he knew that conditions elsewhere in Darfur were much worse, despite the government's best efforts to hide the worst of camps, like Meshtel. There are two health clinics in Abushouk, and evenly spaced latrines. So organized is this camp that road signs have been stuck in the sand.
But Abushouk has a bad neighborhood too. That is where Ms. Musa and the others transferred from Meshtel continue to live in squalor compared with their compatriots in other parts of the camp. Old clothes hung on wooden poles are all that protect them from the elements. They relieve themselves in the sand.
Many here lived with relatives in El Fasher after being forced out of their villages by armed militias. But when they saw other displaced people receiving benefits, they began camping out at Meshtel. Their approach failed, and they were moved once again.
The other day, several hundred of those moved from the Meshtel camp looked on as aid workers gave out rations to other residents of Abushouk. When people from Meshtel would step forward, without the required registration card, the authorities would push them back. The giveaway finished, and the only people left, unfed, were those from Meshtel.
Help may be on the way. The International Committee of the Red Cross, which coordinates aid in the camp, says it intends to begin providing assistance to the people from Meshtel soon.
"These people were brought in all of a sudden, with no organization," said Jean-François Sonnay, head of the Red Cross office in El Fasher. "We hope to start distributing to them in the next few days."
And officials at the World Food Program said the people from Meshtel will soon be added to its ration list. But the people themselves have heard nothing, which is by design. Aid workers fear that if word gets out, residents of the nearby town will flock to Abushouk.
Until the aid does arrive, the outcasts whom Mr. Annan almost met are confused by the treatment they are receiving.
"We don't know why we don't get the same as everyone else," said Ms. Musa, whose two children are recovering from malaria. "No one wants to register us. It's not fair. Everybody is suffering, but we're suffering even more."
-------- police
Police ensure business as usual
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
By Audrey Hudson
August 03, 2004
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20040802-111041-3273r.htm
Heavily fortified financial institutions went about their business yesterday, with combat-armed police officers guarding targeted buildings on high alert of a terrorist attack in the Washington, New York City and New Jersey.
New York's elite "Hercules" team of highly trained officers guarded Wall Street with automatic weapons, and trucks were banned from bridges and tunnels leading to the financial nerve center.
Concrete barriers now surround the Prudential building in Newark, N.J., and employees and visitors were searched before entering the International Monetary Fund and World Bank in Washington. In New York, extra security measures are in place for the Citigroup Center and New York Stock Exchange.
"People around the world rightly have confidence in the U.S. financial markets," said Treasury Secretary John W. Snow. "While we must always remain vigilant against terror, we will not be intimidated and prevented from enjoying our lives and exercising our freedoms."
President Bush called the terrorist-alert level increase a "solemn reminder of the threat we continue to face."
Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge raised the terrorist-alert level Sunday from "elevated" to "high" for just the areas around five specific buildings, though local officials went ahead and put all of Washington on high alert or "Code Orange," likely until November at least.
"The information we have, as we've shared with the public before, is an expressed interest to try to undermine the democratic process," Mr. Ridge told CBS yesterday.
"In addition to the many other pieces of information we've been able to accumulate in the past several months, we decided to alert America to these very specific targets or threats. But we have no way of determining if and when an attack will occur during this election process," Mr. Ridge said.
Officers with high-powered weapons were stationed inside Metro stations in Washington, some streets were closed, and trucks traveling on 19th Street NW were searched by police officers and their drivers questioned. Surveillance cameras are being activated in key areas and officials say Washington will likely remain on "Orange" alert until after the November election.
The intelligence reports that triggered the alert show long-standing efforts by terrorists to use trucks filled with explosives or car bombs to attack the targets, and described by one senior intelligence official as "chilling in scope."
The details include specifics such as security procedures and checks required at some buildings, whether security officials are armed, their schedules, uniforms, the number of pedestrians in the area, the number of employees in buildings, different types of nearby shops and escape routes.
"There is extensive information now available on the information they've been able to acquire regarding the other facilities in the area, whether they be religious establishments, schools, libraries, hospitals, police departments, fire departments," the official said.
Some officials credit the primary source of information to the recent capture in Pakistan of Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan, also known as Abu Talha, an al Qaeda computer expert.
The information is said to have come from documents, computers, surveillance reports and sketches confiscated during the arrest.
-------- prisons / prisoners
Detainees Seeking to End Hearings Without Counsel
By Mary Fitzgerald
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, August 3, 2004; Page A13
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A35784-2004Aug3.html
Lawyers for detainees in the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, filed legal papers yesterday to halt review hearings initiated by the Pentagon, contending that the captives must first be granted access to their attorneys.
The U.S. military on Friday began holding the Combatant Status Review hearings at Guantanamo Bay to allow detainees to challenge their status as enemy combatants. The Pentagon introduced the process after the Supreme Court ruled June 28 that alleged al Qaeda and Taliban fighters have the right to challenge their detentions in U.S. courts.
In the military review hearings, detainees testify and present witnesses or affidavits on their behalf to a three-person panel. They also can be assisted by a "personal representative," an Army officer who is not a lawyer and is not bound by any rules of confidentiality.
Lawyers at the Center for Constitutional Rights and the Washington-based firm of Keller & Heckman sought an emergency stay to prevent their clients, United Kingdom residents Jamil El Banna, Bisher Al Rawi and Martin Mubanga, from being subject to any proceedings until they have access to their attorneys.
The hearings "are a sham. The detainees are given no access to counsel, have no right to meaningfully contest any classified evidence against them and no meaningful way to call any witnesses in their favor," said Jeff Fogel, legal director for the Center for Constitutional Rights.
He also criticized the use of the personal representatives during the hearings.
The papers submitted yesterday in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia also requested access to all detainee medical records and immediate examinations by independent doctors, citing concerns about the physical well-being of the detainees.
Pentagon spokesmen and attorneys could not be reached for comment yesterday.
-------
Al Qaeda Arrest In June Opened Valuable Leads
By Kamran Khan
The Washington Post
Tuesday, August 3, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A35371-2004Aug2?language=printer
KARACHI, Pakistan, Aug. 2 -- The arrest of a senior al Qaeda operative in June and his subsequent interrogation enabled U.S. and Pakistani intelligence agents to gather documents, e-mail addresses and cell phone text messages that suggested al Qaeda planned to strike targets in New York and Washington, according to Pakistani intelligence officials.
The al Qaeda operative, Musaad Aruchi, was arrested here on June 12 by Pakistani paramilitary forces in an operation supervised by the CIA, officials said. According to a senior Pakistani intelligence official involved in the early interrogation of the suspect, Aruchi "was sure that al Qaeda would hit New York or Washington pretty soon."
"He had with him street maps of New York City without the front cover, and addresses of some other important buildings," the official said. "There were some data CDs also recovered from him."
Pakistani officials said Aruchi's capture had led to other important arrests, including the raid last week in the city of Gujrat that netted Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, a Tanzanian wanted in connection with the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
"The Americans always thought that Aruchi was a big catch because of his connection with other active al Qaeda operatives, particularly those planning to target the U.S.," another Pakistani intelligence official said.
Officials described Aruchi as a nephew of Khalid Sheik Mohammad, the chief planner of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, who was arrested in the Pakistani city of Rawalpindi in March 2003. Like Mohammad, Aruchi was born in Pakistan's Baluchistan province, but his parents later moved to Kuwait and subsequently to other Persian Gulf states.
Officials said Aruchi is also a cousin of Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, who planned and carried out an attack on the World Trade Center in 1993 and is serving a life sentence in the United States.
"It seems that this family has something in their genes against the icons of financial power in the U.S.," one Pakistani intelligence official said.
U.S. intelligence telephone and Internet intercepts enabled investigators to trace Aruchi to an apartment building in a congested Karachi neighborhood, other officials said.
Pakistani authorities held him for three days before he was flown in an unmarked CIA plane from a Pakistani air force base to a location that U.S. officials did not disclose to the Pakistanis, intelligence officials said. One official said the casual nature of Aruchi's remarks during his brief time in Pakistani custody provided hints that the al Qaeda operative was in touch with people planning another terrorist strike in the United States.
Intelligence gathered from Aruchi also led to two important arrests last month, another Pakistani official said.
Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan, a Pakistani, was arrested in the city of Lahore on July 13. A Pakistani official familiar with Khan's interrogation said, "Khan did some messaging for some of his Arab associates he knew from his days in Afghanistan. We can't categorize him as a key player, but he was definitely a foot soldier.
"Nothing very incriminating was found to connect him with any terrorist act or to the planning of an act, hence we are still not sure if he'll be prosecuted or not," the official said.
Information obtained from Khan, when compared with extensive debriefing of Aruchi, led U.S. and Pakistani officials to Ghailani, the Tanzanian whose arrest in Gujrat last week has been described by Pakistani and U.S. officials as a major breakthrough.
"The timing of [Ghailani's] arrest is superb. He was definitely working on something big," said a Pakistani official familiar with his initial interrogation in Pakistan.
As Pakistani officials prepared Sunday night for Ghailani's apparently imminent handover to U.S. authorities, they said they were sure that computer disks found in his possession -- one in his laptop and another loose -- might reveal at least some of al Qaeda's plans and clues about important operatives.
The officials said that two other suspects arrested with Ghailani, earlier thought to be insignificant, had provided information showing that Ghailani was expecting important news from the United States.
Pakistani and U.S. officials are still trying to establish the nationalities of the two suspects.
An al Qaeda operative captured several weeks ago by Pakistani security forces, Abu Talaha, was described as one of the key sources of the documentary information on surveillance in the United States, according to a senior American intelligence official. Talaha remains in Pakistani custody, the official said.
Under procedures agreed to by the U.S. and Pakistani governments, agents from the CIA, FBI and National Security Agency have been allowed to eavesdrop and conduct wiretaps on terrorism suspects in Pakistan, a cabinet minister said on condition of anonymity.
For its part, the Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or ISI, Pakistan's military intelligence service, has designated special units to collect counterterrorism intelligence through hundreds of newly recruited agents and state-of-the art surveillance equipment provided by the U.S. government.
"There is almost daily exchange of information between the CIA and ISI. The cooperation is even better than the Afghan war days," said the minister.
Pakistani police and intelligence officials said that once a target is tracked down, any raid is always conducted by local law enforcement agencies under the direct supervision of senior ISI officials, many of whom have taken training courses with the FBI and the CIA.
All key al Qaeda suspects arrested in Pakistan have been handed over to U.S. authorities for broader investigation. In each case, Pakistani intelligence officials were called in by their U.S. counterparts for coordinated follow-up.
"There is not a single significant al Qaeda arrest that didn't yield us more," a senior Pakistani intelligence official said of Aruchi.
-------- terrorism
Al Qaeda computer revealed latest threat
LONDON DAILY TELEGRAPH
By Philip Johnston
August 03, 2004
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20040803-121321-3188r.htm
E-mails on a computer belonging to an al Qaeda agent in Pakistan show that five American targets, including the New York Stock Exchange and the Washington headquarters of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, have been methodically surveyed.
The discovery, which prompted a warning of impending terrorist attacks by Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge on Sunday, show that al Qaeda retains the long-term ability to plan spectacular attacks.
The other threatened buildings are the Citigroup building in New York and the Prudential Financial building in Newark, N.J.
Chillingly precise intelligence - the most detailed evidence of an al Qaeda plot since the September 11 attacks - also spoke of threats to unspecified targets in Britain, Pakistani officials said.
Intelligence officials in Washington said they were startled at the level of detail in the e-mails, suggesting that al Qaeda had been studying five of the most prominent financial buildings in America since before September 11, 2001.
The information amassed by the plotters "was gathered in 2000 and 2001," and "it appears that some of it may have been updated as recently as January of this year," Frances Townsend, the White House homeland security adviser, said on PBS' "NewsHour With Jim Lehrer."
But, she added, "you can't tell from the intelligence itself whether or not those individuals [who amassed it] are still here."
Among the details investigated by al Qaeda agents were the positions of security cameras, the movement of traffic and what kind of explosives would destroy the target buildings.
The agents checked where they could contact employees in the buildings and pinpointed the locations of police stations, fire stations and hospitals. They even counted the flow of pedestrians outside one of the buildings.
Security in major American cities was noticeably tighter yesterday.
Several streets were closed in Manhattan, and trucks were banned from bridges and tunnels leading to the Wall Street area.
Flanked by his senior aides, a somber-looking President Bush said the new alert was a "serious reminder, a solemn reminder of the threat we continue to face."
"We are a nation in danger," he said in an appearance in the White House Rose Garden, where he outlined reforms to American intelligence.
Intelligence agents found plans for new attacks in e-mails on the computer of Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, a Tanzanian arrested July 25 in Pakistan after a 12-hour gunbattle in the eastern city of Gujrat, said Pakistani Information Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed.
Officials also are getting a wealth of information from a militant computer and communications expert arrested 12 days earlier. The man would send messages using code words to al Qaeda suspects, a Pakistani intelligence official said on the condition of anonymity.
Pakistan intelligence said a man delivering groceries went to the police to give information about unusual foreigners living in Gujrat, an industrial town about 100 miles southeast of Islamabad.
Pakistani Interior Minister Faisal Saleh Hayyat said, "We know that al Qaeda is here. They have their sleeper cells in Pakistan, and we are trying to eliminate them."
-------- torture
Karpinski claims conspiracy kept her in dark over prison abuses
8/3/2004
Associated Press
By Michael Mcdonough
http://www.boston.com/dailynews/216/world/Karpinski_claims_conspiracy_ke:.shtml
LONDON (AP) The general who headed the U.S. military prison at Abu Ghraib said in an interview broadcast Tuesday that there had been a conspiracy to prevent her knowing about prisoner abuse at the jail.
Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, who was suspended by the Pentagon in May, has denied knowing about any mistreatment prisoners until photographs surfaced at the end of April. U.S. investigators have not implicated Karpinski directly in any of the abuses.
Karpinski told British Broadcasting Corp. radio that she had information suggesting officials took action to keep her in the dark about the mistreatment.
''I have been told there's a reliable witness who's made a statement ... indicating that not only was I not included in any of the meetings discussing interrogation operations, but specific measures were taken to ensure I would not have access to those facilities, that information or any of the details of interrogations at Abu Ghraib or anywhere else,'' Karpinski said. She didn't identify the witness.
''Correct,'' Karpinski responded when asked if she thought there was a conspiracy at senior level to stop her knowing what was going on.
''From what I understand ... it was people that had full knowledge of what was going on out at Abu Ghraib who knew that they had to keep Janis Karpinski from discovering any of those activities,'' she added.
Asked whether she thought the conspiracy reached up to the Pentagon or the White House, she said: ''The indication is that it may have.''
Karpinski also dismissed an Iraqi man's allegation in a federal lawsuit that she witnessed abuses at Abu Ghraib. In a videotaped deposition, Saddam ''Sam'' Saleh Aboud said he endured beatings at the prison. During one session, his hood was removed and he said he saw Karpinski.
She rejected that claim.
''There's no truth to his statement,'' Karpinski told the BBC. ''There was never a time when I witnessed any abuse at Abu Ghraib or at any other facility anywhere.
''I was never at a location where, if a prisoner was in a detention cell, he would have been hooded. That never took place.''
She added that for security reasons she had never visited Abu Ghraib after dark and that she now believed most of the abuse had occurred in the early hours of the morning.
A military hearing opened Tuesday in the United States to begin gathering evidence to see if one of the soldiers in the photographs, Pfc. Lynndie England, should be court-martialed. She was photographed smiling and giving the thumbs-up sign in the presence of naked, hooded detainees.
-------- POLITICS
-------- foia
Access to Contract Data Questioned
New Private Database on Procurement Worries Researchers
By Christopher Lee
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, August 3, 2004; Page A15
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A35339-2004Aug2.html
A new program that consolidates public information about federal contracts in the hands of a private company has some researchers worried that keeping tabs on government deals with corporations will be harder than ever.
Last year the General Services Administration turned over operation of the Federal Procurement Data System, a central database of information about federal contracts, to Global Computer Enterprises (GCE) of Reston.
The company, which could earn more than $24 million over seven years, will design and operate a new electronic data repository that GSA officials say will be more accurate, more timely and easier to search than the GSA-run system in place since 1979.
The database is an important tool for journalists and academics who use it to track the billions of tax dollars the government spends annually on deals with companies. Businesses turn to it to keep an eye on competitors.
The new system, scheduled to begin in October, represents "the most advantageous solution for the taxpayer," said David A. Drabkin, GSA deputy chief acquisition officer. "You'll be able to get more information, you'll be able to get it quickly, and you can rely on the accuracy of the information."
One big improvement is that fiscal 2004 contracting data should be available by December; last year's data were not ready until May, Drabkin said. The database also will contain fewer errors because information will be entered at the same time a contract is awarded or updated, rather than days or weeks later, he said.
In some cases, the information will come at a higher cost, Drabkin conceded. Although prices still are being negotiated, the contractor will almost certainly charge more than the government did for tailored searches, he said.
It is the predictions of higher cost and fears of reduced access that have made some regular users anxious. A few are already chafing at reports -- which Drabkin calls unfounded -- that a year's worth of contracting data, formerly available for less than $2,000, could cost tens of thousands of dollars.
"How much is this going to cost?" said Aron Pilhofer, database editor for the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit watchdog group. "We just don't know. . . . All I want is the raw data."
Under the new system, the raw contracting data will bypass GSA and go directly from each federal agency to GCE, Drabkin said. It will no longer be available publicly, although a formatted version can be bought from the contractor.
"I've seen reports that somebody claims that it's going to cost them $35,000," Drabkin said. "That's crap. . . . I don't know what we'll ultimately negotiate, but it's a tenth of that or less."
Ray Muslimani, president of GCE, said the firm makes its money designing computer systems, not selling data. "The costs will be very similar to the costs that were charged in the past," he said.
Drabkin said fees will be based on costs of producing the information and the contractor will not share the revenue with the GSA.
Stan Z. Soloway, president of the Professional Services Council, a contractors association, said businesses will not object to paying more as long as they get better information.
Forty types of reports, including compilations of contracts awarded to small or minority-owned businesses, will continue to be free, Drabkin said. Federal agencies and members of Congress can search the entire database at no charge.
Still, some government contracting experts say the GSA effectively has exempted the centralized data from the Freedom of Information Act by allowing a private contractor to control it. Gathering the data through FOIA requests to each federal agency is impractical, they say.
"It seems to me to be wrongheaded for the government to intentionally take data that they have been generating and give it to a contractor for the purposes of not disclosing it," said Steven L. Schooner, a professor at George Washington University Law School. "That sounds like they are hiding it."
Angela B. Styles, a former Office of Management and Budget official who oversaw federal procurement policy, said the new system may not conform to federal law that says, in part, that the contracting information "shall be transmitted to the General Services Administration."
Drabkin said Styles was misreading the statute. In any case, she approved the new system when she was still at the OMB, he said.
"Right now people are talking about something they haven't seen yet," he said. "This is an elegant solution and once we field it, people are going to be thrilled, not disgusted and not angry."
-------- propaganda wars
The Most Influential 'Embedded' Reporter Ever
How the Press Was Spun: Part II. Managing the news at the dawn of the Atomic Age, a special daily report all this week.
By Greg Mitchell
(August 03, 2004)
Editor & Publisher
This week, leading up to the 59th anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb over Hiroshima, I am writing a special daily column to mark the event. In part II today: a look at the most influential "embedded reporter" ever. All of these columns are adapted from my book "Hiroshima in America," co-authored by Robert Jay Lifton.
--
On the morning of Aug. 7, 1945, with reports of death and destruction in Hiroshima still thin, newspapers around the country carried, in full or part, most of the 14 press releases provided by the government the day before.
The official releases, which appeared under headlines such as "Basic Force of Universe Unleashed," disclosed, among other amazing things, the story of the first atomic chain reaction, the existence of dozens of secret bomb sites, and the test of the new weapon at the Trinity site in July.
Each of these events would have dominated the news for days had they been reported when they actually occurred. Now they were all emerging at the same moment, from the same office at the Pentagon, and with a rich cast of unfamiliar names, such as Oppenheimer and Tibbets. Taken together, they chronicled, according to the Pentagon, a "fabulous achievement" and the means to "save thousands of American lives," which would come to be the key official rationale for taking the lives of so many civilians in Japan.
Photographs, however, were still at a premium, so several of the Hearst papers printed a cartoon showing Uncle Sam blasting a buck-toothed "Jap" with the "Sun's Power" of an atomic bomb. Hearst also distributed a picture of a small hydroelectric power station in Hiroshima which it claimed "may have been the primary target of the new atomic bombers." As it happened, the power plant, on the outskirts of Hiroshima, was untouched by the bomb, which exploded over the center of the city, but journalists could not have known that. They had to rely completely on information from the military. Press coverage amounted to little more than rewrites of War Department documents.
In orchestrating the official story of Hiroshima, as in so many aspects of the bomb, General Leslie Groves, military director of the Manhattan Project, played a central role.
Back in March 1945 he had made a bold decision: to hire a "suitable newspaperman" to insert in the Manhattan Project. Reporters near the atomic bomb plants were starting to poke around, and Groves feared "serious breaks" after the first test of the bomb in the New Mexico desert that summer.
Even if secrecy held, the frightening new weapon would have to be sold to the public after it was used, both to justify dropping it over heavily populated cities, and to build more of them after the war. In an internal memo, Groves warned that once the secret was out, "the project will be subject to harassing investigation, official inquiries ... and all the miscellany of crackpots, columnists, commentators, political aspirants, would-be authors and worldsavers."
To combat this, Groves proposed that officials "control the situation by the issuance of carefully written press releases." Indeed, from that moment on, control of nuclear commentary would be the government's goal for decades.
The Manhattan Project already had a public-relations staff, but Groves sought a respected journalist who would supply a "more objective touch" and add authority to the press releases. An associate recommended a brilliant choice: William L. Laurence, Putlizer Prize-winning science reporter for The New York Times.
Meeting secretly at the Times, Groves found Laurence eager to take the "embedded reporter" job.
Laurence brought to any project what top Times editor Turner Catledge once called an "unquenchable, boyish enthusiasm." Told about the bomb project, Laurence considered it the discovery of the century and believed that no greater honor could come to any newspaperman than creating the War Department's press releases.
In the weeks ahead, he would visit bomb plants around the country. Writing to Groves he promised an "Eyewitness account of the test in New Mexico ... provided eyewitness survives." But he asked: "You're going to waste an atomic bomb on American soil? If you have a bomb, why not drop it on Japan right off and end the war? What's the sense of wasting a good bomb?"
After Laurence completed his stories, they were stamped Top Secret, and locked in a vault, awaiting the end of the war or the use of the bomb, whichever came first.
The material would emerge on the morning of Aug. 7. One story likened the Trinity test to "the moment of creation when God said: 'Let there be light.'" The only thing Laurence missed was the bomb run over Hiroshima.
The official releases would indeed "control the situation," as Groves had hoped, thanks in no small part to the celebratory yet highly credible quality of Laurence's writing. In one of these documents, Laurence would coin the expression "the Atomic Age," and it was he, perhaps more than anyone, who set the tone for the entire era.
Where was Bill Laurence on Aug. 7, 1945, when his official stories made front pages around the country? On an island in the Pacific, with the second bomb, getting ready to observe the obliteration of another Japanese city.
----
Distortions Surrounded Press Response to Hiroshima Attack
How the Press Was Spun: Part III. Managing the news at the dawn of the Atomic Age, a special daily report all this week.
By Greg Mitchell
(August 03, 2004)
Editor & Publisher
The Truman announcement of the atomic bombing on Aug. 6, 1945, and the flood of material from the War Department, written by The New York Times' William L. Laurence the following day, firmly established the nuclear narrative. It would not take long, however, for breaks in the official story to appear.
At first, journalists had to follow where the Pentagon led. Wartime censorship remained in effect, and there was no way any reporter could reach Hiroshima for a look around. One of the few early stories that did not come directly from the military was a wire service report filed by a journalist traveling with the president on the Atlantic, returning from Europe. Approved by military censors, it went beyond, but not far beyond, the measured tone of the president's official statement. It depicted Truman, his voice "tense with excitement," personally informing his shipmates about the atomic attack. "The experiment," he announced, "has been an overwhelming success."
The sailors were said to be "uproarious" over the news. "I guess I'll get home sooner now," was a typical response. Nowhere in the story, however, was there a strong sense of Truman's reaction. Missing from this account was his exultant remark when the news of the bombing first reached the ship: "This is the greatest thing in history!"
On Aug. 7, military officials confirmed that Hiroshima had been devastated: at least 60% of the city wiped off the map. They offered no casualty estimates, emphasizing instead that the obliterated area housed major industrial targets. The Air Force provided the newspapers with an aerial photograph of Hiroshima. Significant targets were identified by name. For anyone paying close attention there was something troubling about this picture. Of the thirty targets, only four were specifically military in nature. "Industrial" sites consisted of three textile mills. (Indeed, a U.S. survey of the damage, not released to the press, found that residential areas bore the brunt of the bomb, with less than 10% of the city's manufacturing, transportation, and storage facilities damaged.)
On Guam, weaponeer William S. Parsons and Enola Gay pilot Paul Tibbets calmly answered reporters' questions, limiting their remarks to what they had observed after the bomb exploded. Asked how he felt about the people down below at the time of detonation, Parsons said that he experienced only relief that the bomb had worked and might be "worth so much in terms of shortening the war."
Almost without exception newspaper editorials endorsed the use of the bomb against Japan. Many of them sounded the theme of revenge first raised in the Truman announcement. Most of them emphasized that using the bomb was merely the logical culmination of war. "However much we deplore the necessity," The Washington Post observed, "a struggle to the death commits all combatants to inflicting a maximum amount of destruction on the enemy within the shortest span of time." The Post added that it was "unreservedly glad that science put this new weapon at our disposal before the end of the war."
Referring to American leaders, the Chicago Tribune commented: "Being merciless, they were merciful." A drawing in the same newspaper pictured a dove of peace flying over Japan, an atomic bomb in its beak.
At the same time, however, the first non-official news reports began to break into print, including graphic accounts of casualties, a subject ignored in the War Department's briefings.
Tokyo radio, according to a United Press report, called Hiroshima a city of the dead with corpses "too numerous to be counted ... literally seared to death." It was impossible to "distinguish between men and women." Medical aid was hampered by the fact that all the hospitals in the city were in ashes. The Associated Press carried the first eyewitness account, attributed to a Japanese soldier who had crudely described the victims (over Tokyo radio) as "bloated and scorched -- such an awesome sight -- their legs and bodies stripped of clothes and burned with a huge blister. ..."
Americans who came across these reports were thrust briefly into the reality of atomic warfare -- if this information could be believed; The New York Times observed that the Japanese were "trying to establish a propaganda point that the bombings should be stopped." The Hearst newspapers published a cartoon showing a hideous, apelike "Jap" rising out of the ruins of Hiroshima screaming at Americans, "They're Not Human!", with the caption, "Look who's talking."
But in quoting from Tokyo radio, newspapers did introduce their readers to a disturbing point of view: that the atomic bombing might not be an act of deliverance blessed by the Almighty but a "crime against God and man"; not a legitimate part of war but something "inhuman," a cruel "atrocity," and a violation of international law, specifically Article 22 of the Hague Convention which outlawed attacks on defenseless civilians. The Japanese also compared the bomb to the use of poison gas, a weapon generally considered taboo. It was this very analogy many American policy makers and scientists had feared as they contemplated using the bomb, which they knew would spread radiation.
Other condemnations appeared as the War Department's grip on the story weakened slightly. The New York Herald-Tribune found "no satisfaction in the thought that an American air crew had produced what must without doubt be the greatest simultaneous slaughter in the whole history of mankind," likening it to the "mass butcheries of the Nazis or of the ancients." A leading religious body in America, the Federal Council of Churches, urged that the U.S. drop no more atomic bombs on Japan, in a statement issued by two of its leaders, G. Bromley Oxnam and John Foster Dulles. America had won the race for the bomb but it "may yet reap the whirlwind," Hanson Baldwin, military analyst for the New York Times, declared.
Interest in Hiroshima, however, receded as other events in the Pacific war, as well as speculation about a Japanese surrender, took center stage. On Aug. 9, the top two headlines on the front page of The New York Times announced the Soviets' declaration of war against Japan. Not until line three did this message appear: "ATOM BOMB LOOSED ON NAGASAKI." The target of the second attack, a city of 270,000 people, was described, variously, as a naval base, an industrial center, or a vital port for military shipments and troop embarkation, anything but a largely residential city. The bomb, in fact, exploded over the largest Catholic community in the Far East.
That night, President Truman told a national radio audience that the Hiroshima bomb had been dropped on a military base, not a large city, although he knew this was not true. "That was because we wished in the first attack to avoid, in so far as possible, the killing of civilians," he said.
----
The First On-the-Scene Report From Hiroshima
How the Press Was Spun: Part IV. Managing the news at the dawn of the Atomic Age, a special daily report all this week.
By Greg Mitchell
(August 03, 2004)
Editor & Publisher
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/columns/pressingissues_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000592926
On Aug. 14, 1945, eight days after Hiroshima was attacked, and six days after the Soviets entered the war, Japan agreed to surrender, but with one significant condition: keeping its emperor. Truman called the surrender "unconditional" anyway, and the press did not challenge him. Arthur Krock's report in The New York Times, for example, opened with: "Japan today unconditionally surrendered. ..."
With victory in hand, few Americans protested the emperor clause. V-J Day had finally arrived. This meant that Hiroshima would fade as America plunged headlong into the postwar era. Despite a few breaks in the official story, the War Department had effectively managed the news media, thanks to its control over information, a generally acquiescent press, and the national euphoria over an impending surrender.
But there was one troubling issue. Reports on Japanese radio claimed that thousands were dying from a "mysterious disease" long after the atomic bombing. American officials, identified in the press as "experts on Japanese propaganda," said that these "abstract" theories may be nothing more than an attempt to "capitalize on the horror of atomic bombing in an effort to win sympathy from their conquerors."
Behind the scenes, however, the military was considering the issue of radiation quite seriously. The Pentagon's censorship office had deleted two-thirds of a Philadelphia Bulletin article which revealed that radioactivity from the July 16 atomic test in New Mexico had spread to small towns surrounding the Trinity site.
Reports of death by radiation in Japan complicated the Hiroshima story. As they celebrated the Japanese surrender, most Americans seemed to accept as necessary the instantaneous killing of tens of thousands of the enemy. But now the end-of-the-war euphoria was starting to wear off, just as reports of thousands of additional deaths from a cruel and lingering illness surfaced.
Until late August, however, little was known for certain about conditions on the ground in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, beyond hazy reconnaissance photographs and unconfirmed reports from the enemy about the actual effects of the bomb. But with General MacArthur's arrival at Yokohama on Aug. 28, it was only a matter of time before American reporters entered Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Whether they would be allowed to disclose freely what they discovered was another matter. President Truman had declared an end to wartime censorship on Aug. 15, but articles and photographs documenting the "employment" of the atomic bomb remained under strict review. General MacArthur, in addition, had instituted his own censorship apparatus and notified reporters arriving in Japan that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were off limits. They could witness the Japanese surrender on board the Missouri in Tokyo Bay on Sept. 2, then be escorted, if they wished, on a tour of prisoner-of-war camps in northern Japan.
Of several hundred Western reporters in Japan in early September only two chose to defy restrictions and travel on their own to the atomic cities.
One was the Australian war correspondent Wilfred Burchett. He set out from Tokyo for Hiroshima by train on the morning of Sept. 2. Burchett, who had once written dispatches glorifying the firebombing of Japanese cities, was simply looking for a scoop. (Only later did he become known for his pro-Soviet views.) The following morning he encountered in Hiroshima what he later described as a "death-stricken alien planet." He noticed a dank, sulfurous smell; people hurried past, white masks covering their noses and mouths.
Burchett was taken directly to one of the few hospitals left standing (although badly damaged) in the city. Its director, Michihiko Hachiya, later known in America as the author of "Hiroshima Diary," felt certain that what he called "radiation sickness" was real. Shortly after the bombing he had observed that one in five patients developed purple skin hemorrhages; some were also losing their hair. Many had white-cell counts about one-tenth the normal number. About three weeks later, these patients began to die, and the death rate rose as each day passed.
In the half-standing hospital, Burchett found patients strewn about on the floor, suffering from the final stages of radiation disease. The reporter pulled out his typewriter and, sitting on a chunk of rubble near the hypocenter of the atomic blast, composed his historic article, which began: "In Hiroshima, 30 days after the first atomic bomb destroyed the city and shook the world, people are still dying, mysteriously and horribly -- people who were uninjured in the cataclysm -- from an unknown something which I can only describe as the atomic plague. ... I write these facts as dispassionately as I can in the hope that they will act as a warning to the world. ..."
Just as Burchett was finishing his story, a group of journalists on an Air Force charter landed just outside Hiroshima. Included in this group were Homer Bigart of the New York Herald-Tribune, reporters for The Associated Press, The New York Times and the Hearst news service, and an official censor. According to Burchett's later account, the reporters were not happy to discover they had been scooped. He told one of the visitors, "The real story is in the hospitals." After just a few hours they were ready to leave and Burchett asked one of the officials to carry a copy of his article to Tokyo. The request was denied.
That evening, Burchett managed to transmit his story to a colleague in Tokyo, who eased it through the censorship office mainly intact, perhaps because it was written for a British publication. Two days later, on Sept. 5, it ran on the front page of the London Daily Express under the headline "THE ATOMIC PLAGUE." Burchett credited his editor with displaying extraordinary courage in publishing the article. Great Britain, after all, had helped build the bomb. Greg Mitchell (gmitchell@editorandpublisher.com) is the editor of E&P and co-author (with Robert Jay Lifton) of "Hiroshima in America," from which this week's columns are adapted. Mitchell also served as adviser to the new documentary, "Original Child Bomb," which in June shared the grand prize at the Silverdocs film festival.
----
THE OVERVIEW
Reports That Led to Terror Alert Were Years Old, Officials Say
August 3, 2004
New York Times
By DOUGLAS JEHL and DAVID JOHNSTON
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/03/politics/03intel.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, Aug. 2 -Much of the information that led the authorities to raise the terror alert at several large financial institutions in the New York City and Washington areas was three or four years old, intelligence and law enforcement officials said on Monday. They reported that they had not yet found concrete evidence that a terrorist plot or preparatory surveillance operations were still under way.
But the officials continued to regard the information as significant and troubling because the reconnaissance already conducted has provided Al Qaeda with the knowledge necessary to carry out attacks against the sites in Manhattan, Washington and Newark. They said Al Qaeda had often struck years after its operatives began surveillance of an intended target.
Taken together with a separate, more general stream of intelligence, which indicates that Al Qaeda intends to strike in the United States this year, possibly in New York or Washington, the officials said even the dated but highly detailed evidence of surveillance was sufficient to prompt the authorities to undertake a global effort to track down the unidentified suspects involved in the surveillance operations.
"You could say that the bulk of this information is old, but we know that Al Qaeda collects, collects, collects until they're comfortable,'' said one senior government official. "Only then do they carry out an operation. And there are signs that some of this may have been updated or may be more recent.''
Frances Fragos Townsend, the White House homeland security adviser, said on Monday in an interview on PBS that surveillance reports, apparently collected by Qaeda operatives had been "gathered in 2000 and 2001.'' But she added that information may have been updated as recently as January.
The comments of government officials on Monday seemed softer in tone than the warning issued the day before. On Sunday, officials were circumspect in discussing when the surveillance of the financial institutions had occurred, and Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge cited the quantity of intelligence from "multiple reporting streams'' that he said was "alarming in both the amount and specificity of the information.''
The officials said on Monday that they were still analyzing computer records, photos, drawings and other documents, seized last month in Pakistan, which showed that Qaeda operatives had conducted extensive reconnaissance.
"What we've uncovered is a collection operation as opposed to the launching of an attack," a senior American official said.
Still, the official said the new trove of material, which was being sifted for fresh clues, combined with more recent flows of intelligence, had demonstrated that Al Qaeda remains active and intent on attacking the United States.
The concern about the possibility of an attack was apparent on Monday. Armed guards were positioned at the five targets listed by Mr. Ridge: the New York Stock Exchange and the Citigroup buildings in Manhattan, the headquarters of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in Washington and Prudential Financial in Newark. The buildings were subjected to their highest level of security since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, with barricades, rapid-response teams and bomb-sniffing dogs providing rings of protection.
With intelligence reports specifying a possible truck bombing, police stopped and searched vehicles in the Wall Street area, while vans and trucks were banned from bridges and tunnels entering lower Manhattan.
In Washington, President Bush said the alert issued on Sunday reflected "a serious business.'' He said at a White House news conference, "We wouldn't be contacting authorities at the local level unless something was real.''
Despite the new terror warnings, the stock market gained ground, denting expectations that it would drop with the heightened security alert. The Dow Jones industrial average was up 39 points.
A sizable part of the information seized in Pakistan described reconnaissance carried out before the Sept. 11 attacks, officials said. The documents do not indicate who wrote the detailed descriptions of security arrangements at the financial buildings or whether the surveillance was conducted for a current operation or was part of preparations for a plan that was later set aside.
In a briefing on Sunday, a senior intelligence official said that the threat to the financial institutions "probably continues even today."
Federal authorities said on Monday that they had uncovered no evidence that any of the surveillance activities described in the documents was currently under way. They said officials in New Jersey had been mistaken in saying on Sunday that some suspects had been found with blueprints and may have recently practiced "test runs'' aimed at the Prudential building in Newark.
Joseph Billy Jr., the special agent in charge of the F.B.I.'s Newark office, said a diagram of the Prudential building had been found in Pakistan. "It appears to be from the period around 9/11,'' Mr. Billy said. "Now we're trying to see whether it goes forward from there.''
Another counterterrorism official in Washington said that it was not yet clear whether the information pointed to a current plot. "We know that Al Qaeda routinely cases targets and then puts the plans on a shelf without doing anything,'' the official said.
The documents were found after Pakistani authorities acting on information supplied by the Central Intelligence Agency arrested Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan, an engineer who was found to have served as a middleman in facilitating Qaeda communications. His capture led the C.I.A. to laptop computers, CD-ROM's, and other storage devices that contained copies of communications describing the extensive surveillance.
Mr. Khan had been essentially unknown to the United States as recently as May, according to information provided by a Pakistani intelligence official, who said the C.I.A. had described him to Pakistani authorities that month only as a shadowy figure identified by his alias, Abu Talha.
The lack of knowledge about Mr. Khan reflected how hard it has been for American authorities to penetrate Al Qaeda. He operated successfully without the government learning of his existence even after three years of an intensive intelligence war against Qaeda that has emphasized efforts to intercept the terror network's communications traffic.
In pursuing the new leads, intelligence and law enforcement authorities were working at several different levels, American officials said, in trying to make sense of what some described as a "jigsaw puzzle" that included first names, aliases, and temporary email addresses but little hard identifying material that could lead to suspects in the United States or overseas.
The scope of the inquiry ranged from "individuals who were orchestrating it from far-off lands to individuals who were in charge of different cells, to the actual operating of cells," a senior intelligence official said. The priority effort to identify people connected to the surveillance of the financial institutions has been under way since counterterrorism officials received the new information from Pakistan beginning Thursday evening, counterterrorism officials said on Monday.
The information, which officials said was indicative of preparations for a possible truck- or car-bomb attack, left significant gaps. It did not clearly describe the suspected plot, indicate when an attack was to take place nor did it describe the identities of people involved.
As a result, federal and local authorities began an effort to locate possible suspects who might have carried out the surveillance. Intelligence officers began interviewing Qaeda detainees asking whether they knew Mr. Khan or anyone who might have been involved in monitoring the targeted buildings and allied foreign intelligence services were asked if they had any information about the suspected plot.
At the same time, federal agents and local police began canvassing the buildings regarded as likely targets seeking to determine whether anyone recalled seeing people who appeared to be conducting surveillance. They sought lists of employees to determine whether anyone suspicious might have worked at any of the buildings and names of vendors, searching for anyone who might have visited the buildings to study security arrangements.
Senior counterterrorism and intelligence officials based in Europe said the information targeting the five buildings was developed by Qaeda operatives before Sept. 11, 2001. But a senior European counterterrorism official cautioned that "some recent information'' indicated that the buildings might remain on a list of Qaeda targets.
"Al Qaeda routinely comes up with ways to hit targets for years at a time, so it may not mean much that these buildings were first targeted more than three years ago,'' the official said.
-------- us politics
Cheney hails U.S. defenders
(AP)
August 03, 2004
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20040802-111048-4476r.htm
PETERSON AIR FORCE BASE, Colo. - Vice President Dick Cheney told nearly 1,000 military personnel yesterday that the Bush administration is doing everything it can to protect the nation against terrorists and other threats.
"I am grateful to stand before so many who defend our homeland so well," Mr. Cheney told the airmen and a handful of civilians gathered in a hangar. "Your mission here is nothing less than the defense of America's land, sea and airspace."
Mr. Cheney, who has been campaigning throughout the West, was addressing members of the North American Aerospace Defense Command and the U.S. Northern Command, which was set up here to coordinate the military response to threats to North America after the September 11, 2001, attacks.
"It's been almost three years since the terrorists brought war to our homeland," Mr. Cheney said. "We saw a foe whose hate for us is limitless. This is, to put it simply, an enemy we must vanquish. And we will vanquish this enemy.
"President Bush is determined to remove threats before they arrive ... all Americans can be certain we are doing everything we can to protect this nation."
Chad Clanton, a spokesman for Sen. John Kerry's presidential campaign, said the administration is "not doing all we need to do to strengthen homeland security.... We've been sitting on our hands too long. The time for talk is over. It's time for action."
It was Mr. Cheney's sixth visit since the fall to a state that has two congressional seats left open by the retirement of Republicans. The Bush and Kerry campaigns have been running ads in Colorado in an effort to capture its nine electoral votes in the November election.
In June, Mr. Cheney spoke to 300 workers and their families at Adam Aircraft in Englewood, Colo., about the economy, saying voters should reject any suggestion to roll back tax cuts.
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Bush Backs Creation of Intelligence Director
President Also Supports Counterterrorism Center Proposed by 9/11 Panel
By Mike Allen and Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, August 3, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A35425-2004Aug2?language=printer
President Bush called on Congress yesterday to create a national intelligence director and announced that he would build a national counterterrorism center as part of a refocused election-year effort to fend off future attacks.
Bush's statement embraced the two most significant of the 37 recommendations by the commission that investigated the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, but with significant limitations. Under his plan, the new intelligence chief would lack the authority over budgets, hiring and firing that the commission had envisioned.
The president's statement marked the beginning of an attempt to restructure the nation's intelligence machinery, which the commission said was long overdue. The creation of the director's position and the counterterrorism center are designed to allow swifter melding of domestic and foreign intelligence and to unify the work of the government's 15 spy agencies, which sometimes work at cross-purposes.
"We are a nation in danger," Bush said in the White House Rose Garden. "We're doing everything we can in our power to confront the danger."
Bush, whose aides had once suggested he would not undertake intelligence reform until a second term, was moving speedily in the heated political climate created by the presidential campaign and frequent television appearances by commissioners and families of Sept. 11 victims. Although Bush opposed creation of the commission and fought its requests for witnesses and documents, the White House said he now supports some version of every one of its suggestions.
Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), who issued a blanket endorsement of the commission's recommendations two days after they were delivered on July 22, called Bush's proposal tardy and inadequate. "We cannot afford reluctance in the protection of our country," he said.
Bush said the new director "will serve as the president's principal intelligence adviser and will oversee and coordinate the foreign and domestic activities" of the intelligence community. He said the counterintelligence center "will become our government's knowledge bank for information about known and suspected terrorists," coordinating counterterrorism plans across the government and preparing the daily terrorism threat report for the president and other senior officials.
Three of the members of Bush's war cabinet who stood with him in the Rose Garden had opposed creation of the position, including Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who told the commission in March that the change would be "doing the country a great disservice."
Rather than adopting the commission's idea of making the position part of the White House structure, Bush proposed making the director a free-standing office of Cabinet rank but not actually in the Cabinet.
The commission had said the intelligence head should be stationed in the White House for maximum power and easy access to the president, but Bush's aides said that would encourage accusations that intelligence was being politicized.
Bush and Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr., who later briefed reporters on the plan, made it clear that the director would not control the nation's $40 billion-a-year intelligence budgets. That power would remain with the individual Cabinet departments and agencies.
Bush said the director "ought to be able to coordinate budgets," and Card said that the director would have "significant input" and "tremendous clout" in developing the intelligence budget but that "it would have to be a developed budget consistent with other agencies." That is similar to the power now held by the director of central intelligence.
Administration officials said they realized that giving full budget power to the intelligence official would have ignited a huge battle with the bureaucracy, most notably with Rumsfeld, who now oversees several of the best-funded intelligence agencies.
Bush left many of the details to Congress. Several commissioners said they would lobby lawmakers to make sure the new director has the powers their report advocates.
"You don't want this person as a figurehead," the commission's chairman, Thomas H. Kean (R), said in a telephone interview. "Budget authority is very important."
Commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste (D) called budget authority "an absolutely essential part of our recommendation." Commissioner Timothy J. Roemer (D) said, "The detail will be the difference between success and failure."
Philip D. Zelikow, executive director of the Sept. 11 commission, said last week that if the new intelligence chief was not given hiring and firing and budgetary control over the intelligence community agencies, he would oppose any change in the current system.
"If Congress takes the shell of this idea and then dilutes the powers so that it looks like they've done it but they haven't really done it, then you will have another bureaucratic layer," he said on PBS's "NewsHour." "They might as well not do anything at all, because they'll make us more worse off."
The new directorate would eliminate the position of director of central intelligence (DCI), one of the two jobs now held by the director of the CIA.
Acting CIA Director John E. McLaughlin had opposed the change. White House press secretary Scott McClellan indicated yesterday that Bush was nearing an announcement about a permanent CIA director to succeed George J. Tenet, who left office July 11. "I expect that he'll have more to say on that soon," McClellan said.
Bush's plan would give the new intelligence director many of the responsibilities the DCI now holds. For example, the DCI is by law the principal intelligence adviser to the president and, as CIA director, also has the authority to direct, at the president's request, the clandestine collection of intelligence and initiation of covert actions.
Under the Bush plan, however, the new intelligence chief would lose any direct control over CIA activities. Today, the DCI sits in on the president's morning briefing and manages preparation of the threat matrix. The new chief would do that also.
The DCI now has a 300-person intelligence community staff through which he attempts to manage the budget and intelligence activities of the entire community. The Bush plan would replace that group with a new staff for the new intelligence director that would be expanded to include analysts.
As for authority to hire or fire top personnel within the 15 agencies in the community, the DCI today has that power over the CIA and a secondary role in choosing the director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon-based unit that handles imagery satellites, and the National Reconnaissance Office, which builds and operates intelligence satellites as part of the Pentagon. Those two agencies have CIA employees.
Under Bush's proposal, the new director would be asked to concur in appointments made by Pentagon and Homeland Security officials.
The Bush proposal does not include giving the new intelligence chief power over personnel. Card said he should play a "coordinating role in the selection of people who are going to serve in the intelligence community." But, Card said, the chief would not have authority that would "undermine the chain of command and the responsibilities" that accrue to the Cabinet officials in charge of departments that house the intelligence agencies, such as the Defense Department.
Where the Sept. 11 commission would give its national counterterrorism center and other national intelligence centers the power to order clandestine operations and collections, Bush's proposal would apparently give its counterterrorism unit only the authority to gather intelligence from other agencies and prepare coordinated threat information. But his plan does not further specify the center's role.
Although the CIA would lose much of its authority under the commission's plan, the president's proposal would give the acting CIA director additional interim authority with respect to the Terrorist Threat Integration Center and the coordinated counterterrorism strategy group that meets regularly at 5 p.m. in his conference room.
The Republican leadership in Congress has also scrambled to look responsive to the commission and plans a series of hearings during the August recess. Asked whether he would call lawmakers back this month, or whether they could act after Labor Day, as planned, Bush said, "They can think about them over August and come back and act on them in September."
Kerry told reporters in Grand Rapids, Mich., that many of the changes were "very obvious" and should have been made long ago. "I regret that the president seems to have no sense of urgency to make America as safe as it needs to be," Kerry said. "The time to act is now, not later."
Bush's proposals drew a generally favorable response on Capitol Hill, although several Democrats said they may not be tough enough.
Staff writer Helen Dewar contributed to this report.
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Bush backs intelligence czar
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
By James G. Lakely
August 03, 2004
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20040803-122616-2365r.htm
President Bush yesterday endorsed the creation of a national director of intelligence and a comprehensive counterterrorism center, moving quickly to enact two key recommendations issued last month by the September 11 commission.
"We're a nation in danger," Mr. Bush said in a Rose Garden press conference a day after the terror alert level for five buildings in New York, New Jersey and the District was raised to high or Code Orange, the second-highest rating.
"We're doing everything in our power to confront the danger. We're making good progress in protecting our people and bringing our enemies to account," Mr. Bush said.
"But one thing is certain," he said. "We'll keep our focus and we'll keep our resolve. We will do our duty to best secure the country."
Of the two major moves, appointing a new national intelligence director (NID) is likely to be more contentious because it requires Congress to amend the 1947 National Security Act to create the position. The director would oversee the 15 intelligence agencies of the federal government, which the September 11 commission criticized for a fatal lack of coordination and cooperation.
"All the institutions of our government must be fully prepared for a struggle against terror that will last into the future," Mr. Bush said. "I want - and every president must have - the best, unbiased, unvarnished assessment of America's intelligence professionals."
Mr. Bush's announcement undercuts a recent line of attack by Democratic presidential nominee Sen. John Kerry, who has endorsed wholesale the voluminous recommendations of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States.
Mr. Kerry, who voted several times to cut intelligence funding during his Senate career, has accused Mr. Bush of dragging his feet on reforming the intelligence community.
At a campaign stop yesterday in Grand Rapids, Mich., Mr. Kerry maintained that the president's sweeping plan to reorganize domestic and foreign intelligence doesn't change his opinion.
"If we are at war, we need to do the things that make us safe rapidly, immediately," Mr. Kerry said. "If there is something that will make America safer, it should be done now, not tomorrow.
"I regret that the president seems to have no sense of urgency to make America as safe as it needs to be," Mr. Kerry said, adding that the president should "call the Congress back and get the job done now." Mr. Bush said he was satisfied that Congress already has begun hearings on the reforms during its summer recess.
"They can think about them over August and come back and act on them in September," Mr. Bush said.
Later, White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr., in a briefing with reporters, said he doubted that the laborious congressional committee process would produce a bill quickly "even if they were to come back into session as full bodies next week."
The NID will neither be a member of the president's Cabinet nor operate from the White House, Mr. Card said, because Mr. Bush wanted to ensure that the director could avoid "undue pressure" from presidential staffers.
But the director would serve at the pleasure of the president after Senate confirmation. The NID would act as the president's chief intelligence officer, taking over that duty from the director of the CIA.
In the other major change endorsed by the president, the national counterterrorism center "will become our government's knowledge bank for information about known and suspected terrorists," Mr. Bush said.
The center, which Mr. Bush can create unilaterally, will be responsible for preparing the president's daily terrorism briefing, another duty currently handled by the CIA.
John L. Lehman, a Republican member of the bipartisan September 11 commission, said he was pleased that Mr. Bush decided to move quickly on creating an NID and a counterterrorism center.
"So far, so good," Mr. Lehman said, adding that the NID can only be effective if the official has the power to change the "entrenched bureaucracy" of the intelligence community.
"Creating just a czar with coordinating power is not going to improve things at all," Mr. Lehman said. "It really must have clear authority over hiring and firing and personnel policy protocols, over budgets and over security systems."
Mr. Bush did not detail how much authority the NID would have, but Mr. Lehman said the commission has faith that those factors will be addressed.
"Certainly, there is nothing that the president said today that suggests these things are not going to happen," Mr. Lehman said.
Both the panel's chairman and vice chairman - Republican Thomas H. Kean and Democrat Lee H. Hamilton - also said they welcomed the president's support for "two priority recommendations for the commission."
Sen. Susan Collins, Maine Republican and chairman of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, applauded Mr. Bush's "swift and decisive action to implement a number of the important recommendations made by the 9/11 commission."
Miss Collins said her committee will examine the president's proposals at a hearing today.
Sen. John W. Warner, Virginia Republican and chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee - which oversees almost 85 percent of the intelligence budget - said Mr. Bush "demonstrated strong leadership" with yesterday's proposals.
"The president's announcement provides Congress a clear road map, which I predict will guide us as we legislate the parameters for these important new concepts," Mr. Warner said.
In his press conference, Mr. Bush also suggested that Congress must reform itself, streamlining a committee oversight process that ends up wasting the time of those trying to direct the war on terror.
He pointed to the experiences of Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, who has testified in front of scores of different congressional committees 140 times.
"I mean, it seems like it's one thing to testify and for there to be oversight," Mr. Bush said. "It's another thing to make sure that the people who are engaged in protecting America don't spend all their time testifying."
-------
Kerry Urges Calling Back Congress
Session on 9/11 Report Needed, He Says
By Dan Balz and Lois Romano
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, August 3, 2004; Page A09
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A35337-2004Aug2.html
GRAND RAPIDS, Mich., Aug. 2 -- Sen. John F. Kerry urged President Bush on Monday to call a special session of Congress to implement the recommendations of the Sept. 11 commission, accusing Bush of foot-dragging and charging that the president's policies have encouraged the creation of more terrorists.
In his first response to the government's heightened terror alert along the East Coast, Kerry said Bush has been slow to embrace a national intelligence director and argued that he would have moved far more aggressively to reorganize U.S. intelligence services and also to provide anti-terrorism assistance to local fire and police departments.
Standing in front of a firetruck under a blazing sun, Kerry said: "If the president had a sense of urgency about this director of intelligence and about the needs to strengthen America, he would call the Congress back and get the job done now. . . . The time to act is now, not later."
Kerry said if Bush calls a special session he will go back to debate and vote "when necessary."
Edwards brought the same message to Orlando, where he urged immediate action on the recommendations of the commission that investigated the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. He told residents gathered for what the campaign calls a "front porch" visit that three years after the attacks, the nation's intelligence gathering is woefully inadequate to track down terrorists and there is no coordinated national plan to help communities in the event of an attack.
"We have huge numbers of containers coming into ports every day, and we screen a tiny percentage of them," Edwards said, raising the sensitive issue of port security in this waterway state. "We don't have enough coordination with other countries around the world with them doing their part, so we don't have a lot of information we should have."
Edwards, who spent the day flying around Florida, told a local television affiliate: "When you just generally tell people you are raising the alert in the country, they don't know what they are supposed to do. . . . We need to give them as much information as we can."
James P. Rubin, a senior Kerry adviser, accused Bush of flip-flopping -- a charge the Bush campaign has repeatedly made against Kerry -- on the issue of a national intelligence czar and pointed out that the administration had been slow to support the creation of a homeland security department after the terrorist attacks. Kerry and Edwards, he said, long have called for a national intelligence director.
Although fighting terrorism has been seen as a political asset for Bush and the GOP, Kerry's campaign has not shrunk from taking this fight to Bush. The campaign's strategy has been to take seriously all terror alerts by the federal government while challenging the president's handling of terrorism and the war in Iraq.
As part of that approach, Kerry and his advisers quickly distanced themselves from comments by former Vermont governor Howard Dean, who suggested Sunday that the terror alert may have been politically motivated to blunt the momentum Kerry gained from his convention last week. Saying he took the threats seriously, Kerry said of Dean: "I don't care what he says. I haven't suggested that, and I won't suggest that."
Rubin, however, said he took issue with some comments by Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, saying Ridge implied that the new information was the product of new anti-terrorism and intelligence-gathering policies implemented by the Bush administration. Ridge, he said, was "not as fair-minded as he ought to be" in describing how the latest information was uncovered.
A senior intelligence official briefed Kerry on the new terror alert for about 40 minutes late Sunday night in Michigan after the Secret Service set up a secure phone line for him on his campaign bus.
On Monday morning, the Kerry-Edwards campaign mounted a full-court press to put Kerry in the thick of the debate and the story, lest his post-convention bus tour of the country become relegated to the inside pages of the newspapers. Kerry appeared on CNN's "American Morning" and later scheduled a brief news conference to read a statement for the cameras and take several questions on the subject.
Noting that Bush has often referred to himself as a wartime president, Kerry said: "When we are at war, we need to do the things that make us safe rapidly, immediately. If there is something that will make America safer, it should be done now, not tomorrow. I regret that it's taken us almost three years to get to the point where these recommendations [of the 9/11 commission] are now being adopted."
In his CNN interview, Kerry raised the charge that Bush may be responsible for putting the United States at greater risk from terrorism. "I believe this administration, in its policies, is actually encouraging the recruitment of terrorists," he said.
Challenged later to explain himself, Kerry read from an Oct. 16, 2003, memo from Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, in which Rumsfeld said the government lacks measurements to determine whether the United States is winning or losing the war on terrorism. The memo said, in part, "Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?"
Kerry said it is not just to support military action against the terrorists, saying "there are so many other things that we could be doing" to counter the radical clerics and others in the Middle East.
Kerry outlined his case for charging Bush with foot-dragging, saying the president originally opposed the homeland security department, the creation of the 9/11 commission and the extension of the commission. "We cannot afford reluctance in the protection of our country," he said. "We need leadership, we need to move forward, and we need to move now."
Romano is traveling with Edwards.
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Bush Endorses Naming a Chief on Intelligence
August 3, 2004
By RICHARD W. STEVENSON and PHILIP SHENON
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/03/politics/03bush.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, Aug. 2 - President Bush on Monday generally endorsed the two main recommendations of the 9/11 commission, saying he would support creation of a potentially powerful post, national intelligence director, and the establishment of a counterterrorism center to coordinate intelligence analysis and efforts to thwart attacks.
"All these reforms have a single goal," Mr. Bush said in a Rose Garden appearance, flanked by his senior national security advisers. "We will ensure that the people in government responsible for defending America and countering terrorism have the best possible information to make the best decisions." [Excerpts, Page A13.]
His announcement drew expressions of cautious optimism from members of the panel, whose report has dominated national security debates and taken center stage in the presidential race since it came out last month. But they said they wanted to see more details of the Bush position, especially about the powers granted to the intelligence director.
In a statement, the 9/11 panel's chairman, Thomas H. Kean, the former Republican governor of New Jersey, and its vice chairman, Lee H. Hamilton, a former Democratic House member from Indiana, said, "The fate of these reform ideas turns vitally on the specifics."
After what administration officials acknowledged was an intensive internal debate, Mr. Bush declined to embrace some of the detailed proposals the commission had said would ensure that the new post and the counterterrorism center would have real power and not just create another layer of bureaucracy.
Mr. Bush turned aside the commission's recommendation that the national intelligence director be part of the executive office of the president. He proposed instead that the job not reside within the White House or the cabinet, but instead be a stand-alone post, backed by its own staff. The president would nominate the director, who would be subject to Senate confirmation, and the president could fire the director at any time.
Mr. Bush also proposed granting the director somewhat less authority over the estimated $40 billion annual intelligence budget than the commission had called for. White House officials said they would support giving the director substantial influence over development of the budget.
But they suggested that their intention was to allow operational control of the money to remain with the departments and agencies that conduct intelligence activities, principally the Pentagon, which accounts for about 80 percent of intelligence spending. And they made clear that the new director would have to shape the budget within the administration's existing budget process rather than having the freedom to develop independent spending requests.
Members of the commission have said that without real power over the budget, the director could lack the authority needed to overcome the bureaucratic and turf battles that have impeded coordination among the intelligence services and domestic law enforcement agencies.
The national intelligence director, who would be the president's principal intelligence adviser, would replace the existing post of director of central intelligence, a job that has always been held simultaneously by the director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Like the commission, Mr. Bush proposed that the new counterterrorism center report to the national intelligence director and that the CIA director, who would also report to the new director, concentrate on improving foreign intelligence gathering.
But it was not clear how much more authority the national intelligence director would have relative to the existing director of central intelligence. The White House said it would grant the new post increased influence over the selection of top intelligence officials, but signaled that it would resist the commission's suggestion that the national director "approve and submit nominations to the president" for the leaders of the C.I.A., the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency and other organizations.
The debate now moves to Congress, which must enact legislation if the new post is to be created. The White House said it would press the House and Senate to also address the commission's call for Congress to streamline oversight of intelligence activities and budgets, which is now dispersed across numerous committees and subcommittees.
During his Rose Garden appearance, Mr. Bush said he would act in coming days through executive orders and other presidential powers to address other problems identified by the commission. One example he cited was the need to speed efforts to make it easier for different intelligence and law-enforcement agencies to exchange information through their computer systems.
The actions backed by Mr. Bush, even if less far-reaching than the commission's proposals, would amount to one of the most substantial overhauls in decades of the way the government manages intelligence.
In their statement, Mr. Kean and Mr. Hamilton said: "We welcome President Bush's support for several of the commission's recommendations. His announcements today are an important step in the process of reorganizing the U.S. government for a new era."
But they did not offer a statement of full support, saying instead that they looked forward to "discussions with the administration and with Congress about the substance of these ideas."
They noted that, unlike the White House, Senator John Kerry, Mr. Bush's Democratic rival in the presidential campaign, had offered "unequivocal endorsement of the commission's recommendations."
Seeking to keep the political pressure on Mr. Bush, Mr. Kerry criticized the president again on Monday for not acting more quickly to change the way the nation collects, analyzes and acts on intelligence.
"If there is something that will make America safer, it should be done now, not tomorrow," Mr. Kerry told reporters on a campaign swing in Michigan. "I regret that it's taken us almost three years to get to the point where these recommendations are now being adopted."
Responding to Mr. Kerry's attacks, the White House emphasized that Mr. Bush had already taken many steps to address the issues raised by the commission, and that with the new actions, he had acted to deal with nearly all the concerns raised in the commission's report.
But administration officials acknowledged that no decisions had been made on how to deal with a number of the commission's recommendations. The administration is still debating the commission's call for making public the total amount of money the government spends on intelligence activities, one official said.
Likewise, the official said, the White House has yet to reach any conclusion about the commission's call for taking authority over covert paramilitary activities from the C.I.A. and giving it to the Pentagon. The issue of authority over paramilitary activities "is a complex matter involving assets actively involved in the war on terror," the official said, adding that the White House was studying "the full range of practical and legal considerations such a step would entail."
Mr. Bush made his final decisions about how to proceed on Sunday, White House officials said, after more than a week of intensive meetings among cabinet, intelligence and law enforcement officials and the emergence of the terrorist threat against financial institutions in New York, New Jersey and Washington.
A number of participants in the internal debate, including John McLaughlin, the acting C.I.A. director, initially objected to the creation of the new job, administration officials said. But they said Mr. Bush had made clear from the beginning of the discussions that he was inclined to make changes in the existing intelligence structure, and that the discussions focused more on how to do it rather than on whether to do it.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld was resistant to ceding control over the intelligence budget to a national intelligence director, in part because of concern that it would complicate the military's efforts to develop intelligence for the battlefield, one official said. Mr. Rumsfeld, the official said, was also concerned about whether the changes would breach the chain of command.
Carl Hulse contributed reporting for this article.
-------- ENERGY
-------- alternative energy
California Approves New Wind Power Transmission Line
August 3, 2004
FOLSOM, California, (ENS)
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/aug2004/2004-08-03-09.asp#anchor3
A new transmission line project designed to carry wind energy from the Tehachapi and Antelope Valley area to customers throughout California met with "swift and hearty approval" from the California Independent System Operator (ISO) Board of Governors on Thursday.
The new line is needed to carry power from an expansion of wind turbine generators planned for the area.
The Tehachapi range already holds more than 600 megawatts of wind generation, making it California's largest concentration of wind turbines. As much as 1,100 megawatts worth of new wind projects are planned for the region.
The new clean and renewable generation is expected to help California utilities meet the state's Renewable Portfolio Standard, which requires 20 percent of the energy the investor-owned utilities deliver to their customers to come from renewable resources by the year 2017.
Expansion of California's wind generation is expected to play a major role in meeting that goal.
"We've already seen a significant expansion in wind generation in California, and it's just the tip of the iceberg," said Marcie Edwards, Interim CEO of the California ISO. "Our Board recognizes that and today took action to ensure that this growing, clean, and renewable source of energy in the Tehachapis can make it to the grid."
The California ISO studies and approves new transmission proposals as part of an overall grid planning process. In this case the benefits of the new line were clear. The existing transmission infrastructure in the Tehachapi wind resource area is inadequate to accommodate the new generation planned for the area. There are projects totaling 700 megawatts worth of new generation already in the Cal ISO interconnection queue.
With ISO approval in hand, Southern California Edison plans to apply to the California Public Utilities Commission for final permission to build the project.
The 25 mile Antelope-Pardee line will cost about $94 million to build. It could be energized as early as December 2006.
Southern California Edison originally proposed building a 230 Kilovolt (KV) transmission line to handle a 500-megawatt expansion in wind production in the area. However, many companies plan to expand their wind production there, and the California Public Utilities Commission believes the area could eventually produce as much as 4,000 megawatts.
Based on that, Edison will build the project to 500 KV design standards. However, the line may initially be energized at 230KV and upgraded to 500 KV at a later date.
The California ISO is a not-for-profit public benefit corporation charged with managing the flow of electricity along California's open-market wholesale power grid. The mission of the California ISO is to safeguard the reliable delivery of electricity, and ensure equal access to a 25,000 circuit miles of transmission lines.
As the impartial operator of the wholesale power grid in the state, the California ISO conducts a small portion of the bulk power markets. These markets are used to allocate space on the transmission lines, maintain operating reserves and match supply with demand in real time.
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Biodiesel Popularity on the Rise
August 3, 2003
PERU, Indiana, (ENS)
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/aug2004/2004-08-03-09.asp#anchor4
Two more biodiesel facilities have opened up at petroleum loading racks, streamlining the process of distributing biodiesel nationwide, according to the National Biodiesel Board.
With its grand opening on Friday, Peru, Indiana's Countrymark Co-op became the nation's first soy biodiesel rack injection unit with custom-blending capabilities.
CHS celebrated extending its location offerings of rack-injected biodiesel with a site in McFarland, Wisconsin.
IN April, CHS opened the nation's first facility to offer pre-blended B2 - two percent biodiesel mixed with petroleum diesel - and B5 at the petroleum loading rack at its terminal in McPherson, Kansas.
In the past, petroleum distributors obtained pure biodiesel (B100) and petroleum diesel fuel from separate supply sources and blended themselves.
Access to pre-blended biodiesel increases operational efficiencies for the distributor while maintaining integrity of the product, and will significantly increase availability to consumers, the National Biodiesel Board points out.
Although the majority of biodiesel customers are large fleets at public utility companies, the farm is becoming a market for the fuel. United Soybean Board research shows 31 percent of farmers use biodiesel, with up to 50 percent using it in some states.
"Farmers believe in biodiesel and want to use their own product," said Bob Metz, chairman of the National Biodiesel Board and South Dakota soybean grower.
"They've invested millions of dollars in biodiesel commercialization through the soybean checkoff. By using biodiesel, we are investing in the life of our farm equipment while helping the biodiesel industry thrive. The result ultimately will be sustained higher soybean prices."
-------- OTHER
-------- imf / world bank / wto (economics)
BANKING
Inside Help Suspected in Terror Plans at World Bank and Monetary Fund
August 3, 2004
By ELIZABETH BECKER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/03/politics/03bank.html
WASHINGTON, Aug. 2 - Federal counterterrorism officials have told officials at the World Bank and International Monetary Fund that they believe plans for a possible attack on the two financial institutions were so detailed that terrorists must have had inside help from employees, contractors or visitors with access throughout the buildings, officials at the two organizations say.
Some federal officials have expressed some doubt on how recent the information is that spurred the government to elevate the threat alert status on Sunday. Still other officials are pursuing what they see as the possibility of an inside job regarding the World Bank and I.M.F. by telling officials of these institutions that they are preparing to formally request some lists of their mostly foreign employees and contractors. Special requests are required because the records of these institutions have diplomatic immunity, though not all of their staff does.
But officials said the World Bank and the I.M.F., both members of the larger United Nations family, are reluctant to hand over employee lists.
"If the Iranian government asked for a list of our employees in Tehran we wouldn't comply,'' said one official who spoke on condition of anonymity. "How could we turn around and give names to the United States government?''
Treasury Secretary John W. Snow visited both institutions on Monday to tell their leaders that they had the full support of the Bush administration as they figured out how to protect themselves against the terrorist threat. "It was a very gracious gesture," said James D. Wolfensohn, president of the World Bank, who broke off his vacation in the Galapagos Islands and returned to Washington late on Sunday.
Mr. Wolfensohn held a town-hall-style meeting for the World Bank staff on Monday afternoon, when he said that a new era had begun and that heightened security procedures would be in effect at least through the inauguration of the next American president.
"We now know that the bank is on the awareness screen of Al Qaeda but we also know we must continue our work," he told the over-flowing crowd. "Nothing should remotely allow us to lose our stride."
While relatively unknown in the United States, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund loom large in parts of the world where they are the main source for development aid and loans.
Critics routinely castigate the I.M.F. for the strict conditions it imposes on its loans, and the World Bank is portrayed as doing too little for the poor.
Now, in a turnaround, officials believe they are being singled out by terrorists for offering too much help in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"The terrorists don't want us to build roads, dig wells and treat sick children," said Damian Milverton, a spokesman at the World Bank.
One World Bank employee died in the August 2003 bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad that killed Sergio Vieira de Mello, the United Nations envoy.
Federal authorities alerted the I.M.F. on Saturday that it was a potential target of Al Qaeda and, after further study, told the World Bank on Sunday that it, too, was a target.
In briefings and discussions since then, federal counterterrorism authorities learned that records it may want to review at the institutions are covered by diplomatic immunity.
Counterterrorism authorities were also interested in lists of visiting delegations and employees from some countries, according to several officials at the institutions, who repeated the problems arising from such requests. "These are very complicated legal questions, but one thing is certain: diplomatic immunity is not given up easily," one official said.
There was no question of closing either institution and nearly all the staff members showed up on Monday. But many questioned why their buildings did not seem to have as much overt security as those targeted in New York, where police officers with automatic weapons were patrolling the sidewalks.
But new security was evident outside the complex of modern buildings. The police patrolled the area, suspended public parking and towed away unauthorized vehicles. Chief Charles H. Ramsey of the Washington police conferred through the day with the two institutions.
This was just the beginning of plans for heightened security for the two financial institutions. The city turned on the camera system set up to monitor the area during the spring and annual meetings when protesters routinely attempt to block the session. New cement barriers will be installed. In a few days, the World Bank will set up tents to screen visitors before they enter the building.
Trucks will be inspected randomly by Washington police near the buildings. Out of state trucks will undergo similar inspections by the state police of Virginia and Maryland before they enter the capital.
Rodrigo Rato, the new managing director of the International Monetary Fund, was on an official visit to Nigeria, and his staff also held a town hall meeting in his absence. Mr. Rato was the economy minister of Spain when a Qaeda bombing at a Madrid railway station in May helped topple his government.
-------- ACTIVISTS
Scottsdale band gets MTV play with antiwar music video
By Kelly Wilson,
Arizona Tribune
August 3, 2004
http://www.aztrib.com/index.php?sty=25758
Chronic Future guitarist Ben Collins says he knew his Scottsdale punk rock band would stir up controversy when the video for "Time and Time Again,'' the first single off their new album "Lines in My Face,'' debuted on MTV. The animated video follows a young punk rocker who is sent to fight in Iraq and is wounded by a car bomb.
"It's such a touchy subject,'' says Collins, 23. "When we first came up with it even our label (Interscope Records) doubted that it would get on MTV, but that wasn't the point. We really wanted to stir up conversation about the subject.
"We feel that our music is different than what's being put out there right now. And at the same time, we wanted to have a message and a video that didn't fit into what you see every day on MTV. We have a responsibility as Americans to voice ourselves, and artists have that responsibility because they're given a voice.''
The band recently was interviewed in front of an army recruiting station in New York's Times Square to discuss their video for an upcoming MTV special.
"The message is meant as a criticism of the policy that's sending kids to war,'' says Collins, heading to Atlanta for a Warped Tour music festival performance. "It's not against the people who are over there fighting and serving their country. They don't have a choice as to where they're deployed.''
Collins says the band - which also includes frontman Mike Busse, bassist Brandon Lee and drummer Barry Collins - wasn't expecting MTV to embrace the video.
"It's the 11th-most-played video on their rotation right now,'' he says of the music network, which is also playing a pro-war video by alternative rockers 3 Doors Down.
The guitarist says Chronic Future's video has received a mostly positive reaction from music fans.
"I've received a few e-mails from soldiers that are actually in Iraq right now or who have just gotten back or about to be deployed to Iraq saying that they really are happy about the video because it's showing that it's not necessarily their choice (to go to war),'' Collins says.
"They're just following orders and they really don't believe in fighting in Iraq. It's really our stance. We're not by any means against a war on terror. We feel that the war in Iraq is unfounded and it has nothing to do with terrorism. (The video) is just a criticism of that policy.''
The video also features a saguaro cactus, a Tribune newspaper and Mesa Amphitheatre.
"We're definitely trying to bring attention to Arizona and give respect to the state that has supported us for nine years,'' Collins says. Contact Kelly Wilson by email, or phone (480) 898-5691
--------
Iraq War Crimes Tribunal: The People will Judge George W. Bush
Action Alert
Aug 3, 2004
http://www.axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/article_10617.shtml
Getting ready for the RNC Protests in New York City? Axis of Logic endorses the Peoples' War Crimes Tribunal that will put George W. Bush on trial for war crimes.
Visit www.PeopleJudgeBush.org
Register for the Tribunal ... Donate to Help Convict Bush
Thursday, August 26th, 3:00pm to 9:30pm
Martin Luther King Auditorium 65th St. & Amsterdam New York, NY
Every day that the war and occupation in Iraq continue, Iraqi civilians are killed, injured, denied civil liberties, jailed, abused and tortured by the occupation forces while their basic services and economy are deteriorating. Meanwhile, our sons and daughters are being killed and maimed.
Under the phony "transfer of power," business as usual will continues with U.S. troops occupying Iraq, the construction of 14 permanent U.S. military bases, the funneling of oil revenues to the occupiers, the continuing torture and abuse of innocent Iraqis, the denial of democratic rights, and a failing infrastructure and qualify of life for the women, men and children.
The people of the world know that it is those in the highest echelons of the U.S. government who are responsible for the atrocities, torture, deaths, and war crimes in Iraq.
We have a responsibility to hold this administration accountable for the past and continuing horrors of the war and occupation.
Join in the War Crimes Tribunal being organized by the International Action Center on Thursday, August 26th, just prior to the Republican National Convention in New York City. This historic undertaking will investigate how the Bush and Blair Administrations violated international law and basic human rights by instigating an aggressive war against the Iraqi people, then instituting a brutal occupation, now continuing under the phony "transfer of power." Former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark will draft the indictment, listing the charges against George W. Bush and his criminal administration.
We invite you to participate, to help organize for this major international undertaking, and to bring friends, family, co-workers, members of your organizations, unions, and from your campuses and communities.
Eyewitnesses from Iraq, delegations from over twelve countries, expert witnesses, UN officials, and military resisters, will testify.
The Tribunal will investigate attacks against Iraq civilians, the use of napalm, cluster bombs, and depleted uranium weapons, the illegal incarceration and torture of civilians at Abu Ghraib prison and elsewhere, war profiteering and the initiation of the war itself. It will show culpability for the deteriorating Iraqi economy, infrastructure and social services in Iraq. And it will demonstrate for all to see violations of the Geneva Convention, the Nuremberg Principles, and the UN Charter.
A Program Journal is planned for the Tribunal. It will document the Bush Administration's crimes and will serve as an informative and lasting commemoration of the Tribunal; it will be a historic record of the August 26 Tribunal--in which your voice can be heard!
We urge you to be a part of the historic Tribunal Program Journal by taking out a display ad, listing your name as a Sponsor or Friend so you can be included, or making a direct donation towards the costs of this event--donations of all sizes are appreciated. The deadline for receiving display ad copy is Tuesday, August 10.
Journal ads can be political statements, solidarity messages, memorial tributes to loved ones, progressive bookstore or website ads. Submissions by anti-war, community, labor, student, religious, legal, artists, writers, and other organizations are welcome. Commercial ads can be sent in as well.
You can email your journal name listing or display ad copy to journal@peoplejudgebush.org.
Tens of Thousands of copies of this Program Journal will be distributed to Tribunal participants, members of the media, elected officials, activists, religious, labor, legal and academic institutions.
Journals will be given out to the activists from all over the country who will converge in New York City in late August to protest the administration's policies of war and occupation at the Republican National Convention.
The Journal will also serve as a Resource Field Guide to these protests, with maps, listings of events, and more information of use to the demonstrators.
By contributing to the Tribunal, you will help defray its expenses--printing, travel for expert witnesses, mailings, phone calls, and much more.
Donations by check or credit card can be made out to "IAC / People Judge Bush" or
Donate online! www.peoplejudgebush.org/donate.shtml
Please help get the word out in your communities and organizations about the Tribunal and to be included in its Program Journal to aid this critically important effort. The deadline for ad copy is Tuesday, August 10.
This is a decisive moment. Polls show that the vast majority in the U.S. are opposed to this occupation and want the troops brought home NOW. Now more than ever, people all over the world oppose the U.S. government.
Please join us on August 26th and contribute to the success of this major effort. Your donations will make a difference and will help to publicize this International War Crimes Tribunal and its findings to anti-war activists throughout the world and right here. It will be a resource for the international anti-war movement. It is only through donations from individuals such as yourself that these decisive and historic events happen.
Thank you for your continuing support, and we hope you can join us.
Donate to Help Support the Tribunal:
www.peoplejudgebush.org/donate.shtml
Register to Attend on August 26:
www.peoplejudgebush.org/register.shtml
Iraq War Crimes Tribunal Thursday, August 26
call 212-633-6646 for more information
www.PeopleJudgeBush.org for more information
http://www.iacenter.org
iacenter@iacenter.org
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