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NUCLEAR
DOE seeks improved Hanford safety after close calls
Chinese firm wins first contract for Pakistani nuclear plant parts
Iraqi doctor learns from Hiroshima's past
59 Years After Hiroshima Two Traditions: WMD and Disinformation
Radioactive armour ruled out for new tanks
Nuke ships may enter Aussie waters
Deception was Marine recruiter's game
Iran's nuclear ambitions must be contained
It's almost surprising how poorly strategic sites are protected
Iraqi doctor learns from Hiroshima's past
Lest we forget
North Korean nuclear missile 'could reach US'
N. Korea expands missiles
Persecuted for their faith -- and ignored by the U.S.
Pentagon Prepares Missile Defense
Canada and Russia in 24 million dollar deal to decomission nuclear subs
Turning a blind eye to nukes
Nuclear-security contract draws fire
Interns get technical at Sandia symposium
Waste Control Specialists Submits Application
MILITARY
Afghan Troops, U.S. Warplanes Attack Guerrillas
2 Afghan aid workers killed
Japan eyes eased ban on military exports
$1.9 Billion of Iraq's Money Goes to U.S. Contractors
Halliburton to Pay $7.5 Million to Settle Probe
SEC: Halliburton under Cheney filed misleading reports
Halliburton investigation ends
CACI Gets $15 Million Iraq Contract Extension
Cease-Fire in Colombia
Iraq's New Form Of Justice Seems To Satisfy Few
Violence Claims 4 More Troops
Army Pushes a Sweeping Overhaul of Basic Training
Civilians Die as Iraqi Police and Rebels Clash in Mosul
Stressed Israeli soldiers to be treated with cannabis: army
Pregnant Palestinians Lose Babies, As Israel Keeps Frontier Shut: Police
Pakistan Allows Taliban to Train, a Detained Fighter Says
Russia and Georgia on war footing over breakaway Abkhazia
Cost of Shuttle's Return Escalates
MPs Blamed for Abu Ghraib Abuse
Woman With Leash Appears in Court on Abu Ghraib Abuse Charges
US Air Force denies appeal in Afghan friendly fire incident
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Court Offers Guidance on Sentencing In Md., Va.
Afghan opium a growing threat
Security Might Get Tighter Yet, Officials Say
Impervious Shield Elusive Against Drive-By Terrorists
Seriousness of Threat Defended Despite Dated Intelligence
New Qaeda Activity Is Said to Be Major Factor in Alert
In Age of Terror, How Long Should Security Stay Tight?
City complains about closures
Security boosted around U.S. Capitol
House begins series of hearings on 9/11 report
Athens turned into fortress
Police Corruption Plagues Argentines and President
Judge Refuses to Halt Military Hearings on Detainees
F.C.C. Seeks Equal Wiretap Access to Phone Calls via Internet
Defense to Cite 'U.S. Torture' in German 9/11 Case
POLITICS
Old Data, New Credibility Issues
Signature Achievements of George W. Bush
The Washington Post's creeping hawkishness
Where's Rumsfeld?
Intelligence Plan Reviewed
PARTY TIME AT THE DNC
ENERGY
World oil prices hit record highs
Growth in U.S. fuel supply cools crude
OTHER
Unsafe Mercury Levels Rising in U.S. Fish
Gulf War illness link to brain damage
Most Fish From Lakes Is Too High In Mercury
Get Antioxidants from Food, Not Supplements
Stressed Israeli soldiers to be treated with cannabis: army
ACTIVISTS
Life after the bomb
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- accidents and safety
DOE seeks improved Hanford safety after close calls
tri-cityherald
By Annette Cary
August 4th, 2004
http://www.tri-cityherald.com/tch/local/story/5382717p-5321058c.html
Two near-miss accidents at the vitrification plant under construction at Hanford led the Department of Energy to call for improvements at the end of June.
"These events extend a declining trend in worker safety this year that must be immediately corrected," wrote Roy Schepens, manager of DOE's Office of River Protection in a letter to contractor Bechtel National.
The project, the largest federal construction project in the nation this year, still has a much lower rate of accidents than the industry average.
It had 1.53 accidents per 200,000 construction hours worked for the first six months of this year compared with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration's national average construction rate of 7 recordable accidents per 200,000 hours worked. That's the number of hours 100 people would work in a year.
But the near-misses, which are not included in the accident statistics, are being taken seriously because they had the potential to be life threatening if a worker had been in the wrong place.
On June 22, a 100-pound piece of steel supposed to be embedded in concrete fell 40 to 45 feet, according to a Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board report released Friday. It landed 8 feet from a worker.
Five days earlier, pieces of rebar fell when a "curtain" of crosshatched rebar was being lifted into the air by crane.
Other problems in late June included a worker who lost the end of a finger when his glove caught in a drill press, a worker who fell when a ladder slid out from under him and a worker who fell inside a wall of rebar.
The year had started with some other problems described in another safety board report. A 1,112-pound steel beam fell about 20 feet after the choker holding it contacted a handrail. The area had been cleared of people before work started, according to Bechtel National.
Also that month a stainless steel plate was dropped 8 feet and a section of telescoping brace was dropped 12 feet, according to the safety board.
After the June incidents, contractor Bechtel National stopped work on day and night shifts for a safety awareness day to emphasize its goal of zero accidents.
The day was used to gather information from workers to improve the project's safety performance and emphasize to workers that safety was more important than production or cost, said Jim Henschel, project director for Bechtel National.
Bechtel paid about $500,000 in wages that day although no work was done on the $5.7 billion vitrification plant.
About 1,300 craft workers, such as carpenters and pipefitters, are employed to build the plant. It will turn radioactive waste left from the past production of plutonium at Hanford for the nation's nuclear weapons program into a more stable glass form for disposal.
Work at the plant has taken on another degree of danger as walls go up on the massive buildings of the plant and more work is done high off the ground, Henschel said. The pretreatment building will stand 119 feet tall.
A safety analysis has determined that workers are most likely to have an accident in their first 90 days of work on the project, Henschel said. That presents a potential problem because of the number of workers being added to the construction project as work progresses.
New hires now are being identified with a green sticker on their hard hats for their first three months on the job.
Workers, who have an average age of 48 at the construction site, also are being reminded that muscular and skeletal injuries are more likely as they age.
In the first two years of construction at Hanford, 1943 and 1944, workers were racing to win World War II and 18 workers died, Henschel has pointed out to current construction workers.
"We live in a different time," he said. "We're serious about zero accidents."
-------- china
Chinese firm wins first contract for Pakistani nuclear plant parts
BEIJING (AFP)
Aug 04, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040804145625.baanwech.html
A Chinese firm Wednesday signed the first contract to provide components for a second nuclear power station Beijing is building in Pakistan, state media reported.
China First Heavy Industries Co. Ltd. won public bids to supply the pressure vessel for the new reactor which will be built at Chashma, some 270 kilometers (167 miles) south of Islamabad, Xinhua news agency said.
The pressure vessel, where the core of the reactor will be placed, is the key component guaranteeing the security and durability of the nuclear power plant, it said.
The vessel will be built in the northeastern city of Dalian and it is due to be completed in 38 months.
It was the first equipment supply contract signed by China National Nuclear Corporation (CNNC), which is constructing the 300-megawatt plant, it said.
CNNC and Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission in May signed an agreement to build the plant.
The 600-million-dollar C-2 (Chashma-2) project is likely to be completed in six years. A similar capacity plant built in Chashma with Chinese help became operational in 1999.
CNNC deputy general manager Huang Guojun told Xinhua that China's transfer of nuclear technology and its nuclear cooperation with Pakistan were strictly in accordance with international treaties.
The Chashma project had been under the supervision and inspection of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Xinhua said.
Pakistan has said the plant is for civilian use.
China, Pakistan's strongest and oldest ally, is also financing some 200 million dollars of a port project in Gwadar, southwest Pakistan.
Pakistan has relied heavily on China for its defence needs since 1990 when the United States stopped supplying it with military hardware over its nuclear programme.
Pakistan confirmed it had nuclear weapons in May 1998 when it matched tests conducted by India.
-------- depleted uranium
Iraqi doctor learns from Hiroshima's past
August 4, 2004
(Kyodo News)
Shinya Ajima and Shinsuke Takahashi
http://www.japantoday.com/e/?content=feature&id=706
HIROSHIMA - An Iraqi doctor left his war-battered country in April. His destination was Hiroshima, and the purpose of his trip was to obtain knowledge and data on radiation effects in the city once devastated by the first atomic bombing in the world.
Hussam Mahmood Salih, 34, a pediatrician from Basra, said the number of child cancer cases jumped eightfold in the southern Iraqi city between 1988 and 2002, suspecting it was caused by the 1991 Gulf War, in which U.S. forces used depleted uranium shells.
There are also reports in Iraq about newborn babies lacking limbs or craniums. Depleted uranium has been long blamed for such birth defects in babies believed exposed to radiation while in the womb.
"We don't have any decent facilities in Iraq to check the amount of radiation in human bodies. But we can see the incidences of cancer increased greatly during the first four to five years of the 1990s," said Salih, now studying at Hiroshima University Hospital at the invitation of a Japanese civic group.
Under economic sanctions on Iraq that followed the war, Iraqi hospitals were prohibited from obtaining essential drugs as well as new medical equipment like tools for radio therapy because the international community feared they might be used for military purposes, he said.
"So, death and disease, and death and disease...this is the life of people in Iraq. I want to save Iraqi children," said Salih.
The U.S. military uses depleted uranium-tipped shells, known for their armor-piercing capability, against tanks and other hard military targets.
Although Iraqi doctors allege DU weapons cause leukemia and cancer, U.S. authorities deny direct links between DU and the cancer on the rise in Iraq since the 1991 war.
The medical community in Japan, a U.S. staunch ally, is also reluctant to admit a connection.
"Even so, it is sensible for him to visit Hiroshima, which has skills and knowledge on treating leukemia patients," said Atsuko Oe, a representative of Save the Iraq Children Hiroshima, the group that arranged Salih's visit.
In August last year, when some Iraqi doctors visited Japan to deliver lectures, they asked Oe and other civic group members to look for Japanese medical institutions that can train young doctors from Iraq.
Universities in Hiroshima and Nagoya then agreed to accept some doctors from hospitals in Basra through the civic groups.
Salih said he had never hesitated to come to Japan when chosen as a trainee due to his background as an expert on pediatric leukemia.
His visit apparently exposed a new face of Japan as the sole A-bomb victim in the world.
"Hiroshima had suffered a lot from war, deaths and radiation effects, and the Japanese doctors understand about these diseases...and all strategies about detection, treatment and follow-up. I think we cold learn very much from Japan's experiences," said Salih.
He added there are more Iraqi doctors hoping to learn in Japan and bring back advanced techniques, knowledge and equipment that have been unavailable to Iraqis.
"This is a great chance, a very nice chance. They could do better to save patients," he said.
Another civic group invited two other Iraqi doctors for training at Nagoya University Hospital, as well as a young patient whom Salih has treated.
The United States attacked Hiroshima with an atomic bomb on Aug 6, 1945, and dropped another on Nagasaki three days later. Japan surrendered to Allied forces Aug 15.
The bomb dropped on Hiroshima contained high quantities of highly enriched uranium. There are reports that a number of microcephalic babies were born in the western Japan city after the bombing, Oe said.
Salih is learning from Japanese professors at the university hospital, mainly about chemotherapy and bone-marrow transplants.
He has been given access to data stored in many facilities and organizations in this city, and has opportunities to talk with radiation victims as well as their families.
He is also going to attend the ceremony for the 59th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima next month.
"We wish Mr Salih could learn something by referring to the stored data and comparing them with those kept in Iraq," Oe said.
Salih will stay in Japan until the fall and return to Iraq, where his wife and two children live.
Governments in Hiroshima and Nagasaki are concerned about the aging of A-bomb victims. Their average age was 72.2 as of March, and thousands of the registered radiation victims die every year.
Both cities are forced to take measures to leave the victims' messages and experiences of the atrocities to succeeding generations.
Salih's stay in Hiroshima shows how Japan should be the first and hopefully last country of A-bomb victims in the world by taking on new roles no other country can undertake, Oe said.
"Each of us has our own role," she said, adding, "If we did not act, there would be a third following Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is important for us to think how individuals can be involved in peace or antinuclear activities."
--------
59 Years After Hiroshima Two Traditions: WMD and Disinformation
counterpunch.org
By MICKEY Z.
August 4, 2004
http://www.counterpunch.org/mickey08042004.html
"It is an atomic bomb. It is the greatest thing in history."
-President Harry S. Truman, August 6, 1945
"Congress should endorse the use of all necessary means to eliminate the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction."
-John Edwards, September 2002
We are approaching August 6, 2004, the 59th anniversary of the U.S. terror bombing of Hiroshima, and it's apparent that the history and use of WMD is still not fully understood.
With "Good War" references and rhetoric bandied about by politicians and pundits of all stripes, it's instructive to consider how the U.S. and its allies, 60 years ago, allegedly engaged in a life-and-death battle to prevent a tyrant from wielding WMD. "Working at Los Alamos, New Mexico," writes historian Kenneth C. Davis, "atomic scientists, many of them refugees from Hitler's Europe, thought they were racing against Germans developing a 'Nazi bomb.'"
Surely, if it were possible for the epitome of evil to produce such a weapon, it would be the responsibility of the good guys to beat der Führer to the plutonium punch. While such a desperate race makes for excellent melodrama, the German bomb effort, it appears, fell far short of success.
Thanks to the declassification of key documents, we now have access to "unassailable proof that the race with the Nazis was a fiction," says Stewart Udall, who cites the work of McGeorge Bundy and Thomas Powers before adding that, "According to the official history of the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), those agents maintained 'contacts with scientists in neutral countries.'" These contacts, by mid-1943, provided enough evidence to convince the SIS that the German bomb program simply did not exist.
Despite such findings, U.S. General Leslie Groves, military commander of the Manhattan Project, got permission in the fall of 1943 to begin a secret espionage mission known as Alsos (Greek for "grove"). The mission saw Groves' men following the Allies' armies throughout Europe with the goal of capturing German scientists involved in the manufacture of atomic weapons.
While the data uncovered by Alsos only served to reinforce the prior reports that the Third Reich was not pursuing a nuclear program, Groves was able to maintain enough of a cover-up to keep his pet project alive. In the no-holds-barred religion of anti-communism, the "Good War" enemy was never fascism. Truman's daughter, Margaret, remarked about her dad's early presidential efforts after the death of FDR in April 1945, "My father's overriding concern in these first weeks was our policy towards Russia."
What will Bush daughters be confessing about their Dad one day?
---
The most commonly evoked justification for the dropping of atomic bombs on Japan was to save lives, but was it true? Would such an invasion even have been necessary? Finally, were the actions of the United States motivated by an escalating Cold War with the Soviet Union? Here are the facts that don't mesh with the long-accepted storyline:
Although hundreds of thousands of Japanese lives were lost in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the bombings are often explained away as a "life-saving" measure-American lives. Exactly how many lives saved is, however, up for grabs. (We do know of a few U.S. soldiers who fell between the cracks About a dozen or more American POWs were killed in Hiroshima, a truth that remained hidden for some 30 years.) In defense of the U.S. action, it is usually claimed that the bombs saved lives. The hypothetical body count ranges from 20,000 to "millions." In an August 9, 1945 statement to "the men and women of the Manhattan Project," President Truman declared the hope that "this new weapon will result in saving thousands of American lives."
"The president's initial formulation of 'thousands," however, was clearly not his final statement on the matter to say the least," remarks historian Gar Alperovitz. In his book, "The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb and the Architecture of an American Myth," Alperovitz documents but a few of Truman's public estimates throughout the years:
- December 15, 1945: "It occurred to me that a quarter of a million of the flower of our young manhood was worth a couple of Japanese cities . . ."
- Late 1946: "A year less of war will mean life for three hundred thousand-maybe half a million-of America's finest youth."
- October 1948: "In the long run we could save a quarter of a million young Americans from being killed, and would save an equal number of Japanese young men from being killed."
- April 6, 1949: "I thought 200,000 of our young men would be saved."
- November 1949: Truman quotes Army Chief of Staff George S. Marshall as estimating the cost of an Allied invasion of Japan to be "half a million casualties."
- January 12, 1953: Still quoting Marshall, Truman raises the estimate to "a minimum one quarter of a million" and maybe "as much as a million, on the American side alone, with an equal number of the enemy."
- Finally, on April 28, 1959, Truman concluded: "the dropping of the bombs . . . saved millions of lives."
Fortunately, we are not operating without the benefit of official estimates.
In June 1945, Truman ordered the U.S. military to calculate the cost in American lives for a planned assault on Japan. Consequently, the Joint War Plans Committee prepared a report for the Chiefs of Staff, dated June 15, 1945, thus providing the closest thing anyone has to "accurate": 40,000 U.S. soldiers killed, 150,000 wounded, and 3,500 missing.
While the actual casualty count remains unknowable, it was widely known at the time that Japan had been trying to surrender for months prior to the atomic bombing. A May 5, 1945 cable, intercepted and decoded by the U.S., "dispelled any possible doubt that the Japanese were eager to sue for peace." In fact, the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey reported shortly after the war, that Japan "in all probability" would have surrendered before the much-discussed November 1, 1945 Allied invasion of the homeland.
Truman himself eloquently noted in his diary that Stalin would "be in the Jap War on August 15th. Fini (sic) Japs when that comes about."
Many post-Hiroshima/Nagasaki sentiments questioned the use of the bombs.
"I thought our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives," said General Dwight D. Eisenhower while, not long after the Japanese surrender, New York Times military analyst Hanson Baldwin wrote, "The enemy, in a military sense, was in a hopeless strategic position. Such then, was the situation when we wiped out Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Need we have done it? No one can, of course, be positive, but the answer is almost certainly negative."
Was it the cold logic of capitalism that motivated the nuking of civilians? As far back as May 1945, a Venezuelan diplomat was reporting how Assistant Secretary of State Nelson Rockefeller "communicated to us the anxiety of the United States government about the Russian attitude." U.S. Secretary of State James F. Byrnes seemed to agree when he turned the anxiety up a notch by explaining how "our possessing and demonstrating the bomb would make Russia more manageable in the East . . . The demonstration of the bomb might impress Russia with America's military might."
General Leslie Groves was less cryptic: "There was never, from about two weeks from the time I took charge of this Project, any illusion on my part but that Russia was our enemy, and the Project was conducted on that basis."
During the same time period, President Truman noted that Secretary of War Henry Stimson was "at least as much concerned with the role of the atomic bomb in the shaping of history as in its capacity to shorten the war." What sort of shaping Stimson had in mind might be discerned from his Sept. 11, 1945 comment to the president: "I consider the problem of our satisfactory relations with Russia as not merely connected but as virtually dominated by the problem of the atomic bomb."
Stimson called the bomb a "diplomatic weapon," and duly explained: "American statesmen were eager for their country to browbeat the Russians with the bomb held rather ostentatiously on our hip."
"The psychological effect [of Hiroshima and Nagasaki] on Stalin was twofold," proposes historian Charles L. Mee, Jr. "The Americans had not only used a doomsday machine; they had used it when, as Stalin knew, it was not militarily necessary. It was this last chilling fact that doubtless made the greatest impression on the Russians." It also made an impression on J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientific director at Los Alamos. After learning of the carnage wrought upon Japan, he began to harbor second thoughts and he resigned in October 1945.
In March of the following year, Oppenheimer told Truman:
"Mr. President, I have blood on my hands."
Truman's reply: "It'll come out in the wash."
Later, the president told an aide, "Don't bring that fellow around again."
"Why did we drop [the bomb]?" pondered Studs Terkel at the time of the fiftieth anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings.
"So little Harry could show Molotov and Stalin we've got the cards," he explained. "That was the phrase Truman used. We showed the goddamned Russians we've got something and they'd better behave themselves in Europe. That's why it was dropped. The evidence is overwhelming. And yet you tell that to 99 percent of Americans and they'll spit in your eye."
They'll also spit in your eye if you point out that the U.S. has waged several nuclear wars...against Japan in 1945, against Iraq from 1991 to present, in Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, and on military bases like Vieques. Or if you point out that the US and Britain did not call for a military strike after Saddam's infamous gassing of Kurds at Halabja in March 1988...in fact, both nations continued support for Hussein. Some will still spit in your eye if you mention the absence of WMD in Iraq today.
Americans are rather fussy about their WMD. We, of course, can have them, a few allies can openly possess such weapons, and we'll deftly look the other way when Israel's plutonium slip shows. Russia? Well, as long as they stay away from that communist stuff. As for tyrants like Hitler and Hussein: no way. The world simply can't risk having WMD in the hands of those likely to use them, right?
(Commonly referred to as the gassing of his own people, it's essential to clarify that if the Kurds were Hussein's people, then the Palestinians are Sharon's people, the Zapatistas are Vicente Fox's people, the Tibetans are Hu Jintao's people, the Chechens are Putin's people, the Seminoles were Andrew Jackson's people, and the Puerto Ricans who were bombed and radiated with depleted uranium are Bush's people.)
Mickey Z. is the author of two brand new books: "The Seven Deadly Spins: Exposing the Lies Behind War Propaganda" (Common Courage Press) and "A Gigantic Mistake: Articles and Essays for Your Intellectual Self-Defense" (Library Empyreal/Wildside Press). For more information, please visit: http://mickeyz.net.
-------
Radioactive armour ruled out for new tanks
AAP
August 4, 2004
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/08/04/1091557902426.html?oneclick=true
The government has ruled out equipping the Army's new Abrams tanks with nearly invulnerable depleted uranium armour, but what type of armour they will carry remains top secret.
Army chief Lieutenant General Peter Leahy and other officials today were tight-lipped about describing just what armour Australia would receive for an investment of more than $500 million in 59 rebuilt American tanks.
"We are getting very good armour, one that I have every confidence in and one that I would be happy for our soldiers to fight behind," Gen Leahy told a briefing on the new tank project in Canberra today.
Under the project, Australia will buy 59 used M1A1 Abrams tanks which will be rebuilt to zero-kilometres and zero-hours standard in the US. The first will arrive in 2007.
Both the government and defence say the army's nearly three-decade-old Leopard tanks need to be replaced because they were too vulnerable to widely available anti-tank weapons.
But the government has ruled out acquiring either DU armour or DU ammunition carried by US tanks in frontline units. DU is a uranium derivative which is extremely hard and has low radioactivity. Advertisement Advertisement
It has been blamed for causing health problems, particularly in southern Iraq where DU anti-tank ammunition was widely used in the 1991 Gulf War.
Lieutenant Colonel Duncan Hayward said the 59 Australian vehicles had been selected from a batch of low use vehicles which had spent most of their lives in storage.
"They have not had depleted uranium armour on them and they have not been used in operations," he said.
"During the rebuild process, they will be fitted with an advanced non-DU armour package.
"The armour we are getting is very close to depleted uranium armour. In some aspects it is better against some type of threats but I am unable to discuss that in this forum."
Colonel Hayward said armour technology remained a sensitive and classified area.
He said an Australian defence scientist who visited the US recently had confirmed that what Australia was getting offered a high level of protection.
Australian Defence Association executive director Neil James, who attended the briefing, suggested political considerations stopped the government from opting for the advanced DU armour.
But he said after the briefing he would be kicking up a much greater fuss if he believed Australian tanks crews were receiving an inferior product.
He said information on actual performance of tank armour remained highly classified.
"Within the limit of what is publicly available, we are reasonably satisfied that it is probably a good solution," he said.
"If we thought the greenies were kicking up a fuss and soldiers were going to be endangered as a result, you would be hearing the screaming."
-------
Nuke ships may enter Aussie waters
AAP
04/08/04
http://seven.com.au/news/nationalnews/107109
Defence Minister Robert Hill has refused to rule out the use of nuclear-powered US vessels in exercises near a joint US-Australia training facility.
John Cherry (AD,QLD) asked Defence Minister Robert Hill if nuclear-powered vessels would be allowed into Australian waters during joint exercises at the Shoalwater Bay military training area in central Queensland.
Senator Cherry also asked if environmentally harmful devices such as weapons which used depleted uranium would be permitted in the training area.
Senator Hill said the Defence Department was aware of environmental standards which needed to be met at Shoalwater Bay.
"Defence is very proud of its environmental record in relation to Shoalwater Bay," Senator Hill told parliament.
"In relation to military vessels, we don't prohibit any specific military vessels.
"But there are well-established rules under which they have to operate; again, in part to ensure the highest possible environmental standards."
Senator Cherry later said the government should publicly release the text of its agreement with the US to upgrade Shoalwater Bay for joint-exercises.
"It just isn't good enough that the Australian community is being kept in the dark about what is planned to be built at Shoalwater Bay and what the enhanced training centre will mean for the intensity of training exercises in the area," he said in a statement.
--------
Deception was Marine recruiter's game
August 04, 2004
Brattleboro Reformer
By MIKE KALIL
http://www.reformer.com/Stories/0,1413,102~8862~2298883,00.html
BRATTLEBORO -- When Staff Sgt. Jimmy Massey worked as a Marine recruiter, he felt like a god.
Now, he prays to God for forgiveness.
"I pray to God every day for his forgiveness for what I've done," he said Tuesday.
Massey, of Waynesville, N.C., encouraged people at the Robert H. Gibson River Garden to be tough on military recruiters. He told a crowd of roughly 100 to be there during every step if their child is considering joining the military and to be aware that their children need not remain on recruiters' prospect lists.
Massey recruited Marines for three years, during which time he said he brought 75 men and three women on board. About 95 percent of those recruits, he said, are most likely serving in Operation Iraqi Freedom.
That is not OK with him.
The war in Iraq is not legitimate, he said; the only war he considers a just one was World War II.
Massey was part of the first wave of Marines that spearheaded the U.S. invasion of Iraq last March. What he saw still disturbs him, he said.
His platoon killed innocent civilians, he said, and the news was covered up. The military has used depleted uranium munitions in the war, he said, shooting the armor-piercing ammo at vehicles.
"I saw children playing in and around these vehicles that we shot at," he said.
Much as the scenes of war have disturbed him, it was Massey's recruitment methods that he spoke most forcefully about.
As a recruiter, he said he had access to a list of all the juniors and seniors in a high school. He would start stalking potential recruits early.
"As long as he's 17 and he's fixing to be a senior, I can sign him up," he said.
He said he would feed off the student's desires and weaknesses -- money, self confidence. He would drive around in a brand-new Ford Mustang to show that his way of life brings in the money, even though Massey could hardly afford the car payments.
This was his job, he said, and not doing it brings punishment. Nevertheless, he said parents and students have a choice: They can opt out of allowing the military to get their children's name through public schools.
His message was met with seemingly no opposition, and the groups sponsoring the event are all for his cause. The event was sponsored by the Brattleboro Area Peace and Justice Group, Alternatives to Recruitment by the Military, American Friends Service Committee and Veterans for Peace, Chapter 88.
"For the record, our group never tells (anyone) not to join the military," said Ellen Kaye of the Brattleboro Area Peace and Justice Group, adding that their mission is to help people make more informed decisions about signing up.
The Iraq war has hit the Green Mountain state hard. So far, 10 Vermonters have died in combat in Iraq. An 11th man died in Kuwait of natural causes.
Army Pfc. Kyle Gilbert, 20, was the first and so far the only Windham County resident to die in Iraq. He was killed on Aug. 6, 2003.
Leo Fchiff, member of Alternatives to Recruitment by the Military, acted as master of ceremonies Tuesday. The event also featured Nancy Brown, a Rochester woman whose son in the Vermont Army National Guard, Ryan, is presently stationed in Baghdad, and Windham's Gary Cheney, a Vietnam War veteran who belongs to Veterans for Peace and Alternatives to Recruitment by the Military.
Brown said it puzzles her how the United States can send Guardsmen over to Iraq, when that is clearly not the job they signed up for. She said she also struggles with the idea that Guardsmen have longer deployments than actual active duty members.
Brown is the founder of the Vermont Chapter of Military Families Speak Out, which is a national group whose members oppose the Iraq war and have relatives or loved ones in the military. "They've got mothers. They're with kids. They've got fathers," she said before she spoke. "I don't understand the rationale of the whole thing."
Vermont National Guard members are preparing for what could be their largest deployment since World War II. Guardsmen and women have been put through a two-day screening process over the past few weeks. Between 1,300 and 1,500 soldiers were expected to be prepared for mobilization by the end of July.
-------- iran
Iran's nuclear ambitions must be contained
NYT
August 04, 2004
http://www.iht.com/bin/print.php?file=532568.html
The invasion of Iraq, which President George W. Bush has often said would help stabilize the Middle East, is now hindering efforts to deal with a real nuclear threat: Iran. Despite its ritualistic denials, Iran gives every indication of building all the essential elements of a nuclear weapons program. And while the United States has hoped to pressure Iran into halting that program, the government in Tehran has clearly concluded that it has little to fear for now from an American government whose diplomatic credibility has been damaged and whose military capacities have been stretched by the war in Iraq.
Given Washington's unsatisfactory options right now, the best choice is to support Britain, France and Germany as they search for a diplomatic settlement. The chances of success do not look good; the European initiative has had minimal results and seems to be losing ground.
Iran announced Saturday that it had resumed the construction of centrifuges that are capable of producing material for a nuclear bomb. Tehran says it is still honoring a pledge not to operate any of these centrifuges, but it proclaims its right to resume enrichment at any time.
There would be little reason for Iran to take the provocative step of restarting centrifuge construction now unless it also intended to resume operations at some later date. And since there are other, safer ways for Iran to get the less-enriched uranium used in power-producing reactors, it is fair to presume that Iran means to use the centrifuges to produce bomb fuel.
Constructing uranium centrifuges is, regrettably, legal under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Using them to produce fuel for bombs is not. Diplomacy can resolve this issue only if both sides ultimately want a deal, and it is not at all clear that Iran's ruling clerics do. They may just be playing for time to develop their enrichment capacity before quitting the nuclear treaty and building bombs.
The tone of Iran's dealings with the outside world has changed for the worse since early this year, when hard-line clerics seized control of Parliament by excluding many of their once-formidable reformist rivals. That shut down an experiment in partial democracy that many hoped would eventually lead to less confrontational foreign policies, like decisions to close the nuclear program and end support for terrorist groups. Since then, Iran has stepped up its meddling in Iraq, stopped trying to improve its abysmal human rights reputation and turned more belligerent in the nuclear negotiations with Europe. Britain, France and Germany want Iran to renounce, permanently and verifiably, all technology capable of making nuclear bomb fuel. In exchange, they offer an equally firm commitment to use outside suppliers to guarantee an adequate supply of uranium for civilian power reactors. Such a deal could work only if Iran returned the spent fuel to the outside suppliers. Otherwise, plutonium could be extracted from it and reprocessed to make nuclear weapons. Unless Iran changes its position and forswears all rights to enrich uranium or reprocess plutonium, there can be no deal.
For want of a better alternative, Europe is right to give Iran a little more time to change its mind. But the world cannot afford to wait long. Once the new centrifuges are completed, Iran's ambitions will become much harder to contain. If no agreement is reached soon, this apparent drive to build nuclear weapons should be recognized as a threat to international peace and security and taken up by the United Nations Security Council later this year.
-------- israel
It's almost surprising how poorly strategic sites are protected
By Ze'ev Schiff,
Haaretz Analysis
Wed., August 04, 2004
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/459865.html
If a sophisticated terror cell were to make the intelligence-gathering and operational effort, it could expose sensitive weak points and carry out a serious strategic attack in Israel - that, in effect, is the bleak conclusion of a report prepared by a special Knesset subcommittee that examined security at sensitive sites around the country. Headed by Labor MK Ephraim Sneh, the subcommittee of the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee included Likud MK Omri Sharon and National Union MK Aryeh Eldad. Its purpose was to examine the defensive measures taken to protect strategic sites in Israel, and it was set up after the Ashdod terror attack in March, when two Palestinians managed to penetrate the port and kill 10 Israelis. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz and other ministers who are responsible for various strategic sites cannot ignore the report issued yesterday by the three MKs.
There is a tendency in Israel to claim the Americans exaggerate in their security measures, but now it turns out that those who deserve the mocking are the Israelis for their low standards of security at key sites. Because of justified censorship, most of the report cannot be published. At one site, the spot check by the MKs found illegal foreign workers, including Palestinians, living in shacks next to the rusting fence of an important strategic facility, said MK Sneh.
The special committee's findings confirm what was discovered by the Defense Ministry's comptroller, Brig. Gen. (res.) Yosef Beinhorn. His people examined the safety and protection of various Israel Defense Forces bases, which were found to be poorly protected.
Particularly worrisome is that the committee found a simplistic approach to the matter in the army. Each branch makes its own definitions about what are strategic sites, and the army seems to take a "trust me" approach to the entire matter. There is no master list of strategic facilities, nor is there a checklist for the minimum actions required to protect a strategic facility.
On the other hand, the subcommittee was impressed by the Defense Ministry's Field Security department's approach to protecting facilities like the two nuclear reactors and the various military industries that are under the ministry's aegis. The police also take a much more serious approach than the army on the issue of protecting its facilities.
-------- japan
Iraqi doctor learns from Hiroshima's past
Shinya Ajima and Shinsuke Takahashi,
August 4, 2004
Japan Today
http://www.japantoday.com/e/?content=feature&id=706
HIROSHIMA - An Iraqi doctor left his war-battered country in April. His destination was Hiroshima, and the purpose of his trip was to obtain knowledge and data on radiation effects in the city once devastated by the first atomic bombing in the world.
Hussam Mahmood Salih, 34, a pediatrician from Basra, said the number of child cancer cases jumped eightfold in the southern Iraqi city between 1988 and 2002, suspecting it was caused by the 1991 Gulf War, in which U.S. forces used depleted uranium shells.
There are also reports in Iraq about newborn babies lacking limbs or craniums. Depleted uranium has been long blamed for such birth defects in babies believed exposed to radiation while in the womb.
"We don't have any decent facilities in Iraq to check the amount of radiation in human bodies. But we can see the incidences of cancer increased greatly during the first four to five years of the 1990s," said Salih, now studying at Hiroshima University Hospital at the invitation of a Japanese civic group.
Under economic sanctions on Iraq that followed the war, Iraqi hospitals were prohibited from obtaining essential drugs as well as new medical equipment like tools for radio therapy because the international community feared they might be used for military purposes, he said.
"So, death and disease, and death and disease...this is the life of people in Iraq. I want to save Iraqi children," said Salih.
The U.S. military uses depleted uranium-tipped shells, known for their armor-piercing capability, against tanks and other hard military targets.
Although Iraqi doctors allege DU weapons cause leukemia and cancer, U.S. authorities deny direct links between DU and the cancer on the rise in Iraq since the 1991 war.
The medical community in Japan, a U.S. staunch ally, is also reluctant to admit a connection.
"Even so, it is sensible for him to visit Hiroshima, which has skills and knowledge on treating leukemia patients," said Atsuko Oe, a representative of Save the Iraq Children Hiroshima, the group that arranged Salih's visit.
In August last year, when some Iraqi doctors visited Japan to deliver lectures, they asked Oe and other civic group members to look for Japanese medical institutions that can train young doctors from Iraq.
Universities in Hiroshima and Nagoya then agreed to accept some doctors from hospitals in Basra through the civic groups.
Salih said he had never hesitated to come to Japan when chosen as a trainee due to his background as an expert on pediatric leukemia.
His visit apparently exposed a new face of Japan as the sole A-bomb victim in the world.
"Hiroshima had suffered a lot from war, deaths and radiation effects, and the Japanese doctors understand about these diseases...and all strategies about detection, treatment and follow-up. I think we cold learn very much from Japan's experiences," said Salih.
He added there are more Iraqi doctors hoping to learn in Japan and bring back advanced techniques, knowledge and equipment that have been unavailable to Iraqis.
"This is a great chance, a very nice chance. They could do better to save patients," he said.
Another civic group invited two other Iraqi doctors for training at Nagoya University Hospital, as well as a young patient whom Salih has treated.
The United States attacked Hiroshima with an atomic bomb on Aug 6, 1945, and dropped another on Nagasaki three days later. Japan surrendered to Allied forces Aug 15.
The bomb dropped on Hiroshima contained high quantities of highly enriched uranium. There are reports that a number of microcephalic babies were born in the western Japan city after the bombing, Oe said.
Salih is learning from Japanese professors at the university hospital, mainly about chemotherapy and bone-marrow transplants.
He has been given access to data stored in many facilities and organizations in this city, and has opportunities to talk with radiation victims as well as their families.
He is also going to attend the ceremony for the 59th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima next month.
"We wish Mr Salih could learn something by referring to the stored data and comparing them with those kept in Iraq," Oe said.
Salih will stay in Japan until the fall and return to Iraq, where his wife and two children live.
Governments in Hiroshima and Nagasaki are concerned about the aging of A-bomb victims. Their average age was 72.2 as of March, and thousands of the registered radiation victims die every year.
Both cities are forced to take measures to leave the victims' messages and experiences of the atrocities to succeeding generations.
Salih's stay in Hiroshima shows how Japan should be the first and hopefully last country of A-bomb victims in the world by taking on new roles no other country can undertake, Oe said.
"Each of us has our own role," she said, adding, "If we did not act, there would be a third following Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is important for us to think how individuals can be involved in peace or antinuclear activities." (Kyodo News)
----
Lest we forget
Nearly six decades after the US dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Justin McCurry reports on efforts to ensure that the horrors of a nuclear strike remain etched on the collective memory
Wednesday August 4, 2004
UK Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/elsewhere/journalist/story/0,7792,1276045,00.html
On Friday, the people of Hiroshima will come together to remember the morning of August 6th 1945, when their city became the target of the first atomic bomb unleashed on a civilian population.
Gathering within sight of the burned out shell of the former industrial promotion hall near the epicentre of the blast, they will remember the 200,000 people who perished in the immediate aftermath or who died later from the effects of exposure to radiation.
Remembering the A-bomb, though, is becoming an increasingly local affair. Representatives of just two of the world's seven acknowledged nuclear powers - Pakistan and Russia - will attend.
Almost six decades after the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, collective horror at their consequences is being replaced by collective amnesia. And to forget, say those who survived, is to invite the prospect of a disastrous repeat of the radioactive infernos of the summer of 1945.
The hibakusha - the Japanese name for those who survived the bombings - are falling victim to the passage of time and shifts in the geopolitical environment that are concentrating minds on terrorism and regime change at the expense of more traditional threats, such as nuclear war.
In Japan itself, the anti-nuclear movement has been marginalised. What was once a mass movement - a largely silent but powerful majority committed to upholding the country's pacifist constitution and non-nuclear principles - has become too closely associated with the impotent political parties of the far left.
To many, the rallying cry of "No More Hiroshimas!" sounds cloying and hopelessly out of date.
It is little wonder, then, that the voices of the hibakusha are being drowned out amid the din of real politik, especially in a region that is coming to terms with a North Korea emboldened by a nuclear weapons programme.
Inevitably, age, too, is an obstacle. Most of the survivors are in their 70s, 80s and 90s. Many are in poor health.
Yet they are determined not to be written off as mere unfortunates in a singularly tragic event. They still have battles to be won - for recognition and to secure their rightful place in history, lest, they say, it be repeated.
"They are not forgotten, but they have been forced to exist in a historical file labelled 'A-Bomb'," said Kazumi Mizumoto, an associate professor at the Hiroshima Peace Institute.
"At the same time, they are the only people to have experienced the effects of the military use of nuclear bombs. Whenever the world faces the danger of nuclear weapons, they alone can tell the world what the result will be. In that sense they are still important, and I think the world understands that."
The community of atomic bomb survivors is now a diaspora spread between Japan, North and South Korea, China, the United States and Brazil - separated geographically, but united in their experience of coming under nuclear attack and by fear that many are not getting the official assistance that they deserve in their old age.
The subjects of numerous books, magazines and recordings, their recollections will survive long after they are gone.
In one of the biggest such projects, conducted just over 40 years after the attacks, NHK, Japan's public broadcaster, and the Hiroshima Peace Cultural Centre, asked 100 survivors to talk about the day their world fell apart.
Among them was Toshiko Saeki, a 26-year-old-woman who rushed to Hiroshima from her home in the suburbs on the afternoon of August 6 1945 to search for her mother and other family members.
Saeki, who lost 13 relatives in the attack, made perhaps the most eloquent case for not allowing the voices of the A-bomb survivors like her to fade into obscurity.
"Our experience must not be forgotten," she said. "What we believed in during the war turned out to be worth nothing. I went through hell on earth [so that] Hiroshima should not be repeated again. That is why I keep telling the same old story over and over again. And I'll keep on repeating it."
Hers is just one of countless similar experiences that Mizumoto believes will remind the region and the world of what they stand to lose should they ever be pushed to the brink of nuclear war. Simply rationalising the political consequences, he says, is not enough.
"People are often motivated more by emotion than by logical discussion," he said. "That is where the meaning behind Hiroshima and Nagasaki plays a part, and will continue to play a part."
-------- korea
North Korean nuclear missile 'could reach US'
The Guardian
Jonathan Watts
August 4, 2004
http://www.guardian.co.uk/korea/article/0,2763,1275587,00.html
North Korea is deploying a new missile which may be able to strike the US mainland with a nuclear warhead, a report in Jane's Defence Weekly says today.
In the most alarming and detailed picture yet painted of Pyongyang's deterrent force, the authoritative military publication said the navy had customised a dozen scrapped Russian submarines to launch ballistic weapons of mass destruction.
Rumours have been circulating for several years that North Korea is developing an intercontinental missile - the Taepodong 2 - but the latest report suggests that the country's leader, Kim Jong-il, may also have ordered his military to attempt a short cut.
If confirmed, North Korea would join an exclusive club capable of covertly launching atomic weapons from submarines.
Only the five permanent members of the United Nations security council - the US, UK, France, China and Russia - and possibly Israel possess such a strategic advantage.
The article, which appears in this week's edition of Jane's, says North Korea's new systems appeared to be based on a decommissioned Soviet submarine-launched ballistic missile, the R-27.
It notes that several Russian missile experts from Chelyabinsk, a city in the Urals, were blocked in an attempt to enter North Korea in 1992, but others succeeded in subsequent years.
Much of the technology was reportedly transferred in the form of scrap in 1993, when a Japanese trading firm sold 12 decommissioned Foxtrot and Golf II class submarines to North Korea.
Although many key mechanisms were removed, the magazine said the vessels still contained launch tubes and stabilising sub-systems.
By customising these devices, it said, North Korea had developed and deployed a land-based missile with a range of 2,500km to 4,000km, as well as a sea-based missile with a range of 2,500km (1,500 miles).
The version of the missile capable of being launched from submarines or ships "is potentially the most threatening," Jane's said.
"It could finally provide its leadership with something that it has long sought to obtain - the ability to directly threaten the continental US."
North Korea's nuclear and missile programmes have long been a concern to the world.
In 2002, President George Bush named North Korea, alongside Iran and Iraq, as part of an axis of evil.
Pyongyang is now locked in a standoff with Washington over its withdrawal last year from the nuclear non-proliferation treaty.
Although the country has never successfully tested a nuclear weapon, it is thought to have reprocessed sufficient plutonium for one to eight warheads.
According to the South Korean military, North Korea has 600 Scud missiles with a range of 600km and 100 Nodong missiles with a range of 1,300km. It also test-fired a multi-stage Taepodong 1 rocket over Japan in 1998.
A second-generation Taepodong capable of hitting Hawaii, Alaska and possibly the western seaboard of the US is under development. Although the CIA believes that North Korea possesses an arsenal of biological and chemical weapons, Jane's news editor, Ian Kemp, said there was no doubt that the new missiles were primarily designed to carry nuclear warheads.
But Japanese military analysts are sceptical that North Korea possesses the miniaturisation technology to fit a nuclear warhead into a missile.
--------
N. Korea expands missiles
August 04, 2004
(Agence France-Presse)
http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary
LONDON - North Korea is developing a pair of new ballistic-missile systems, including a sea-launched model that soon could enable the communist state to target the continental United States, a leading military publication said yesterday.
"Both these new land- and sea-based systems appreciably expand the ballistic-missile threat presented by the DPRK," a report in Jane's Defense Weekly said, using the official name for the country, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
The version of the missile capable of being launched from submarines or ships "is potentially the most threatening," the weekly said.
"It would fundamentally alter the missile threat posed by the DPRK and could finally provide its leadership with something that it has long sought to obtain - the ability to directly threaten the continental U.S."
Information about North Korea's military capabilities is sketchy because of the ultra-secretive nature of the hard-line communist regime, which has been ruled for the past half-century by father-and-son dictators Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il.
However, the country is known to possess ballistic-missile technology. In August 1998, Pyongyang stunned the world by test-launching a Taepo-Dong-1 missile over Japan, officially saying it was a satellite launch.
Four years later, the United States said North Korea had acknowledged that it was developing nuclear weapons, prompting a series of as-yet unsuccessful talks involving Washington as well as China, South Korea, Russia and Japan.
According to Jane's Defense Weekly, North Korea is working on a pair of missile systems based on Russian technology, completely different from the Taepo-Dong-1 and its mooted successor, the Taepo-Dong-2.
The new systems are based on the defunct Soviet R-27 submarine-launched ballistic missile, known to NATO at the time as the SS-N-6, Jane's said.
The land-based model has an estimated range of 1,560 to 2,500 miles, bringing into range all of East Asia, as well as Hawaii and U.S. military bases on the Pacific islands of Okinawa and Guam.
The sea-launched model could be fired at least 1,500 miles, the article said.
The origin of the new missiles is thought to have been shown by an incident in 1992, when specialists from the Makeyev Design Bureau in Chelyabinsk, Russia, which developed the R-27, were detained as they tried to leave for North Korea.
"Reports indicate that other groups of missile specialists successfully traveled to the DPRK," Jane's said.
Then in 1993, the North Korean navy bought 12 decommissioned Russian submarines, ostensibly for scrap metal.
Some of these had been equipped to blast ballistic missiles. All missiles and firing systems were removed, but the submarines still had "significant elements" of launch systems.
"This technology, in combination with the R-27 design, provided the Korean People's Navy with elements crucial to the subsequent development of a submarine or ship-mounted ballistic-missile system," the report said.
-------- mideast
Persecuted for their faith -- and ignored by the U.S.
If Bush truly believes religion is the "first freedom of the human soul," why isn't his administration pressuring countries that persecute people for their beliefs?
By Judd Legum
Aug. 4, 2004
Salon
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2004/08/04/religious_freedom/print.html
Even staunch defenders of the U.S.-Saudi alliance, such as former Secretary of State James Baker, would be hard-pressed to assert that Saudi Arabia respects religious freedom. A 2003 State Department report flatly states that "freedom of religion does not exist" in that nation. The State Department has also concluded that "non-Muslim worshippers risk arrest, lashing, deportation and sometimes torture for engaging in religious activity." Even Muslim members of the Shiite minority "are the subject of officially sanctioned political and economic discrimination," according to the same report.
Yet the evidence in the report, mandated by the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998, was not quite persuasive enough for the Bush administration. For the past several years, the State Department has ignored the recommendation of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom -- an independent body created by the IRFA -- to list Saudi Arabia as a country of "particular concern for religious freedom."
Saudi Arabia isn't the only country whose crackdown on religious expression is ignored by the administration. The State Department also turned a blind eye to its own findings on Pakistan, Eritrea and Turkmenistan and failed to list them as countries of "particular concern."
The requirement that the president (via the secretary of state) designate countries that "engage in or tolerate violations" of religious freedom as being of "particular concern" is one of the most significant provisions of the IRFA. Rabbi David Saperstein, the first chairman of the Commission on International Religious Freedom, explained that this process is important because countries "often try to accommodate U.S. concerns to avoid [that] designation." As a result, a number of countries have made changes "that made life noticeably better" for individuals who had been mistreated because of their religion.
The law requires the president to make this designation each year by Sept 1. But the Bush administration's last designation was in March 2003 -- more than 16 months ago. Saperstein says the administration's failure to comply with the timetable of the law "undermines the consistency of diplomatic efforts across the globe and eases the pressure" on countries that persecute people on the basis of religion.
The IRFA is the fulfillment of America's obligation under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a document adopted by U.N. General Assembly in 1948 to protect "the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family." Every signatory is obliged to do what it can to make sure that the principles expressed in the declaration are respected, including the affirmation that "everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion" (from Article 18). The 1998 act was an aggressive effort to ensure that the United States fulfills its part of the bargain with respect to religious freedom. The bill passed Congress unanimously and was championed by the religious conservatives whom Bush considers the core of his political base. Although the act requires the executive branch to take significant and specific steps to promote international religious freedom, the Bush administration, in contradiction to its public statements, has failed to comply with the letter or the spirit of the law.
The administration touts international religious freedom as a priority of its foreign policy agenda. Page 3 of the president's June 2002 National Security Strategy describes religious tolerance as one of the "nonnegotiable demands of human dignity." Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage recently called religious freedom "a central tenet of United States foreign policy." Bush himself, in a May 2001 speech to the American Jewish Committee, said with uncharacteristic eloquence, "It is not an accident that freedom of religion is one of the central freedoms in our Bill of Rights. It is the first freedom of the human soul -- the right to speak the words that God places in our mouths. We must stand for that freedom in our country. We must speak for that freedom in the world."
The State Department explained in February that promoting international religious freedom has a renewed importance since 9/11 because it "reinforces the development and strength of civil societies, and it dampens the appeal of religious extremism and religion-based violence."
Saudi Arabia, as a nation known to have provided recruits and funding for the 9/11 terrorist attacks, ought to be the prime target of such a policy. In May, the annual report of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom revealed: "There are numerous serious reports, which warrant official U.S. government investigation, that Saudis are funding efforts to propagate globally a religious ideology that promotes hate, intolerance, and other human rights violations toward non-Muslims and disfavored Muslims." Michael Young, current chairman of the commission, said the State Department's repeated refusal to list Saudi Arabia, Eritrea, India and Pakistan as countries of concern was "wrong" and not "in the interest of the people in those countries ... [or] the global community."
What's more, the administration has failed to take actions authorized by law to improve the conditions of religiously persecuted people in the countries that were designated as being of "particular concern" in March 2003: Burma, China, Iran, Iraq, North Korea and Sudan. The IRFA requires the administration to impose one or more of 15 specified penalties on designated countries. The penalties range from an official condemnation to the suspension of security assistance to economic sanctions. Instead, for each of these countries, the administration has invoked a provision in the law that allows the president to waive the requirement if "pre-existing sanctions are adequate." For example, no additional sanctions were imposed on China because of existing restrictions on U.S. exports of crime control and detection equipment to that country.
The Commission on International Religious Freedom calls the reliance on preexisting sanctions "technically correct under the statute" but "unacceptable as a matter of policy." "Reliance on pre-existing sanctions," the commission says, "provides little incentive for [countries] to reduce or end severe violations of religious freedom." According to the commission, "the failure to take additional action under IRFA suggests that nothing further can, or will, be done by the U.S. government to those countries that are deemed the world's worst violators of freedom of religion or belief."
Since 2001, the State Department has also failed to meet the reporting requirements of the IRFA. The law requires the secretary of state to transmit to Congress an annual report by Sept. 1 of each year or the first day after that on which Congress is in session. In 2003, the State Department didn't complete its report until mid-December, and when the report was finally submitted, it was incomplete. According to the Commission on International Religious Freedom, the State Department "has not made public any actions it has taken" regarding countries that violate religious freedom "despite statutory provisions ... that require public dissemination of that information." The State Department has also "not submitted to the Congress the required evaluation of the effectiveness of prior actions."
What explains the administration's failure to take seriously the issue of international religious freedom? Why, after top officials publicly declared it a priority, has the administration failed to meet even the minimum statutory requirements? The extent of its neglect of those requirements suggests that the administration's failure goes beyond incompetence or carelessness. Clearly, despite repeated public statements to the contrary, the administration does not view international religious freedom as a priority.
Robert Seiple, the first U.S. ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom, attributes the administration's neglect of the issue to "the limited amount of political oxygen in Washington," adding that the neglect is "disappointing to those of us who have been working the issue." It should be disappointing to anyone who values human rights, national security, the rule of law -- and religious liberty. For all the White House's talk about religious freedom and its open appeal to religious constituencies in the election campaign, Bush's record in this area is stunning for its lack of interest, consistency and results.
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About the writer Judd Legum is deputy research director at the Center for American Progress in Washington and coauthor of the Progress Report.
Sound Off Send us a Letter to the Editor http://www.salon.com/about/letters/index.html
Related stories Bush's bungled Saudi deal-making http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2004/07/23/saudi_deals/index.html President Bush and his lawyer, the former U.S. ambassador in Riyadh, wasted a golden opportunity to pressure the Saudis to crack down on terrorism. By Charles Tiefer 07/23/04
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2004/08/04/religious_freedom/print.html
-------- missile defense
Pentagon Prepares Missile Defense
PolitInfo.com
Aug 4, 2004
Pentagon
http://www.politinfo.com/articles/article_2004_08_4_1100.html
By the end of this year, the Pentagon is set to have in place a system designed to protect the United States from an attack by a long range missile that could be carrying a weapon of mass destruction.
When President Bush took office three years ago, he quickly embarked on a controversial, multibillion dollar plan to put in place a missile shield capable of intercepting a nuclear warhead fired at the United States by a rogue nation. Largely unnoticed by the public and the media, a Pentagon agency has been moving ahead with work on an elaborate air, land and sea-based defense system capable of knocking out an enemy missile heading toward the United States.
Despite questions over whether it will work, the Bush Administration is confident it will and considers the system essential to the nation's defense, given the increasing number of countries, such as Iran and North Korea, that are working to acquire nuclear weapons. "Over the next five, 10, 15, 20 years or more, we can expect offensive missiles to become far more capable than they are now and so we need to ensure we have the defense against that type of missile," says Rick Lehner of the Missile Defense Agency, the Pentagon office charged with deploying the multi-layered missile shield. "The goal is to have an operational system against long range missiles by the end of this year."
Six years ago, North Korea stunned its Asian neighbors and the world when it test fired a medium range missile that flew over Japan. That same year, a congressionally mandated commission looked into America's vulnerability to a missile attack and determined North Korea in particular was well on its way to developing ballistic missiles that could threaten the United States. The head of the commission was Donald Rumsfeld, who was then a private citizen and is now defense secretary.
Missile defense has been one of the most controversial aspects of the Bush administration's foreign policy. In order to move ahead with deployment, the United States withdrew in 2002 from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with the Soviet Union, a move opponents, including Democratic Congressman Rush Holt of New Jersey, believes could encourage America's enemies to build better missiles.
"It leads to destabilization," he argues. "The potential enemies will think that this is a threat to them and it will lead to an arms race."
There are also questions about whether a system untested in battle can, in fact, protect the nation from a missile attack. In tests conducted by the Pentagon in recent years, just five out of eight were judged fully successful. Of those that failed, some failed to separate from their booster rockets; others missed their targets.
"The system is very early in its development phase," says Physicist Lizabeth Gronlund with the Union of Concerned Scientists.
The Union of Concerned Scientists is a research group that believes the system has not demonstrated an ability to handle an attack involving multiple warheads and decoys.
"In other words, I think that the system can be made to work against one missile if that missile takes no steps to make the job of the defense more difficult," she adds. "But that's a really unrealistic assumption."
Rick Lehner of the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency says the entire project is still in the testing phase.
"It will continue to be very much a work in progress in terms of keeping up with the threat to make sure that the system that we are deploying is capable of being reliable and effective against all types of ballistic missiles," he notes.
Opponents also point out that the deadliest ever attack on the nation came not from missiles, but from terrorists already in the country.
"The most likely threat to the U.S. from terrorists is something of the sort that happened on 9/11," says Lizabeth Gronlund. "The worst threat you could think of from terrorists is that they would acquire a nuclear weapon or highly enriched uranium or plutonium that they need to make a nuclear weapon. There are hundreds of tons of this material primarily in Russia and the U.S. and it's not well guarded and that is where we should be putting our efforts."
Construction and testing on the missile shield are moving ahead. A total of 20 interceptor missiles are set to be deployed at Alaska's remote Fort Greely Army base and at Vandenburg Air Force Base in California by the end of next year. This article uses material from VOA.
-------- russia
Canada and Russia in 24 million dollar deal to decomission nuclear subs
OTTAWA (AFP)
Aug 04, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040804201912.dzu6oqqm.html
Canada said Wednesday it had signed a 24 million dollar deal (18 million US dollars) to help Russia dismantle nuclear submarines, under a scheme devised to keep radioactive material out of the hands of terrorists.
"Spent nuclear fuel in Russian submarine reactors presents an international security risk and an environmental threat to the Arctic and Barents Sea," said Foreign Minister Pierre Pettigrew
The deal is part of the Group of Eight industrialised nations Global Partnership, which provides 20 billion dollars in funding to target vulnerable stocks of radioactive material in post-Soviet Russia.
Russia currently has 56 retired nuclear submarines in the Barents Sea region awaiting disposal.
Canada will help dispose of three Victor class submarines at first and over the next three years sign three new deals to provide a total of 116 million dollars to decommision 12 submarines.
Britain, Norway, Germany and the United States have already made contributions to dispose of Russian nuclear submarines.
-------- treaties
Turning a blind eye to nukes
IHT
Jonathan Power
August 04, 2004
http://www.iht.com/bin/print.php?file=532538.html
The U.S. and Saudi Arabia?
LONDON In his forthcoming memoir, Strobe Talbott, a former Deputy Secretary of State, recounts the surprise and alarm that swept through the State Department on May 11, 1998, when the first reports came in over CNN television that India had tested a nuclear weapon. Yet The Statesman, an influential Indian daily, had published articles on April 8 and April 15 of that year, that argued that now that the Indian nationalists of the Bharatiya Janata Party had come to power, India was going to go nuclear very quickly. The information was around for those who had eyes and ears. It was as if Washington didn't want to know until it had to.
Similarly, the reports are emerging today suggesting that Saudi Arabia may be the latest Middle Eastern country to engage in a planning program on nuclear weapons - but as long ago as 1989, the International Institute for Strategic Studies, in London, remarked on the Saudi purchase of Chinese CSS-2 rockets: "Missiles of such range are difficult to justify unless they carry nuclear weapons." "They are too elaborate and expensive to make sense for anything else," I was told at the time.
But Washington didn't want to know and still doesn't want to know. Despite worrying new intelligence reports, not one senior Bush administration figure is talking about Saudi Arabian nuclear weapons plans. Neither will the United States confirm on the record what everyone knows - that Israel has about 200 nuclear weapons.
Washington prefers, when it is in its immediate strategic interest (albeit not its long-term one), to put its telescope to its blind eye. It couldn't allow itself to be too agitated about India's nuclear research because it had kept quiet for so long about Pakistan's, its close ally. When the Soviet Army poured into Afghanistan during the Carter administration, the United States suspended its nuclear nonproliferation policy so that Pakistan could escape sanctions and receive the military and economic aid that the United States wanted it to have. Yet everyone knew that Pakistan was developing its nuclear weapons' capability at a fast rate. And today we know that Pakistan's chief nuclear weapons scientist was selling nuclear technology and equipment far and wide - to North Korea, Libya, Iran and, now the spooks say, a "fourth customer," which can only be Saudi Arabia.
How can Washington be a credible force against proliferation when it has a record of doing little or nothing until too late? Talbott gives a hair-raising ringside view of the Indian-Pakistani nuclear crisis of 1999. He reports that President Bill Clinton thought that it brought the antagonists closer to nuclear war than the United States and the Soviet Union were at the time of the Cuban missile crisis.
We know, too, that when Saudi Arabia bought sophisticated Chinese missiles in 1988, Israel was nervous enough to warn Saudi Arabia that it would engage in a pre-emptive nuclear strike if it ever had cause for suspicion they would be used against it. Some observers are still convinced that only U.S. pressure stayed Israel's hand in March and April 1988. (Saudi Arabia, for its part, attempted to reassure Israel by saying it acquired the rockets for defense against Iran, not Israel.)
Diplomatically, it is very difficult for Washington to rally international opinion behind a hard line on nuclear nonproliferation in North Korea and Iran when its recent performance has been so ambiguous and inconsistent.
The credibility of the Bush administration is further undermined by its lack of action in securing "loose nukes" and "near-nukes" in Russia. Graham Allison, of Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, has described the attitude of the Group of Eight nations toward this issue as "lackadaisical and unfocused." Despite the United States having agreed in principle to work with Russia on the issue, less plutonium and highly enriched uranium was secured in the two years after Sept. 11, 2001, than in the two years before. President George W. Bush does not give the issue his direct personal attention.
Meanwhile, at home, rather than setting a good example by freezing weapons development, the administration has been seeking an increase in research funding for two new kinds of nuclear weapons.
Jonathan Power is a commentator on foreign affairs.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
Nuclear-security contract draws fire
August 04, 2004
UPI Correspondent
By Thom J. Rose
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20040803-062204-5654r.htm
Washington, DC, Aug. 3 (UPI) -- A new round of force-on-force security tests to be carried out in U.S. nuclear facilities beginning in November will be based around "hostile forces" trained and employed by the same company that employs many of the guards to be tested.
Wackenhut Corporation, which provides guard forces to 30 of the United States' 64 nuclear power plants, has been chosen by an industry group to create two handpicked, specially trained teams to test guards' performance across the country.
"They're going to be in essence testing themselves in a lot of places," Peter Brand of the watchdog group Project on Government Oversight told United Press International. "The flipside is that they're going to be testing their competitors."
The industry group that selected Wackenhut for the job, the Nuclear Energy Institute, counters that Wackenhut is the best-qualified company for the job and has employees uniquely qualified to play hostile forces.
"This program has (Nuclear Regulatory Commission) oversight from start to finish," said Steve Kerekes, a spokesman for the NEI.
Kerekes said Wackenhut's testing-team members will not be permitted to test guards at facilities where they have worked and said a number of similar safeguards will be in place to avoid compromising the integrity of the coming force-on-force tests.
Brand said Wackenhut's position as both tester and tested represents an inherent conflict of interest, however, and questioned the NEI's role in choosing Wackenhut for the hostile-force job.
"The nuclear industry is exerting undue influence over the process of homeland security," Brand said.
Fear of terrorism since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks has greatly increased the amount of attention paid to security at nuclear plants. The specter of suicide attackers -- who would not have to both enter and escape a nuclear plant, but simply enter -- has raised considerable concern among members of the public and nuclear-security experts.
Kerekes said the nuclear-power industry has taken significant steps to increase the security of its plants since Sept. 11. He said power-plant operators have spent $1 billion on additional security since the attacks, adding 2,000 guards across the country for a total of 7,000.
"Our facilities are extremely well protected," Kerekes said.
At the same time, the Government Accountability Office, Congress's investigative arm, and other groups have questioned the safety of some U.S. nuclear facilities.
In an April report, the GAO questioned the standards of protection the Department of Energy has set, which it said do not pay enough attention to the threat of improvised nuclear bombs that terrorists might be able to assemble very quickly.
Additionally, a number of accusations of shoddy security work at nuclear power plants and government nuclear sites have raised public concern.
In fact, some of the most high-profile security questions have involved Wackenhut guards.
A "protective force performance test" of Wackenhut security guards stationed at a nuclear site in Oak Ridge, Tenn., performed by the Department of Energy in June 2003 is one of the most controversial examples.
The test, which was intended to measure security forces' readiness to protect the highly enriched uranium stored at the site, drew the department's attention since the Wackenhut officers being tested received uncharacteristically high scores. A subsequent investigation indicated that Wackenhut officers might have cheated on the 2003 test and perhaps on many other tests at Oak Ridge from the mid-1980s on.
Witnesses told the Department of Energy that private guards had studied plans for the simulated attacks before they were carried out, had disabled the laser sensors they wore during tests to determine when they were "shot" by mock enemies, arranged trucks and other obstacles to help foil simulated attacks, created special non-standard plans to help them perform better on tests and put more guards on duty at the time of tests than would normally have been present.
Wackenhut has denied any wrongdoing at Oak Ridge, but the Project on Government Oversight and others continue to question the company's record.
Kerekes defended Wackenhut's work and reiterated that the company is well qualified to perform the planned force-on-force tests.
"Wackenhut has the best capabilities to achieve the ends of this program," Kerekes said. "I would challenge (the Project on Government Oversight) or anyone else to find security experts who are better qualified to do this."
The Project on Government Oversight has also questioned the decision to put a foreign-owned firm in charge of guarding sensitive U.S. sites. Wackenhut is owned by the British company Securicor.
"The Department of Homeland Security won't contract out airport security to foreign companies," said Brand.
The Project on Government Oversight has sent a letter to Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chairman Nils Diaz objecting to Wackenhut's involvement in the new force-on-force tests, but Diaz has made no public response. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission could not be reached for comment.
-------- california
Interns get technical at Sandia symposium
August 04, 2004
trivalleyherald
By Lea Blevins
http://www.trivalleyherald.com/Stories/0,1413,86~10671~2313267,00.html
LIVERMORE -- While some people barely trust a college student to bag their groceries, the government is entrusting some young adults with scientific projects with national security implications. Student interns at Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore presented their summer projects Tuesday at the Student Symposium, showing off their vast knowledge of science.
And the trust in students is evident. Interns often work on their own projects or help with other projects that actually will be put into use.
Christina Bonebreak, a student from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, assisted in designing a machine that will be used to help detect uranium and plutonium in nuclear reactors so the United States can monitor other countries' materials that could be used for weapons of mass destruction.
"For what I've created, I'm the expert, so if they have questions about it, I'm really the best person to ask," said Bonebreak, adding that she may still work with her team after she goes back to school.
Bonebreak, 21, got to travel to San Clemente, where the San Onofre Nuclear Generation Station is located and where her designs will be tested.
"I was actually there to put it together and troubleshoot," said Bonebreak, a Maryland resident.
Intern Nick Degnan is working from start to finish on another innovative project.
A student at the University of California, Davis, Degnan has put together a vibrating machine controlled by a computer, which also collects data generated by the device.
The machine is designed to simulate different circumstances so lab employees can determine how certain items will respond to various vibrations, such as something being transported on a truck.
"It's challenging, and it's exciting for my field," said Degnan, 21.
He said the employees at Sandia have treated him as an equal rather than as just a student intern.
"They've made me feel like I'm a part of that team," he said.
Although Sandia's work in various fields of science is often what gets the lab recognized, opportunities are available for interns interested in other careers.
Janine Scott, 19, has been interning at Sandia for four years in the public and community relations department.
The Las Positas College student, who is transferring to the University of California, Los Angeles, in the fall, has combined science and working with the public.
She has helped organize Family Science Nights at local elementary schools, where families can get hands-on experience with science experiments.
"All the people here are really easy to work with," said Scott, a Livermore resident. "They really give a lot of opportunities to the interns."
Lea Blevins covers education in Livermore, Pleasanton and Dublin. Contact her at (925) 416-4819 or lblevins@angnewspapers.com .
-------- us nuc waste
Waste Control Specialists Submits Application for State Waste Disposal License
PRNewswire
Aug. 4, 2000
http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=109&STORY=/www/story/08-04-2004/0002225194&EDATE=
DALLAS, -- Waste Control Specialists LLC (WCS), announced today that it has filed an application for state approval to operate a low-level radioactive waste disposal facility 30 miles west of Andrews,Texas. A $500,000 license application fee to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) was included as part of the 4,000 page license application submittal.
"The application demonstrates to the state and its citizens that WCS is committed to providing an environmentally safe and scientifically sound disposal facility and has the financial resources to do so," said George E. Dials, president and chief operating officer of WCS.
The permit application was submitted to the state under comprehensive regulatory legislation approved by the Texas Legislature last session to provide for the safe and permanent disposal of low-level radioactive waste generated by hospitals, research institutions, power plants and industrial activities. Under this legislation, a licensed private company may, upon issuance of a permit from the TCEQ, dispose of low-level radioactive waste from the Texas Compact and federal facilities, although the amount of federal waste that can be received is limited. The disposal activities will be regulated by agencies of the state of Texas. The Texas Compact is a federally approved agreement that provides for Texas to host a low-level radioactive waste disposal site to dispose of waste from Texas, Maine and Vermont. Under the Texas Compact, the state will receive hosting fees from the other states of up to $50 million, and the state will also receive disposal fees from waste generators as waste is received at the site's facility.
"The application reflects WCS' commitment to operate a low-level radioactive waste disposal site that relies heavily on proven technology, good management and excellent geology to protect public health and the environment," Mr. Dials said. "Our application goes well beyond the stringent technical requirements set by the TCEQ," he said. "More than 80 engineers, technicians and scientists spent nearly 30,000 staff-hours putting the document together." The extensive application and accompanying documentation covers such diverse issues as engineering and design, operations, closure, geology, archeology, ecology, climatology, hydrology, site characteristics and socio-economic impacts. Mr. Dials said, "part of the strength of WCS' application is its location in Andrews County. There is more than 800 feet of clay beneath the surface, which will prevent the percolation of water and will contain any waste far longer than the time needed for it to decay to natural background levels."
Efforts have been ongoing to locate such a low-level radioactive waste facility in Texas for more than 20 years before adoption of the new legislation.
A qualified disposal site will let Texans and the citizens of the Texas Compact states continue to take advantage of activities that produce low-level radioactive waste such as in medical treatment applications and research, as well as in some industries that produce items like smoke alarms, computer disks and reflective signs. Research facilities and power plants also produce low-level radioactive waste. Mr. Dials emphasized that low-level radioactive waste to be disposed at the site does not include spent fuel from nuclear generators or uranium or plutonium from inside nuclear weapons.
WCS currently holds licenses from the state and federal government for the management and disposal of hazardous waste as well as the storage and processing of low-level radioactive waste.
Mr. Dials stated, "The Andrews facility has an excellent environmental compliance record and an outstanding safety record. In May 2004, WCS completed three years of operations without a lost-time accident. The company's management and staff have extensive credentials and industry backgrounds in hazardous and low-level radioactive waste management activities."
Once the application has been determined to be administratively complete by the Texas regulators, which determination may take several weeks, the application can be viewed from a link on WCS' website, which is http://www.wcstexas.com .
WCS owns and operates a facility in West Texas for the processing, treatment, storage and disposal of a broad range of hazardous, toxic and certain types of low-level radioactive waste. WCS is a subsidiary of Valhi, Inc. (NYSE: VHI).
SOURCE Waste Control Specialists LLC Web Site: http://www.wcstexas.com
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
Afghan Troops, U.S. Warplanes Attack Guerrillas
Dozens Killed Near Border
Associated Press
Wednesday, August 4, 2004; Page A15
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A37818-2004Aug3.html
KABUL, Afghanistan, Aug. 3 -- Afghan troops backed by U.S. warplanes killed as many as 70 guerrillas in a day-long battle near the Pakistani border, military officials said Tuesday.
An Afghan commander said government forces heard radio messages in Arabic and Chechen suggesting that al Qaeda fighters were involved.
"We could hear the enemy," said Gen. Nawab, the Afghan commander. "I'm sure there were foreigners involved."
The battle began about 2 a.m. Monday when dozens of guerrillas armed with rockets, mortars and machine guns attacked a border post in the province of Khost, a former al Qaeda stronghold 100 miles southeast of the capital, Kabul.
A U.S. spokesman, Maj. Rick Peat, said the U.S. military sent in a B-1 bomber, A-10 ground-attack aircraft and helicopter gunships and flew in Afghan reinforcements, eventually forcing the assailants to flee "in panic." Peat said no U.S. ground troops were involved.
Pilots reported seeing 40 to 50 bodies on the battlefield near the mountainous Pakistani border, Peat said, and several wrecked vehicles were spotted.
Nawab put the rebel toll as high as 70, saying the guerrillas had dragged away many dead and wounded as they retreated into Pakistan. Afghan forces recovered only 10 bodies, he said.
The U.S. military said one of more than 100 Afghan soldiers involved in the fighting was killed and three others were wounded. However, another Afghan commander, Khial Baz, said two of his men had died.
The guerrilla death toll appeared to be one of the heaviest since U.S. planes pounded Taliban forces before the hard-line Islamic movement was driven from power in late 2001.
Assaults led by U.S. Marines in a Taliban stronghold in southern Afghanistan in May and June killed more than 100 guerrillas, commanders have said, but it was unclear how many fell in a single engagement.
Khost borders Pakistan's Waziristan tribal area, where Pakistani officials say hundreds of foreign fighters have found refuge among sympathetic Pashtun tribesmen, the same ethnic group from which the Taliban draws much of its strength.
--------
2 Afghan aid workers killed
Battle near Pakistani border leaves up to 70 militants dead
MSNBC News Services
Aug. 4, 2004
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5580383/
KABUL, Afghanistan - An Afghan aid worker and his driver have been killed by unidentified gunmen in southeastern Afghanistan in the latest attack on humanitarian agencies which have been increasingly targeted by Islamic militants.
A field officer working with a partner organization to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees was shot dead in the attack on Tuesday on a road between Gardez, south of Kabul, and the nearby town of Zormat, a UNHCR spokesman said on Wednesday.
His driver was seriously wounded and later died after being airlifted to the U.S. military base at Bagram north of the capital, said Mohammad Nader Farhad.
More than 30 aid workers have been killed in Afghanistan since the beginning of 2003, most of them by suspected remnants of the ousted Taliban militia who have vowed to halt humanitarian work and derail elections planned for October and April.
The Medecins Sans Frontieres agency announced last week it was leaving Afghanistan after 24 years because of concerns over security. Five of its staff were killed in an attack in the northwest of the country in June.
Up to 70 militants killed
On Tuesday, military officials said as many as 70 militants were killed in a daylong battle against Afghan troops backed by U.S. warplanes near the Pakistani border.
An Afghan commander said government forces heard militant radio messages in Arabic and the Chechen language, suggesting al-Qaida fighters were involved.
"We could hear the enemy," said Gen. Nawab, an Afghan commander who uses one name. "I'm sure there were foreigners involved."
Only two Afghan soldiers were reported killed in the fighting, an indication of the militants' vulnerability to American air power.
The battle began at about 2 a.m. Monday, when dozens of militants armed with rockets, mortars and machine guns hit a border post in Khost province, a former al-Qaida stronghold 120 miles south of the capital, Kabul.
Aerial assault
The U.S. military said it sent a B-1 bomber, A-10 ground-attack aircraft and helicopter gunships and flew in Afghan reinforcements, eventually forcing the assailants to flee "in panic."
U.S. spokesman Maj. Rick Peat said pilots reported seeing 40 to 50 bodies on the battlefield near the mountainous Pakistani border. Several wrecked vehicles were also spotted.
Nawab put the rebel toll as high as 70, saying the militants had dragged away many dead and wounded as they retreated into Pakistan. Afghan forces recovered only 10 bodies, he said.
The U.S. military said one of more than 100 Afghan soldiers involved in the fighting was killed and three others were wounded. However, another Afghan commander, Khial Baz, said two of his men died.
Peat said no U.S. ground troops were involved.
The death toll appeared among the heaviest since the aerial poundings of Taliban troops by U.S. planes before the hard-line regime folded in late 2001, and confirms a surge in violence ahead of the October presidential elections.
Assaults led by U.S. Marines in a Taliban stronghold in southern Afghanistan in May and June killed more than 100 militants, commanders have said, but it was unclear how many fell in a single engagement.
"The coalition and Afghan security forces continue to reap outstanding results" against militants, a U.S. statement said, "refusing to allow them to gather enough strength to affect progress toward a democratic government in Afghanistan."
Border refuge
Khost borders Pakistan's Waziristan tribal area, where officials in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, say hundreds of foreign fighters have found refuge among sympathetic Pashtun tribesmen, the same ethnic group from which the Taliban draws its main strength.
Pakistani troops have mounted a string of operations to crush the militants, sparking battles that have left scores of dead this year. American officials said recently they had no firm fix on the whereabouts of al-Qaida leaders Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahri, who could have found refuge in the area.
Peat said it was unclear if the attack in Khost was a response to that increased pressure or to a spate of arrests of suspected al-Qaida members in Pakistan.
The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.
-------- arms
Japan eyes eased ban on military exports
Asia Times Online Ltd
By David Isenberg
Aug 4, 2004
http://atimes.com/atimes/Japan/FH04Dh01.html
Japan is not known for making bold, radical moves on military and foreign-policy issues, but over the past several months there have been signs that it is contemplating modifying one of its sacrosanct policies: the prohibition on the export of weapons, or any hardware or technology that could be defined as having a military purpose.
On July 20 the Nippon Keidanren, or Japan Business Federation, called on the government and opposition in a position paper to review the ban and consider amendments, while still adhering to United Nations bans on exports to certain countries and those involved in international conflicts.
Some observers suggest that growing public acceptance of Japan's need to bolster its military capabilities raises the chances that the export ban will be amended this year when the government revises its mid- and long-term defense policies.
The current ban, in place since 1967 in the administration of prime minister Eisaku Sato, is a result of Japan's constitution, which renounces "war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes", as well as an earlier parliamentary decree from the 1960s.
Japan has adhered to guidelines prohibiting arms exports to communist states and countries subject to any embargo under United Nations Security Council resolutions, as well as those involved in or likely to be involved in international conflicts. Over the years, there have been minor amendments to the ban. In 1976 prime minister Takeo Miki expanded the ban to include arms exports to other nations. In a major but not unexpected change, in 1983 prime minister Yasuhiro Nakasone decreed that Japan could provide arms technologies to the United States.
But the current government has adopted a more flexible interpretation of the pacifist constitution than its predecessors, as evidenced by sending the Japanese Self-Defense Forces to southern Iraq in what has been described as a humanitarian mission.
In its appeal on July 20, the Japan Business Federation said that because of the curbs, the country's defense industry had been left out of international military hardware and technology trends and markets. "While respecting the basic principle of [the ban] rather than an outright restriction [on exports] it is necessary to rethink export management, technology exchange and investment in light of our national interest."
Of course, Japan's military-industrial complex is far from being a heavyweight contender in the world's weapons-production arena. The 2002 list of the world's top 100 arms-producing companies, compiled by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, listed only five Japanese companies. The United States had 41.
The real motive: Not to be left behind If the ban is modified - and an act of the Diet (parliament) would be required - Japanese and foreign observers do not expect Tokyo suddenly to start flooding the market with weapons systems. Observers point out that the real motivation is a desire not to be left behind as military technology marches on.
Critics of the ban say that unless it is reviewed, Japan will fall woefully behind in defense technology. They point out that advanced military systems are increasingly being developed through joint programs and that if Japanese companies are prohibited from participating in international joint development projects, their technology will fall behind global standards.
Specifically, the Keidanren's main concern is that the ban prevents Japanese contractors from participating in joint development efforts such as the US-led 13-nation development of the Joint Strike Fighter.
Japanese military contractors are under pressure after the government's move to cap military-equipment spending, while shifting 100 billion yen (US$902 million) out of annual procurement of about 700 billion yen to a missile defense system to be imported from the US.
In fact, the missile defense system is an important influence on the move to modify the ban. Last December, when the government decided to introduce the missile defense system, then chief cabinet secretary Yasuo Fukuda said a review of the principles of non-export "should be considered".
One aspect of joint development of the missile defense system means that Japan will provide weapons parts to the United States. Japanese officials have said it is likely that the Pentagon would place orders for covers on the tips of anti-ballistic missiles and other components.
Yet the Japanese military-industrial complex is far from having to declare bankruptcy. As an industry it benefits from a military budget that, in purely monetary terms, is surpassed only by those of the United States, Russia and China. This fiscal year alone, total military spending will amount to the equivalent of $45 billion.
Some independent analysts are supportive of the move. Christopher Preble, director of foreign-policy studies at the Cato Institute in Washington, DC, and author of a forthcoming study on Japanese security policy in regard to the US, said in a telephone interview: "In general I was encouraged by the news. The Japanese are becoming more like a normal country. It is an expression of willingness on the part of Japan to assert their independence." He noted that this was another sign of Japanese willingness to assume a greater role in world affairs. "There is a growing domestic political dynamic moving to reexamine a whole range of restraints that have been imposed on Japan. It is easier to make that case now with the rise of a new generation."
Export ban could be eased this year The government will revise its mid- and long-term defense capabilities this year, and the ban could be amended and eased.
Already this year a committee on defense policy headed by Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi also recommended reviewing the ban. Shigeru Ishiba, head of Japan's Defense Agency (JDA) and minister of state for defense, said the ban should be lifted to allow Japanese companies to develop advanced weapons.
The ban is to be revisited this year when an advisory panel and a JDA panel release reports on Japanese defense. By mid-December, the government is planning to endorse the first new defense guidelines in a decade.
In March, a subcommittee of the Liberal Democratic Party's National Defense Division proposed a new set of principles to provide greater export latitude. This would limit the weapons ban to nations branded by United Nations resolutions and others as harboring terrorists and abusing human rights, to nations singled out by UN resolutions for a ban on arms exports, to regions of ongoing international conflict, and to nations whose trade-control systems are woefully inadequate.
Ironically, lifting the ban could also expose Japan's protected industry to international competition, possibly harming the 1,000 companies that provide the JDA with military-related products.
David Isenberg, a senior analyst with the Washington-based British American Security Information Council (BASIC), has a wide background in arms control and national-security issues. The views expressed are his own.
-------- business
$1.9 Billion of Iraq's Money Goes to U.S. Contractors
By Ariana Eunjung Cha
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, August 4, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A37822-2004Aug3?language=printer
Halliburton Co. and other U.S. contractors are being paid at least $1.9 billion from Iraqi funds under an arrangement set by the U.S.-led occupation authority, according to a review of documents and interviews with government agencies, companies and auditors.
Most of the money is for two controversial deals that originally had been financed with money approved by the U.S. Congress, but later shifted to Iraqi funds that were governed by fewer restrictions and less rigorous oversight.
For the first 14 months of the occupation, officials of the Coalition Provisional Authority provided little detailed information about the Iraqi money, from oil sales and other sources, that it spent on reconstruction contracts. They have said that it was used for the benefit of the Iraqi people and that most of the contracts paid from Iraqi money went to Iraqi companies. But the CPA never released information about specific contracts and the identities of companies that won them, citing security concerns, so it has been impossible to know whether these promises were kept.
The CPA has said it has awarded about 2,000 contracts with Iraqi money. Its inspector general compiled records for the major contracts, which it defined as those worth $5 million or more each. Analysis of those and other records shows that 19 of 37 major contracts funded by Iraqi money went to U.S. companies and at least 85 percent of the total $2.26 billion was obligated to U.S. companies. The contracts that went to U.S. firms may be worth several hundred million more once the work is completed.
That analysis and several audit reports released in recent weeks shed new light on how the occupation authority handled the Iraqi money it controlled. They show that the CPA at times violated its own rules, authorizing Iraqi money when it didn't have a quorum or proper Iraqi representation at meetings, and kept such sloppy records that the paperwork for several major contracts could not be found. During the first half of the occupation, the CPA depended heavily on no-bid contracts that were questioned by auditors. And the occupation's shifting of projects that were publicly announced to be financed by U.S. money to Iraqi money prompted the Iraqi finance minister to complain that the "ad hoc" process put the CPA in danger of losing the trust of the people.
Kellogg Brown & Root Inc., a subsidiary of Halliburton, was paid $1.66 billion from the Iraqi money, primarily to cover the cost of importing fuel from Kuwait. The job was tacked on to a no-bid contract that was the subject of several investigations after allegations surfaced that a subcontractor for Houston-based KBR overcharged by as much as $61 million for the fuel.
Harris Corp., a Melbourne, Fla., company, got $48 million from the Iraqi oil funds to manage and update the formerly state-owned media network, taking over from Science Applications International Corp. of San Diego. The new television and radio services and newspaper have been widely criticized as mouthpieces for the occupation and symbols of the failures of the reconstruction effort. When it was being financed with U.S.-appropriated funds, the contract drew scrutiny because of questionable expenses, including chartering a jet to fly in a Hummer H2 and a Ford pickup truck for the program manager's use.
Fareed Yaseen, one of 43 ambassadors recently appointed by Iraq's government, said he was troubled that the Iraqi money was managed almost exclusively by foreigners and that contracts went predominantly to foreign companies.
"There was practically no Iraqi voice in the disbursements of these funds," Yaseen said in a phone interview from Baghdad, where he is awaiting his diplomatic assignment.
Even Iraqi officials who served in the government while the CPA was in charge complained they had little say in the use of their own country's money. Mohammed Aboush, who was a director general in the oil ministry during the occupation, said he and other Iraqi officials were not consulted about expanding the KBR contract. But he said he informed his American "advisers" at the CPA that the Iraqis felt KBR's performance had been inadequate and that he'd prefer that another company take over its work.
Aboush said that he was ignored and that he believes the decision to go with KBR was political. "I am old enough to know the Americans and their interests and they are not always the same interests as the Iraqi interests," he said.
U.S. officials contend the CPA was faithful to the terms of a United Nations resolution that gave the United States authority to manage the Iraq oil money during the occupation. "We believe that contracts awarded with Iraqi funds were for the sole benefit of the Iraqi people, without exception," Brig. Gen. Stephen M. Seay, head of contracting activity for the successor to the CPA's office, wrote in a response to a critical CPA inspector general report released last week.
The CPA identified the best company for each job, said Army Lt. Col. Joseph M. Yoswa, a Defense Department spokesman. He said shortcomings in the contract-award process should be looked at in the context of the volatile work environment in Iraq, where the need for speed and security were critical.
Critics of the CPA accused the occupation authority of using Iraqi money to bypass U.S. contracting rules on competition, oversight and monitoring for controversial projects.
"With American firms charging 10 times as much as Iraqi firms for construction work, with sole-source contracts being awarded, with allegations of money-wasting . . . is it likely that the CPA was doing its best to ensure Iraqi money was spent in Iraqi interests? It doesn't look like it," said Anthea Lawson, an analyst for Christian Aid, a nonprofit group that has been investigating the spending of Iraqi oil money.
Svetlana Tsalik, director of the Iraq Revenue Watch project of the Open Society Initiative think tank, said there were few clear distinctions between which pot of money -- U.S. or Iraqi -- the CPA would use to pay for reconstruction. "Whenever it had expenses that looked unpalatable for the U.S. public they would just dip into Iraqi funds," Tsalik said.
While it ran Iraq, the CPA had at its disposal at least $45 billion -- the biggest reconstruction fund since the Marshall Plan rebuilt Europe after World War II. The money included $22 billion that Congress appropriated in two supplemental spending bills, and $23 billion in two Iraqi accounts, one holding proceeds from oil sales and the other seized assets, including frozen overseas bank accounts from the Hussein years.
In most cases, to spend congressionally appropriated funds, CPA officials had to coordinate with officials in Washington, keep detailed records, advertise contracts widely and conform to waiting periods for bids to come in. Some of the money was held up by a turf war between the Pentagon and the State Department over who controlled the reconstruction.
It was simpler to use the Iraqi money.
Nearly all the Iraqi assets were held in what was known as the Development Fund for Iraq. It was used primarily to support Iraqi government ministries by paying salaries and expenses, according to budget documents. But some of the fund was used to pay private contractors for reconstruction projects. The main restriction on spending the money was that it be used for the benefit of the Iraqi people.
To get access to the funds, all that was usually needed was the recommendation of an entity called the Program Review Board, made up of 10 members and a chairman, according to former CPA officials. The final authorization required a single signature -- that of L. Paul Bremer, the occupation's top civil administrator.
CPA officials have acknowledged that contracts were sometimes shown to a just a few bidders and that winners were picked within days. Several of the large contracts that went to U.S. companies, for example, were awarded with no competition, including a $16.8 million contract awarded to Custer Battles LLC of McLean to provide security for the main U.S. military base in Baghdad, and a $15.6 million contract for police radios awarded to Motorola Inc. of Schaumburg, Ill., the CPA inspector general's compilation shows.
Iraqi company executives have complained since the first days of the occupation that the process favored U.S. firms. They said in interviews that they could not get through the heavily guarded gates of the occupation headquarters in the Green Zone to meet with contracting officers. They also said the process was so secretive that they had to bribe CPA translators to get information about what requests for bids were coming up.
In April, the CPA announced that contracts worth less than $500,000 awarded from the Iraq oil fund should go only to Iraqi companies.
The biggest contract obligation paid with Iraqi money went to KBR. The oil-services company's work began in early 2003, before the war with Iraq began, when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers gave it a no-bid contract worth as much as $7 billion to repair Iraq's oil infrastructure. There were fears that Hussein would set the oil fields ablaze, and the U.S. government believed that it needed a contractor lined up to go in right behind invasion forces.
The first tasks KBR performed under the contract -- training for and advising on a safe shutdown of oil facilities, pre-positioning spill equipment and preparing repair plans -- were paid for with U.S. funds.
But in fall 2003, the occupation was confronted by a different kind of oil problem. It had become clear that pipeline sabotage was causing a shortage and the occupation authority decided that it had to import fuel to prevent a full-blown crisis.
Meanwhile, some members of Congress expressed their disapproval of using more U.S. money for KBR's no-bid contract. In meetings on Nov. 11 and Nov. 29 in Baghdad, the CPA authorized tapping Iraqi funds to import fuel and fix the distribution system, according to minutes of CPA meetings. The task was added to KBR's contract and no new bids were sought, even though the funding source changed.
In all, KBR was paid $2.53 billion, $1.64 billion of which came from the Iraqi funds, according to an analysis for The Washington Post by Andre Verloy, a researcher for the Center for Public Integrity.
Verloy said the commingling of U.S. and Iraqi money to pay for tasks under a single contract raises significant oversight issues. "It is often difficult enough to find out where the money is coming from, but if U.S. taxpayer funds are used alongside Iraqi money, who has the ultimate oversight?" he said. "Can Congress oversee work funded with Iraqi assets? Should U.S. government agencies even pay U.S. companies with Iraqi money?"
The CPA also shifted the funding source for several other contracts.
As U.S. money for Stevedoring Services of America Inc.'s contract to manage the port of Umm Qasr began to dwindle, CPA officials on March 6 authorized an infusion of Iraqi money to keep the company in place until the transfer of authority. Sometime this spring, a few months into Harris Corp.'s media contract, the CPA stopped using Defense Department money to pay Harris and began charging the Iraqi oil funds.
On April 24, a little over a month after complaints by a losing bidder of political favoritism and a flawed contracting process prompted the U.S. Army to cancel a $327 million contract funded by U.S. money to Nour USA Ltd. of Vienna, the CPA awarded the company a different contract from Iraqi money. The new $9.9 million contract was for supplying the Iraqi security forces with vehicles.
Two recently released audits point to numerous problems with the procedures the CPA used to account for, authorize and disburse Iraqi money.
The United Nations, in a report dated July 15, noted that metering of oil extracted from Iraq was not functioning so it was impossible to tell whether all of it had been accounted for. The U.N. report also criticized the CPA's program review board for authorizing funds in at least 10 cases when it lacked a quorum. The audit also noted that only one of the review board members was Iraqi, and he had attended only two of the 43 meetings held by December 2003. "Controls were insufficient to provide reasonable assurance . . . whether all [Iraqi oil-funded] disbursements were made for the purposes intended," the audit concluded.
The CPA's inspector general found in audits released last week that the occupation failed to establish "effective funds controls and accountability" for hundreds of millions of dollars that were held in cash. In fact, the investigative unit said, the keys to one of the safes that held the cash was "kept in the disbursing officer's unattended backpack."
It also studied 60 disbursements from assets seized from the former regime and found that no documentation existed for five of them, totaling $99.1 million in payments. Paperwork had not been properly filled out for items such as furniture, carpets and vases, meaning, the inspector general said, that the CPA was not able to ensure that the assets "would be available for the use and benefit of the Iraqi people."
Special correspondent Omar Fekeiki in Baghdad contributed to this report.
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Halliburton to Pay $7.5 Million to Settle Probe
By Carrie Johnson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, August 4, 2004; Page E01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A37936-2004Aug3.html
Halliburton Co. yesterday agreed to pay $7.5 million to settle Securities and Exchange Commission charges that it failed to disclose a change in accounting practices that allowed the Houston oil services company to report higher earnings over six quarters in 1998 and 1999.
The SEC also cited Halliburton for unspecified "unacceptable lapses" in conduct that delayed regulators' access to information during the investigation. The company and its former controller, R. Charles Muchmore Jr., who paid $50,000 to settle related charges, did not admit or deny wrongdoing. Simultaneously, the SEC filed a lawsuit against former chief financial officer Gary V. Morris, who is not involved in the settlement.
Dick Cheney was Halliburton's chief executive from 1995 to 2000. Cheney, who was not charged with wrongdoing, provided sworn testimony and "cooperated willingly and fully" with the investigation, according to a news release issued by the SEC. Cheney's lawyer, Terrence O'Donnell, said his client's tenure at Halliburton was "proper in all respects."
The charges stem from a change in the way Halliburton accounted for revenue from construction projects from which the company received fees that were set in advance. Sometimes, however, Halliburton would seek reimbursement for extra, unplanned costs. For years, the SEC said, Halliburton booked such fees in the quarter when disputes with clients were resolved. But in the second quarter of 1998, the company changed its policy and began to offset losses with revenue from projects in which Halliburton officials thought recovery of additional fees was "probable." At that time, Halliburton was preparing to merge with Dresser Industries Inc.
Regulators said yesterday that the company's failure to tell investors about the change until 2000 was "materially misleading."
The SEC said the accounting change increased Halliburton's pretax income for 1998 by $87.9 million, or 46 percent. In the second quarter of 1998 alone, when the change was put into effect, the company was able to report a 34 percent increase in net income compared with the year before. Otherwise the increase would have been 6.7 percent, regulators said.
"Comparability of results is important for investors," said SEC enforcement chief Stephen M. Cutler.
Spencer C. Barasch, head of enforcement at the agency's Fort Worth office, said in a written statement that the Halliburton penalty "serves as yet another reminder that the Commission will not tolerate lapses by companies that serve to delay or hinder the Commission's investigative processes."
In recent years the SEC has levied a $10 million penalty against Bank of America Corp. and a $3 million penalty against Dynegy Inc. for failing to fully cooperate with regulators.
"We are pleased to bring closure to this matter," David J. Lesar, Halliburton's chairman and chief executive, said in a prepared statement. "The resolution of this issue and the pending resolution of the company's asbestos liability will help us focus on strengthening our business in energy services and engineering and construction."
Timothy R. McCormick, a lawyer for Morris, who left Halliburton in August 2002, said, "We think the commission is using a novel theory of disclosure which is not supported by the precedent. . . . We intend to defend this case vigorously."
McCormick said Halliburton had followed accounting rules and would not need to restate its earnings for the six quarters flagged by the SEC. He added that "this is not a situation where there was any investor harm."
A lawyer for Muchmore, who is now a vice president for financial controls at Halliburton, did not return calls.
Halliburton officials said they do not believe that the SEC is continuing to investigate any current employees in relation to the 1998 accounting change. But other government investigators are examining whether Halliburton unit Kellogg Brown & Root Inc. overcharged for food and fuel in Iraq, and the Justice Department is investigating its business practices in Nigeria and Iran.
Halliburton said it would adjust its previously announced results for the second quarter of 2004 and record an additional $7.5 million in expenses to cover the cost of the settlement. The adjustments broaden Halliburton's second-quarter net loss to $667 million ($1.52 per share) from $663 million ($1.51).
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SEC: Halliburton under Cheney filed misleading reports
USA TODAY
GREG FARRELL
August 4, 2004
Halliburton filed "materially misleading" financial statements that raised its profits in 1998 and 1999 while Vice President Dick Cheney was its chief executive, but it did not violate accounting rules, the Securities and Exchange Commission said yesterday.
The SEC did not hold Cheney responsible for the errors. It brought charges against the company's former chief financial officer and former controller. Halliburton agreed to a $7.5 million fine to settle SEC charges that it did not cooperate fully when the SEC's investigation began in mid-2002.
The SEC action ends one controversy for the government's lead contractor in the rebuilding of Iraq. In an unusual disclosure that reflected the investigation's political sensitivity during a tight presidential election campaign, the SEC said Cheney "cooperated willingly and fully" with the investigation.
Joan Claybrook, president of Public Citizen, said the penalty was "too small" compared with the $120 million by which Halliburton's accounting boosted profits in 1998 and 1999.
The SEC investigation focused on a 1998 change in Halliburton's accounting for cost overruns on construction contracts. Before 1998, whenever a project's costs exceeded budget, Halliburton booked an immediate loss. If the company later recouped the cost overrun, it recognized revenue then. In 1998, Halliburton began estimating how much it would recover and booking the revenue before the client approved payment.
Both practices are allowed under generally accepted accounting practices, the SEC said, but the revised method added millions of dollars to Halliburton's quarterly income. The SEC said investors should have been told of the change at the outset, but Halliburton did not do that until March 2000.
Former Halliburton controller Robert Muchmore agreed to a $50,000 fine. Halliburton and Muchmore neither admitted nor denied wrongdoing in their settlements with the SEC. The SEC filed civil charges against former chief financial officer Gary Morris in federal court.
Cheney's lawyer, Terrence O'Donnell, said Cheney's conduct as CEO was proper. "He was not involved in the change in the accounting practice or its disclosure, and there is no allegation whatsoever that he acted in any way other than in the best interests of the company and its shareholders."
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Halliburton investigation ends
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
August 04, 2004
By Patrice Hill
http://www.washtimes.com/business/20040803-093717-6415r.htm
The Securities and Exchange Commission yesterday concluded an investigation of Halliburton Co. without charging Vice President Dick Cheney, its former chief executive, although it extracted a $7.5 million settlement from the company and charged two Cheney subordinates with misleading investors.
After a two-year investigation in which the commission staff took sworn testimony from Mr. Cheney and 22 other witnesses and reviewed more than 340,000 company documents, the SEC found the company did not disclose an important accounting change that inflated reported income by 46 percent in 1998, when Mr. Cheney headed the company.
The decision not to pursue the vice president, while charging two of his subordinate finance officers, raises questions of fairness, coming at a time when the CEOs of Enron, WorldCom, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia and other companies are facing criminal charges and jail terms for their parts - both large and small - in securities fraud cases, former federal prosecutors say.
"What we've learned over the last few years from Enron to Arthur Anderson to WorldCom is when investors are uninformed, you have disasters," said Roscoe Howard, a former Bush Justice Department prosecutor.
In other SEC and Justice Department cases, "what they really want are for CEOs to be made more responsible for what happens in their companies," he said. "There was a time when CEOs basically acted with a sense of plausible deniability" about the details of complicated accounting transactions, but that time has passed.
SEC enforcement director Steven Cutler defended the agency's light-handed treatment of Mr. Cheney, who participated in teleconference calls to investors where misleading financial information was provided, though the SEC credited him with "cooperating fully" in the investigation.
"We brought the charges that we believed were appropriate and warranted by the evidence," Mr. Cutler said.
A key distinction with the government's case against Enron CEOs Kenneth L. Lay and Jeffrey Skilling, he said, is that the accounting change at issue in the Halliburton case was not in itself illegal or fraudulent - only the failure to disclose it to investors.
The SEC has treated CEOs in similar situations the same way, he said, pointing to a case the SEC brought against Edison Schools in 2002, where the company but not the CEO was charged for failing to disclose a legal accounting change to investors.
In the Halliburton case, the change turned what had been operating losses into major income gains and profits in five quarters of 1998 and 1999 when Wall Street expectations for quarterly earnings were growing increasingly grandiose.
In a move to smooth out and brighten the earnings picture from quarter to quarter, Halliburton booked uncollected revenues that it expected to collect to offset losses in some quarters.
Before that, the company had booked revenues from uncollected billings for cost overruns on construction projects only during the quarter when the bills were paid, and had disclosed that to investors.
The result was the company's pretax income appeared 46 percent, or $88 million, higher than it otherwise would have been during 1998 in the company's 10K filing with the SEC, the complaint charges. Reported income for five quarters in 1998 and 1999 was from 5.7 percent to 24.8 percent higher.
The SEC said Halliburton Chief Financial Officer Gary V. Morris and controller Robert C. Muchmore Jr. were responsible for the accounting change and scripted the teleconference calls with investors.
Mr. Muchmore and Halliburton agreed to fines in a cease-and-desist order without admitting guilt. The case against Mr. Morris is proceeding in court.
"Mr. Morris intends to defend himself vigorously," said Tim McCormick, Mr. Morris' attorney. An attorney for Mr. Cheney said he was not involved in the accounting change or the decision not to disclose it.
Accounting changes that have such a major impact on earnings are normally cleared or even authorized by the CEO, securities lawyers say.
Even in some cases where the CEOs pleaded ignorance on accounting matters, the SEC has held them to task. In the Enron case, for example, Mr. Lay is being charged for "recklessly" not knowing that statements he made to investors were misleading.
"Politics may have spared Cheney from necessary enforcement action," said Joan Claybrook, president of Public Citizen, founded by Ralph Nader. "The CFO and controller both reported to Cheney, and he ultimately should be held responsible."
She added that the settlement with Halliburton is too small in light of the company's $120 million overstatement of revenues at a time when it had losses in its oil services business.
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CACI Gets $15 Million Iraq Contract Extension
Aug 4, 2004
WASHINGTON (Reuters)
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=5876819
- CACI International Inc., under scrutiny over whether it contributed to the abuse of Iraqi prisoners, was awarded a $15 million extension of its work in Iraq, the U.S. Army said on Wednesday.
The award allows CACI's work supporting interrogations and other intelligence operations to continue while competitive bids are sought on a new contract for these services, a senior Army contracting official said.
The contract with CACI is expected to expire at the end of November but could be extended a further two months if extra time is required to finalize the new contract, the Army official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
CACI said in a statement it was pleased to continue supporting the Army's mission in Iraq. A spokeswoman was unable to immediately say if CACI would bid on the next contract.
CACI has been sued in a Washington, D.C. federal court by civil rights campaigners who accuse the company of conspiring with U.S. officials to torture and abuse prisoners in Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison.
CACI has described the lawsuit as being "malicious and farcical" and has denied the allegations "in their totality."
A CACI employee was also named in a report on Iraqi prison abuse by U.S. Army investigator Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba.
CACI said last week its employees were never in charge of military personnel in Iraq and at all times have been under the operational control and direction of the U.S. military.
The company has also said it does not condone, tolerate or in any way endorse illegal behavior by its employee but will not rush to take punitive action against any worker without reasonable confirming evidence.
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Cease-Fire in Colombia
August 4, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/04/international/americas/04boga.html?pagewanted=all
BOGOTÁ, Colombia, Aug. 3 - One of two far-right militias that were warned by President Álvaro Uribe to stop fighting or be banned from peace talks says it has declared a cease-fire.
The militia, the Centauros Bloc, announced "a unilateral cease-fire" in its war with the rival Peasant Self-Defense Forces of Casanare in a communiqué late Monday.
Hundreds of fighters from the two militias have been killed in a struggle over cocaine-producing regions in eastern Colombia, even though both groups promised to observe a cease-fire during peace talks.
The 3,000 fighters of the Centauros Bloc are members of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, a 20,000-member outlaw group that has killed thousands of suspected guerrilla collaborators.
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Iraq's New Form Of Justice Seems To Satisfy Few
Case Offers View of U.S.-Backed Court
By Jackie Spinner
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, August 4, 2004; Page A12
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A37815-2004Aug3?language=printer
BAGHDAD -- Kamal Mutib Salim, a neatly bearded man in a yellow prison jumpsuit, stopped briefly to whisper a prayer before walking into the courtroom where three judges in black robes were waiting for him. A police officer clasped his right hand firmly into Salim's left and led him to an ornately carved wooden cage at the front of the room. Salim stepped inside, folded his arms across his broad chest and waited for his trial to begin.
Salim's case was making its way through the hybrid legal system that evolved after the U.S.-led invasion last year as a blend of Iraqi- and American-style justice. He was arrested by the U.S. Army in April, when soldiers from the 1st Infantry Division raided his house and charged him with illegally possessing explosive-making materials. Last week, he answered the charges in an Iraqi court -- the Central Criminal Court, established last year by the U.S.-led occupation authority.
The court, which so far has tried 37 cases involving 55 defendants, relies on a mixture of Iraqi law and rules laid down by the now-dissolved occupation authority. Although U.S. military authorities say they have established something new in Iraq -- a fair tribunal that gives defendants due process -- many Iraqis have refused to accept a legal system backed by the U.S. government, even if it is run by Iraqis.
While Iraqi justice generally tends to be swift -- before Salim's trial, a man was tried and sentenced to death for a double murder in two hours -- the court has been bogged down from the start, handling just a fraction of the hundreds of cases the military plans to send to trial.
In cases in which Iraqis have been accused of being threats to security, the Iraqi judges have imposed light sentences, ranging from two months to six years. The stiffest sentence involving a security detainee was handed down when a man who had approached a military checkpoint with four mortars, 16 mortar rounds, fuses and explosive charges in the trunk of his vehicle was ordered to spend 30 years in prison, the minimum sentence.
But the majority of the cases have turned out like Salim's. He got 18 months, and his trial provided a rare look into how an Iraqi court is dispensing justice for a foreign military force.
The court meets under heavy security in a building that used to be a personal museum of the overthrown president, Saddam Hussein. The man in charge of the court, Luqman Thabit, was also chief judge for Hussein's special secret court, in which sentences were often dictated by the Iraqi leader or his sons. Thabit said he was fired and persecuted by Hussein three years ago after he refused to sentence five prostitutes to death. As a matter of law, the women did not deserve death, Thabit said while drinking tea in his chambers before court convened.
After Hussein's son Uday had the women executed, Thabit said, he was asked again to impose the death penalty, as one final slap.
"You can't kill someone who is already dead," Thabit said. "So when I refused, I was removed from the bench."
The new court over which he presides "is fully independent," Thabit said. Because the court was set up to hear all cases of threats to security and stability in Iraq, the double-murder case also came before Thabit.
As evidenced by Salim's trial, the U.S. military has no official role in the actual court proceedings, other than to provide witnesses and an interpreter.
Staff Sgt. Guy Ridings, 31, of Waco, Tex., and Staff Sgt. Eduardo Fernandez, 27, of Guayama, Puerto Rico, were members of the unit that raided Salim's house. The two soldiers, dressed in their camouflage fatigues, testified that they found circuit boards, a disassembled alarm clock and batteries hidden in a dresser in the house. They spoke to Thabit through Maher Soliman, an Arabic-speaking divorce lawyer from California who works as a special prosecutor for the U.S. military.
Thabit, a slight but commanding figure who had sentenced the double-murderer to death by telling him in an impassioned speech that "the bloodshed must stop," asked Fernandez whether Salim had resisted arrest. No, Fernandez replied, and then he grabbed the interpreter's arm. "Tell him," Fernandez pleaded with Soliman. "Tell him it was early in the morning and he was basically asleep."
Before the start of the trial, as he waited with Fernandez in a small room used by military lawyers, Ridings said that if it were up to him, Salim "wouldn't see the light of day."
"I've got soldiers dying about every day," he said. "I picked a dead body out of a vehicle no more than a week ago. I hope he gets what he has coming to him."
In the courtroom, the soldiers looked at Salim only once, when the judge asked them to identify him as the owner of the house where the materials were found.
After the soldiers testified, a plainclothes guard and an Iraqi police officer removed Salim from the defendant's cage to stand in front of the judges. Etched into the pink marble behind them were a scale of justice and a verse from the Koran that read, "When you judge between a man and a man, you judge with justice."
Salim told the judge that the circuit boards came from a battery factory where he had worked and that he was only holding them for safekeeping after the factory was looted.
"Aren't you against the Army?" the judge asked. "Aren't you against the Iraqi police?"
"No," Salim responded. "No."
Later, Salim asked to speak with the judge. Gesturing from inside the cage, Salim said he was a victim of a conspiracy. The informant who had tipped off the Army was an old nemesis, he said, and the materials in the house were used for fishing. "I shock the fish and take them," he said. "But the timer, I don't use it at all."
After a 10-minute recess to discuss the case with the other judges, Thabit announced that he was ready to rule.
"The instruments they found in your house can be used for bombs," Thabit said, his head turned to address Salim in the cage. "But we didn't have any connection between a bomb in your neighborhood and the devices in your house."
Thabit ordered Salim to spend 18 months in jail.
Mukdad Alwan, Salim's attorney, protested that the court had no right to bring charges against his client in the first place. "This court is not legitimate," he said in an interview after the verdict.
Alwan said no Iraqi law prohibits the possession of the materials that the soldiers claimed to have found in Salim's house. "The Iraqi law found my client not guilty, but the court didn't say that. They tried him according to occupation forces."
Although the court is open to the public, not many Iraqis know that it exists. Americans as well as Iraqis have expressed surprise and disappointment at how light the judges have gone on security detainees like Salim.
Bashar, a 25-year-old pharmacist who was kneeling on a prayer rug behind the desk in his shop, said the violence will stop only if the detainees are imprisoned longer.
"We have many bad people in my country. Unfortunately, we need a thousand people like Saddam to control them," said Bashar, who declined to give his last name. "The court is legal, but the judge is not fair. He should put him in the jail a long time."
The only one who seemed pleased by the outcome was Salim.
After his trial, he greeted his attorney outside the courtroom with a kiss on each cheek.
Well, Alwan told his client, it could have been worse. The guy the other day got 30 years.
Salim smiled broadly.
"I'll take it easy," he said, before gesturing with his thumb at the U.S. soldiers. "Those dogs are finished."
Special correspondents Omar Fekeiki and Luma Mousawi contributed to this report.
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Violence Claims 4 More Troops
Seven Iraqi Security Officers Also Killed in Scattered Attacks
By Pamela Constable
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, August 4, 2004; Page A13
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A36073-2004Aug3.html
BAGHDAD, Aug. 3 -- Four U.S. troops and seven members of the Iraqi security forces were killed late Monday and Tuesday in continuing violence across the country, including a car bombing near the central city of Baqubah and a roadside bomb in the capital.
Meanwhile, four Iraqis working for a French aid organization were reported Tuesday to have been stabbed to death near the city of Najaf, the scene of recurrent clashes between U.S. military forces and Shiite militia members loyal to the radical cleric Moqtada Sadr.
The latest attacks occurred as the interim prime minister, Ayad Allawi, returned home late Tuesday from a 10-day trip through the region aimed largely at seeking support from other Muslim countries to bolster security in Iraq by tightening borders and providing troops.
Also Tuesday, saboteurs bombed an oil pipeline in northern Iraq, causing a large fire to spread, and negotiations continued to free seven foreign truck drivers, taken hostage July 21 by Muslim militants who have demanded that foreign firms and troops withdraw from the country.
Four Iraqi National Guardsmen were killed and six were injured in the Baqubah incident Tuesday afternoon, U.S. and Iraqi officials said. A white pickup truck sped toward a guard post, attempting to reach a U.S. military convoy, and exploded as a driver in the convoy tried to force the truck off the road. No Americans were killed in the blast.
The car bomb was the second recent attack on security forces in Baqubah, where 70 people were killed last Wednesday when a minibus detonated in a crowded street outside a police station where hundreds of men were lining up to apply for jobs.
Meanwhile, in the affluent Baghdad district of Mansour, a roadside bomb killed an Iraqi police station chief, Col. Moayad Mahmoud Bashar, and a second officer. In the northern city of Mosul, gunmen fired at a police station, killing one officer and wounding two more before escaping.
"The continued targeting of Iraqi security force personnel undermines the security of all Iraqis and will only quicken the resolve of Iraqi security forces to provide a safe and secure environment," said Maj. Neal O'Brien, a U.S. military spokesman.
Officials said two U.S. soldiers were killed either late Monday or early Tuesday when a roadside bomb exploded in west Baghdad, but no further details were immediately available.
Military spokesmen also reported Tuesday that two U.S. Marines were killed in western Iraq overnight during clashes with insurgents. A total of 919 American troops have died since U.S.-led forces invaded Iraq 16 months ago.
In two other incidents, officials said one U.S. soldier died from "non-hostile fire," indicating an accidental shooting, and another was killed in a vehicle accident.
In the gruesome Najaf killings, officials of the Paris-based Agency for Technical Cooperation and Development, known as ACTED, said four of their Iraqi employees were apparently stabbed to death Friday after local militiamen discovered them near the site of a car bombing.
The group said the militiamen suspected the aid workers of being linked to the car bombing and summarily executed them in a scene of panicky violence just after the explosion. All the men were stabbed, and the eyes of one were gouged out. The men were reported missing Friday, and their bodies were found in the Najaf cemetery.
The city, a Shiite Muslim shrine center and the headquarters of Sadr and his youthful Mahdi Army militia, has been the scene of recurrent clashes. In the past few days, U.S. troops have surrounded Sadr's house and engaged in heavy armed clashes with his followers.
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Army Pushes a Sweeping Overhaul of Basic Training
August 4, 2004
By THOM SHANKER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/04/politics/04training.html?hp
WASHINGTON, Aug. 3 - The United States Army is pressing into place sweeping changes in its basic training program, introducing rigorous new drills and intensive work on combat skills to prepare recruits for immediate missions to Iraq and Afghanistan.
In what officers describe as the most striking changes to basic training since the Vietnam era, soldiers whose specialties traditionally kept them far from the front - clerks, cooks, truck drivers and communications technicians - will undergo far more stressful training. The new training regimen includes additional time dodging real bullets, more opportunities to fire weapons, including heavy machine guns, and increasing the time spent practicing urban combat and hiking and sleeping in the field during the nine-week courses.
Before Iraq, freshly minted soldiers could expect months, if not years, of additional training in their assigned units before seeing combat.
But with the Army stretched today by long-term deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, a growing percentage of new soldiers are in combat zones within 30 days of being assigned to a unit, Army officials say. Even those whose specialties are not combat arms often face situations where the traditional distinction between hazardous front lines and secure rear areas has vanished.
"Historically, combat support specialists had been in the rear of the battlefield, far from direct contact with the enemy," said Col. Bill Gallagher, commander of the basic combat training brigade at Fort Benning, Ga. "The emphasis in their training was more on the technical side of their specialties, not on the combat side."
But in the missions soldiers face today, "there is no front, there is no rear," he said. "Soldiers of all specialties will face direct contact with an adversary. They all have to have a common set of combat skills. A sense of urgency dictated that we analyze what skills are required of them in Iraq, or in Afghanistan, and how to update the nine-week program back in the States."
The changes were endorsed at a meeting of the Army's training brigade commanders in June, and were promptly put into effect on an official, if still interim, basis at all five installations where the Army conducts its basic training.
The Army's senior leadership must approve the plan for it to become a formal part of the service's training, and additional financing must be secured for the changes to become permanent, as more realistic live-fire training and longer field maneuvers are more expensive. The changes grew out of various studies dating to last summer of lessons learned in both Afghanistan and Iraq, when senior officials realized it was time to update the tasks and drills in basic training, with an emphasis on combat skills for all those in uniform.
"This is the new mentality that says, 'Everybody is going to be a warrior first,' everybody is going to have the ability to defend themselves and survive in combat," said William F. Briscoe, director of the directorate for training plans and capabilities review at the Army's Training and Doctrine Command at Fort Monroe, Va.
In discussing the changes to basic training, Army officers do not specifically acknowledge how deeply the military was stung by some high-profile combat failings, including the attack on an Army support convoy near Nasiriya, Iraq, early in the war. During that firefight, troops of the 507th Maintenance Company were outmaneuvered and then outgunned by Iraqi irregulars.
Previous Army training programs for these noncombat specialties required less than one week of field training. Under the interim training program, they will spend up to 16 days in the field. And that time out in the woods has been consciously designed to be more stressful, requiring soldiers in training to carry heavier loads of water and ammunition, and allowing less time for them to sleep and eat.
Support soldiers are also receiving added training for military operations in urban areas, which includes drills in how to enter a building held by hostile forces and to run convoys through contested territory. They will receive additional practice in how to manage prisoners of war and how to maneuver and fight when civilians are in the line of fire.
"We are teaching quick-fire techniques, moving in an urban environment - things that have not been done in basic training for combat support and combat service support before," said Lt. Col. Fred W. Johnson, commander of a basic training battalion at Fort Jackson, S.C., where the Army conducts its mixed-sex training.
"And we are introducing an emerging leadership program," Colonel Johnson said. "We don't expect to create junior officers, but we are teaching basic leadership techniques: accountability, precombat inspections, how to motivate a small element to accomplish a mission."
The changes in basic training will be seen mostly in the initial nine-week course given recruits whose tasks will be combat support or combat service support - two categories of Army duty that include engineering, personnel, transportation, maintenance and logistics - rather than for those in the combat arms specialties of infantry, armor, artillery and aviation. After basic training, the support troops receive focused training in their specialties before assignments to units.
While previous generations may recall basic training being the same for all recruits, the modern Army allows many new soldiers to choose their specialties when they sign up, and basic training is divided between those who go into combat arms and those who go into support jobs.
--------
Civilians Die as Iraqi Police and Rebels Clash in Mosul
August 4, 2004
By SABRINA TAVERNISE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/04/international/middleeast/04CND-IRAQ.html?hp
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Aug. 4 - Fighting erupted between Iraqi police officers and insurgents in the northern city of Mosul today, leaving at least 12 people dead and dozens more wounded, and prompting city authorities to impose a curfew.
Farther south, six foreigners taken hostage by insurgents were freed, some through a rescue raid staged by local leaders.
In Mosul, dozens of gun-toting insurgents wearing masks got out of a van in the city center around noon and began spraying bullets along two main roads. Iraqi policemen opened fire and the groups battled for at least three hours, witnesses said.
The fighting in Mosul was the fiercest since the American invasion more than a year ago and raised the specter that the insurgency - already strong in large areas of the so-called Sunni Triangle - has taken hold in the north.
Mosul, about 250 miles north of Baghdad, has been the target of bombs, most recently at a church on Sunday, when 12 Christians died in attacks on five churches in the country, but its streets have been mostly free of gun battles.
Loud explosions and heavy gunfire reverberated through the city as the fighting raged on the west bank of the Tigris River. The authorities closed down streets to try to contain the violence, and plumes of smoke were seen across the skyline.
Coordinated attacks were staged in other areas of the city as well.
Insurgents fired on the house of the Iraqi president, Ghazi al-Yawar, drawing rocket fire from American helicopters, but no serious injuries were reported. Mr. Yawar is from Mosul, but has lived in Baghdad since he assumed office in June. Mortars were also fired at the American Consulate.
The governor of Mosul, Dored Mohammed Kashmola, said in an interview on Al Jazeera television that eight civilians and four policemen had been were killed. He said Iraqi policemen were patrolling the roads Tuesday night without American troops, who, he said, had withdrawn to their bases.
A doctor at the Medical City hospital in Mosul said medical workers had received 12 bodies, including those of two women, and were treating 26 people for their wounds, Agence France-Presse reported. Most of those wounded were civilians, the doctor said.
The Iraqi police also faced hostility in the southern city of Najaf, where six police officers were kidnapped by militiamen loyal to the radical Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr. The governor of Najaf, Adnan al-Zorfi, pledged that the authorities would free the men, the French news agency reported.
"We warn against such acts and we will take action against this militia, including legal action which we will announce shortly," the governor said.
A spate of kidnappings have terrorized Iraqis and foreign nationals, and abduction is fast becoming a favored method of extracting money and testing the authority of the new Iraqi government, which took over from the American-led coalition in June.
In the past several months, about 70 people have been kidnapped in Iraq. Most have been released safely, but 8 are known to have been executed, often by beheading.
About 20 hostages have been taken in the two weeks since the Philippines withdrew its troops from Iraq to spare the life of a Filipino truck driver.
In an unusual development, a group of local tribesman and clerics rescued four Jordanian truck drivers in the restive city of Falluja on Tuesday night. Ibrahim Jasim, a sheik in Falluja, said by telephone that he had led a group of about 30 men to a house where the hostages were being held and brought them out without firing a shot.
The Jordanian Foreign Ministry later confirmed the release of the men, Agence France-Presse reported from Amman.
The kidnappers, numbering either seven or eight men, were said to have fled when the rescuers entered the house.
One of the hostages said that the kidnappers were all Iraqis, his brother told Al Jazeera. The men were seized last week and shown in a videotape that demanded that the company they work for end its operations in Iraq.
But the hostage, Ahmed Hassan, also speaking on Al Jazeera, described his ordeal as "a mugging," and said the kidnappers simply wanted money.
"It was an attempt to fabricate the charge of terrorism," Mr. Hassan said. Increasingly, kidnappers with political demands are also asking for money. Captors of a Lebanese man who was taken late last week asked for several hundred thousand dollars for his release, according to a co-worker who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Al Jazeera also reported that a group linked to the Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi - described by the United States as an ally of Al Qaeda - had released two Turkish drivers because their company had agreed to stop working in Iraq. On Monday, the group released a videotape showing a Turkish hostage being executed after he was made to read a statement urging Turkish businesses to halt operations in Iraq.
-------- israel / palestine
Stressed Israeli soldiers to be treated with cannabis: army
JERUSALEM (AFP)
Aug 04, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040804181819.g9fru8zp.html
Israeli soldiers suffering from combat stress after tours of duty in the Palestinian territories could soon be treated with cannabis to relieve their symptoms, the Israeli army said late Wednesday.
"The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) medical corps, in cooperation with the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, is introducing the use of THC, the active agent in the cannabis plant, which helps relieve post-traumatic stress disorders, on an experimental basis," an army statement said, confirming a report in the Maariv daily.
Maariv said the mental health department of the Medical Corps was set to to begin tests on volunteers suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder after reserve duty.
Hundreds of Israelis have been treated for combat stress after performing their mandatory national service in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
The scientist who will help conduct the experiment, heads a research team which discovered that cannabis helped mice which had suffered physical stress, and had even reduced the risk of stroke, Maariv said.
The army said the use of THC, which stands for tetrahydrocannabinol, had been approved by a military and a civilian committee.
--------
Pregnant Palestinians Lose Babies, As Israel Keeps Frontier Shut: Police
AFP
8/4/2004
http://www.turkishpress.com/turkishpress/news.asp?ID=23762
RAFAH, Egypt, Aug 4 (AFP) - Three Palestinian women lost their babies through miscarriages in the past two days as they waited for the Israeli army to open the Rafah frontier, closed since mid-July, a police source there said on Wednesday.
The three were among the Palestinians, whose numbers have now swollen to around 3,400, including children and elderly people, who have been trapped since Israel closed the border in the southern Gaza Strip, according to the same source.
Sabah Habbal, aged 40 and several months pregnant, waiting in torrid heat and deteriorating conditions, suffered contractions on Tuesday and lost her baby. She is now in hospital in the Egyptian sector of the border town of Rafah, in a serious condition, an Egyptian medical source said.
Two other women, Najah Ezzedine, aged 29, and Sabah Abdel Wahab, 32, had also lost their babies in the past 48 hours in similar circumstances.
The Israelis say they closed the border because of fear of attacks, blocking the Palestinians trying to return to the Gaza Strip.
Israeli authorities refused to open the frontier to allow a Palestinian to take home the body of his wife who died last Friday, according to the widower, Saleh Mahmud Lebed, a 57-year-old Gaza resident.
He said Yusra Awad Abdel Fattah, 52, died while being treated for cancer in a Cairo hospital, and she had had to be buried in the cemetery on the Egyptian side of Rafah.
Assessing the number of Palestinians waiting for Israel to open the border, the police source said: "Nearly 1,400 people are living literally at the border post where they spend the night on the floor for want of money to do otherwise and more than 2,000 other Palestinians are lodged in hotels or with relatives who live on the Egyptian side."
France on Wednesday called on Israel to find a rapid and dignified answer to the problem.
Israel's supreme court on July 29 gave the army 30 days to answer a petition for the border to be opened.
The petitioners said some Palestinians had been waiting for more than two weeks owing to the almost complete sealing of the Israeli-controlled Rafah border since July 10. The crossing has been open for just two days in that period.
-------- pakistan / india
Pakistan Allows Taliban to Train, a Detained Fighter Says
August 4, 2004
By CARLOTTA GALL
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/04/international/asia/04afgh.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
KABUL, Afghanistan, Aug. 3 - For months Afghan and American officials have complained that even while Pakistan cooperates in the fight against Al Qaeda, militant Islamic groups there are training fighters and sending them into Afghanistan to attack American and Afghan forces. Pakistani officials have rejected the allegations, saying they are unaware of any such training camps. Now the Afghan government has produced a young Pakistani, captured fighting with the Taliban in southern Afghanistan three months ago, whose story would seem to back its complaints about Pakistan.
The prisoner, who gave his name as Muhammad Sohail, is a 17-year-old from the Pakistani port city of Karachi, held by the Afghan authorities in Kabul. In an interview in late July, in front of several prison guards, he said Pakistan was allowing militant groups to train and organize insurgents to fight in Afghanistan. Mr. Sohail said he hoped that granting the interview would increase his chances of being freed. Mr. Sohail described his recruitment through his local mosque by a group listed by the United States as having terrorist links, his military training in a camp not far from the capital, Islamabad, and his dispatch with several other Pakistanis to Afghanistan.
He did not give all the details that intelligence officials said they gleaned from him in interrogations, but he talked easily about his party and its leaders, and said they had high-level support from within the establishment. He said he was recruited and trained within the past eight months by Jamiat-ul-Ansar, the new name for the Harakat-ul-Mujahedeen party, which was designated a terrorist group by the State Department and banned by President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan in January 2002. Under its new name it is functioning, if more discreetly, and its leader, Fazlur Rehman Khalil, moves around freely.
Mr. Khalil has been involved in recruiting and training militants since the 1980's. In 1998, American planes bombed his training camp in Afghanistan when they were targeting Osama bin Laden after the bombings of the American Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The bombing killed a number of Pakistanis, and Mr. Khalil at the time vowed to take revenge against America for the attack.
It is an open secret in Pakistan that groups supporting separatism in Kashmir have not stopped their activities, despite official declarations, and have continued to train men and infiltrate them into Indian Kashmir. Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage said during a visit to the region last month that Pakistan had not dismantled all the camps used to train militants for Kashmir. And while he praised Pakistan for its efforts against Al Qaeda, he urged the country to do more to stop Taliban militants carrying out attacks from Pakistan.
Mr. Sohail is not the first Pakistani to be captured fighting alongside the Taliban and other militants in Afghanistan over the past two years. On at least one occasion, Pakistanis who were captured in a joint American-Afghan military operation last year were handed back to Pakistan. But he is the first made available for an interview by the Afghan government. Intelligence officials said they found on him a Jamiat-ul-Ansar membership card and a list of phone numbers of high-level party officials.
A Pakistani official interviewed recently described Mr. Sohail as a "one-off case," and denied that Pakistani militants were showing up in Afghanistan.
The Pakistani ambassador to Afghanistan, Rustam Shah Mohmand, said he thought Jamiat-ul-Ansar and its network had been dismantled. "There is no ambiguity in our policy," he said. "The government does not sponsor, nor create, nor is aware of training camps. If they were aware of any, they would go and dismantle them."
Zalmay M. Khalilzad, the American ambassador to Afghanistan, has stated publicly that Pakistan has not done nearly enough to stop the Taliban and other militants from using Pakistan's border areas as operational and recruiting bases.
In a speech in Washington in April, he warned that if Pakistan did not do the job on its side of the border, American forces would have to do the job themselves.
A Western diplomat who spoke on condition of anonymity in an interview last month in Kabul said: "When you talk about Taliban, it's like fish in a barrel in Pakistan. They train, they rest there. They get support."
Western diplomats in Kabul and Pakistani political analysts have said that Pakistan has continued to allow the Taliban to operate to retain influence in Afghanistan. Pakistan supported the Taliban in the 1990's as a way to create an area where Pakistani forces could retreat to the west if war erupted with its the country's longtime rival and neighbor to the east, India. Pakistan has also long tried to maintain influence over Afghanistan's largest ethnic group, the Pashtuns, because of its wariness of its own Pashtun minority in the border areas.
General Musharraf may also fear that a crackdown on the Taliban will provoke protests from an alliance of hard-line Islamist political parties that are now the third largest block in Parliament, the Western diplomat in Kabul said. And Pakistani officials may fear that the United States will abandon the region if Mr. bin Laden is captured.
In interviews along the border over the past two years, Pakistani government officials have made statements that they do not see the Taliban as a threat to Pakistan. They have also, at times, said the Taliban have a legitimate political grievance in Afghanistan.
Mr. Sohail was probably chosen to fight in Afghanistan because he is a Pashtun, the dominant group in the Taliban. Born in Swat, near the Afghan border, he grew up in Karachi, left school at 15 and went to work in a confectionary shop.
"I was going to the mosque every Thursday, and they were saying you should go and do jihad," he said. "In Palestine, Chechnya, Cuba, France and a lot of places all over the world, they are mistreating Muslims. So I decided to do it and got training for one month."
He traveled with a group of 15 others from his mosque to a training camp near Mansehra, north of Islamabad. It was a remote place, in the mountains with lots of trees, he said. There he received one month of training in explosives and weapons.
An uncle of Mr. Sohail's, reached by telephone in Karachi, said the family recently received a letter via the Red Cross from Mr. Sohail saying he was in an Afghan jail.
After their training in Mansehra, Mr. Sohail and his group went to Islamabad and met Mr. Khalil, the leader of Jamiat-ul-Ansar, at his headquarters.
Three months later, Mr. Khalil went to speak at their mosque and called the group up to fight, Mr. Sohail said. "He said, 'Go and fight the Americans.' "
They went to the Pakistani border town of Quetta, and then Mr. Sohail set off with four other fighters. They crossed over the main border and drove to the city of Kandahar. They went to a designated hotel and in a room found a bag with weapons. The next day they headed to a mountain base near the town of Panjwai, not far west of Kandahar, where they joined some 50 fighters and rapidly became involved in combat operations themselves.
Mr. Sohail's account becomes vague after that. He said he only fought for one night and returned to Pakistan. Sent back into Afghanistan to gather information about casualties, he approached some Afghan police, thinking they were Taliban. They arrested him.
He is accused of taking part in an attack on the Panjwai District center in April, in which a police officer and two aid workers were killed, security officials said.
Other militants who have been captured are Afghans from the refugee community in Pakistan. They have described receiving training in large, walled residential compounds in and around Quetta, rather than in military camps, according to Sher Muhammad Akhundzada, the governor of Helmand Province in southern Afghanistan.
One Afghan prisoner interviewed recently in Kandahar, who spent 10 years in a madrassa, or religious school, in Pakistan from the age of 14, complained that the arrival of American troops in Afghanistan brought behaviors that were against the Koran, including drinking alcohol and prostitution. "They are destroying Islam," the prisoner said.
Mr. Sohail has received a 20-year sentence from a judge in Kabul. His appeal is in progress.
"I'm very sad," he said mournfully. "The jihad is over for me." But he showed flashes of fanaticism, too. "I wish I was a prisoner of the Americans," he said. "Then I could die a martyr at their hands, or kill myself."
Heavy Fighting Against Taliban
KABUL, Afghanistan, Aug. 3 (Reuters) - Afghan forces backed by American attack aircraft engaged in heavy fighting with suspected Taliban guerrillas near the border with Pakistan, the United States military said Tuesday. The military said as many as 50 guerrillas had been killed, but both an Afghan commander and a former Taliban official in the area said only 2 had died.
The military's casualty figure was based on estimates by pilots flying in support of Afghan soldiers in the battle, which started when the Taliban attacked the force on Monday morning. If confirmed, the total would be one of the heaviest losses the insurgents have suffered in a single battle in recent months.
But Abdul Rauf Akhund, the former governor of Khost under the Taliban, said by satellite phone that 2 Taliban fighters had died and 8 had been wounded, and that 10 Afghan soldiers had been killed.
Gen. Khialbaz Sherzai, an Afghan military commander in Khost, said Monday that he only knew of two Afghan soldiers and two Taliban fighters killed.
David Rohde contributed reporting from Pakistan for this article.
-------- russia / chechnya
Russia and Georgia on war footing over breakaway Abkhazia
MOSCOW (AFP)
Aug 04, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040804153511.slrzijgi.html
Russia and Georgia were on a war footing Wednesday after Moscow hinted it could resort to military action in response to a Tbilisi threat to open fire on vessels that "illegally" entered the waters of its breakaway region of Abkhazia.
The Russian defense minister said Georgia's leaders were turning into "pirates" while the country's most popular Internet news site Gazeta.ru screamed in a headline that "Russian tourists will be shot" in Georgia.
Russian ships frequently take tourists to the separatist region on the Black Sea coast in northwestern Georgia that was a top spot for summer vacations in the Soviet era.
Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili has vowed to reunify his fractured republic since toppling the old administration in a peaceful "rose revolution" last year.
And he has since taken a stern view of Russia's involvement in his tiny and impoverished former Soviet republic that will soon be home to a key pipeline from the Caspian Sea backed by the United States.
"I gave such an order a few months ago and I am repeating it today: all the ships will be sunk, we will fire on them... as happened in the waters of Abkhazia a few days ago," Saakashvili said Tuesday before leaving for a private visit to the United States.
Georgian coast guards last Friday opened fire on a Turkish ship that entered the Black Sea waters of Abkhazia.
Abkhazia's defense chief Vyacheslav Eshba said he would do "everything I can to make sure that the ships arrive safely. If need be, we will use our army for this," ITAR-TASS reported.
Russia's Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov said "these comments are starting to resemble those made by pirates and in no way correspond to international norms."
The foreign ministry in Moscow described Saakashvili's comments as "unprecedented" and warning of a looming war.
"These sort of comments are starting to show that Tbilisi is starting to lose contact with the reality in which the modern world lives," a ministry statement said.
But Saakashvili seemed unbowed and took another stab at Moscow by saying that his order "affects all the so-called Russian tourists."
The conflict between Georgia and Abkhazia, which lies between the Caucasus Mountains and the Black Sea, began with the collapse of the Soviet Union and sparked an exodus of 250,000 Georgians from the region.
A bitter war ended in August 1993 with the region of Abkhazia gaining de facto independence from the former Soviet republic.
The two sides have been holding talks with the help of a special United Nations mission and Russia, which maintains a peacekeeping force in the region.
Relations between Tbilisi and Moscow seemed to deteriorate steadily through Wednesday as a top Russian lawmaker came under fire while visiting another separatist pro-Moscow region -- South Ossetia.
Andrei Kokoshin -- who once served as Russia's security council chief and heads a parliamentary committee on relations with former Soviet republic -- said he was in the region on a bridge-building mission and came under fire from Georgian troops.
His dominant United Russia party said it may retaliate by adopting a resolution supporting South Ossetia's bid to become a part of Russia.
During his US stay, which ends August 8, Saakashvili is scheduled to meet with several US officials including US Secretary of State Colin Powell and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
-------- space
Cost of Shuttle's Return Escalates
By Guy Gugliotta
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, August 4, 2004; Page A06
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A37814-2004Aug3.html
NASA officials said yesterday that the costs of returning the grounded space shuttle to flight have risen as much as $900 million over original projections, raising the possibility that the agency may have to seek extra money from Congress next year or cut other space programs to fund the shortfall.
NASA Deputy Associate Administrator Michael Kostelnik said that "we'll be easily able to handle 2004," by searching within the agency for between $100 million and $200 million in extra money. But funding for 2005, with a projected shortfall between $400 million and $700 million, "is still an uncertainty," he added.
Nevertheless, Kostelnik emphasized that the cost projections may change and that even with a $700 million shortage, "we wouldn't need help in that regard until the fall of next year." He said NASA was unlikely to seek congressional help until 2005, and only if necessary.
"First we would look for resources with Space Operations and second within the agency," Kostelnik told reporters during a telephone news conference. "Then we would look to do something outside the agency later in the year."
NASA's announcement came 12 days after a key congressional committee passed a bill cutting the Bush administration's 2005 NASA budget proposal by more than $1 billion, dealing a sharp blow to the president's initiative to return humans to the moon and eventually send them to Mars. Bush has threatened to veto the bill.
One knowledgeable Republican source, who refused to be quoted by name because of office policy, acknowledged that Congress had heard about the shortfalls last month, and lawmakers "don't know what to think about it." While NASA is "acting responsibly" by voicing its fears early, the source said, the news "puts additional pressure on an already impossible budget -- and what are you going to take it from? And is this as high as [the shortfall] is going to get?"
The budget shortfalls were outlined in the newest version of NASA's "Implementation Plan for Space Shuttle Return to Flight and Beyond," which described the agency's ongoing efforts to ready the shuttle for a trip to the international space station in March. Kostelnik said preparations were "on track."
NASA grounded the orbiter after the Feb. 1, 2003, Columbia tragedy. The agency has been striving to implement 15 key recommendations by the blue-ribbon Columbia Accident Investigation Board, which analyzed the causes of the accident.
Some of these deal with vital systems, including changing the shuttle's external fuel tank so its foam insulation will not as easily break off and damage the wings during launch -- identified as the trigger of the Columbia disaster.
Others, however, deal with matters as seemingly mundane as forging an interagency agreement to ensure that the shuttle will be photographed while in orbit, and requiring NASA to simplify its definition of "debris."
In all, NASA has at least "conditionally closed" five of the recommendations and plans to comply with the rest by the end of this year: "We have a plan laid out," said John Casper, manager of the Space Shuttle Management Integration and Planning Office. "It's ambitious but doable."
Space Shuttle Program Deputy Manager Wayne Hale said NASA was also confident that planners would have a "safe haven" plan in place -- to enable a shuttle crew to stay aboard the space station until a backup shuttle could fly up to rescue them.
"This is an eventuality that we hope will never happen," Hale said. Preparing a backup mission would require converting a second shuttle into a rescue vehicle by loading it with special equipment, changing computer software, staffing it with a specially trained team of astronauts and getting it to the station before overloaded life support systems there were exhausted.
Current plans call for the backup to be ready to support the first two shuttle flights next year. "After that, we'll see where we go," said Space Shuttle Program Manager Bill Parsons. NASA could discontinue the plan, he added, because "there is a possibility that we'll have enough confidence in our system."
-------- us
MPs Blamed for Abu Ghraib Abuse
By Josh White
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, August 4, 2004; Page A14
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A37980-2004Aug3.html
FORT BRAGG, N.C., Aug. 3 -- Army investigators said they believe a group of seven military police soldiers beat and humiliated detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq as a way of "having some fun" and to blow off steam, not at the behest of their superiors, according to testimony at a preliminary court hearing for the one of the MP soldiers here Tuesday.
During the first day of an Article 32 hearing for Pfc. Lynndie R. England, 21, two Army special agents said they found no credible evidence that anyone in the Army's chain of command ordered the soldiers from the 372nd MP Company to embarrass detainees by forcing them into sexual positions and piling them naked in a human pyramid. England's smiling face while posing with naked detainees and the image of her holding a leash attached to a detainee's neck have been some of the most indelible images of the scandal.
The investigators said Tuesday what the Pentagon and the Bush administration have been saying since the scandal hit: The abuse appeared to them to be at the hands of a few rogue soldiers.
"They were joking around; they didn't think it was that serious," said Special Agent Paul Arthur, who headed the initial investigation at Abu Ghraib and said the soldiers appeared to be venting their frustrations. "They were just joking around, having some fun, on the night shift."
But the first courtroom testimony in the United States regarding Abu Ghraib showed that the initial Army investigation focused narrowly on the military police soldiers seen in hundreds of now-infamous digital photographs despite MP claims that military intelligence tactics shepherded the abuse. The probe only later turned a casual eye to the military intelligence brigade in control of the facility when a handful of its personnel were implicated in photographs.
"We were focusing on the abuse. We weren't focusing on the tactics," Arthur testified.
Investigators also said Tuesday that they turned an investigation into the use of unmuzzled military working dogs in interrogations over to the military intelligence commander at the prison who dog handlers have identified as the officer who approved the tactic, Col. Thomas M. Pappas. They also said that military intelligence Lt. Col. Steve Jordan verbally attacked abuse reported by the International Committee of the Red Cross, saying he thought detainees were "making up" the allegations.
England's defense team poked at the Army's first investigation into the abuse, asking whether enough time was spent looking at the role of military intelligence interrogators who had been asking for help from the MPs to set the conditions for interrogations. Army officials have said the MPs were asked to help regulate sleep patterns and meals, but some of the charged MPs told investigators that they were asked to "rough up" or "soften up" detainees. Special Agent Warren Worth, who also investigated the abuse, said there was significant confusion over what the standard operating procedures were at the prison and that there was little guidance about the rules.
Capt. Jonathan Crisp, England's military attorney, asked Worth about suggestions from Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, who traveled to Abu Ghraib in the weeks before the abuse and overhauled the operation. In a 13-page report, obtained by The Washington Post, Miller suggested it was "essential that the guard force be actively engaged in setting the conditions for successful exploitation of the internees," and that such efforts "will consolidate both detention and strategic interrogation operations and result in synergy between MP and MI resources and an integrated, synchronized and focused strategic interrogation effort."
Col. Denise Arn will decide whether 19 charges -- including several related to intimate sexual photographs depicting England -- should go to a court-martial, where England could face nearly 40 years in prison.
Richard Hernandez, one of England's attorneys, said the investigation was not complete and England was simply following orders: "The government is doing whatever it can to make her a scapegoat."
Staff writer Scott Higham in Washington contributed to this report.
--------
PRISON MISTREATMENT
Woman With Leash Appears in Court on Abu Ghraib Abuse Charges
August 4, 2004
By KATE ZERNIKE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/04/national/04abus.html?pagewanted=all&position=
FORT BRAGG, N.C., Aug. 3 - She is the last but best known of seven accused soldiers to enter a military courtroom on charges of prisoner abuse that have disgraced the armed services.
Pfc. Lynndie R. England, the grinning face of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, appeared on Tuesday before a military judge who will determine whether she should face a court-martial on 19 charges of assault, misconduct, and posing for what the military termed "numerous wrongful photographs," including the now infamous one of her holding a naked prisoner on a leash.
Private England, 21 and six months pregnant, sat mostly expressionless as two military investigators described a carnival-like mentality among soldiers at the Iraqi prison where mistreatment of detainees and sexual high jinks were carried out with equal giddiness.
"From the get-go, it seemed like it was just a joke," said Special Agent Paul D. Arthur, who was the lead investigator into the abuse, describing Private England's description of the mistreatment in two sworn statements. "They didn't think it was that big a deal, they were just joking around."
"Kind of to vent their frustration," Special Agent Arthur added. But he noted that Private England herself did not express any frustration: "She said it was more for fun."
Private England, wearing a maternity version of military camouflage, appeared to suppress a smile as investigators described a videotape that showed her having sex with Cpl. Charles Graner, who prosecutors say was a ringleader of the abuse and Private England says is the father of the child she is carrying. Her mother sat stern-faced in the observation gallery, her eyes darting from the witness stand to her daughter as an investigator described photographs of Private England topless and engaged in what he called oral sex.
Investigators said they discovered 1,000 photographs and additional videos on computers owned by various soldiers. About 280 photos, interspersed with travelogue shots of Iraq and Kuwait, showed detainees being sexually humiliated or mistreated, or soldiers engaged in various kinds of sexually inflected misconduct.
In one photograph, a detainee cowers against the bared teeth of a military dog; in another, a prisoner stands hooded on a box with wires attached to his genitals. There is a series showing soldiers imitating oral sex with a banana, or waving their genitals alongside the face of a comrade napping on a couch.
Private England's lawyers, like those for the other military police soldiers who have already been ordered to face courts-martial, have said she was acting on orders from military intelligence to "loosen up" detainees so they would say more in interrogations. The lawyers argue that military intelligence personnel, and therefore the military police who served as prison guards in the interrogation wing, were under pressure from as high as the White House to get detainees to give up more information. They tried to press that case in their cross-examination of the two investigators on Tuesday.
But both said there was no evidence that the abused detainees had any value to military intelligence - most were common criminals, not terrorists. A majority, Special Agent Arthur testified, were never even interrogated. And they noted that Private England was assigned to an administrative job, not to the wing where the abuses on film occurred. She has told investigators she went there to visit Corporal Graner.
The investigators said that none of the accused soldiers had been able to recall the names of anyone who had given the orders. And known techniques to encourage interrogations did not include the acts depicted in the most graphic photographs - piling naked detainees in a human pyramid, or forcing them to masturbate.
Special Agent Warren Worth, the other investigator, said he had interviewed military intelligence soldiers. "I found nothing to suggest they were aware of any of the events we've spoken of today," he testified.
The evidence captured on film, including Private England smiling and giving a thumbs-up next to naked prisoners, left her defense team to poke relatively small holes in the investigators' case, arguing, for instance, that while she did hold a leash attached to the neck of a detainee nicknamed Gus, she did not drag him, as the investigators said. The leash in the photograph, her lawyers noted, was slack.
Five other soldiers, like Private England members of the 372nd Military Police Company, have been ordered to face courts-martial. Another soldier, Specialist Jeremy Sivits, pleaded guilty to taking a photograph of the abuse, in exchange for an agreement to testify at the hearings of the other soldiers and a year in prison.
While previous hearings lasted a day or two, Private England's is expected to last the week, because the government and her lawyers have called at least 25 witnesses. If court-martialed and found guilty of all 19 charges, Private England could face 38 years in prison.
Outside the courtroom, her lawyers said that she had not done anything she was not ordered to do. But they said she was embarrassed at the photographs, and they sought to play down the level of degradation shown in them.
"She's as stressed as anyone would expect of a 21-year-old young lady who faces 30 years in prison for photographs you'd see at Mardi Gras or spring break, but not here," said her lead lawyer, Richard Hernandez.
"Of course she regrets things," he added. "Every one of us regrets things in our teens and 20's."
Private England and her mother left the courtroom at the lunch recess and did not return. Her lawyers and the government said she had phoned her doctor at midday and that he asked her to go see him.
Danes Dismissed in Abuse Case
COPENHAGEN, Denmark, Aug. 3 (AP) - Defense Minister Soeran Gade dismissed the two top Danish military commanders in Iraq on Tuesday as an inquiry widened into charges that a Danish officer denied water to Iraqi detainees and made them sit in uncomfortable positions for long periods.
Mr. Gade said he relieved Col. Henrik Flach, the head of the country's 496-member unit in southern Iraq, from command "because of lack of judgment." He said the unit's executive officer, Lt. Col. Poul Erik Andersen, was also dismissed.
--------
US Air Force denies appeal in Afghan friendly fire incident
CHICAGO (AFP)
Aug 04, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040804012604.ko7rtb2g.html
The US Air Force on Tuesday upheld the punishment handed out to the US fighter pilot at the center of a friendly fire incident in Afghanistan that left four Canadian soldiers dead, denying his final appeal.
Major Harry Schmidt was found guilty of dereliction of duty, reprimanded for "willful misconduct," and fined 5,762 dollars last month in connection with the deadly April 2002 incident.
Lawyers for Schmidt later appealed the punishment, but Air Force General Hal Hornburg, the four-star chief of the Air Combat Command, denied Schmidt's appeal in a decision that came down Tuesday.
Schmidt's lawyer, Charles Gittins, said by e-mail: "We are not surprised by the denial. We expected it. Any other decision is an acknowledgment that Harry was not at fault for the accident.
"It is in the Air Force's interest to keep the responsibility as far away from the careerist (Air Force) generals who were involved in creating the non-doctrinal command and control system that directly led to the accident."
Hornburg's decision closes the book on a highly publicized case that caused an outcry across Canada.
Schmidt disobeyed orders and dropped a 500-pound bomb on Canadian infantrymen engaged in a live-fire training exercise whom he mistook for Taliban fighters.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- courts
Court Offers Guidance on Sentencing In Md., Va.
U.S. Judges Urged To Issue 2 Penalties
By Jerry Markon
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, August 4, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A37500-2004Aug3?language=printer
A federal appeals court trying to end confusion over the legality of sentencing guidelines has come up with a highly unusual suggestion: Judges should sentence defendants twice.
The Richmond-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit issued the recommendation to judges in Virginia, Maryland and three other states on a temporary basis until the Supreme Court explains its recent decision casting doubt on the constitutionality of U.S. sentencing guidelines.
The 4th Circuit's decision to weigh in late Monday is a measure of the turmoil that has gripped federal courts nationwide since the Supreme Court ruled June 24 that Washington state's sentencing guidelines were unconstitutional. The high court struck them down because they allowed a judge, rather than a jury, to consider factors that increase a defendant's sentence.
Because Washington state's system resembles the federal one, dozens of federal judges have since ruled that the high court's decision makes part or all of the U.S. sentencing guidelines unconstitutional. The confusion has affected thousands of cases, with some hearings delayed, other sentences drastically reduced, and prosecutors and defense lawyers flooding courts with changes to indictments and requests for new sentences.
In its two-page order, the 4th Circuit said the high court's ruling in Blakely v. Washington did not invalidate under the guidelines the 155-year sentence of a North Carolina cigarette smuggler convicted on terrorism charges. The court instructed federal judges in Virginia, Maryland, West Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina to continue using the guidelines to sentence defendants.
But in case the Supreme Court does decide to toss out the sentencing guidelines system, the 4th Circuit recommended that judges also issue a second sentence using the guidelines only as "advisory." The second sentence is apparently designed as a fallback that could be imposed if a later Supreme Court ruling invalidates the first.
A number of federal District Court judges across the country have started issuing such dual sentences since the Blakely decision, experts said.
The existing federal sentencing guidelines, developed over the past two decades, established a complicated points-based system that requires judges to decide a sentence based on "aggravating" factors not necessarily considered by a jury during a trial, such as whether a gun was used during a crime or whether the defendant played a leadership role in a criminal organization. The Blakely decision calls that system into question by mandating that a jury must decide the facts of any issues that would increase a defendant's sentence.
After numerous conflicting decisions from appellate courts nationwide over whether Blakely invalidated the guidelines, the Supreme Court agreed Monday to reconsider the issue. The court said it will hear two cases suggested by the Bush administration, both involving federal drug defendants, on Oct. 4, the first day of the new court term.
The 4th Circuit's guidance won praise yesterday from some legal experts who said it would restore order in the courts temporarily until the Supreme Court reconsiders the sentencing dispute this fall.
"It's innovative," said Steven L. Chanenson, a Villanova University law professor and former federal prosecutor. "It's kind of like the chicken soup theory: I'm not sure how much it's going to help, but it can't hurt."
But defense lawyers and other experts said the court might have sown more confusion inadvertently.
Douglas A. Berman, an Ohio State University law professor closely following the Blakely debate, credited the court for making an effort but said he found the recommendation for double sentences "amazingly peculiar."
"How a court even does these backup sentences is completely uncharted territory," Berman said. "Do they have to have two sentencing hearings? Can the second sentence get appealed? They're asking judges to do a lot more work, and if in fact the old rules do apply, all that extra work will be wasted."
Federal public defender Frank W. Dunham Jr., whose office handles the majority of criminal cases at the federal courthouse in Alexandria, expressed concern that both sentences could be invalidated if the Supreme Court reaches a middle ground between upholding the guidelines and throwing them out. That would cause numerous cases to be sent back to U.S. District courts for resentencing.
Day to day, Dunham added, the 4th Circuit guidance "does make it somewhat easier to muddle through. At least the judges will know what to do. But this is all up in the air until the Supreme Court decides it."
Federal prosecutors in Alexandria declined to comment yesterday. In a July 2 memo to all federal prosecutors, Deputy Attorney General James B. Comey said the Justice Department's position is that the Blakely decision does not apply to sentencing guidelines. But prosecutors have been aggressively pursing "Blakely waivers" in which defendants agree, as part of a plea bargain, not to use Blakely to challenge their sentences.
The Blakely decision has affected numerous federal sentences. For example, Dwight Watson, the North Carolina farmer who drove his tractor onto the Mall and threatened to set off a bomb in 2003, was sentenced to time already served and ordered freed because a judge decided he could not add extra jail time under Blakely.
In Richmond, the 4th Circuit order entered at the direction of Chief Judge William W. Wilkins Jr. said a full decision on the North Carolina cigarette smuggler's case will be issued "in due course," with majority and dissenting opinions. Experts said it is highly unusual for the court to telegraph a future opinion before issuing it.
-------- drug war
Afghan opium a growing threat
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
By Rowan Scarborough
August 04, 2004
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20040803-110102-7203r.htm
Afghanistan is on a pace to increase illegal opium production by 200 percent over this year and next, yet the provisional government is failing to take decisive action against traffickers, Bush administration officials say.
The officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told of errors that allowed this year's bumper poppy crop to be harvested and turned into opium virtually free of interference by the Afghanistan government or the U.S.-led coalition.
These officials warn that unless poppy production is reduced, the nation risks falling into the hands of narco-warlords whose wealth and power would enable them to dominate the government.
At a hearing this summer of the House International Relations Committee, Chairman Henry J. Hyde, Illinois Republican, said: "Their continued influence is due in large part to the consequences of high levels of poppy production, which are putting Afghanistan on the road to becoming a narco-state. As a result, there has been very little progress to date in U.S. and coalition efforts against drug trafficking."
Administration officials say that at this point, it appears that the Afghan government and coalition forces will not achieve even half their goal of eradicating 25 percent of this year's crop.
Even in public, the State Department, which is leading the counternarcotics effort in Afghanistan, is guarded about claiming successes.
"We have begun, but only begun, an eradication program, an interdiction program to go along with an alternative-livelihood program" for farmers, said William B. Taylor, State's coordinator for Afghanistan.
Government sources told The Washington Times that traffickers will produce somewhere between 5,400 metric tons and 7,200 metric tons of opium gum this year, an increase of 50 percent to 100 percent compared with 2003's crop. At the rate land is being used to grow poppies, the tonnage could double in 2005. The 2004 crop may produce from 540 to 720 metric tons of heroin, primarily for the European black market.
President Hamid Karzai is trying to bring sufficient peace to the countryside to be able to hold presidential elections in October. This is preventing decisive counternarcotics operations, U.S. officials say, for fear of alienating powerful warlords who tap into the drug stream.
"The narcotics threat is potentially the most powerful political and economic destabilizing force in Afghanistan," one official said.
The real threat to the United States, the sources said, is there is growing evidence that al Qaeda is tapping into the drug trade to finance operations. Afghanistan's yearly opium production is estimated at $2 billion.
Exactly where the money is going is still the point of debate inside the administration. Military intelligence agents on the ground believe the money is divided among farmers, producers, warlords who allow production in their territory, traffickers and al Qaeda.
Nearly three years after ousting the Taliban government, the Pentagon's strategy is to support Afghan counternarcotics units with equipment and intelligence information, said MaryBeth Long, the Defense Department's top anti-drug policy-maker.
"Narcotics trafficking not only hinders our efforts to defeat extremists and the terrorist forces in Afghanistan, but also our efforts to support the stability and legitimacy of the Afghan central government and to protect the security of the United States," Ms. Long told Mr. Hyde's committee.
"The counternarcotics effort in Afghanistan will take time, and it must be sustained over many years, perhaps as long as a decade," she said.
-------- homeland security
Security Might Get Tighter Yet, Officials Say
Changes Considered Near Treasury and White House
By Spencer S. Hsu and Cameron W. Barr
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, August 4, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A37933-2004Aug3?language=printer
Federal officials may restrict truck traffic and fence sidewalks on 15th Street NW near the White House and Treasury Department, authorities said yesterday, as heavily armed police began inspecting cars, trucks and buses at more than a dozen checkpoints around the U.S. Capitol.
Secret Service and Department of Homeland Security officials confirmed that additional precautions next to the Treasury Department headquarters have been under discussion since Sunday, when the Bush administration announced a heightened terror threat to financial institutions in Washington, New York City and New Jersey. A decision could come as soon as today.
Scores of U.S. Capitol Police officers closed portions of First Street NE and set up roadblocks around Capitol Hill, scrutinizing car compartments, boarding Metro buses and asking some drivers to show identification. Across town at the International Monetary Fund and World Bank headquarters in Foggy Bottom -- the two specific Washington sites identified as terrorist targets in Sunday's announcement -- police activity was comparatively subdued. No-parking signs had been posted, a bomb-sniffing dog stood by and a few cars queued near Pennsylvania Avenue NW with trunks opened for inspection.
The checkpoints slowed traffic, particularly during the morning rush hour, but the blockades seemed to function smoothly, generating more weariness than complaints.
"From a security perspective and a traffic flow, I think it went very well," Capitol Police Chief Terrance W. Gainer said. "We were well-prepared, and traffic is light in August."
But the curtailed access to major roads around key symbolic and functional centers in Washington marked a dramatic acceleration of the creeping encroachment of security measures in the nation's capital in recent years. District leaders decried the steps yesterday, pronouncing them draconian and an overreaction whose legacy would be felt for years.
"We are fighting to preserve both security and freedom, not one or the other," Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) said at a noon news conference with Mayor Anthony A. Williams (D) on Capitol Hill. "We're not going to accept the closing of the city."
Even D.C. Police Chief Charles H. Ramsey complained about the actions, rare criticism leveled at his former chief deputy and close friend, Gainer. "I'm not pleased at all with it," Ramsey said. "We weren't part of any kind of planning. They just told us what they were going to do."
Williams and Norton said the restrictions would worsen already bad congestion, harm local businesses and could be avoided by using Jersey barriers to shunt traffic away from federal buildings.
Whatever approach is used, Norton said, federal authorities should not block the Capitol from the American people. "I don't care if it's a red alert," Norton said. "Their job is to think of ways to make us safe and keep us open at the same time."
Added Williams: "When in doubt, preserve freedom."
The Capitol street closure was approved by Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), Minority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.) and the Republican chairman and ranking Democrat of the Senate panel that oversees rules for the Capitol, Sens. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) and Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.), according to Senate Sergeant-at-Arms William H. Pickle. House leaders went along but were less involved because the First Street closure runs between the Dirksen and Russell Senate office buildings.
Pickle said the decision was a "collective" one, based on intelligence briefings and a number of factors, including al Qaeda's habit of returning to earlier targets, the symbolism of the Capitol, the importance of "vehicle bombs as the weapon of choice" for terrorists and warnings of attacks in connection with the November elections.
There was no specific threat to the Capitol, he said.
Gainer also responded to critics: "By golly, it is inconvenient to people. It would have been inconvenient to people in August 2001 to increase security at the airport. But if we had done that, two airplanes wouldn't have flown into the World Trade Center and one into the Pentagon."
Restrictions on Capitol Hill soon could spread. Treasury, Homeland Security, Secret Service and District officials met last night, and a decision on possible new limits around the White House could come as early as today, two U.S. officials said.
Authorities may bar most trucks from a three- or four-block stretch of 15th Street NW just east of the White House and Treasury Department, between about E Street and New York Avenue, because of the threat from truck bombs, officials from two agencies said.
The Secret Service imposed a similar prohibition on an eight-block span of 17th Street NW on the west side of the White House in August 2002, enforced by electric road signs and uniformed Secret Service police officers.
In addition, Treasury officials are discussing closing the sidewalk on the west side of 15th Street alongside its headquarters, officials from two agencies said, to deter a suicide bombing.
Robert Nichols, a spokesman for Treasury Secretary John W. Snow, and Secret Service spokeswoman Lorie Lewis declined to comment about the proposal publicly. "A number of options are under consideration, but no final decision has been made," Homeland Security spokeswoman Valerie L. Smith said.
While D.C. Council member Carol Schwartz (R-At Large) protested that federal officials should "leave us alone," and Capitol Hill council member Sharon Ambrose (D-Ward 6) called the closures "a sneak attack on the District of Columbia based on old information," residents coped in the streets.
A number of Metrobus routes were delayed by the Capitol Hill closures and checkpoints -- Routes 30, 96, 97, A11, J11, N22, X3 and X8. Metro transit officials advised riders to visit www.metroopensdoors.com or call 202-637-7000 for details.
To Chris Adams, a coffee service delivery driver, having his truck stopped and searched by D.C. police in Foggy Bottom was just a part of doing business. "I'm fine with it,'' said Adams, 33, of Greenbelt. "If I can't make a delivery, my customers will know why.''
David Garrison, a Brookings Institution scholar, altered his walk to work to take in the checkpoints along Second Street NE but seemed unfazed by the sight of uniformed officers, concrete barriers and fluorescent orange traffic cones. "We're used to it up here on Capitol Hill," he said. "To some extent it seem like an overreaction, but how can we assess it as a private citizen?"
Practices varied from checkpoint to checkpoint. At the intersection of Second Street and Independence Avenue SE, 19 uniformed officers infrequently looked in vehicle trunks, while two blocks away at C Street, nearly every car was searched.
At Second Street NE, Robert Nettey was asked to pull over, produce identification and hand over his car keys. Officers did not explain why, he said.
An inscription on the Dirksen building affirms that "the Senate is the living symbol of our union of states." Yesterday the street beneath, nearly devoid of traffic, was unusually quiet.
Staff writers Dakarai I. Aarons, Arielle Levin Becker, Helen Dewar, Sari Horwitz, Lyndsey Layton, Daniele Seiss, Eric M. Weiss, Martin Weil and Del Quentin Wilber contributed to this report.
----
Impervious Shield Elusive Against Drive-By Terrorists
By Spencer S. Hsu and Sari Horwitz
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, August 8, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A48677-2004Aug7.html?referrer=email
Government bomb technicians have packed Chevrolet sedans, Dodge vans and Ryder trucks with 10 tons of explosives and have blown them up in the desolate New Mexico desert hoping to analyze the flight of debris over the sand.
Federal agents in Front Royal, Va., have trained more than 400 Labrador retrievers to sniff out the chemical compounds used in 19,000 separate explosives formulas.
Law enforcement officers have left thousands of calling cards across the country -- from a farmer's co-op store in McPherson, Kan., to a chemical company in West Haven, Conn. -- asking sales managers to report unusual interest in fertilizer or other components of homemade bombs.
The United States has spent more than $1 billion on these and other efforts to stop a single threat: the explosion of a car or truck bomb at a government installation or other structure. But 11 years after Muslim extremists used an explosives-laden van to attack the World Trade Center and nearly three years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, even senior federal agents acknowledge that the country has virtually no defense against a terrorist barreling down the street with a truck bomb.
"If a person doesn't care about dying, they can pull right up to a building, push a button and the building would go," said Michael E. Bouchard, assistant director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. "That's why we have checkpoints and try to keep large vehicles away from buildings."
The government has been racing to devise ways to systematically detect and warn against plotters creating truck bombs. But those efforts are embryonic at best, government officials say, even as al Qaeda and other Islamic extremists have used the truck bomb time and again overseas and the threat to use it here is growing.
The frustrating struggle to thwart terrorists' low-tech, low-cost weapon of choice provides a case study of America's challenge in waging the fight in the post 9/11 world -- a fight in which the enemy is hiding and the traditional role of soldiers and weapons takes a back seat to intelligence and prevention.
It is a war in which the United States, with all its technological and economic advantages, has been unable to develop protection against a self-taught bomber assembling large amounts of explosives in secret, acquiring a vehicle and fading into the landscape before detonating a payload.
Since the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the government has hardened federal buildings and military facilities at home and abroad; passed laws restricting the sale of explosives and shipments of hazardous materials; inspected thousands of people who deal with explosives; and researched explosive-detection and vehicle-disabling technology. But the only foolproof defense was on display last week, when heavily armed police sealed off buildings, roads and bridges in Washington, New York and Newark after the government issued an elevated terror alert focusing on five financial institutions.
The threat of truck bombs underscores the ways terrorists can turn America's economic strength and freedoms against itself, academic experts say.
"The challenge is to provide a level of security that does not impede normal life and commerce, which would achieve the terrorists' aims without even launching an attack," said Bruce Hoffman, author of "Inside Terrorism" and head of the Washington office of the Rand Corp., a nonprofit think tank.
In a society based largely on the free movement of information, bombmakers acquire their expertise from chemistry texts, the Internet or each other. Taking advantage of a giant economy that depends on efficiency, they can buy or steal bomb components and obtain vehicles without fear of regulation while security measures are resisted by many farmers, truckers, city planners and citizens. They exploit free movement of people through states and cities, requiring society to undertake extraordinary surveillance and spend large amounts of time and effort to find them.
"What do you do when you have whole cities built up with no regard to this threat?" asked Daniel Benjamin, former counterterrorism director at the National Security Council. "Are we going to turn Lower Manhattan into a pedestrian zone?"
Counterterrorism experts say the threat is especially striking because al Qaeda and other Muslim extremists have demonstrated mastery of the weapon. Since the first World Trade Center attack was plotted by Ramzi Yousef with 1,200 pounds of chemical explosives tied to Casio watch timers in a rented Ford van, al Qaeda cells perpetrated simultaneous truck bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, blew up three housing compounds in Saudi Arabia in May 2003, attacked resorts in Bali and Jakarta and carried out multiple bombings in post-war Iraq.
In Britain, authorities recovered a half-ton of ammonium nitrate in March, and in April, Jordanian officials disrupted a plan that involved tons of commercial fertilizer and two heavy trucks.
"The truck bomb is a pervasive threat. Al Qaeda is adept at it and comfortable with it, and for all those reasons it is difficult to protect against it," Hoffman said. "The lesson of September 11 was there's not a moment to lose, but we're constantly behind the curve. . . . We improve security, and it slows them down slightly, but it doesn't stop them." A Strategy Shattered
On April 19, 1995, disillusioned Persian Gulf War veteran Timothy J. McVeigh and Army washout Terry L. Nichols blew the face off the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City with a 5,000-pound mixture of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil, killing 168 people.
The bomb was instructive in its power and ease of assembly. Equivalent to 4,100 pounds of dynamite, the blast damaged 312 buildings, cracked glass as far as two miles away and inflicted 80 percent of its injuries on people outside the building, up to a half-mile away. ATF officials had never studied the effects of a vehicle bomb larger than about 1,200 pounds, an ATF explosives expert said.
The components came largely from a Kansas co-op. Nichols bought two tons of fertilizer in 50-pound sacks starting seven months before the attack. McVeigh also was careful to avoid detection, renting a Ryder truck from a Junction City, Kan., body shop one state away from his target.
Today, it remains difficult to detect similar activity. Nearly 5 million tons of ammonium nitrate fertilizer are sold each year in the United States. None of it is regulated, although its explosive properties are used in mining and construction and by armies around the world. Government controls are resisted by farm and chemical lobbies, who say they would burden law-abiding citizens and not thwart terrorists. U.S. law permits farmers to mix it with fuel oil for personal demolition uses.
Controlling vehicles is similarly problematic. There are 23.8 million trucks used for business purposes in the United States and 70 million more in personal use, according to the American Trucking Associations.
Unlike commercial aviation, motor vehicles are not registered by a single federal agency; they're not based at a fixed number of airports or operated by a small number of companies controlling access to them. There are 600,000 trucking companies, which have 2.6 million tractors, 3.1 million big-rig drivers and 5 million trailers, the association said.
Regulation is complicated not only by sheer numbers, but also by fragmentation of the industry and of state and federal regulators, analysts said. For example, unlike many countries in Europe, which have national motor vehicle databases, each U.S. state maintains its own records.
Also, 92 percent of trucking companies are mom and pop operations with 20 or fewer trucks, said Tom Nightingale, spokesman for Schneider National Inc., the nation's biggest truck carrier. Schneider holds just 4 percent of the market.
There is also the problem of rentals. The FBI and Department of Homeland Security issued their latest threat bulletin Thursday, warning car, truck and limousine rental companies to report suspicious people. "There is no standard type of vehicle associated with" delivering a car or truck bomb, the alert says.
The bulletin listed suspicious behavior and urged companies to file detailed reports. It took special note of limousines, which it said have larger storage capacity and may get special treatment to approach buildings.
And with 1 million cars and trucks stolen in the United States each year, counterterrorism agents say they would investigate only if other evidence linked it to terrorism.
With such challenges, law enforcement authorities say they have few warning signals to stop bombers from building their weapons and approaching their targets.
As one ATF explosives expert said, "The only true defense is to shut the road down so no one can come down there. Sedans, sport-utility vehicles, a Ryder truck, a large flatbed vehicle or a truck -- there's no sure-fire way to look at that vehicle and say, 'That's a large vehicle bomb.' " The expert spoke on condition of anonymity because of agency security rules.
Added Bouchard: "Distance is our friend."
For the U.S. government, blast walls, barricades and setbacks at sensitive buildings have become the last line of defense. The Pentagon, White House and Capitol increasingly resemble fortresses. Defensive measures costing hundreds of millions of dollars are proposed or underway at more than 20 facilities, and the government has adopted a 100-foot setback as a guideline for high-security new construction in the United States and overseas.
The problem is that hardening some locations might redirect terrorists to "softer" ones, including hotels, malls or stadiums, analysts said.
"You cannot secure all of the potential targets for the U.S. government or government employees in Washington, or New York City for that matter," said Ronald K. Noble, who was U.S. Treasury undersecretary when the Secret Service shut Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House in 1995 and is now secretary general of Interpol.
Michael Mason, assistant FBI director for the Washington field office, likened the sense of vulnerability to boxing in the dark against a terrorist with "night vision goggles. They know when they're going to attack, how they're going to attack and where they're going to strike," he said. "You reach out and think you have an elbow. You think you have a shoulder, but it takes time to put it all together to effectively strike back." Competing Priorities
For four years in the 1990s at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, government technicians wired vehicles with explosives and tracked the blasts' effects with high-speed cameras. In Florida and overseas, scientists conducted similar tests -- adding buildings to the destructive mix.
Dubbed "Dipole Might" and funded by the National Security Council, the tests mapped the flight of debris as small as a matchbook, crater patterns and even the street sign-bending effects of blasts. Those experiments have become the basis of U.S. truck bomb forensics, allowing investigators to identify the type and quantity of explosive from studying the effects of the blast. But in 2000, the money ran out, and so did the tests, the ATF said. Agents say they need more. Based on the experience in Iraq and around the globe, the diversity of explosives has grown.
The desert tests reflect both the promise and the limits of the struggle to manage the threat. Some outside observers say other government efforts have not been creative or energetic enough.
"The administration has focused primarily on two areas. . . . One is aviation security, and the other is bioterrorism," said Benjamin, a former Clinton administration official and co-author of "The Age of Sacred Terror." "Truck bombs have been very far down the list."
In March, the Transportation Security Administration awarded a $19 million grant to American Trucking Associations to expand Highway Watch, a computerized instant-reporting network through which professional drivers and highway workers can report accidents, thefts, hazards and suspicious incidents nationwide.
Cited by TSA officials as a major initiative, it, too, was funded at half the $43 million the industry requested back in 2002.
"We are the point men. We are the Distant Early Warning line for the trucking security problem," said Jeff Beatty, security consultant to ATA, comparing the system to the nation's northernmost radar defense line during the Cold War to detect a Soviet nuclear attack.
Regulatory initiatives have been delayed or watered down because of concerns by industry groups that say a cure may be worse than the illness. In June, Homeland Security announced it had completed background checks of 2.7 million commercial driver's license holders authorized to haul hazardous materials, but it culled only 29 with potential terrorist connections.
Another fingerprint-based background-check program, which has been opposed by truckers, has been delayed nine months. The program, now scheduled to begin Jan. 1, would require states to collect fingerprints from hazmat drivers to undergo FBI checks as well, part of a USA Patriot Act requirement.
"People ask, 'What's the big deal?' But a one-hour delay [for the nation's truck drivers] costs the entire truck industry $500 million," Nightingale said.
Similar sensitivity limits the controls of bomb components. Last month, the fertilizer industry urged ammonium nitrate sellers to voluntarily track sales and require buyers to show identification. But it resists any government regulation, and only Nevada and South Carolina have laws requiring tracking.
The move followed a history of voluntary initiatives. In 1996, the Fertilizer Institute and ATF unveiled a "Be Aware for America" campaign after the Oklahoma City bombing, distributing 30,000 brochures and asking industry members to report suspicious activities.
In 2001, they launched another education campaign, "Be Secure for America," encouraging manufacturers, distributors and retailers to prevent theft. In April, after the arrest of alleged terrorists in England, ATF met again with industry officials and rolled out "America's Security Begins with You." This time, the mission was to raise awareness and ask for voluntary reporting of thefts or unexplained losses.
Kathy Mathers, spokeswoman for the Fertilizer Institute, said most fertilizer is sold in rural outposts. "These retail outlets and employees know their customers. A customer they don't know . . . will raise suspicions," she said.
On another front, the government last year began requiring all people receiving explosives to obtain a permit from the ATF -- "a major change," said Audrey Stucko, chief of the ATF's firearms and explosives services division.
The Safe Explosives Act requires users and sellers of explosives to submit photographs and fingerprints and undergo criminal background checks. About 12,300 licenses and permits have been issued by the agency.
At the end of the day, the nation's security experts say they expect terrorists will get their hands on the weapon and that keeping bombers away from buildings is their best hope.
The FBI's Mason, whose office is handling about 800 terrorism cases, warns that the public is "being fed a false bill of goods" if it is led to believe that every terrorist will be stopped. He described security measures as a "net that stretches from coast to coast" and government efforts as an attempt to "shrink the mesh."
"Despite all the reforms and changes being made at the FBI and other agencies, the best we can hope to do is shrink the size of the mesh, allowing fewer things to pass through," Mason said.
Staff researchers Madonna Lebling and Don Pohlman contributed to this report.
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Seriousness of Threat Defended Despite Dated Intelligence
By Dan Eggen and John Mintz
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, August 4, 2004; Page A11
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A37954-2004Aug3?language=printer
Bush administration officials acknowledged yesterday that the latest terrorism alert was based primarily on information that is three to four years old, but they aggressively defended the decision to warn financial sectors in Washington, New York and Newark because of the continuing threat posed by al Qaeda.
Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge said at a news conference in New York that while much of the intelligence that led to the alert was dated, authorities were alarmed by evidence that al Qaeda computer files obtained last week had been updated as recently as January.
"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," Ridge said, adding: "When you see this kind of detailed planning, you have to take preemptive action."
Ridge's comments came after reports that the surveillance of five financial institutions in the three cities by al Qaeda operatives occurred as long as four years ago and that authorities were unsure whether it had continued since 2001. U.S. officials raised the terrorist threat level to orange -- or "high risk of terrorist attacks" -- on Sunday for financial services sectors in the three cities, suggesting initially that the plot was believed to be ongoing.
The debate over the surveillance information is the latest controversy over the administration's system of color-coded threat alerts, which have been criticized as vague and difficult for local officials and the public to act upon. The alert Ridge issued on Sunday, however, was narrowly targeted and based in large part on information that al Qaeda operatives had surveilled five buildings: 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.
But authorities did not publicly make it clear until yesterday that the information compiled during that surveillance, contained on computer disks and documents seized during raids in Pakistan, was created in 2000 and 2001 or, in some cases, undated. Much of the information was also obtained from the Internet or other public sources, officials said.
Authorities issued somewhat conflicting signals yesterday about the timing of the surveillance. Frances Fragos Townsend, the White House deputy national security adviser for terrorism, said in a television interview that "the casings were done in 2000 and 2001." Ridge said the information "might be two or three years old," adding that "there's no evidence of recent surveillance."
White House press secretary Scott McClellan, meanwhile, told reporters that "it's wrong and plain irresponsible to suggest that [the alert] was based on old information."
Two senior intelligence officials stressed yesterday that the U.S. government has information from interrogations of recently captured al Qaeda operatives and other seized documents that buttresses the assertion that U.S. financial sites, possibly including the five buildings, were targeted for attack.
The pre-Sept. 11 computer files "are corroborated by other intelligence of strong credibility that is of a very, very current nature," one of the officials said, referring to intelligence from detainee interrogations and other documents.
One said the government has "very, very recent information showing a clear terrorist intent related to planning attacks," and said the computer files related to the casings are "part of a larger package of information we gained access to." Taken together, the information makes clear that "this is not information for information's sake," one of the officials said. "The context is attacking."
The two senior officials defended their explanation of the orange alert Sunday, saying it referred to the computer files from 2000 and 2001 and to several more current streams of intelligence.
"We were doing what we thought was our job, to uphold our sworn duty to protect people, and now we're being criticized for doing it," one official added. "The detail and specificity of the [computer] reports was so striking and dramatic that we felt we had no choice" but to consider releasing it.
Law enforcement officials, who declined to be identified because classified information is involved, said the earliest entry in the surveillance documents found on the computer was January 2000. U.S. officials are attempting to determine the age of some recovered paper documents.
The law enforcement officials and others said one of the computer files, which was related to one of the five buildings put on alert, was opened as recently as this January. The CIA and other intelligence agencies are still working to determine whether the file was changed in any way. The file contained photographs of the building in question, a law enforcement official said.
In all, the materials include about 500 photographs, drawings and diagrams, officials said.
The ramp-up to Sunday's alert began three days earlier, when acting CIA Director John E. McLaughlin presided over the CIA's daily 5 p.m. counterterrorism meeting. Attended by representatives of every major intelligence agency, such as the FBI, the National Security Agency and the Pentagon, the meeting included extensive discussions of the newly acquired material.
Intelligence officials would later describe it as the most remarkable "treasure trove" of information about an al Qaeda plot that many of them had ever seen. Officials said the documents showed meticulous and long-running surveillance of the targets, including counts of pedestrian traffic, details about employee routines and discussion about the kinds of explosives that might work best to destroy each building.
President Bush was informed Friday morning aboard Air Force One, during his daily intelligence briefing, an aide said. The CIA, which worked around the clock for the next 72 hours translating and attempting to make sense of the material, told Bush about "emerging information that might require us to take preventive action on certain specific targets," the aide said.
Paul Brown, deputy commissioner for public affairs at the New York Police Department, said Commissioner Ray Kelly learned about the emerging information late Friday. Brown said the details were alarming.
"It doesn't take a genius to know that bin Laden would like to hit Wall Street," Brown said, referring to Osama bin Laden, leader of the al Qaeda network. "Now we go to last Friday. We hear very good reconnaissance, and we put it together with what we know and our past experience, and I'd say that our response was rational from our point of view."
The plans for what to release publicly were made during a 90-minute meeting that began at 10 a.m. Sunday in the White House situation room, with some officials calling in over secure phone lines. Bush authorized raising the alert after church services that morning, aides said.
The public alert was preceded by an unusual conference call between Ridge and news executives at 1 p.m. Sunday, in which he talked about "a most unusual set of circumstances where, from a variety of different sources that we continue to exploit, there's a convergence of information that compels us to talk publicly about specific potential targets."
Bush and his top aides said yesterday that they knew much of the information that inspired the terrorist alert was years old but reacted urgently because they saw echoes of the long planning that preceded the Sept. 11 attacks, administration officials said yesterday.
"The fact that the casing began over the course of a longer period of time is consistent with how al Qaeda operates but does not suggest that the information itself was not then outdated or not relevant," White House communications director Dan Bartlett said.
But Ivo H. Daalder, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who was a National Security Council official under President Bill Clinton, said it "would have been useful for Mr. Ridge to have explained that information they were acting on was largely old."
"I don't doubt that this information was found -- I don't think they made it up," Daalder said. "But there is a real question of: Are we finding the kind of information that ought to worry and concern us as much as it has at the moment?"
Ridge dismissed such criticism yesterday. "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," he said. "We don't do politics in the Department of Homeland Security."
Staff writers Mike Allen, Spencer S. Hsu, Del Quentin Wilber, Dana Priest and Walter Pincus in Washington and Michael Powell in New York contributed to this report.
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New Qaeda Activity Is Said to Be Major Factor in Alert
August 4, 2004
By DOUGLAS JEHL and RICHARD W. STEVENSON
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/04/politics/04terror.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, Aug. 3 - Senior government officials said Tuesday that new intelligence pointing to a current threat of a terrorist attack on financial targets in New York and possibly in Washington - not just information about surveillance on specific buildings over the years - was a major factor in the decision over the weekend to raise the terrorism alert level.
The officials said the separate stream of intelligence, which they had not previously disclosed, reached the White House only late last week and was part of a flow that the officials said had prompted them to act urgently in the last few days.
The officials disclosed the information a day after the Bush administration acknowledged for the first time that much of the surveillance activity cited last weekend by Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge to justify the latest, specific warnings had been at least three years old. At the same time, the White House offered a vigorous defense of its decision to heighten the alert in Manhattan, Newark and Washington, with officials saying there was still good reason for alarm.
"I think it's wrong and plain irresponsible to suggest that it was based on old information,'' Scott McClellan, the White House spokesman, said of the heightened warning as President Bush traveled to Dallas on a campaign swing.
In an appearance in New York, Mr. Ridge responded forcefully to a question about whether election-year politics had played a part in determining how and when the intelligence was released.
"We don't do politics in the Department of Homeland Security,'' Mr. Ridge said.
He added: "The detail, the sophistication, the thoroughness of this information, if you had access to it, you'd say we did the right thing. Government should let the public know about situations like this. It's not about politics. It's about confidence in government telling you when they get the information.''
In addition to the surveillance activity, detailed in reports uncovered late last week from computer disks in Pakistan, a senior intelligence official said that "very current and recent activity on the part of Al Qaeda'' has left little doubt that "Al Qaeda is moving toward the execution stage of attacks here in the homeland.''
The language used by senior administration officials on Tuesday in warning of a possible attack was at least as strong as that Mr. Ridge used in announcing the alert on Sunday, and much stronger than the language used on Monday, when the officials acknowledged that the reconnaissance reports dated back to the period surrounding the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Among other things, one official disclosed on Tuesday that one intelligence report had pointed to a possible attack "in August or September.''
That shifting tone may prove frustrating to the public, providing little guidance for assessing the gravity of threat information whose details remain shrouded in intelligence reports not available to anyone outside the highest ranks of the government.
A senior White House official who mentioned the new stream of intelligence in an interview refused to say anything more about its source or content. The official said it had not been publicly disclosed out of concern that such a step could compromise intelligence and law enforcement operations in the United States and around the world. Officials would not describe those operations but said they were meant to disrupt a possible plot.
But senior federal intelligence and law enforcement officials also described the intelligence as important. They said it had reached the White House last Friday and strongly reinforced the sense of alarm prompted by the separate flow of information that was arriving at the same time via the Central Intelligence Agency from Pakistan and that was based on information culled from seized computer disks that contained detailed case reports of reconnaissance conducted on buildings in Manhattan, Newark and Washington in 2000 and 2001.
In providing new details about those case reports, senior government officials described them for the first time as discrete documents, each at least 20 pages long and devoted to a particular target, and perhaps most intriguingly, they said, written in "perfect English.''
The author of the reports was "obviously someone who has lived an extensive period of time in the West, exceptionally professional, exceptionally meticulous,'' a senior intelligence official said in a telephone interview. "Anyone who thinks that these terrorists are a bunch of ne'er-do-wells, if 9/11 didn't convince them, these case reports would convince them.''
Though the case reports do appear to have been completed before the Sept. 11 attacks, as Bush administration officials first acknowledged on Monday, some of the computer files appear to have been updated or accessed more recently. One was a file modified in January and including a photograph of a building, a senior White House official said. The official also said there was reason to believe that people associated with Al Qaeda who are still at large would have had access to the reports.
The officials would not identify the building that appears in the recently modified file, except to say that it was not one of the five that have been named. Those five are the New York Stock Exchange and the Citigroup Center in Manhattan, the Prudential building in Newark and the headquarters of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in Washington.
The officials also acknowledged that they had not been able to assess the significance of the fact that the computer file had been modified. Such a modification could have meant that the file was updated with newly taken surveillance photographs but might simply have meant that the file had recently been opened and closed.
The White House officials spoke in a lengthy interview arranged at the request of The New York Times in which they offered a detailed accounting of the decision-making that led to the terrorist alert.
The computer disks on which the case reports were found were linked to Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan, a 25-year-old Pakistani computer engineer who was arrested by Pakistani authorities on July 13, American officials have confirmed. The officials have described Mr. Khan's arrest, carried out at the request of the C.I.A. , as having provided the crucial breakthrough in the case, leading them not only to the case reports but also to information about other Qaeda officials still at large who appear to have had access to the documents.
Mr. Khan has been described as having cooperated with Pakistani and American interrogators, and some American officials said that the information he himself provided, as distinct from the computer records, may also have pointed to the prospect of a current threat of terrorism in New York and Washington.
A senior official from the Department of Homeland Security was among those who sought to emphasize that the computer files containing the case reports were not the only new source of intelligence being reviewed at senior levels of the administration in the hours before the alert was made public.
"All the information wasn't from one source; there was new information that was introduced late Friday night,'' the official said.
For weeks, senior intelligence officials have said that multiple streams of intelligence, including information provided from intercepted communications, interrogations of Qaeda prisoners and foreign intelligence services, had pointed to the increasing possibility of a major terrorist attack in the United States this year, most likely before the Nov. 2 election.
But the government officials said the intelligence reviewed only late last week was more significant in pointing to financial targets in New York and possibly Washington.
Eric Lichtblau contributed reporting for this article.
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PREPARATIONS
In Age of Terror, How Long Should Security Stay Tight?
August 4, 2004
By MICHAEL WILSON
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/04/nyregion/04security.html?pagewanted=all&position=
In New Jersey, which has suddenly found itself on a list of potential terrorism targets, police chiefs bemoaned the costs of its heightened security procedures.
In Washington, the municipal police bristled at what they called the walling-in of the nation's Capitol, and the traffic jams it caused.
And in New York City, there were questions as to whether new security measures should be kept in place even for the rest of the month - including during the Republic National Convention.
Just two days after the new terror alerts, questions - and even resentment - arose from inside the cross hairs, and police officials coordinating stepped-up security measures were looking ahead to when it would be possible to step back down.
Sunday's announcement that Al Qaeda operatives had staked out several financial centers in New York, New Jersey and Washington was somewhat tempered on Monday with the disclosure that the operatives' legwork had been conducted three or four years ago. The material is believed to have been updated as recently as last January.
Yesterday, officials were grappling with the delicate question of when a threat - especially one as detailed as the one described Sunday - expires. Law enforcement officials in all three areas said they were negotiating the balance between protecting the public in the face of intelligence, some of it four years old, and allowing life to go on as usual.
Some said that a threat, no matter its age, had to be acted upon, others said they detected an overreaction, and still others said that in this era of terror threats, there really is no concrete playbook for those responsible for protecting against an attack.
"We're still looking at it every day," said Paul J. Browne, a New York City Police spokesman. "There is still material being analyzed from what was captured."
Senior White House officials said yesterday that while some intelligence concerning the New York Stock Exchange and the Citigroup buildings was dated, the city was included in a "second stream" of intelligence concerning a possible attack. The information reached the White House on Friday, the same day it learned of the other, more dated intelligence. The Police Department declined to comment directly on the second stream.
"In and of itself, that some of the material is dated does not permit us to let our guard down," Mr. Browne said.
He said that the Department of Homeland Security had notified police officials of the time frame that the intelligence was gathered almost as soon as the agency contacted the city on Friday night. But the threat is being treated as immediate.
The police are diverting trucks from several entrances into Manhattan and are searching vehicles and people. No decision has been made yet on how long the searches will continue; they may not even last through the month and the Republican National Convention, Mr. Browne said.
"Our convention security was robust to begin with," he noted. "We don't expect any significant changes as a result of this new information."
In New Jersey, officials lashed out at Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, saying that he did not immediately tell them the age of the intelligence. Mayor Sharpe James of Newark said he discovered that the information was dated from the news Monday night, and that the city's homeland security official was not allowed to view the F.B.I. document outlining the threat until Monday, after decisions about how to react had already been made.
"The tragedy of this whole issue is that with homeland security, you can't separate the politics from the security," he said. "If we don't set up precautions and a tragedy happens, we're irresponsible."
But Mr. Ridge defended Sunday's announcement during an appearance in New York yesterday, saying that releasing the information was "not about politics."
If nothing new is learned to bolster the threat in the coming weeks, officials will be left with the questions of whether to diminish their security, and how to do so without seeming to take the matter less seriously.
"If it stays this way then what do you do?" said Senator Charles E. Schumer, a Democrat of New York. "Do it until the election? After the election? These are very difficult decisions to make."
Officials stressed that the age of some of the information did not dampen its relevance.
"Al Qaeda took years to plan the 9/11 attacks," said Councilman Peter F. Vallone Jr., of New York. "The fact that it's three-and-a-half years old shouldn't lessen our vigilance."
Indeed, the beefed up security around the New York Stock Exchange and the Citigroup buildings could become part of New York's so-called "shades of orange" alert, an evolving and shifting police presence throughout the city, he said.
Officials in New Jersey, expressed concern about mounting costs. "However long term, it's going to be costly to keep that type of presence around Prudential," said Director Anthony F. Ambrose of the Newark Police Department. "It's tough to not know how long this is going to last."
Jersey City, which the Holland Tunnel links to Manhattan, is spending an additional $16,000 a day in overtime, said Chief Ron Buonocore.
Elected officials used the alerts to renew a call for more federal financing to combat terror. Senators Jon S. Corzine and Frank R. Lautenberg of New Jersey and Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York sent letters to the White House complaining of insufficient financing.
In Washington, the mayor accused the Capitol Police of effectively closing streets around the Capitol for vehicle screening.
The police did this with "no consultation or courtesy of any kind," said Tony Bullock, director of communications for Mayor Anthony A. Williams. These measures are "walling off the Capitol - turning it into a gated community for the governmental elite," he said. "We can't absorb this - these cars have no-where to go," he said, citing "massive gridlock" with the closings of one block of E Street, and Independence and Constitution Avenues. Mr. Bullock also said that the mayor's office had not been advised of any threat to these areas, and they were responding to the heightened terror alert by activating closed-circuit TV surveillance cameras around the city and "staying on top of things that look suspicious."
Reporting for this article was contributed by Jason George, Colin Moynihan and Damien Cave, in New Jersey, and Jason Pesick, in Washington.
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City complains about closures
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
By S.A. Miller
August 04, 2004
http://www.washtimes.com/metro/20040803-101543-3035r.htm
D.C. officials criticized the federal government yesterday for not consulting them before closing a downtown thoroughfare and staging checkpoints that have slowed traffic around the Capitol - the third time since the September 11 attacks that national security has trumped the city government when closing streets.
Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, Mayor Anthony A. Williams and D.C. Council members Sharon Ambrose and Carol Schwartz expressed their displeasure at a press conference yesterday beside a closed-off section of First Street NE.
They said U.S. Capitol Police disregarded D.C. residents, businesses and tourists by imposing traffic restrictions without consulting city leaders. The impediments, they said, will hurt the rebounding economy and force traffic into Capitol Hill neighborhoods, where residents include children and the elderly.
"We just want to put everybody in the House and Senate on notice that we will never accept the closure of streets simply as a knee-jerk reaction," said Mrs. Norton, the District's nonvoting congressional delegate. "It is dangerous to shut off access to a major portion of any street in any big city."
Mrs. Norton called the road closure a "draconian, last-resort solution."
She also said, "We are fighting to preserve security and freedom, not one or the other."
Capitol Police early yesterday closed the heavily traveled First Street NE between Constitution Avenue and D Street and set up the checkpoints to inspect every vehicle passing near the Capitol. Officials said they had planned the changes for years and that the moves were only partly in response to the elevated terror alert in New Jersey, New York and the District.
Capitol Police Chief Terrance W. Gainer said when announcing the changes on Monday that he expected a backlash from city officials but that security around the Capitol takes precedent.
He said Monday night that the checkpoints likely will remain in place until after the Nov. 2 general election or until after the Jan. 20 presidential inauguration. He also said the First Street closure could continue indefinitely.
He declined yesterday to respond to the comments by city officials.
Traffic tie-ups on Capitol Hill frustrated morning commuters who watched as officers stopped and inspected every vehicle at checkpoints at First and Second streets and on Constitution, Independence, Maryland, New Jersey and Pennsylvania avenues.
Metro officials have advised bus riders to expect delays because of detoured routes around Capitol Hill.
Capitol Police Sgt. Devin Gildea said officers will inspect every vehicle without exception. Yesterday, an officer with an assault rifle was inside a Metro bus at a checkpoint.
"The officers are doing an outstanding job, and the people coming in have been very understanding," Sgt. Gildea said.
The driver of a work van who had to open a rear compartment for a search said the experience was "not bad" and that the checkpoint stop took only a couple of seconds. At midday, most vehicles appeared to spend about five seconds at a checkpoint.
Silver Wosu, a 65-year-old taxi driver who was picking up fares in Capitol Hill, said the changes are necessary.
A Capitol Hill business employee disagreed.
"It was aggravating getting here," said Bonnie Ryan, a bartender at the Tune Inn Restaurant. "You have to go all the way around the checkpoints."
Mrs. Norton and Mr. Williams, both Democrats, have opposed the permanent closure of Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House, which was blocked to traffic after the April 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.
After the September 11 attacks, the federal government also closed a section of E Street adjacent to the White House and a section of First Street in Southeast beside the Capitol office buildings.
Mr. Williams said yesterday said the closure of Pennsylvania Avenue at the White House continues to hurt downtown business and the District's tourist trade. He also said more closings will add to the problem.
Although Mr. Williams said he understood the need for tighter security, he thinks city officials should be consulted.
"This is a living, breathing city," he said. "You cannot continue to close streets without dealing death to this city [and] commerce in this city."
The street closure and checkpoints coincided with the Metropolitan Police Department's heightened security at the World Bank and International Monetary Fund buildings, after Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge's announcement on Sunday that "unusually specific" intelligence indicated the al Qaeda terrorists were planning attacks on five financial institutions. The Capitol was not included among the announced targets.
Mr. Ridge increased the terrorist threat level for the institutions from Code Yellow to Code Orange, indicating a "high" alert status. Mr. Williams and D.C. police also raised the city's alert level to Code Orange on Sunday.
Mrs. Ambrose, Ward 6 Democrat, said D.C. transportation officials have been resisting the federal government's efforts to seal off the Capitol since the September 11 attacks and that federal officials used the Code Orange alert as an excuse to implement the plan.
"What is so awful about this is that it was so sneaky," said Mrs. Ambrose, who represents all of Capitol Hill. "I very much resent having this sneaked in here in the middle of the night under an orange blanket."
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Security boosted around U.S. Capitol
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
By Amy Fagan
August 04, 2004
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20040803-110115-9032r.htm
U.S. Capitol Police, in consultation with congressional leaders, decided to beef up security around the Capitol, even though it was not mentioned as a terror target this weekend, because it is thought that any threat against the District warrants extra protection on Capitol Hill.
"[A]ny threat against any portion of D.C., we take as a possible threat against us, and we react accordingly," said Michael Lauer, assistant public-information officer for the Capitol Police.
Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge cited "unusually specific" intelligence on Sunday when raising the terror level for financial institutions considered targets in New York, New Jersey and Washington. The D.C. targets are the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
U.S. Capitol Police are inspecting every vehicle passing near the Capitol at checkpoints on Constitution, Independence, Maryland, New Jersey and Pennsylvania avenues, and at First and Second streets. They've also closed First Street NE, between Constitution Avenue and D Street.
The Capitol Police Board - which consists of the Capitol Police, the sergeants-at-arms of the House and Senate, and the architect of the Capitol - recommended the increased Capitol Hill security on Sunday, after Mr. Ridge's announcement.
Mr. Lauer said increased Capitol Hill security has been under discussion anyway, so this weekend's increased terror level wasn't the only motivating factor, although it definitely contributed.
He said the extra tight security on the Hill reduces the possibility of vehicle bombs around the Capitol.
"This was the best option that we felt would prevent harm to any congressional members or its facilities," he said.
"House leadership and Senate leadership, Capitol Police, which includes the sergeant-at-arms ... consulted one another and came to the conclusion of what you see on the streets today," said Pete Jeffries, spokesman for House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, Illinois Republican.
Mr. Jeffries said the decision process included Mr. Hastert and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, California Democrat.
But a spokeswoman for Mrs. Pelosi's office said, "We were informed by the sergeant-at-arms of the decision" on Monday afternoon.
"It wasn't as if we were asked if this is something [we] think is appropriate," said Jennifer Crider.
Still, Miss Crider didn't criticize the extra security, saying, "It's what the Capitol Police and the sergeant-at-arms feel is necessary. They are responsible for security."
Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, Tennessee Republican, consulted with Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, South Dakota Democrat - as well as the chairman of the Senate Rules and Administration Committee, Sen. Trent Lott, Mississippi Republican, and Sen. Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut, the panel's top Democrat - before agreeing to the recommendations.
Mr. Jeffries said the move is justified because new security measures always "throw the bad guys off their game," and "anything that disrupts the normal flow and ultimately keeps us safe is a positive step."
"The Capitol Police made a recommendation about the best way to protect the lives of the people who live and work on Capitol Hill, and we wanted to do what they thought was best," said Sara Feinbergh, spokeswoman for Mr. Daschle.
Capitol Hill staffers didn't seem to mind the inconvenience of the increased security.
"The short answer is, there are crazy people who want to kill us, so security is good," said a House Democratic aide.
The aide said it's always "highly unpopular to close down streets in D.C. because it inconveniences people," but "I'm never opposed to increased security."
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House begins series of hearings on 9/11 report
UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL
By Shaun Waterman
August 04, 2004
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20040803-110100-5595r.htm
The House of Representatives yesterday held the first of more than 15 hearings before a half-dozen committees to discuss the recommendations of the September 11 commission.
But in this rush to debate the findings of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, congressional leaders have demonstrated the truth of at least one of them: There are too many committees with jurisdiction over the nation's counterterrorism agencies.
President Bush pointed out Monday that Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge and his senior officials testified at least 148 times before the 88 congressional committees and subcommittees that have jurisdiction over their activities in the nine months of 2003 that the department was in existence.
"It seems to me," said the president, "that it's one thing to testify and for there to be oversight; it's another to make sure that the people who are engaged in protecting America don't spend all their time testifying."
Congressional oversight of counterterrorism policy is a hodgepodge of conflicting and overlapping jurisdiction. Critics say it distracts some officials from their primary mission and - worse - leaves others with a budgetary and legislative back door through which they can escape effective scrutiny and spending control.
The Department of Homeland Security probably has the worst of it. In the Senate, its work is overseen by the Governmental Affairs Committee. The House Select Committee on Homeland Security is scheduled to be dissolved at the end of the current session unless the rules are changed to make it permanent.
In both chambers, the lead oversight committees share jurisdiction with the so-called legacy panels, which were responsible for overseeing the 22 agencies that were merged to create the department.
Homeland Security officials say they have testified 142 times in seven months this year, nearly matching last year's figure.
The workload occasioned by such a heavy schedule is "inordinate," said the department's second in command, Adm. James Loy.
"It's not just the preparation," he said last week, "though there are hours and hours of that. It's the administrative aftermath. There's a long trail of questions for the record following every hearing - and this for a department that's literally only just getting its feet on the ground."
Homeland Security officials had more than 800 briefings for members of Congress and their staffs last year, and more than 1,000 so far this year. The department's legislative affairs staff members have answered more than 4,000 written inquiries.
Sometimes, Adm. Loy said, it is challenging "to carve out time to get the mission done."
Relations between the oversight committees and the department are not always friendly.
Indeed, in a gesture that might be described as petulant, the House Appropriations homeland security subcommittee zeroed out the budget for the department's Legislative Affairs Office. If the bill is passed in that form, officials will have to get reprogramming authority to pay the people whose job it is to answer congressional inquiries.
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Athens turned into fortress
08aug04
By LEO SCHLINK in Athens
Australia Herald Sun
http://www.heraldsun.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5478,10376174%255E663,00.html
OLYMPIC organisers have built a ring of steel around the ancient city, cluttering one of the most famous skylines in the world with the largest security network international sport has seen.
High above the Acropolis, an airship trains cameras and sensors over the metropolis as competition officials implement Europe's largest peacetime security operation.
Costing more than $1.4 billion, the exercise has turned Athens into a fortress for the first Games since the September 11 and Bali atrocities and the Iraq war.
More than 70,000 officers, including army, navy, policy and private security, have been drafted into the Greek capital to help ensure the safety of 10,000 athletes, including Australia's.
Scores of Pac3 Patriot missiles have been stationed around the city, while the Zeppelin airship - dubbed Big Brother - will patrol the sky along with three police helicopters 24 hours a day.
On the ground, 50,000 police, soldiers, special forces, coast guards and divers will be on duty in Athens and 20,000 more at soccer matches in the other four Olympic cities.
The technology alone has left organisers with a bill three times larger than that paid to guarantee safety in Sydney.
A battalion of forces trained to defend against weapons of mass destruction has been deployed around Greece in an operation known as Distinguished Games.
NATO and Italian, Turkish and US naval forces remain on high alert, leaving organisers confident of delivering an event free of terrorism -- unlike in Munich in 1972, when Israeli athletes were murdered, and Atlanta in 1996, when a bomb blast left a woman dead.
"We are doing whatever is humanly possible to provide the world with safe and secure Games," organising committee chief Gianna Angelopoulos said.
"But these will not be the military Games."
It certainly looks that way on the streets. Armed police and soldiers stand on almost every corner, and cars and spectators are scanned by X-ray machines at every Games entrance.
Thousands of cameras and microphones have been secreted across the city. Police officers will have hand-held computers capable of receiving and taking accurate pictures of danger spots.
Australian Federal Police are in town, along with unarmed private security hired by media and business networks.
AWAC surveillance planes will patrol Athens skies.
Greece has managed the exercise itself. It refused to let foreign troops or security guards accompanying teams carry weapons, saying its constitution banned foreigners from bearing arms on its soil.
NATO has stationed 400 troops off shore, placing them on standby to fly to Greece in the event of a major attack.
Public Order Minister George Voulgarakis said the American troops would be used only as a last resort - "essentially equal to World War III".
While no Australian athlete has complained about the increased security, American and Israeli competitors are isolated from their peers by inner perimeter fences at the Olympic Village.
For all the infrastructure, there is an edginess.
A Mexican TV crew was allegedly beaten by police after filming at the port of Piraeus.
Such is the sensitivity around the port and the main Olympic precinct that photography of the stadiums has been banned.
Historians speculate Athens has not been in such a state of agitation since the Greeks reclaimed the place from the Ottoman Turks in the 19th century.
Now, as then, the Athenians are fiercely protective - even of Australians, who are not the most popular visitors here because of the Government's security warnings over safety in Athens.
It feels and looks like a fortress. The next month will show whether it is penetrable or not.
----
Police Corruption Plagues Argentines and President
August 4, 2004
New York Times
By LARRY ROHTER
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/04/international/americas/04arge.html?pagewanted=all&position=
BUENOS AIRES - He was a 23-year-old engineering student from a middle-class family, kidnapped one night early this year on his way to see his fiancée. Days later, while held for ransom, he managed to escape, but when neighbors alerted the police to a man running down the street calling for help, they say they were ordered back into their houses and told to mind their own business.
Only later, after the student, Axel Blumberg, was fatally shot in March, did an explanation for that seemingly strange police behavior emerge. Two senior members of the Buenos Aires provincial police were charged with complicity in the case, and an investigating magistrate says others in the local precinct have also been implicated in the act, which is believed to have been carried out by an organized-crime gang.
For Argentines, the Blumberg case has become a scandal so heinous that it has led to protest marches and the formation of civic groups. But current and former police officials and Argentine criminologists said the only aberrations were the exposure of the misdeed, its fatal conclusion and the outraged public response. What was apparently the involvement of the police, they said, is actually an example of business as usual that could not take place unless it also involved powerful politicians who provided protection.
"This phenomenon has existed and is historic," León Arslanian, the recently appointed minister of public security, said in an interview, in which he pointed to efforts to curb it. "The political class has contributed to the phenomenon of police corruption in various ways."
During his first year in office, President Néstor Kirchner of Argentina has repeatedly pledged to cleanse the Buenos Aires provincial police, a 47,000-member force that he describes as "oozing with pus." At his initiative, purges have been conducted there and within the troubled Federal Police, leading to the removal of hundreds of officers.
More than public security is at stake: the success of his presidency, in fact, may hinge on his ability to bring to heel La Bonaerense, the nickname for the force in the Buenos Aires Province, which is home to nearly 40 percent of Argentina's 39 million people. Top police officials who are protected by powerful politicians are said to be responsible for funneling millions of dollars to Mr. Kirchner's political rivals within the governing Peronist movement.
Mr. Kirchner did not respond to requests for an interview, and Justice Minister Gustavo Béliz canceled an interview to discuss the police cleanup campaign. But in recent public remarks, Mr. Béliz said, "The problem is that the police forces have been corrupted because there have been criminal politicians who have made deals with them."
Mr. Kirchner fired Mr. Béliz in late July in a dispute over how much force should be used in quelling political demonstrations in the capital. Just two days earlier, the president had also fired the head of the Federal Police in a related dispute, for refusing to carry out his order not to allow police officers to carry firearms while patrolling at such protests.
Many of the officials who supervise the provincial police say the force is notorious for corruption and despised by the public. A foreign official who has been forced to work with the provincial police describes it as "a mafia in uniform,'' and prosecutors and experts on public security say it is deeply entwined with organized crime.
In the Buenos Aires provincial police, "each division dedicates itself to the area of crime that it is supposed to be fighting," said Alejandra Vallespir, a sociologist at the University of Buenos Aires who has written extensively about the police force. "The robbery division steals and robs, the narcotics division traffics drugs, auto theft controls the stealing of cars and the chop shops, and those in fraud and bunco defraud and swindle."
Prosecutors and former police officials say there is not an area of crime, from prostitution and gambling to drug-running and kidnapping, in which members of the provincial police force are not involved. On roadways and in the pampas, so-called "pirates of the asphalt," sometimes in marked patrol cars, are engaged in cattle rustling and highway robbery.
In an interview in the provincial town of Mercedes, Miriam Rodríguez, a crusading prosecutor who has obtained numerous convictions for police corruption, including that of her chief personal assistant, described how the system typically works. She cited the case of an auto-theft ring in which she obtained the conviction of seven police officers.
Thieves would steal a car and sell it with fake registration papers to an unsuspecting buyer, she said. The police would then seize the car, threaten the new owner with jail unless he paid hefty bribes, and give the car back to the thieves. The cycle would be repeated sometimes three or four times before the car would be turned over to a chop shop and dismantled.
The sums raised through such schemes are huge: as much as $30,000 a month in profits and bribes from the richest of the province's 300 police stations, according to prosecutors and former police officials. Norberto Fiori, a former precinct chief who admitted his corruption and turned state's evidence after a fallout with colleagues, says the payoffs required for criminal acts are well-established: a typical bordello, for instance, pays the police a $100-a-week fee for each of its prostitutes, while the "commission" for a stolen car is a minimum of $300.
"Each precinct is given a quota that it has to meet, and finds various ways to do that," said Ricardo Ragendorfer, an investigative journalist who is the author of a pair of best-selling books on what he calls "la maldita policía," or cursed police. "Half of the takings stay there, at that level, and the other half goes up the chain to the high command."
But the money does not stop there. Current and former government officials who have been involved in investigations of the provincial police say that much of the graft ends up in the hands of political bosses and party functionaries, mainly but not exclusively Peronists, who use it to buy votes and assure passage of legislation that advances their interests.
By taking on the provincial police, President Kirchner hopes to strengthen himself on two related fronts, government officials and public security experts said. First of all, he needs to restore public security, which was cited as the country's main problem by 64.1 percent of those questioned in a recent poll.
By doing so, he would weaken his main political rival, former President Eduardo Duhalde. Though no longer holding public office, Mr. Duhalde still controls the Peronist machine and the party's large congressional delegation from Buenos Aires province.
Mr. Duhalde did not respond to interview requests. When he was governor of Buenos Aires Province in the 1990's, he described the force as "the best in the world" and thwarted reforms, said officials who worked in the public security area at the time.
Mr. Kirchner, while also a Peronist, comes from a small province in Patagonia. He would like to build an independent political base in Buenos Aires Province, but is said by party officials and Argentine political commentators to see his efforts to consolidate power and past political and economic reforms as being blocked by Mr. Duhalde.
Previous governments have made similar pledges to reform the police and failed to make significant changes. To strike back effectively, Mr. Kirchner needs more allies, but they are hard to find. Many segments of society that might be expected to support reforms, like business groups, have been frightened into silence.
"There is no way this institution can reform and cleanse itself," said Marcelo Saín, a former deputy provincial minister of public security who now is a researcher at the University of Quilmes. "There are simply not police officials with the will to carry out such a task."
-------- prisons / prisoners
Judge Refuses to Halt Military Hearings on Detainees
Associated Press
Wednesday, August 4, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A37757-2004Aug3.html
A federal judge refused yesterday to stop military hearings that will decide whether the Pentagon can continue to hold hundreds of terrorism suspects at a Navy base in Cuba.
Judge Richard Leon rejected a request from lawyers for a group of Algerian detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to halt the administrative hearings that began last week.
The hearings are to determine whether the prisoners are being held properly. More are expected this week in a process expected to take as long as four months.
Human rights lawyers have argued that the military panels could hurt detainees' chances to eventually win their freedom through lawsuits in federal court.
The military has said the panels -- called combatant status review tribunals -- will be neutral, and any detainee found to be wrongly held will be freed. The panels were set up after the Supreme Court ruled in June that the detainees have a right to challenge their detention status in U.S. courts.
Lawyers for at least two groups of detainees have asked federal judges to intervene and stop the military hearings.
Leon's ruling on an emergency request filed Monday was mostly a victory for government lawyers, but defense lawyers saw two bright spots. Leon rebuffed government lawyers who argued that civilian courts lacked jurisdiction, and he said statements the detainees make in the military hearings can be excluded from hearings they may eventually have in federal courts, lawyers Robert Kirsch and Melissa Hoffer said.
-------- privacy
F.C.C. Seeks Equal Wiretap Access to Phone Calls via Internet
August 4, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/04/technology/24WIRE-VOIP.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Internet phone calls should be subject to the same type of law enforcement surveillance as cell and landline phones, federal regulators said Wednesday.
The Federal Communications Commission voted for proposed rules that would require Internet service providers to ensure their equipment will allow police wiretaps.
Lawyers for the Justice Department, FBI and Drug Enforcement Administration asked the FCC in March to affirm that Internet calls -- or Voice Over Internet Protocol -- fall under the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA).
The 1994 law requires the telecommunications industry to build into its products tools that federal investigators can use to eavesdrop on conversations after getting court approval.
"Our support for law enforcement is unwavering," FCC chairman Michael Powell said. "It is our goal in this proceeding to ensure that law enforcement agencies have all of the electronic surveillance capabilities that CALEA authorizes to combat crime and terrorism and support homeland security."
Voice Over Internet Protocol, also known as VoIP, converts phone calls to data packets and sends them across high-speed Internet connections.
The FCC will solicit comments from industry and the public as it crafts final rules.
-------- torture
Defense to Cite 'U.S. Torture' in German 9/11 Case
Wed Aug 4, 2004
BERLIN (Reuters)
By Mark Trevelyan, Security Correspondent
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=1X03UGESPCJZSCRBAELCFEY?type=topNews&storyID=5871907&pageNumber=1
- Key evidence in the planned retrial of a September 11 suspect in Germany was probably obtained by U.S. authorities under torture, his lawyer alleged on Wednesday as he called for the case to be thrown out.
Lawyer Josef Graessle-Muenscher said he would use the torture charge to press for the case against Moroccan Mounir El Motassadeq to be dropped as soon as the retrial gets under way in Hamburg next Tuesday.
"I will say that we can't conduct fair proceedings because the evidence we need comes from the United States, it was obtained under torture and it must be rejected," he told Reuters in a telephone interview.
President Bush has condemned torture as alien to American values and said he has never ordered its use, but Washington has faced an international outcry over its treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba and the abuse of Iraqi inmates at Abu Ghraib jail near Baghdad.
The German court case revolves around Ramzi bin al-Shaibah, a captured al Qaeda leader who knew Motassadeq in Hamburg. Both were part of a circle of Arab students there which included Mohamed Atta, Marwan al-Shehhi and Ziad Jarrah, three of the suicide hijackers who led the attacks of September 11, 2001.
Germany has asked the United States to provide information from the interrogation of bin al-Shaibah, who was captured in Pakistan in 2002, which could help secure a conviction in the Motassadeq trial.
INADMISSIBLE EVIDENCE
But Graessle-Muenscher said any such evidence would be inadmissible because of the likelihood it had been extracted under torture.
He said he would argue this in court using a variety of material, including documents released by the Bush administration as well as accounts of prisoner treatment at Guantanamo Bay.
U.S. documents declassified in June showed that tactics including 20-hour interrogations, light deprivation, removal of clothing and the use of dogs to frighten prisoners at Guantanamo Bay were approved by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in December 2002 but rescinded the following month.
Of these "Pentagon Papers," Graessle-Muenscher said: "I have got them before me and I will certainly cite them."
He said he did not need to raise the example of Abu Ghraib because the Guantanamo case was more relevant to the trial and there was a "strong presumption" that al Qaeda prisoners like bin al-Shaibah would have been treated in similar fashion.
He also noted news reports that another top al Qaeda figure, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, had been strapped down and pushed under water during interrogation to make him believe he might drown.
Graessle-Muenscher said he hoped the court would set a precedent which would send a strong message. "The state which tortures must be told that torture doesn't pay."
Motassadeq became the first person anywhere to be convicted in connection with September 11 when he was sentenced to 15 years' jail in 2003 for aiding and abetting several thousand murders and belonging to a terrorist organization.
But he won an appeal in March and was freed the following month pending the new trial -- to the irritation of Washington, which called him "a dangerous guy." A friend and fellow-Moroccan, Abdelghani Mzoudi, was acquitted of similar charges in February.
-------- POLITICS
-------- propaganda wars
Old Data, New Credibility Issues
By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, August 4, 2004; Page A01
The White House's failure to make it clear that the dramatic terrorism alert Sunday was based largely on information that predated the Sept. 11 attacks is a case study in the difficulty of managing such warnings for an administration whose credibility is a central issue in a difficult presidential campaign.
At one level, experts yesterday credited the Department of Homeland Security for narrowly targeting the warning to selected buildings in three cities, rather than raising the threat level across the nation. But they said the effort was seriously undercut by the revelation that much of the surveillance of those buildings took place three to four years ago.
"Their efforts to focus attention on specific areas and targets is good," said William H. Webster, a former FBI and CIA director who is vice chairman of the Homeland Security Department's Advisory Council. "But they obviously have a ways to go," he said, adding that "it opens the door for people to be suspicious and cynical."
Webster said the administration is trying to avoid appearing as if it is "crying wolf," and he felt the news conference by Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge was "studied and not designed to raise panic levels." He also noted that terrorist acts often take years of planning, so a "three-year spread doesn't mean the intentions have changed; it just means nothing has happened."
Still, Webster said, it is unclear when -- or whether -- the threat level for these buildings could be lowered, given that the surveillance that prompted the alert was old. In an odd coincidence, another high-profile New York landmark -- the Statue of Liberty -- reopened yesterday for the first time since the 2001 attacks, despite the increased vigilance in the nearby financial center.
Democratic presidential nominee John F. Kerry -- who received a briefing on the intelligence behind the warning from Ridge -- has not faulted the administration for its handling of the situation, and his campaign declined yesterday to make an official available to comment. Other Democrats have not been shy, however, with former Vermont governor and presidential candidate Howard Dean strongly suggesting political motives behind the announcement. "I am concerned that every time something happens that's not good for President Bush, he plays this trump card, which is terrorism," Dean said Sunday.
Moreover, the administration's credibility on intelligence matters has been undermined by the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq -- a fact that Kerry has repeatedly noted on the stump. In his nomination acceptance speech last week, Kerry declared: "Saying there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq doesn't make it so. . . . As president, I will ask hard questions and demand hard evidence."
Jesse L. Jackson, echoing that theme, said he was suspicious of the timing of the alert, just days after the Democratic convention. "We've been told to be on alert" before, he said yesterday, referring to Iraq and the unsuccessful search for banned weapons there. "That did not prove to be true."
Administration officials defended the decision to make the announcement, saying that the information, even if old, was too specific to ignore. "What we know about al Qaeda is that they case things and they do their homework well in advance and then update it before an attack," White House homeland security adviser Frances Fragos Townsend said on NBC's "Today."
One piece of information on one building, which intelligence officials would not name, appears to have been updated in a computer file as recently as January 2004. But officials could not say whether that data resulted from active surveillance by al Qaeda or came from publicly available information.
To some extent, the disclosure that the federal government only now learned that three years ago al Qaeda was checking out these buildings underscores the limited nature of the intelligence in the government's hands -- and how little the administration knows about al Qaeda's activities.
Michael Greenberger, director of the Center for Health and Homeland Security at the University of Maryland, found it curious that the administration withheld the dated nature of the information at the time of the original announcement and disclosed it only after President Bush made a Rose Garden appearance Monday to discuss reforms of the intelligence community recommended by the Sept. 11 commission.
When Bush held his news conference, reporters knew only that the administration had recently uncovered this information. Bush "would have faced more difficult questions" if reporters had known how much of the information had been obtained three years after the surveillance, Greenberger said.
Greenberger added that the alert "has left a lot of anger in its wake" among local officials, who had to use resources and money that might have been held in reserve if the age of the intelligence had been clear from the beginning. He said the administration's credibility may be hurt the next time it issues a warning.
"It is going to wear the welcome mat away," Greenberger said.
Bruce Hoffman, Washington director of Rand Corp., noted that the government understands the where -- economic targets -- and the why of al Qaeda attacks. "But very rarely will we know the when" of an attack, he said, adding that "we may not know as much as we think" about al Qaeda's operations.
Hoffman said that the Sept. 11 attacks took six years of planning and the East African embassy attacks took five years and that one reason no more attacks have occurred on U.S. soil may be that al Qaeda is still in mid-operational cycle. He said that the administration had little choice but to release the information and that it could still throw al Qaeda off balance.
"I've always found if you are straightforward and honest with people and give them the facts, it is a lot easier for them to deal with," said James Lee Witt, head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency under President Bill Clinton and now head of a crisis consulting firm. "They should have said, 'This is the information we found, but it is old.' That is what I would have done."
--------
Signature Achievements of George W. Bush
By Anthony Wade
August 4, 2004
OpEdNews.com
President George W. Bush has made it clear coming out of the Democratic National Convention. His message is "results matter", and is now fond of pointing out that John Kerry does not have any "signature achievements."
When one looks at Bush's record, we can see why he chose this tact; after all he has so many signature achievements to pick from. In fact he has so many it is difficult to tell which one he may be most proud of.
Possibly it is his "War on Terror". In this signature achievement we see the following "results":
- Spent over 166 billion dollars to blow up two third world countries that posed no threat to us.
- Has presided over the deaths of close to 1000 US soldiers, and over 12,000 innocent Iraqi civilians.
- Has not attended one US soldier's funeral.
- Won't allow the returning dead from Iraq be seen by the public.
- He has crafted policy that allows us to torture prisoners, regardless of their innocence, violating international law.
- This torture has now been reported to have occurred to children, sexually, in front of their parents. This was used as a means to "break" them.
- Has not caught Osama bin Hidin.
- Has allowed the Taliban and warlord tribes take over Afghanistan again.
- Has turned Osama bin Laden from public enemy number one, to being marginalized and not thought of much.
- Encourages Americans to fly in the face of fear, but plans on canceling the elections.
- Created the terror color code chart which gives us a vibrant way of being perpetually scared, without anything of substance behind the fear. Conveniently, the chart comes in handy whenever trailing on the polls.
- Has permanently adopted Halliburton as a dependent.
- Has seen an increase in terrorist activity since taking office.
Hmm, that doesn't seem very positive. It can't be this area; maybe it is in his domestic agenda. No not in Iraq, here in the US. Let's try the environment:
- Created the Clear Skies Initiative, which would completely overhaul the Clean Air Act, to reduce requirements of businesses that contribute to pollution. The data has been summarized as follows: "under Clear Skies sulfur dioxide pollution could increase 34 percent, mercury pollution could rise by up to 88 percent, and nitrogen oxides pollution could double".
- Passed the Healthy Forests Initiative (No Tree Left Behind), which is a devious handout to the logging industry, which contributed over $14 million to political campaigns since 1999, with over 80 percent going to Republican lawmakers; President Bush has received more than $500,000. Healthy Forests is disguised as a fire prevention bill, which, you guessed it, solves the problem of forest fires by removing those pesky trees.
- Suspended the new arsenic-in-tap-water standard and right-to-know requirements, which compel water utilities to divulge their arsenic levels to their consumers. Interesting, remove the health restrictions, AND remove their accountability.
- 2005 budget slashes federal funding to prevent lead poisoning by $35 million, leaving some 40,000 homes contaminated with lead next year.
- Mountaintop Mining Self-Reporting Program will actually allow polluting companies that deposit mountaintops into streams which pollute public waters, to simply self identify and avoid any prosecution from the federal government.
- Proposed to loosen regulations to let the nuclear industry dump low-level radioactive waste, which now must be stored in closely monitored facilities, in regular landfills and hazardous waste sites that weren't designed to handle these dangerous substances. The rule change, which could open landfills to such deadly radioactive materials as cesium, strontium, cobalt and plutonium, would substantially reduce the nuclear industry's waste-disposal costs.
Yikes, that just doesn't sound right. Sounds like the only environmental thing about Bush, is his name. Well, I am sure when we look at the economy we will see those signature achievements. After all according to George, we have just turned a corner and are not looking back, right?
- The first net loss of jobs since Herbert Hoover. Yes, that Herbert Hoover from the Great Depression.
- Has lost 1.8 million private sector jobs.
- Handed out tax breaks targeting the richest 1% of this country, who he affectionately refers to as his base.
- This tax break has not "stimulated" the economy, it has crippled it and accounts currently for 290 billion dollars of the deficit.
- Bush has created the second highest lay-off rate in history at 8.7 percent, only topped by Reagan in the early 1980's.
- On the average, those who are lucky enough to find work again are earning an average of $9,160 (21%) less, without medical insurance.
- 3.7 million American families have lost their medical insurance under Bush.
- A record 82 million American families have gone without medical insurance.
- For those who are still lucky enough to have coverage, family medical insurance premiums have increased over $2,600 under Bush. - A new record budget deficit of over 400 billion dollars, which is 800 billion dollars worse, than when he took office.
- Home foreclosures hit a record high in 2003.
- Personal bankruptcies hit all time high in 2002.
I don't know what corner Mr. Bush has turned, but it appears he has left the rest of us behind in this little place we like to call reality. Luckily for him, we still have other areas to examine because those signature achievements should be around here somewhere, kinda like those WMD, right? We must be a safer country, where our civil liberties are protected and we don't live in a police state. That would be a great signature achievement. Let's take a look at life in George W. Bush's America:
- George W. Bush has essentially eliminated the provision of habeas corpus by granting himself unlimited power to declare any citizen an "enemy combatant". This results in permanent detention, at Bush's whim, no counsel, no offer or proof ever has to be made, and Bush may move the case to any district he wishes.
- Email and library records are now allowed to be monitored and searched, without probable cause or warrant.
- Brandon Mayfield of Oregon is wrongly arrested for connection to Madrid bombing; his house is searched by FBI without his knowledge.
- Steven Kurtz of Buffalo is currently being persecuted, after his wife died, and is being brought up on bio-terrorism charges, for his artwork.
- A Wyoming woman is dragged off her cruise ship in cuffs and leg shackles for an incorrect warrant, involving a $50 "improper food storage" summons, which she had already paid, months prior.
- A Texas married couple at a Bush rally in West Virginia were arrested and led away in cuffs. Their offense? Wearing anti-Bush tee shirts. People wearing pro-Bush shirts were not accosted. The woman, who worked for FEMA, lost her job immediately. The ACLU is trying to help the couple fight the case in court.
- A St. Petersburg couple was pepper sprayed by police for receiving a cell phone call in a theater. Witnesses say the couple did nothing wrong and were cooperating at the time of the assault by police.
- A Homeland Security inspector of the United States was charged with violating a Chinese tourist's civil rights following an altercation that left the innocent woman's eyes nearly swollen shut and bumps and bruises on her face and head. This occurred at Niagara Falls, where the woman was mistaken for being involved with a marijuana buy. Apparently this officer beat the hell out of the wrong person.
- A government scientist finishing a candy bar on her way into a subway station where eating is banned was arrested, handcuffed and detained for three hours by transit police in Washington DC. Yes, that's right, illegal use of a Kit Kat is now punishable with handcuffs and arrest. The worst part is the Transit Police Chief actually defended the actions.
- A US couple were removed from a New York-bound flight at Miami Airport because crewmembers considered a T-shirt one of them was wearing obscene. The offending tee shirt had a picture of an exposed breast. Mind you, no passengers complained, the flight staff demanded they remove the shirt, when the couple correctly asserted their free speech rights, they were booted off the plane.
- At the presidential conventions, protesters are to be cordoned off in cages with razor wire. These are referred to as "free speech zones". - Just last week John Ashcroft ordered five previously public documents to be removed from all libraries, without any rationale given other than the Department determined they were not "appropriate for external use".
Damn, doesn't seem like Bush would want to trumpet those results. If anything, it sounds like we are more in a police state. Last time I checked, America was supposed to be a "free speech zone". I think I know what Bush's signature achievement is. It must be the integrity with which he campaigns.
- Just last week, Team Bush tried to ascertain the race of a woman scheduled to photograph Dick Cheney. This is most probably due to the fact that her name was middle-eastern in sound.
- Two weeks ago, a Bush campaign worker suggested that American workers unhappy with low-quality jobs should find new ones -- or pop a Prozac to make themselves feel better. Apparently, she is unaware that without medical insurance, Prozac costs a lot of money.
- The GOP sent out flyers to Florida republican voters telling them to make sure their vote counts, use absentee ballots! This after fighting any sane attempts to have a paper trail with the new computer voting machines, provided by big-time Republican donors.
- Also last week, in order to attend a Cheney rally, you had to sign an endorsement of Bush. You follow that? You are not allowed to even ATTEND a public event that Dick Cheney is at, unless you sign an official document swearing loyalty to GW Bush. Gee, it smells like Stalin in here.
- A group helping new citizens register vote, supplied the people with voter registration cards that already had Republican selected as their party.
Hmm, this doesn't sound too good to me. Demanding affiliation, falsifying voter registration cards, and callous "let them eat Prozac" mentality are not what I want to vote for. I would have looked at education, but Bush actually has no record there to examine. You see, he ran on No Child Left Behind, but then forgot to fund it.
I do however; wish to state that I finally have found some agreement with President Bush. Results do matter. Maybe he should have checked first if he actually had any. This is the record of George W. Bush. This is what he is going to run on, well this and fear. Hold onto this checklist and refer back to it when he is speaking over the next few months. You will hear all sorts of clever catch phrases, and snazzy slogans.
"We have turned a corner and are not looking back."
"My opponent has no signature achievements"
"Results matter."
All they are is words. Empty words from a shallow man who has done nothing for the first 3.5 years of his term and now expects you to reward him for it. This isn't Yale and his daddy can't help him. You want proof these are hollow words, try these on:
"I am a uniter, not a divider."
"Real plans for real people."
"Reformer with results."
"Leave no child left behind."
"Compassionate conservatism."
Has George W. Bush fulfilled any of these slogans, which he sold you on in 2000? His has been the most divisive administration in history, with people from his own camp constantly defecting. He has had no real plans, other than wars based on lies and how to avoid the Geneva Conventions. After nearly four years, he has reformed nothing, and has no results other than what is listed in this article. Children have been not only left behind, but also forgotten about and in other countries, tortured. Now he wants to say he is an education President? Where was he the first three and a half years? Finally, there is not only nothing compassionate about George W. Bush, there is actually nothing conservative either.
No, I am sorry George, these are your signature achievements and they say you do not deserve another term. The right will say that I am not "optimistic" or that I am part of the "blame America first" crowd. Don't you believe them. I am fully optimistic that if we get rid of this war-profiteering, ruin education, cripple the environment, trash the bill of rights, oil for blood president, that yes we can be a great nation once again.
I don't blame America. America voted for Gore.
Anthony Wade is co-administrator of http://www.ibtp.org, a website devoted to educating the populace to the ongoing lies of President George W. Bush and seeking his removal from office. He is a 36-year-old independent writer from New York with political commentary articles seen on multiple websites. A Christian progressive, and professional counselor, Mr. Wade believes that you can have faith and hold elected officials accountable for lies and excess.
Read other articles by Anthony in Anthony Wade's Archive: http://www.opednews.com/archiveswadeanthony.htm
Email Anthony: karac1967@hotmail.com
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The Washington Post's creeping hawkishness
Once it challenged Nixon.
Now the supposedly liberal paper is attacking Kerry for not fully embracing Bush's Iraq war
Aug. 4, 2004
By James P. Pinkerton
http://fairuse.1accesshost.com/news1/salon23.html Salon.com
Remember the days when the Washington Post was the enemy of the Republican administration in the White House? Those days are gone. Today, the neoconservative voice of the Post's editorial page is one of President Bush's most valuable allies. It's possible, of course, to find more hawkish voices than that of the Post, but none have the same wide circulation or impact -- and none have the Post's liberal reputation. Which is a gift to the neocons, who can say, "Even the liberal Washington Post agrees with us!"
What a difference a few decades make. Back in 1971, the Post, along with the New York Times, began publishing the leaked Pentagon Papers, the documents that proved that America's entry into Vietnam in the previous decade had been predicated on lies. The Nixon administration took both newspapers all the way to the Supreme Court in an effort to squelch the publication of the documents -- and lost.
That same year, the Nixon hard men, spearheaded by Chuck Colson in his pre-prison, pre-Christian days, put together an enemies list that mentioned simply "the Washington Post" -- presumably the entire newspaper, from publisher Katharine Graham down to the lowliest news aide. In the days when officials of the White House and Justice Department openly contemplated murder and arson as "rat-fucking" tactics, the Post showed no small amount of courage. In 1972, John Mitchell, the former U.S. attorney general, then serving as Nixon's reelection campaign manager, memorably warned Post reporter Carl Bernstein about a forthcoming article: "Katie Graham's gonna get her tit caught in a big fat wringer if that's published."
That was then. Now the Post's editorial page is helping the current Republican president win reelection. To be sure, the Post rarely praises Bush, but it frequently pokes at John Kerry. Which amounts to the same difference.
Exhibit A is the Post's lead editorial on July 30, the morning after Kerry's acceptance speech to the Democratic National Convention, titled "A Missed Opportunity." The editorial takes Kerry to task for not embracing Bush's war in Iraq.
That nonembrace made Kerry's speech "a disappointment," according to the paper. The Post fretted that "Kerry last night elided the charged question of whether, as president, he would have gone to war in Iraq. He offered not a word to celebrate the freeing of Afghans from the Taliban, or Iraqis from Saddam Hussein, and not a word about helping either nation toward democracy." At a time when even conservatives such as William F. Buckley, Bill O'Reilly and Tucker Carlson have backed away from their once rock-solid support for the war, surely the Democratic nominee's waning enthusiasm for the war in Iraq is not a shock.
The Post spotted creeping dovishness in Kerry's speech -- and that's the plumage the paper wanted to pluck. The editorial continued, "Kerry could have spoken the difficult truth that U.S. troops will be needed for a long time. He could have reaffirmed his commitment to completing the task of helping build democracy." In other words, Kerry could have completely signed on to the Bush policy, but instead, the paper lamented, "he chose words that seemed designed to give the impression that he could engineer a quick and painless exit."
The horror! If I didn't know better -- the Washington Post is, after all, by great reputation, a liberal newspaper -- I would think that the Post was trying to sabotage the Democratic candidate by seeking to talk him into upholding an open-ended war policy that antagonizes most Democrats and independents. It was in another wartime election year, 1968, that such misplaced hawkishness arguably cost Democrat Hubert Humphrey the White House. In clinging to LBJ's war policy, the Minnesotan, once the icon of liberal Democrats, depressed his own turnout in dovish states like Iowa, New Jersey and Vermont, all of which he lost to Nixon.
But in fact, the Post is seemingly doing its best to undo its port-side editorial reputation. The July 30 editorial was followed by one on July 31 that laid out the neocon marching orders for Iraq. Adopting the peremptory style that has worked so well for U.S. diplomats in the past few years, the paper declared, "The United Nations ... must step up to the job" of providing peacekeeping forces for Iraq. But then, the Post quickly added, if other nations "won't provide the troops ... the United States should fill the gap." Which is to say, the Post's editorial war stance is about the same, these days, as that of the Wall Street Journal.
And while the Post doesn't join in the Journal's generalized right-wingery, it does seem determined to keep up with the Dow Joneses on advocating additional foreign adventures. The July 30 editorial argued that "for many in the hall last night, the intelligence lapses in Iraq prove the wrongness of Mr. Bush's preemption strategy, and Mr. Kerry seemed to agree, saying that 'the only justification for going to war' would be 'a threat that was real and imminent.' Yet a President Kerry, too, would face momentous decisions based on inevitably imperfect information, whether about Iran or North Korea or dangers yet to emerge. How would he respond? Will it always be safe to wait?"
The Post doesn't mention, or seem to mind, that many top Bush appointees, still securely in their jobs, pressured the intelligence community to cough up such "imperfect information" -- and to further tout such dreck a "slam-dunk" casus belli.
Yet the Post is ahead of the Journal in advocating robust action against Sudan. On Aug. 1 the paper rehashed familiar neocon arguments: It's wrong to consider "realism" or "national interest" in deciding whether to intervene militarily; those words are code for prudence, for looking before you leap -- exactly what the neocons hate. And it's equally wrong to accept the idea that the United States might be perceived as launching a "crusade" against Muslims; they will greet us, of course, as humanitarian liberators. No, the correct line, the Post insists, is to think that national sovereignty is "a less useful principle than it once was." So maybe in Sudan we'll find out -- again -- whether Muslims and others around the world agree with this bold-strokes neocon view of intervention.
To be sure, the Post's editorial voice is not neoconservative in the same sense as is, say, Charles Krauthammer, one of the Op-Ed page's aces. But to the degree to which the word "neoconservative" evokes a new kind of "internationalist" militarism, the editorial positions of today's Washington Post surely meet that definition.
If the bugle-blowing Post of today had been around in the '60s, the war in Vietnam might have taken a different turn. And in the '70s, the presidency of Richard Nixon might have taken a different turn, too.
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Where's Rumsfeld?
The Washington Post
By Harold Meyerson
August 4, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A38133-2004Aug3.html
It was one of those summer days in D.C. when people were ducking into steam baths to cool off. My feet were propped up on my desk, and just as I noticed that my shoes had started to sweat, the phone rang.
"How long has it been since you've heard a good 'My goodness?' " she asked in a voice that was all New York neocon.
"Months," I answered. "What's it to you?"
"That's just it," she said. "Rumsfeld says 'My goodness' when he's good and steamed, or just every now and then. He's not said it in a while now. He's not really said anything. They've got to be shutting him up. Or worse," she added, and her voice started to tremble.
"Calm down," I told her. "Rummy was in the Rose Garden on Monday when Bush said he'd back an intelligence czar."
"That couldn't have been him," she said. "Rummy would never stand for that. He has his own boutique intelligence unit in the Pentagon, employing Leo Straussian analysis to find hidden truths."
"Like the weapons of mass destruction," I replied. "Like the chow-down in Prague between Mohamed Atta and the tooth fairy. Like we can occupy all of Iraq with a couple of brigades and the Woodcraft Rangers handling psy-ops. Like -- "
"Mr. Marlowe, I'm not hiring you for your jejune political rants," she said. "I want to know what's happened to Donald Rumsfeld. He's vanished. I'm concerned."
Turned out the dame was named Midge Decter, a neocon who'd written a love letter of a book on Rumsfeld last year. And the dame had a point. Rummy had all but vanished in the past six weeks or so. All those Pentagon news conferences and Sunday morning shows were suddenly Rummy-less. Somebody was clamming him up, or jamming him -- or worse.
Could be the Abu Ghraib business. After a couple of days digging around, I discovered in the current issue of Newsweek a story that speculates that Rummy's own special committee to investigate how nice American boys and girls turned into a Junior Gestapo might actually finger Rummy himself.
But that couldn't be the whole story. Rummy's been under wraps for a while now. In fact, he disappeared around the time U.S. forces in Iraq disappeared.
I mean, what have we heard out of our guys since we transferred power, as we say, to the Iraqis at the end of June? The whole occupation is under wraps. In June, when we were running the joint, 42 American soldiers were killed. In July, when we'd reduced ourselves to a historical footnote, 54 American soldiers died, but who knew it? None of our guys is around to talk about the occupation anymore. L. Paul Bremer is gone. Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez is gone. Rummy is -- well, that's what I was trying to find out.
We've gone from Mission Accomplished to Mission Invisible. The fact that we still have men and women in harm's way doesn't play very well if the boss is going to get reelected. The fact that we never had a plan for Iraq after Saddam Hussein -- or, worse, that we had plans from the generals and from State and from the CIA, and that Rummy trashed them all and figured we could run the place with nothing more than Ahmed Chalabi and the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo -- is not something the Bush boys want voters thinking about as the election draws near.
But Bush doesn't whack you if you're loyal. That would be admitting a mistake, and Bush is such a strong leader he can't do that. Yet somebody has Rummy walled up somewhere, and so I paid that somebody a call.
"So the neos are looking for him," Karl Rove chuckled. "Let 'em look. Don't they understand that their role at election time is to hide? Lay low? Scram? That we breed these compassionate-conservative cicadas that come out every four years at Republican conventions, that we've got gay marriage for the sticks, that the last thing we need to do is parade around the architects of the Iraq war?"
He rose, walked behind his desk and threw open a closet door. There they all were, Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, the whole gang, poring over maps, planning the invasions of Old Europe, California and the Democratic 527s. "Mum's the word," said Rove.
It was all pretty neat. Screw up a war and our foreign relations, go into hiding, and come right back after Election Day. A neocon job if ever there was one.
meyersonh@washpost.com
-------- us politics
Intelligence Plan Reviewed
Senators, House Members Say New Director Needs More Power
By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, August 4, 2004; Page A17
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A37955-2004Aug3.html
Senior Senate and House members called for giving a new national intelligence director more authority than proposed by President Bush, arguing yesterday that the position must have budgetary and personnel powers over the 15 agencies that make up the U.S. intelligence community.
As Congress moved forward with a series of summertime hearings on intelligence reorganization, leaders on Capitol Hill parted ways with the administration on specifics, and some cautioned against making changes too quickly and without enough deliberation.
Sept. 11 commission members John F. Lehman, right, and Bob Kerrey testify on the panel's recommendations to the House Government Reform Committee. (Juana Arias -- The Washington Post) President Bush on Monday endorsed two central recommendations of the Sept. 11, 2001, commission, but with significant restrictions: appointment of a national intelligence director to coordinate efforts of the CIA, Defense Department and other intelligence agencies, and creation of a national counterterrorism center.
Yesterday, Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.), vice chairman of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, was among several who criticized Bush's recommendation that the intelligence chief participate in -- but not control -- spending and hiring-and-firing decisions across government agencies. "I worry that would create a kind of Potemkin national intelligence director, where you see the facade but there's not real authority behind it," said Lieberman, whose panel held one of two Capitol Hill hearings on intelligence reform.
Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), a former chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, asked: "If you don't have the authority to pick the people, isn't a national director just a shell game and a shell operation?"
At a hearing held at the same time by the House Government Reform Committee, Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.), sounded a similar theme: "In this city, if you have a fancy title but you are not in the chain of command and you don't control the budget, you're a figurehead, and another figurehead is not what the 9/11 commission recommended and what our nation needs."
White House spokesman Scott McClellan, responding to questions about the criticisms, indicated that Bush may be willing to negotiate on the plans he announced Monday.
The president, McClellan said, "made it very clear in his remarks that this person would have the authority and power he or she needs to do the job. . . . We're going to continue moving forward and talking in more detail about that authority as we move forward and as we work with Congress."
At the Senate hearing, directors of four intelligence organizations -- three of them created after Sept. 11 -- outlined their counterterrorism operations and defended them against criticism by the Sept. 11 commission. The commission, chaired by former New Jersey governor Thomas H. Kean (R), concluded that U.S. intelligence agencies failed dramatically before the 2001 attacks in their work against the terrorism threat.
"I strongly disagree with Governor Kean's comment on Friday that the system today does not work," said John O. Brennan, director of the Terrorist Threat Integration Center, created after the attacks so that foreign and domestic intelligence on terrorism could be analyzed in a central location. Brennan's center would become part of the new national counterterrorism center proposed by the commission and backed by Bush.
Brennan told the panel there is room for improvement in how the United States handles intelligence, but that many critics overlook the changes that already have been made to force better coordination among the CIA, Defense Department, FBI and other government agencies involved in counterterrorism.
"The system today works better than it ever has before," Brennan said, acknowledging that "the status quo on 9/11 was certainly insufficient."
Brennan said he supported the proposal to give the new national counterterrorism center broader authority than that given to his Terrorist Threat Integration Center. The Sept. 11 commission proposed that the new center have the power not just to analyze data but also to plan covert counterterrorist operations for the CIA, FBI and Pentagon, both inside the United States and abroad.
At the same time, he cautioned against "moving precipitously," saying that the commission's reorganization plan "does not, quite honestly . . . provide the detailed type of engineering blueprint that we need in order to undergo that transformation."
Retired Lt. Gen. Patrick M. Hughes, former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency and now an assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security, also urged the senators to study the intelligence community carefully before acting.
"Consider the possibility that some of these functions are not well understood yet," Hughes said, "and some of the ideas behind the structure haven't yet been completely formed or understood."
Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.), a critic of the CIA in the past, said Congress would have to proceed deliberately, noting that the Sept. 11 commission's recommendations would diminish the agency's power and authority.
"I think we need to be very, very careful as we approach this not to weaken or perhaps begin the dismantlement of the CIA . . . because the CIA does things for us other than just dealing with counterterrorism."
----
PARTY TIME AT THE DNC
August 4, 2004
World Policy Institute
Michelle Ciarrocca, Senior Research Associate
http://www.worldpolicy.org/projects/arms
So much for campaign finance reform, the 2004 presidential election is shaping up to be the most expensive one yet. Analysts predict spending will reach or surpass $1 billion. During the national conventions, politicians and delegates will have their pick of breakfasts, luncheons, dinners, cocktail hours, parties, concerts, golf outings and much, much more as lobbyists, corporations, labor unions and other special interest groups dole out large sums of money for access.
Unlimited donations to the national party committees - also known as Soft Money contributions - were banned in 2002, but, as the Washington Post reported, "thanks to a loophole in campaign finance laws, a presidential convention is the one place where corporations and labor unions can still spend with abandon to influence holders of high office."
And spending with abandon is just what they're doing. As Charles Lewis, executive director of the Center for Public Integrity, noted, "Conventions are the Super Bowl of influence." During the Democratic National Convention more than 250 public and private events took place at a myriad of locations - from the usual hotel conference room to Fenway Park, museums, and ships docked in Boston Harbor.
According to a study from the nonpartisan Campaign Finance Institute, while each party gets about $15 million in federal taxpayer money to hold its convention, this year corporate, union and individual private funds to the host committees will exceed $100 million, compared to the $56 million in 2000. Private funds for the Republican National Convention are estimated at $64 million, $39.5 million for the Democratic National Convention.
Information on exactly who is giving and how much is somewhat hard to come by, the host committees are not required to disclose their contributors until 60 days after the conventions, though some of the information is available on their respective websites. Boston 2004 lists 162 donors, New York City host committee lists 85, the amount given by each donor is not listed. As The New York Times reported, "There are hosts -- particularly corporations and interest groups -- that do not want the public to hear about how much money they spent to get face time with politicians."
Here's a sampling of some of the "key" donors and the events that took place during the Democratic National Convention:
Textron Inc. sponsored a lunch for Senator Mary Landrieu (D-LA)
Lockheed Martin sponsored breakfasts for both the North Dakota and New York delegations
Rep. Jane Harmon (D-CA) was featured at a brunch sponsored by Boeing, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman and SAIC
In return for kicking in $100,000 each for a Symphony Hall gala, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Raytheon and the AFL-CIO among others, were promised "a private post-event reception with Senator Kennedy (D-MA)"
Two dozen companies sponsored a party with an "Indiana Jones" theme at an Egyptian exhibit at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, including Altria Group (parent company of Philip Morris tobacco), BellSouth, Miller Brewing, Fannie Mae, Sallie Mae, FedEx and DynCorp International
"Official Providers" for the DNC convention included IBM, Microsoft, Motorola, and Nextel among others
$1+ million donors -- or platinum sponsors -- to the democratic host committee include Blue Cross and Blue Shield, the Boston Foundation, Fidelity Investments, Bank of America, John Hancock Financial Services and Raytheon Corporation
Two lobbyists threw a "Caribbean Beach Bash" for Senator John Breaux (D-LA) who's retiring this year. The $300,000 event took place at the Aquarium with music by Ziggy Marley and Buckwheat Zydeco
In a special report on the financing of the election for CorpWatch, Bill Mesler notes that "corporate influence has become so pervasive that the very concept of impartial governance has been turned on its head: lobbyists have become government officials; and government officials have become lobbyists." One part of the solution is to get special interest money out of politics by supporting full public financing of presidential and congressional races on the "clean money" model, where candidates can successfully run for office without taking any corporate contributions.
Notes and Resources:
Ever since the Republicans took control of Congress in January 1995, major weapons contractors have favored them over Democratic candidates by a 2 to 1 margin. And this year is no exception. The Center for Responsive Politics lists the nation's top three weapons contractors among the top 50 overall donors in this election cycle. Northrop Grumman is at #34, donating $1,097,683, 68% of which went to Republican candidates. To date, Lockheed Martin (#44), Boeing (#47) and General Dynamics (#49) have all donated just under $1 million each, with Republicans receiving between 57% and 63%. Check out The Center for Responsive Politics for all the details at www.opensecrets.org
"The $100 Million Dollar Exemption: Soft Money and the National Party Conventions," from the Campaign Finance Institute, www.campaignfinanceinstitute.org/eguide/partyconventions/financing/cfistudy.html
"Soft Money Out, Bundling In Corporate Backers Spend More, Get More," by Bill Mesler, Special to CorpWatch, July 22nd, 2004, www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=11460
"The Party's Party," Special Report By Meredith O'Brien, The Center for Public Integrity, www.public-i.org/report.aspx?aid=340&sid=200
Frida Berrigan Senior Research Associate World Policy Institute 66 Fifth Ave., 9th Floor New York, NY 10011 ph 212.229.5808 x112 fax 212.229.5579
The Arms Trade Resource Center was established in 1993 to engage in public education and policy advocacy aimed at promoting restraint in the international arms trade.
-------- ENERGY
-------- energy
World oil prices hit record highs
NEW YORK (AP)
August 04, 2004
http://www.washtimes.com/business/20040803-093708-9615r.htm
- Oil prices climbed to new highs around the globe yesterday, rising above $44 a barrel in the United States, as global supply concerns and terrorism fears made for jittery trading at a time of strong demand.
Light crude for September delivery rose 33 cents to $44.15 on the New York Mercantile Exchange, topping the previous record, set Monday, of $43.82.
On London's International Petroleum Exchange, September Brent crude futures hit a fresh 14-year high of $40.64, up 67 cents from Monday's settlement.
Traders are investing largely on psychological factors, analysts said.
"We've got a market that's reacting ahead of time, it seems, to every single bullish scenario," said Peter Beutel, president of energy consulting firm Cameron Hanover Inc. in New Canaan, Conn.
Mr. Beutel added that oil and refined products futures are climbing in spite of increasing output levels, jumps in refinery use and other factors that typically drive prices lower. "Though supplies continue to increase, there's a sense that there's a tighter market ... than it really is."
Early yesterday, the president of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries warned the cartel could not immediately increase output to help bring down prices.
Purnomo Yusgiantoro, who is also Indonesia's oil minister, said yesterday that Saudi Arabia, the world's largest oil exporter, had spare capacity, but could not bring more crude oil to the market in the short term.
But Dow Jones Newswires quoted a senior Saudi source as saying Saudi Arabia had the capacity to "immediately" increase its oil output from 9.5 million barrels a day to 10.5 million barrels a day.
Futures were also pressured yesterday by fears of terrorist attacks in the United States. U.S. authorities on Sunday warned that al Qaeda was planning attacks on five key financial institutions in New York, New Jersey and Washington.
There also was uncertainty over the fate of troubled Russian oil giant Yukos, which produces 2 percent of the world's oil. Russian tax authorities said Monday they would begin an investigation into the activities of Yukos, Russia's largest oil producer, for 2002.
Yukos already is struggling with a demand for $3.4 billion in back taxes for 2000. Market observers said Monday's move could mean Yukos also would be saddled with tax claims for 2002. Yesterday, a senior Russian tax official made remarks that suggested Yukos could face a bigger bill than initially announced.
Attacks on Iraqi oil infrastructure also have kept oil traders on their toes, said John Kilduff, senior vice president of the energy risk management group at Fimat USA Inc. Yesterday, saboteurs bombed a northern pipeline that sends oil to a local refinery as well as to Turkey for export, oil officials said.
--------
Growth in U.S. fuel supply cools crude
(UPI)
Aug. 4 2004
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20040804-120323-8274r.htm
-- Reassuring news on the fuel supply in the United States kicked support away from crude futures Wednesday.
Crude fell more than $1 per barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange following weekly inventory reports showing a growth in gasoline and distillate fuel stockpiles.
September crude settled at $42.83 per barrel, off $1.32 from Tuesday's all-time high of $44.34. August gasoline tumbled 8.32 cents to $1.203 per gallon, while heating oil slipped more than 2 cents to $1.15 per gallon.
The market turned bearish Wednesday as traders saw indications that short-term gasoline and heating oil supplies would be able to meet autumn demand.
The U.S. Energy Information Administration report said gasoline supplies had increased 2.4 million barrels last week,, although the crude supply fell 1.9 million barrels.
Production of distillate fuels -- heating oil, diesel and jet fuel -- grew to more than 4.1 million barrels per day, the second-highest weekly average in history.
-------- OTHER
-------- environment
Unsafe Mercury Levels Rising in U.S. Fish
August 4, 2004
WASHINGTON, DC, (ENS)
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/aug2004/2004-08-04-09.asp#anchor1
Mercury pollution is pervasive in U.S. lakes, environmentalists say in a report that blasts the Bush administration's proposal for cutting mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants. In the report released Tuesday, environmental groups said recent tests by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) of fish caught in U.S. lakes found every sample had at least low levels of mercury.
From 1999-2001, EPA collected two composite samples of one predator fish species and one bottom dwelling fish species at 260 lakes, for a total of 520 composite samples, or 2,547 fish.
Some 55 percent of samples contained mercury levels that exceed the EPA's safe limit for women of childbearing age, and 76 percent exceeded the safe limit for children under age three, according to the report by Clear the Air, a joint campaign of the Clean Air Task Force, National Environmental Trust, and U.S. Public Interest Research Group (PIRG).
The report is based on the first available data from the EPA's ongoing National Study of Chemical Residues in Lake Fish Tissue.
Exposure to mercury, usually through eating contaminated fish, can cause permanent harm to the brain in humans and reproductive harm in wildlife.
Young children whose brains are still developing, and women of childbearing age are most at risk. EPA scientists estimate at least one in eight American women of childbearing age have unsafe levels of mercury levels in her blood.
Last year, 44 states issued warnings about eating mercury contaminated fish - a 63 percent jump from 1993.
The findings "underscore the need to reduce mercury emissions from power plants as much and as quickly as possible," said Emily Figdor, author of the report and policy analyst for Clear the Air. "Delaying action for at least 10 years will unnecessarily expose an entire generation of children to toxic mercury pollution."
Mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants are currently unregulated - these facilities emit some 48 tons of mercury each year, accounting for about 40 percent of the nation's mercury pollution.
The Bush administration has proposed using a cap for mercury emissions and a trading program in emissions credits to achieve a total of 15 tons of mercury emissions by 2018 - a 70 percent reduction.
Ten state attorneys general and 48 U.S. Senators, along with a wide range of scientists, environmental and public health organizations opposed the proposal, which they believe is too lax.
Under pressure from critics, the Bush administration in April delayed the finalization of its mercury rule by four months until March 2005.
Administration officials and industry groups say technologies to cut emissions more quickly are too expensive and they dispute the idea that power plants are responsible for mercury found in fish.
Mercury is also a naturally occurring metal. Industrial emissions of mercury add to the existing pool, which is continuously mobilized, deposited on land and water, and remobilized.
-------- health
Gulf War illness link to brain damage
Telegraph
By Oliver Poole
04/08/2004
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/08/04/wgulf04.xml&sSheet=/portal/2004/08/04/ixportal.html
A scientist whose findings have been supported by the American Joint Chiefs of Staff yesterday detailed how some Gulf War veterans complaining of post-conflict illnesses had been found to have brain damage.
Robert Haley, from the University of Texas, told the independent Gulf War Illnesses inquiry in London that his findings were the first sign of physical injury associated with the syndrome.
His conclusions - which he suggests are due to low-level exposure to nerve agents - paves the way for a medical test which would determine if servicemen are suffering from an illness unique to the conflict. The US Department of Defence recently authorised a further $5 million to explore his findings, which earlier this year were also presented to Congress.
However, Dr Haley warned that further research had to be done before a definitive diagnosis could be made.
He told the inquiry, headed by Lord Lloyd of Berwick, how he examined a colonel in the US Army rangers, Bill Davis, who had developed neurological illnesses soon after returning from the 1991 conflict.
He found that Col Davis had lost nerve cells in the basal ganglia structures, two small areas in the brain which determine cognitive thinking and balance. Subsequent research on 43 servicemen (23 of whom were ill) found similar damage. "It is statistically significant," he said.
Dr Haley said those veterans who showed the most damage to the basal ganglia had been in north-east Saudi Arabia on the fourth day of the air war. Bombing of Iraqi military sites in that period is believed to have destroyed chemical weapons stockpiles, blowing small doses towards coalition troops.
The inquiry continues.
--------
Most Fish From Lakes Is Too High In Mercury
By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, August 4, 2004; Page A06
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A37702-2004Aug3?language=printer
The Environmental Protection Agency has determined that more than half of all freshwater fish it sampled from America's lakes could be unsafe for women of childbearing age to eat twice a week, according to data disclosed by environmental groups.
More than three-quarters of the fish sampled also had mercury levels that may be unhealthy for children younger than 3. The data, collected between 1999 and 2001 on 2,547 fish from 260 lakes, are part of the first-ever nationwide study the EPA has conducted on freshwater fish in an ongoing four-year project.
"It's a public health imperative to reduce mercury emissions as quickly as possible," said Emily Figdor, a policy analyst for Clear the Air, which compiled the EPA findings. The new numbers, which EPA released as raw data in the past year, represent the latest evidence that mercury emissions pose a public health threat, the environmentalists said.
In March, the EPA and the Food and Drug Administration warned pregnant and nursing women and young children against eating more than a small amount of canned albacore "white" tuna once a week because of mercury contamination, based on analyses of commercial saltwater fish sampled from the marketplace.
For freshwater fish, federal officials advised consumers to check local health advisories. As of 2002, 43 states had warned residents to limit how much freshwater fish they consume, restrictions that encompass 30 percent of the nation's lakes and 13 percent of its rivers.
Jim Pendergast, chief of the EPA Office of Science and Technology's health protection and modeling branch, said the agency has yet to establish a safe limit for freshwater fish and said the mercury levels outlined in yesterday's report will not necessarily make consumers sick.
The EPA has determined there is no health risk for women and children eating less than 0.1 micrograms of mercury per kilogram of body weight per day, but less than half the fish in the new survey met that standard, assuming two fish meals a week.
Mercury, a metal, is toxic and can cause neurological and developmental problems in children.
Some mercury exposure stems from industrial air pollution that gets into water and the food supply, in part because it builds up in predator fish. Coal-fired power plants rank as the greatest U.S. source of mercury pollution, according to the EPA, and environmentalists say the Bush administration is not doing enough to curb plants' emissions.
President Bush has proposed regulations that would reduce pollution from mercury plants by 70 percent by 2018. But Figdor and others cited a federal Energy Information Administration study in May that projected the plan would not meet this goal until after 2025.
"The rule doesn't come close to doing what it needs to do to solve the problem of mercury contamination in our lakes," said Clear the Air's director, Angela Ledford.
EPA spokeswoman Cynthia Bergman said the agency is still assessing what its plan would achieve.
The plants "must be cleaned up," Bergman said. "We are proposing to do that for the first time ever in the history of the EPA."
Industry officials countered that coal-fired plants account for just 1 percent of global mercury emissions, and that some academic studies suggest much of the mercury in the environment is naturally generated.
"No matter how great or small the reductions we make in our emissions, there will be very little measurable benefit to public health," said Edison Electric Institute spokesman Dan Riedinger, whose group represents 190 utilities. "This is not an excuse for inaction, but these groups are overpromising the public health benefits that are not going to be achieved."
There is some anecdotal evidence that reducing industrial mercury pollution translates into cleaner fish, said Thomas D. Atkeson, mercury coordinator for Florida's Department of Environmental Protection. Mercury pollution dropped by 90 percent in South Florida since medical waste and municipal solid-waste incinerators there installed new controls in early 1990s, he said, as there are no coal-fired plants in the area.
Mercury levels in largemouth bass and wading birds declined 80 percent during that same period, and local officials have eased restrictions on eating fish from the north and central Everglades.
"None of us thought we would live to see levels of mercury concentrations in the Everglades come down as quickly and as sharply as they have," Atkeson said.
Researcher Karl Evanzz contributed to this report.
--------
Get Antioxidants from Food, Not Supplements
REUTERS USA:
August 4, 2004
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/26398/story.htm
WASHINGTON - People hoping vitamins can protect their hearts need to eat healthy foods instead of popping pills, the American Heart Association said yesterday.
A review of various studies on whether supplements can reduce heart disease risk shows they have virtually no effect, the group said.
"At this time, there is little reason to advise that individuals take antioxidant supplements to reduce their risk of cardiovascular disease," said Penny Kris-Etherton, a professor of nutrition at Pennsylvania State University who led the study.
Antioxidants are molecules that work to reduce the damage done to cells and to DNA by free radicals - charged chemical particles found in the environment and caused by everyday biological processes.
It is clear that foods rich in antioxidants can reduce the risk of cancer and heart disease, and scientists have been working to isolate the particular compounds responsible. Vitamins, such as A an C, are antioxidants.
But several research studies have shown that people who took antioxidant supplements did not have a lower risk of cancer or heart disease, and one important Finnish study showed that male smokers who took supplements actually had a higher risk of lung cancer.
Nutritionists and doctors now argue it is probably a combination of compounds in foods that give the healthy antioxidant benefits.
"The American Heart Association continues to promote a diet rich in fruits, vegetables, whole grains, fish, legumes, poultry and lean meats to derive antioxidant vitamin benefits," the group said in a statement published in its journal Circulation.
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Stressed Israeli soldiers to be treated with cannabis: army
JERUSALEM (AFP)
Aug 04, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040804181819.g9fru8zp.html
Israeli soldiers suffering from combat stress after tours of duty in the Palestinian territories could soon be treated with cannabis to relieve their symptoms, the Israeli army said late Wednesday.
"The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) medical corps, in cooperation with the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, is introducing the use of THC, the active agent in the cannabis plant, which helps relieve post-traumatic stress disorders, on an experimental basis," an army statement said, confirming a report in the Maariv daily.
Maariv said the mental health department of the Medical Corps was set to to begin tests on volunteers suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder after reserve duty.
Hundreds of Israelis have been treated for combat stress after performing their mandatory national service in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
The scientist who will help conduct the experiment, heads a research team which discovered that cannabis helped mice which had suffered physical stress, and had even reduced the risk of stroke, Maariv said.
The army said the use of THC, which stands for tetrahydrocannabinol, had been approved by a military and a civilian committee.
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Life after the bomb
Aug. 4, 2004
The Japan Times:
By MARK SCHILLING
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/getarticle.pl5?ff20040804a1.htm
The Face of Jizo Rating: 3 1/2 (out of 5)
Director: Kazuo Kuroki
Running time: 99 minutes Language: Japanese
The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 were Japan's single greatest catastrophe of World War II. They loom so large in the popular imagination that the events of the previous decade and a half have paled -- or faded from view altogether. (Conveniently so, as Asians affected by those events have noted.)
In millions of words and images, eulogizing and otherwise, the bombings have been ritualized and abstracted in that same imagination, their horror endlessly referred to, but less and less clearly felt. Meanwhile, the victims have come to be seen more as park statuary, less as flawed human beings.
Filmmakers of the war generation have tried, in recent years, to reclaim that humanity, including Akira Kurosawa with "Rhapsody in August (Hachigatsu no Rhapsody)" (1993) and Shohei Imamura with "Dr. Akagi (Kanzo Sensei)" (1998), but they have also found the memorializing urge hard to resist. Though recognizably -- even eccentrically -- human, their heroes glow with the nobility of wronged innocents.
Born in 1930, Kazuo Kuroki is also of the war generation, but his trilogy of war films -- "Tomorrow" (1988), "Kirishima 1945 (Utsukushii Natsu Kirishima)" (2002) and now "The Face of Jizo (Chichi to Kuraseba)" (2004) -- come from a different, darker place than those of many of his contemporaries. As a 15-year-old war plant worker, Kuroki saw his friends and colleagues blown to pieces in an air raid. Instead of staying to help the wounded, he ran to save his own skin -- and carried a burden of guilt forever after. His war films, he has said, are an act of penance.
The filmed version of a play by Hisashi Inoue, "The Face of Jizo" is not as personal a film as "Kirishima 1945," which was not only about Kuroki's wartime boyhood, but also filmed in the same house and fields where it unfolded. Nonetheless, it expresses themes close to Kuroki's heart, including survivor's guilt, even when the survivor has done little or nothing to deserve it.
Also, Kuroki is less interested in conventional attitudes, however grand, than the human truth of a specific time and place. Set in Hiroshima in 1948, "The Face of Jizo" reflects the poverty, exhaustion and traumas of the time, placed in the context of a close and textured father-daughter relationship. The verbal thrust and parry between the two, played by a graying but still sprightly Yoshio Harada and a stressed but still lovely looking Rie Miyazawa, at times verges on the sitcomish -- and had the Iwanami Hall audience laughing out loud. (For non-native speakers of standard Japanese, a prescreening glance at the script is advisable; otherwise the characters, who speak in Hiroshima dialect, may sound as though they have marbles in their mouths.)
"The Face of Jizo" has its stagey, lugubrious and overly determined side, but the warmth and passion generated by its two leads mostly carry it through -- and gives the ending the right mix of poignancy and chill. A well-made "play" indeed.
It begins with Mitsue (Miyazawa), a young librarian, rushing home in a thunderstorm, frightened out of her wits. Her terror, we soon see, is a product of the war, particularly the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, which she barely survived.
She lives with her father, Takezo (Harada), in their bombed-out house, now partly repaired. Dad is her confessor, adviser and friend, the only one she can tell about her fears, dreams and past. Most of her friends and family died in the bombing -- including Dad.
That Dad is with her only in spirit doesn't faze her -- or him, for that matter. He looks, acts and talks like one of the living (one of the more robust and vital living in fact). But, as befits a ghost no longer bound by selfish earthly concerns, he is interested only in her problems, particularly her budding relationship with the shy, bespectacled Kinoshita (Tadanobu Asano), who is researching the bombing and wants Mitsue's help -- and possibly slightly more than that.
Mitsue resists Takezo's efforts to play matchmaker -- and not just of out maidenly reserve. She feels she has no right to be happy. How can she marry, have a family and all the rest, when so many of her friends have been reduced to ashes? There is also another reason for her guilt, which she can only reveal under duress and never rationalize away.
Nearly all the action takes place in Mitsue and Takezo's house and garden, with only occasional glimpses at Mitsue's past as well as her present-day encounters with Kinoshita. Miyazawa and Harada thus have to carry the film almost entirely on their own -- and carry it they do. A larger-than-life type known for his excesses on and off the screen, Harada channels his formidable energies effectively, while riding the fine line between fatherly joshing and bullying. Miyazawa, who starts by playing 23-going-on-13, proves to be an adequate foil for Harada, while expertly revealing Mitsue's dark side.
Miyazawa's performance also draws strength from her of-the-period attitude and appearance. Most young actresses would have looked too buff and radiant for the role; Miyazawa, who has successfully battled the anorexia that nearly ended her career, flawlessly impersonates a woman who has suffered through postwar food shortages and health crises. I only hope she doesn't look as wispy off camera as she does on.
There will be more films about Hiroshima, just as there will be more about the Holocaust. But "The Face of Jizo" may be among the last by a director with a living memory of the bombing, now nearly six decades past.
What will the next generation have to say about it? Will they use Kuroki and Inoue's allusive approach, which assumes a knowledge of Hiroshima that a younger audience may not have? Somehow, I think they will come up with something different, more direct. Japan may yet get its "Schindler's List."
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