Archive By Date | Today's Links to Search By
Activists' News | Nuclear | Depleted Uranium | Military | Police
Alternative Energy Etc. | From Subscribers
NUCLEAR
U.S. to ship plutonium to France without armed escort
Marin Depleted Uranium Resolution Heats Up
Japan remembers the horror of Hiroshima
Targeting Civilians at Hiroshima and Nagasaki
In the Shadow of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Three characters, no dialogue
Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Peace Pilgrimmage arrives at Hiroshima
How can Japan preserve the memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
Hiroshima mayor chastises U.S. for developing small nukes
Hiroshima's Goal Is a Nuclear-Free World
Japan, NKorea may hold nuclear, kidnapping talks next week
Canada insists no decision on missile shield despite amending US pact
Canada opens door for missile shield
Bush Administration Slammed For Inaction on 'Loose Nukes'
Washington's Gift to Bomb Makers
You show yours, I'll hide mine
Bush's pointless treaty
History teaches that war policy is bankrupt
Battle Swirls on Security at A-Plants
MILITARY
Sudanese Suffer as Militias Hide in Plain Sight
Mass Killings Reported in Ivory Coast
Russian rail workers unearth World War II explosives
Central Asian, Russian militaries hold manouevres in Kyrgyzstan
Suit Accuses Halliburton of Fraud in Accounting
Radical Cleric in Iraq Sets Off Day of Fighting
Iraqi Cleric Urges Renewed Revolt
Fierce Gunbattles Rage for a Second Day in Iraq
Iraq set to use martial law in terror fight
Shia cleric urges truce in Iraq
Israeli Pullback in Gaza Met With Palestinian Rockets
Israel Reopens Border Crossing Between Egypt and Gaza
Uprooted trees, razed houses... Israel leaves its calling card in Gaza
Gaza's breadbasket left in ruins after Israel ends five-week offensive
Russia, irked by NATO enlargement, expels Lithuanian envoy
Pakistan, India discuss Siachen demilitarisation
India, Pakistan hold new round of talks on strategic Kashmir glacier
Pakistan Pressures Al Qaeda
Georgian Vows Peaceful Solution With Russia
Russia, irked by NATO enlargement, expels Lithuanian envoy
Sri Lanka's army spy chief seeks retirement amid controversy
Security Fears Are Slowing U.N. Return to Baghdad
UN Bureaucrats Angry Over Iraq's Refusal to Pay Dues
Copter-Borne Medics: Disciplined Ballet, Choreographed to Save G.I.'s
G.I. granddaddies: Vietnam vets bring jungle-tested grit to new tour
Corruption in the Corps?
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Besieged D.C. Both Resentful And Resigned
Passport ID Technology Has High Error Rate
Confusion Mounts Over Threat
Supporters question arrest of mosque leaders
Guantánamo Detainees Begin Hearings
Court: Stateless can be held indefinitely
US opens up Guantanamo tribunals for first time
U.S. Ties British Detainee to Terror Recruitment
2 Mosque Leaders Are Arrested in Plot to Import Missile and Kill Diplomat
N.Y. Home Searched In Anthrax Probe
Two Leaders of Mosque Arrested in Albany Sting
Iraqi Prison Abuse Not a Strategy, Officer Says
POLITICS
Senator Is Described as a Likely Source of Intelligence Leak
59 Years Later: The Legacy of Hiroshima
Whitewashing Hiroshima
At Journalist Convention, Bush Defends Terror-Threat Alert
Rumfeld: No way to stop all terrorism
Powell Denies Rift Over Iraq Invasion
ENERGY
Bioenergy Producers Compete for $150 Million in Subsidies
Sunny California Flirts With Million Solar Homes Proposal
California EPA wants to spur solar-home development
ACTIVISTS
Obituaries: Gloria Emerson, 75, who wrote about war and its victims
War Crimes Trial Victoria Square, ChCh Aug. 7
Peace pastor faces penalties for Iraq trip
Puerto Rican Kayakers Carry Enviro Message Against All Odds
-------- NUCLEAR
U.S. to ship plutonium to France without armed escort
(Kyodo News)
August 6, 2004
http://www.japantoday.com/e/?content=news&cat=8&id=307797
WASHINGTON - The U.S. government plans to ship weapons-grade plutonium from disassembled Russian nuclear arms from the United States to France for reprocessing, but the vessels will not be escorted by warships, according to U.S. Energy Department documents obtained by Kyodo News on Thursday.
Anti-nuclear groups have expressed opposition and concern that the two vessels transporting 140 kilograms of high-purity plutonium across the Atlantic Ocean could be targeted by terrorists, even though they are armed. (Kyodo News)
-------- depleted uranium
Marin Depleted Uranium Resolution Heats Up
GI's Will Come Home To A Slow Death
By Carol Sterritt,
August 2004
Coastal Post
http://www.coastalpost.com/04/08/01.htm
"There are only two things worth knowing in life, but I forget what they are."
John Hiatt, American songwriter
Now I remember what the two important things are. One is that the situation is dire. (And thus we need the artist and musician, the soul healer and the clown, more than ever.)
The other is that despite the horror of the day, there are people who are so brave and beautiful in both thought and action that one is moved to tears.
Look at the mindfulness of actions here in this county. For years, certain people in Marin have devoted a large portion of their lives to an outfit called the Marin Peace and Justice Coalition. Inside that group, some members are beginning a major work that could affect military service today and in the future when a draft might be instituted.
One such Peace and Justice member is Yvette Wakefield. For over eighteen months, she has examined the Depleted Uranium issue. A county employee, she has often read the inscription on the 20 North San Pedro Building. This inscription reads: "The mission of health and human services is to promote and protect the health, well-being, self-sufficiency and safety of all people in Marin."
Yvette could not reconcile what she learned about depleted uranium (DU) with the idea of health and human safety. For one thing, she had befriended Leuren Moret, a geoscientist who is now a world renowned authority on DU. Moret, who comes from a Quaker background, once worked at Livermore Labs. She now travels the world speaking out against the "omnicide" destructiveness of this material.
The Creation of A World Class Activist
How could someone like Moret, who once worked for the war industry, become a friend of a "peacenik," like Wakefield. Or for that matter, how could she herself become a peace activist? Well, back in 1991, Moret had a major realization. According to Moret, "In 1991 I became a whistleblower at the Livermore Nuclear Weapons Laboratory near San Francisco, CA. Richard Berta, the Western Regional Inspector for the Department of Energy, told me, "The Pentagon exists for the oil companies and the nuclear weapons labs exist for the Pentagon."
The more Moret learned, the more she became convinced that research and work involving depleted uranium was immoral. Beginning in 1991, depleted uranium was used to support three policies: One, to test the radiobiological effects of 4th generation nuclear weapons (still under development); Two, to blur and break down the distinction between conventional and nuclear weapons; Three, to make it easier to reintroduce nuclear weapons into the US military arsenal.
While at her job at Livermore, Moret watched America wage a short and apparently victorious Gulf War. In just a few short weeks, and after only 110 American casualties, we routed Iraq from Kuwait. But the true toll of this war upon our young servicemen and women occurred over the next decade. Of the 700,000 troops who served in the region, 267,000 suffered from some form of disability. Not only that, but some soldiers "infected" their spouses with disabilities similar to their own. Or they suffered the tragedy of having a child born with birth defects. Some victory, huh?
At first, in its usual fashion, the Department of Defense (DOD) and the Pentagon simply denied that this was happening. Those men and women, who had been hale and hearty before their military service, were now branded "malingerers."
But internationally, other researchers spoke on record that these illnesses had nothing to do with malingering. Testimony from Admiral Vishnu Bhagwat, Former Chief of the Naval Staff, India reads, "DU weapons emit Alpha particle dose impacting a single cell from U-238 some 50 times the annual dose level. Cancer is initiated with one alpha particle, its daughter isotopes effect generations as the isotopes bio-concentrate in plants and animals. They then travel up the food chain. It is a nuclear weapon because the energy is derived from the nucleus of the atom. The particles enter the body through the lungs, the digestive system or breaks in the skin.
"One gram of DU releases more than 12,000 particles per second. The radiation slowly kills the cells that make life possible. The Gulf War syndrome of 1991 did just that (reported by Dr. Asaf Durakovic, Prof. of Medicine, Georgetown University, and discoverer of the Gulf War Syndrome.)"
Our military has lobbed more than 500 tons of DU munitions on Afghanistan. Professor Yagasaki has calculated that 800 tons of DU is the "atomicity equivalent to 83,000 Nagasaki bombs." This fact he presented to the World Uranium Weapons Conference in Hamburg in October 2003. The amount of DU used in Iraq in 2003 equals nearly 250,000 Nagasaki bombs. Just as the Gulf War vets and their families have been imperiled by their service in Gulf War I, those veterans about to return from the Iraq war will undoubtedly face similar consequences.
The Local FallOut
This is why Yvette Wakefield is concerned. Should Marin County expend the energy and funding to nurture its children with healthy baby clinics, education Kindergarten to twelfth grade, sports programs and parks and recreation, only to then hand our kids at age eighteen over to the military? And not just any military, but one that plans on dispatching its personnel to a killing field where they will, even if surviving the "normal" activities of the battlefield, come home to a life of infirmity, sickness and hospitalization? Wakefield has problems with this idea.
A trained paralegal, she began work on a County wide resolution that would proclaim the unacceptability of any Marin citizen serving in any area of the world where their health might forever be destroyed by DU.
Her working draft of this resolution reads: Therefore in view of those dangers posed by exposure to depleted uranium, Marin County requires that all Marin residents serving in the United States Armed Forces and its Reserves be prohibited from serving in those areas where depleted uranium weaponry is used. This is because we acknowledge that our residents should not be required to face the life-threatening and lifelong health problems of radiation poisoning. Their having faced the normal dangers of combat should be enough. Soldiers who survive their military service are entitled to return home to a normal life of working, having families and friends and engaging in normal activities.
She is now building a case for her resolution. She has set up a public forum on August 12, at 7:30 PM at the First United Methodist Church 9 Ross Valley Drive, San Rafael. Both Leuren Moret and Dennis Kyne will be speaking at the event. Their talk is titled "Depleted Uranium - The Trojan Horse of A Nuclear War." Once people in Marin hear the truth of the DU deployment, and they realize the horrific consequences born by the populations in the Middle East and our soldiers, they can be counted on to be supporters of this County wide resolution.
Where DU Policies Came from, And Why They Continue
The use of depleted uranium can be traced back to certain Nixon-Kissinger era decisions. When our country was stymied by the 1973 oil embargo, Nixon remarked that we have to make sure that an oil embargo will never happen again. Perhaps he would have been stopped by the test ban treaty of 1963, signed by Russia and the United States, both super powers at that time. According to the treaty, nuclear war was outlawed. But one way for a nation to achieve sovereignty over another nation was and is to utilize depleted uranium weaponry. Although such weaponry will not necessarily offer up a mushroom cloud, the wake of its devastation can be as deadly. Thus a policy of using depleted uranium in weapons began. It first surfaced in the Arab-Israeli war, Fall 1973, when Israel received and used such weapons from the United States. It used these weapons under our country's supervision. (Never think for a moment that the Muslim nations hate us for our shopping centers and our democracy, our backyard swimming pools and our skyscrapers. They hate us for what we have done, and are doing, to them.)
The population-devastation politics of DU continues to this day. It is an effective policy. Witness what is occurring to the civilian population in Iraq. Following the Gulf War, birth defects and cancer cases rose exponentially. In one Baghdad hospital, which in pre-war days saw a single birth defect a week, there soon occurred three and four birth defective babies in a single day. (According to Moret, these defects are a deliberate contamination of the population.) For the past thirteen years, rare leukemias and bone cancers have been on the rise there. And of course, in the days of sanctions, the hospital supplies and equipment to help those affected were unavailable. Now, after the devastation of the "shock and awe" campaign of Spring, 2003, supplies are equally non-existent. Also, hospitals are now faced with the consequences of having only sporadic electricity and a lack of clean water. (The Bagdad population has survived the past winter by utilizing rainwater, collected in pots and pans put out on their roofs.)
The stories related to birth defects are heart-breaking. Some Iraqi babies are born with eyeballs the size of lemons protruding from their eye sockets. Some babies have no brains. Some babies are born without any skin. Some pregnancies, although carried close to full term, result in a birth of only a lump of flesh, with no discernable torso, limbs or head or facial features.
Our soldiers are coming home from our Middle East "adventures" with bodies pushed to the breaking point. On KPFA radio in June, it was revealed that of nine returning servicemen to New York City, six tested positive for unusually high levels of radioactivity in their bodies. Those with the highest levels already feel its effects. They are mind-numbingly tired; they have rashes, muscle aches and pains, and their nervous systems are impaired.
The Horrific Working of Pernicious Materials
These men were average soldiers in terms of their war experiences. But for certain soldiers, especially those who have survived the destruction of their tanks, the radiation diseases hit hard and heavy.
By its nature, DU is aerosolized when impacted by explosion. Also the metal components of DU-hardened tanks become a deadly, inhale-able radiation upon explosion. The men and women experiencing this first hand are unaware that every breath they take during these events is impacting their lungs and blood streams with nano-sized charged particles that begin the ruin of their health immediately.
Unlike the Japanese survivors of atomic blasts, who first felt radiation sickness within three days to a week, our soldiers can experience symptoms almost immediately. This is the result of the aerosol effects of the materials. The radioactive dust can be pulverized to the point that it is one hundred times smaller than bacteria. The particles go from the air to the lungs to the blood stream. They then end up attacking the body's mitochondria. The results range from multiple sclerosis type illnesses, to Parkinson's, to chemical sensitivities, and of course, at a somewhat later date, various cancers.
Our nation's youth will sacrifice their prime years to this devastation, wearing adult diapers, shuffling along with walkers, using oxygen tanks, and trying to live with blindness and hearing loss.
Meanwhile, our nation's policy shapers have big plans inside our country as well. In both Ohio and Kentucky, DU processing plants are underway. Both these areas have high unemployment rates. The local populace, desperate for work and a steady income, will have few qualms about what they are doing or why they are doing it. They will be told that the work is safe, and indeed it will seem so. There is no stench to uranium processing; the tiles and linoleum in the plants will no doubt be spotless. Those who recruit them will seem friendly and kind. The fact that the DU workers may have health problems five or ten years down the road is not a big matter for concern. After all, if you don't consider reality, how can it bother you?
I ask that if you are moved by this account of Depleted Uranium devastation, you make a commitment. Red circle the date of the public forum, August 12th, on your calendars. For further information, call 415 721 2844. The lives you save are your own. After all, the air a Baghdad housewife breathed in this morning can be in your lungs by tomorrow afternoon.
Public Forum "Depleted Uranium - The Trojan Horse of A Nuclear War." 7:30 PM at the First United Methodist Church 9 Ross Valley Drive, San Rafael
-------- japan
Japan remembers the horror of Hiroshima
Around 140,000 people died from both direct and indirect fallout
Friday 06 August 2004,
AFP
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/E5672DB8-C69A-4F71-BE6E-AE3B713D3064.htm
Atomic Bomb Dome, a preserved ruin of the 1945 bombing
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/rdonlyres/E5672DB8-C69A-4F71-BE6E-AE3B713D3064/44755/D512B38D033D47D3A5C68B979C32827E.jpg
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/rdonlyres/E5672DB8-C69A-4F71-BE6E-AE3B713D3064/44756/459F51A499F84EB1B84E8879AC44D0BF.jpg
The mayor of Hiroshima has slammed the United States for continuing to develop nuclear arms.
His criticism came on the 59th anniversary of the world's first atomic bombing which killed tens of thousands of people in this Japanese city.
"The egocentric world view of the US government is reaching extremes," Mayor Tadatoshi Akiba said on Friday at the ceremony held against the backdrop of the Atomic Bomb Dome, the preserved ruins of one of the few buildings not flattened by the blast.
Memorial ceremonies are being held to mark the 6 August 1945 second world war bombing by the US.
"Ignoring the United Nations and its foundation of international law, the United States has resumed research to make nuclear weapons smaller and more usable," the mayor told 45,000 people at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park.
Chain of violence
Meanwhile, a chain of violence and retaliation around the world showed no sign of ending, he said.
"Reliance on violence-amplifying terror and North Korea, among others, buying into the worthless policy of 'nuclear insurance' are salient symbols of our times," he said.
Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi meanwhile pledged that Japan would stick to its post-1945 war-renouncing constitution.
As the clock clicked onto 8:15 am (2315 GMT Thursday), the exact time the US dropped the bomb codenamed Little Boy, those at the ceremony bowed their heads for a minute's silence in memory of victims of the attack.
Around 140,000 people - almost half the city's population of the time - died immediately or in the months after the dropping of the 20 kiloton atomic bomb, from radiation injuries or horrific burns.
During Friday's ceremony officials added to the existing toll the names of 5142 atomic bomb sufferers who died or were confirmed dead during the past year.
Cumulative toll
The additions brought the cumulative death toll associated with the effects of the bombing to 237,062.
The Hiroshima bombing was followed by the dropping of a second atomic bomb on the city of Nagasaki on 9 August 1945, leaving tens of thousands more dead.
The appalling loss of life among ordinary Japanese was credited with forcing Japan to surrender six days later, ending the second world war II in the Pacific theatre.
The mayor also declared the period from Friday to 9 August 2005 to be a year of "Remembrance and Action for a Nuclear-Free World", while calling on Americans to act as "a people of conscience".
The head of a group of survivors of the bombs said they were "boiling with anger" over global stockpiles of nuclear weapons and the spreading violence since the September 2001 attacks.
"We have a grave duty in today's critical situation ...," Hiroshima Prefectural Confederation of A-Bomb Sufferers Organisations head Sunao Tsuboi said.
"We have to pass stories of our suffering from generation to generation and appeal more to the public about the terrible nature of nuclear weapons," he said.
----
Targeting Civilians at Hiroshima and Nagasaki
by Anthony Gregory,
August 6, 2004
Future of Freedom Foundation
http://www.fff.org/comment/com0408b.asp
The U.S. government has killed civilians for well over a century. During the Civil War, General William Tecumseh Sherman waged war on civilians in Atlanta. During the Philippine Insurrection at the turn of 20th century, U.S. forces killed about 200,000 civilians, and even had a policy to shoot anyone more than 10 years old who dared to resist the U.S. occupation of the Philippines. During World War II, the Allies ruthlessly firebombed Dresden and Tokyo and other cities in Germany and Japan, killing hundreds of thousands of innocent noncombatants.
But there was nevertheless something special about Hiroshima and its sequel of mass horror, Nagasaki.
People still defend Harry Truman's atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on pragmatic grounds. Truman's defenders say that the bombings saved far more lives than they extinguished. They concede that the bombing was an act of targeting civilians, but insist that it was for the worthy goal of ending the war.
Before even examining the plausibility of this argument, we have to acknowledge the argument's essence. In effect, to rationalize the targeting of noncombatants as the best method of bringing about a greater good is to make excuses for state terrorism. Terrorism, if it means anything, is a method by which civilians are the targets of violence for the purpose of achieving political goals. Having Imperial Japan surrender, even if a worthy goal, was nevertheless a political one, and the targeting of innocents to achieve that goal was an act of terrorism.
Indeed, it was terrorism on an incredibly large scale. Hundreds of thousands of innocent Japanese were instantaneously wiped off the earth on August 6 and August 9, 1945. Many more died in the following years from the radioactive climate left behind by the bombings.
So the questions remain: Was this a case where terrorism was justified? Can there be other circumstances where the overt targeting of civilians can be justified, so as to bring about a greater good?
In the case of Hiroshima, no substantive evidence exists that the bombing was "necessary" to make Japan surrender. In fact, the Japanese had already attempted to sue for peace in July and were only hesitant because they distrusted the terms of unconditional surrender that the Allies demanded. They specifically wanted to keep their emperor, which, after the atomic bombings, they were allowed to, anyway. The military estimated before Hiroshima that invasion would cost as many as 20,000 American lives, but not nearly the half million lives that Truman later claimed had been the estimate. Even without invasion, Japan was utterly defeated by the war and U.S. blockades prevented the island nation from getting the necessary food to survive, much less maintain any type of threat against America.
Truman's decision to use nuclear weapons against civilians has not gone without criticism from the political and military elite of his time. Truman's chief of staff, Admiral William D. Leahy, wrote in his book I Was There that using the "barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons." He lamented that the U.S. government "had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages" and that he "was not taught to make war in that fashion." In 1963 Dwight Eisenhower told Newsweek that "the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing." Although many Americans revere Truman and think he made the right decision, that was not the universal opinion among the top brass.
Why did the U.S government even develop such a ghastly weapon? The conventional history dictates that a reasonable fear of Hitler's acquiring nuclear bombs forced the U.S. government to develop them first. Albert Einstein wrote Franklin Roosevelt on August 2, 1939, and warned about Germany's potential development of nuclear weapons. Even the master physicist Einstein seemed to have no idea how potent and deadly the atom bomb could be, as he wrote:
A single bomb of this type, carried by boat and exploded in a port, might very well destroy the whole port together with some of the surrounding territory. However, such bombs might very well prove to be too heavy for transportation by air.
So Roosevelt, if he took Einstein's advice and assumed the worst, had good reason to worry about a Nazi nuclear weapons program. But this is not the whole story.
After Germany surrendered to the Allies, the Alsos Mission (American Science Intelligence Unit) dismantled the German nuclear effort in April 1945. In May, the Allies confirmed there had been no German atomic threat, but the Manhattan Project continued unabated.
The Manhattan Project employed 180,000 people who worked for several years with a clear mission and a $2 billion budget, whereas the German nuclear operation had nothing remotely near that manpower or level of organization. In fact, the scientists who had worked on Germany's nuclear program had believed as early as 1941 that the atomic bomb was virtually unattainable, and were stunned to see the "success" of the Hiroshima bombing.
We know this because in July 1945 the British brought the top ten scientists in Hitler's nuclear program to Farm Hall, near Cambridge, Massachusetts. Confined to a house until January 1946, the scientists were monitored and much of their dialogue was recorded and transcribed. The transcripts became declassified in 1992, and are now available in the books Operation Epsilon: The Farm Hall Transcripts and Hitler's Uranium Club, which present the British and American translations of the transcripts, respectively.
Hitler would have doubtless loved to have had the atom bomb, but from the Farm Hall transcripts it becomes clear that the German scientists had lacked the resources, personnel, and understanding to build it. Germany's most brilliant physicist, Werner Heisenberg, reacted with complete disbelief that the Allies achieved what the Germans never hoped to accomplish. Heisenberg did not fully understand the science that went into the isotope separation, had made arithmetic errors, and, upon hearing of Hiroshima, rightly conjectured that to pull it off the United States must have used tens of thousands of people - many times more than what the Germans had. The scientists pondered among themselves how the Allies had done it, even wondering which fissionable element had been used. At times, Heisenberg assumed the Allies were bluffing about Hiroshima.
Several of the scientists expressed horror at the Hiroshima bombing. Otto Hahn said, "I am thankful that we didn't succeed," and Max von Laue cried out, "The innocent!" Walther Gerlach expressed sorrow that the Germans had failed to do what the Allies had done, prompting Hahn to reply, "Are you upset we did not make the uranium bomb? I thank God on my bended knees we did not make the uranium bomb."
Heisenberg voiced a similar sentiment that we hear today: "One could equally say [the atomic bomb was] the quickest way of ending the war." Some have wondered if Heisenberg knew how to develop nuclear weapons, but sabotaged the Nazi program out of a sense of morality. We cannot be totally sure, but we do know that he insisted until his death that he had been completely clueless that the weapons could feasibly be made. We know that the Germans were light years from attaining them and that it took 180,000 people working on the Manhattan Project to develop them - and that the Allies continued the project even after they knew the Germans had never come close.
Truman has been quoted as saying, "The atom bomb was no 'great decision.'... It was merely another powerful weapon in the arsenal of righteousness." He also called the bomb the "greatest achievement of organized science in history," and wondered aloud about how "atomic power can become a powerful and forceful influence toward the maintenance of world peace."
We cannot know whether Truman believed this or exactly why he chose to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Some still insist that the president genuinely thought it was the least deadly way to end the war; others think that he was trying to intimidate Stalin or even prevent the USSR from invading and conquering Japan before the United States could.
But we do know that the bombings did accomplish a number of things. They ushered in a new era of warfare, in which targeting civilians became an acceptable strategy. The advent of the nuclear bomb brought on decades of Cold War between the U.S. and Russian superpowers, whose subjects lived in constant anxiety under the perennial threat of nuclear annihilation. It encouraged the Russians to accelerate their production of weapons of mass destruction. It further consolidated power in the executive branch of the U.S. government - what power even compares with the power to destroy so many lives at the push of a button? And it launched civilization toward the ultimate collectivism, whereby civilian lives became expendable fodder for the sufficiently empowered governments of the world. More than half the fatalities in World War II were civilian, and the apocalyptic finale of the war in Hiroshima and Nagasaki drastically altered the formula for waging war, henceforth branding civilians as legitimate targets to achieve higher, collectivist purposes.
Since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the U.S. government has continued to treat civilians and combatants as roughly indistinguishable. During the Vietnam War, Richard Nixon carpet-bombed Cambodia, killing hundreds of thousands of peasants. The first Bush and Clinton administrations devastated the lives of Iraqi civilians, bombing civilian infrastructure and imposing UN sanctions with the express policy goal of destroying civilian water treatment facilities and starving the Iraqi people into submission, in hopes to incite them to rise up and overthrow Saddam.
On 60 Minutes in May 1996, Leslie Stahl asked Clinton's UN Ambassador, Madeline Albright, point blank: "We have heard that a half million children have died [from the sanctions]. I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima. And - and you know, is the price worth it?"
Albright replied, "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price - we think the price is worth it."
Perhaps there has never been a clearer case of a U.S. official rationalizing the targeting of countless foreign civilians in the context of what happened at Hiroshima. The precedent had been set, and what decades ago may have been considered an immeasurable but necessary evil to stop Imperial Japan has more recently been invoked as a proper way of dealing with as negligible a threat to the United States as Saddam Hussein.
Surely, Albright's words were well publicized in the Islamic world, where Muslims saw little concern whatever on the part of U.S. officials for the civilian lives of Middle Easterners, as long as expending such lives achieved "higher" policy goals. Reciprocally, Islamist terrorists have had little concern for American civilian lives in their quest to change U.S. policy.
Three years after Albright's frightening admission, Clinton went on to drop cluster bombs on Serbia, knowing full well that civilians would endure the most suffering. In regard to Gulf War II, the U.S. government has shown a complete apathy toward civilian dead in Iraq, refusing even to keep and publicize an accurate body count.
Some Americans have celebrated Hiroshima, as though it was a necessary end to the madness of World War II in which 50 million people lost their lives. They perceive the atomic bombings the way one might look at a peace treaty. Several years back, the Post Office even commemorated the event with a stamp depicting the image of the mushroom cloud that took hundreds of thousands of lives.
Instead, Hiroshima and Nagasaki should be remembered with solemn and thoughtful reflection as atrocities that reinforced collectivist attitudes toward war and sparked the beginning of a fearful era of cold and hot war with the United States and its proxies against the USSR and its proxies.
Instead of making excuses for past U.S. war crimes, we need to remember them for the great evils that they indeed were. We cannot undo history, but with determination, we might possibly prevent such horrendous crimes from ever again being done in our name. The worst way to guarantee a brighter future is to look at Hiroshima and Nagasaki and draw the lesson that sometimes the government needs to kill hundreds of thousands of civilians for the sake of humanity. Indeed, it is that conventional lesson that has helped solidify the United States in a state of perpetual war since the end of World War II, and that dangerously faulty lesson might still one day be invoked to facilitate such terror and atrocity that we can now hardly imagine.
Anthony Gregory is a writer and musician who lives in Berkeley, California. He earned his bachelor's degree in history at UC Berkeley, where he was president of the Cal Libertarians. He is an intern at the Independent Institute and has written for RationalReview.com, the Libertarian Enterprise, and LewRockwell.com. See his webpage, AnthonyGregory.com, for more articles and personal information. Send him email.
----
In the Shadow of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
The Cultural Conditions of Unconditional Surrender
By DAVID PRICE
August 6, 2004
Counterpunch
http://www.counterpunch.org/price08062004.html
Today's fifty-ninth anniversary of the United States' bombing of Hiroshima finds most Americans still satisfied that President Truman's decision to use the bomb was a difficult but necessary one designed to bring peace and save lives. It seems unlikely that many Americans will reconsider their positions on this issue. To some Hiroshima has become the paradigm of the very notion of "bombing for peace," and one's variance from this position tends to mark an individual as holding liberal or radical political tendencies. But a few days ago as I was reading through the papers of the late sinologist and cold warrior George Edward Taylor at the University of Washington I encountered some documents which reminded me that questioning the wisdom of using atomic weapons against Japanese civilians to end the Pacific War is not a position reserved for the contemporary left: even at the time of these bombings there were embedded conservative members of the military-intelligence community who viewed the use of these weapons as unnecessary folly.
George Taylor was a classic Twentieth Century international man of intrigue. He ran intelligence operations in Japanese occupied China, during World War Two served as Deputy Director for the Far East of the Office of War Information (OWI), later worked with Rand, State, other articulations of the Twentieth Century's revolving door of American intelligence agencies and universities. During World War Two Taylor brought anti-Communist sinologist Karl Wittfogel to the United States, after the war he helped establish a safe nest for then "useful" Nazi-collaborator Nicholas Poppe, and during the McCarthy era he betrayed his former friend Owen Lattimore before Senator McCarran's Internal Security Subcommittee. His support for the Vietnam War on the University of Washington campus marked him as a Nixonian reactionary. Taylor was a sort of Third Man who shape-shifted through the foreground and background of various Twentieth Century theatres of conflict-and his correspondence finds him holding court with the likes Henry Kissinger, Edward Lansdale and Harold Lasswell.
In 1996 I met Taylor at his spectacular penthouse home atop Seattle's Pill Hill-- overlooking the city and the Olympic and Cascade Mountains--to conduct a lengthy interview covering his contacts with Wittfogel, the McCarthy period and his years supervising a small army of anthropologists weaponizing anthropology against the Japanese at the Office of War Information (OWI) during the Second World War.
At OWI Taylor's team of social scientists studied Japanese culture and created cultural-specific propaganda-primarily leaflets dropped from airplanes on Japanese soldiers and civilians. Because Taylor believed that an understanding of culture was vital to the success of his OWI team he recruited over a dozen anthropologists and other social scientists to work on his Japanese analysis and propaganda campaigns. Among other resources, Taylor's team had access to five-thousand diaries seized from captured and killed Japanese soldiers, and these heartfelt writings were used as important resources for voicing the OWI's successful propaganda efforts. Ruth Benedict's OWI work resulted in her post-war publication of The Chrysanthemum and the Sword which analyzed the culture and personality of the Japanese. Benedict's work focused on the role and importance of the Emperor in Japanese culture and reflected many of the institutional views of Taylor's OWI division.
When I interviewed Taylor I was surprised by his insistence that at the beginning of the war he viewed his psychological warfare programs as a means of ending the war by helping the Japanese overcome all the cultural obstacles preventing their surrender-however, as the war advanced and the American advantage became clear he came to see his job as being to convince U.S. civilian and military leaders that they did not have to engage in acts of genocidal annihilation to end the war. Racist stereotypes of maniacal Japanese soldiers and citizens fighting to the death dominated the War Department and the White House, and Taylor and his staff increasingly strove to battle this domestic enemy as a prime deterrent of peace. It was with great difficulty that Taylor and his staff of anthropologists worked to convince civilian and military personnel that that Japanese were even culturally capable of surrender.
Taylor's papers contain numerous typewritten speeches capturing his efforts to convince U.S. military strategists that the Japanese could surrender. In one such undated speech (probably from 1944) he argued that, "If we accept, as we must, the view that Japanese soldiers, in spite of their indoctrination, are as human as other troops, we shall be the less surprised at the mounting evidence of their very human reactions to defeat. We are taking more and more prisoners. Two years ago it would have been very unusual for sixty men to allow themselves to be picked up out of the water when their transport had been sunk. In New Guinea and Burma stragglers are coming in out of the jungles to surrender without a struggle. We have known for a long time that many Japanese officers have been evacuated from indefensible positions and that their reaction on places such as Attu, where escape was impossible, was not to fight to the last man."
But it was just this sort of reasoned analysis--arguing against the War Department's pull for a genocidal campaign to obliterate a "race" believed incapable of surrender--that was ignored by the War Department and White House. The OWI had little success in convincing President Roosevelt of the importance on not including the demise of the Japanese Emperor in America's demands for unconditional surrender, but as Taylor told Sharon Boswell in a 1996 interview "fortunately Roosevelt died and Truman came in."
Taylor maintained that Truman understood the OWI's insistence that surrender could be negotiated and he seemed to grasp the importance of exempting the Emperor from conditions of "unconditional" surrender. Taylor said that Truman authorized the OWI to communicate this to the Japanese. As Japan's war effort collapsed there was a growing interest in surrender.
A few days ago I found among Taylor's papers and correspondence some blurry photocopies of declassified intelligence reports from the codename "MAGIC-Diplomatic Summaries." These are translated Japanese diplomatic intercepts that were secretly being decoded and read by American military intelligence during the war. A May 11, 1945 MAGIC intercept supports the views of Taylor, others at the OWI, and elsewhere in military intelligence that the Japanese military were ripe for surrender:
"Report of peace sentiment in Japanese armed forces: On 5 May the German Naval Attaché in Tokyo dispatched the following message to Admiral Doenitz: 'An influential member of the Admiralty Staff has given me to understand that, since the situation is clearly recognized to be hopeless, large sections of the Japanese armed forces would not regard with disfavor an American request for capitulation even if the terms were hard, provided they were halfway honorable.'
Note [by U.S. military intelligence]: Previously noted diplomatic reports have commented on signs of war weariness in official Japanese Navy circles, but have not mentioned such an attitude in Army quarters."
This mention of "halfway honorable" terms of surrender was exactly why the anthropologists in Taylor's group had been focusing on the importance of the emperor in Japanese society. But such considerations were easily ignored by a War Department whose cost benefit calculations weighed the coming hundreds of thousands dead in Hiroshima and Nagasaki against the balance of specifying the acceptable conditions that came to follow unconditional surrender.
Even more tragic is a July 20th MAGIC intercept in which Japanese Ambassador Sato advocated his desire for a Japanese surrender if the United States would assure him that the "Imperial House" would remain in existence. These MAGIC Documents are a sad testimony that in the days before the attacks of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, American intelligence had good evidence that Ambassador Sato was close to surrendering to the Americans. But neither the knowledge gleaned from these intercepts nor the general advice of social scientists at the OWI dissuaded American plans to unleash nuclear weapons on Japanese civilians.
Perhaps it is George Taylor's gloomy credentials as a hawk, a dangerously-anti-Communist-conservative, and as an intelligence insider that makes his voice such an intriguing one in the chorus of those questioning the necessity of Truman's deployment of the A-Bomb. While out of the A-Bomb decision making loop Taylor and others at the OWI knew Japan was ripe for (pseudo-unconditional) surrender. Like many others, Taylor later came to believe that Truman's decision to use of nuclear weapons had more to do with "scaring the hell out of the Soviet Union" than it did with saving the inflated estimates of American lives some argued would be lost in a Japanese invasion and occupation.
But beyond the obvious message sent to the Soviet's, Truman's decision to use his doomsday weapon (twice) without presenting the Japanese with the actual conditions of his unconditional surrender revealed elements of an important American post war trajectory-a trajectory of violence where American military force became the tool of preference selected over the promise of diplomacy.
----
Three characters, no dialogue
August 6, 2004
Nation Institute
TomGram
http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=1666
[Note for Tomdispatchers: Good news! To the right of the main screen at www.tomdispatch.com, the site now has a Google search window. So if you put in "peak oil," "permanent bases," "Mike Davis," "Chalmers Johnson," "Rebecca Solnit," or anything else you might want to recover from Tomdispatch 2004, you'll find it immediately at hand.]
Here we are cycling for the 59th time since 1945 past August 6, the day the Earth stood still (to steal the title of a 1951 sci-fi film). Remembrance of August 6, Hiroshima Day, is receding even in Japan where the aging hibakusha or survivors of the blast are dying off. It never gained a place in the country that developed the Manhattan Project and made the first atomic weapons, loosing one over Hiroshima and another, three days later, over Nagasaki in those final weeks of World War II. As Justin McCurry of the British Guardian writes, "Almost six decades after the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, collective horror at their consequences is being replaced by collective amnesia."
And yet, even though we in the U.S. hardly acknowledge August 6th and the weapons themselves have been swept into a larger, muddier catch-all category ("weapons of mass destruction"), the nuclear story refuses to go away. This is in part because our own nuclear arsenal remains at approximately 10,000 weapons; while the Bush administration continues to push for yet more research on ever newer generations of them, continues to threaten to settle nuclear proliferation questions unilaterally through "proliferation wars" of its choosing, and had no hesitation about scaring Congress or citizenry into the first of these by invoking the image of Iraqi mushroom clouds rising over American cities.
As if to offer its own version of a Hiroshima Day celebration, only last week the Bush administration reversed course and announced, according to the Washington Post's Dafna Linzer, that "it will oppose provisions for inspections and verification as part of an international treaty that would ban production of nuclear weapons materials... Arms-control specialists reacted negatively, saying the change in U.S. position will dramatically weaken any treaty and make it harder to prevent nuclear materials from falling into the hands of terrorists. The announcement, they said, also virtually kills a 10-year international effort to lure countries such as Pakistan, India and Israel into accepting some oversight of their nuclear production programs."
At least, to look on the bright side, if some of those "materials" should fall into the hands of terrorists, this administration has a plan -- to save itself. With an extra $652 million in supplemental Armageddon funds last year and thanks to a Relocation Procedures and Support Handbook it's produced, notes Los Angeles Times military analyst William Arkin, top Bush administration officials will be prepared to repair to Site R, the Raven Rock underground bunker that housed Vice President Dick Cheney after Sept. 11, with full instructions on what to bring:
"'Two complete changes of clothing,' as well as a combination lock, flashlight, two towels and a 'small box of washing powder.' The government will provide lodging, but it draws the line at detergent. Nor does the installation accommodate those who like a late dinner: Its dining facility, known as 'Granite Cove,' closes at 5 p.m."
As scholar Paul Boyer pointed out in By the Bomb's Early Light, a now-classic volume on the bomb's cultural fallout in the United States, Americans grasped the world-ending, species-endangering implications of atomic weapons almost instantly. Our most familiar images of nuclear holocaust entered our culture within weeks, or at most months, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki (and have now migrated to other world-ending scenarios -- whether of global warming or the arrival of random asteroids).
The bomb, as I argued in my Cold War history, The End of Victory Culture, turned upside down a reasonably sunny American triumphalist tale filled with mobilizing ambushes that led to victory. It was no-time before our leaders were warning of "nuclear Pearl Harbors." Of President Kennedy's terrifying televised Cuban Missile Crisis address to the nation ("We will not prematurely or unnecessarily risk the costs of worldwide nuclear war in which even the fruits of victory would be ashes in our mouth"), I wrote:
"Each step up the ladder of military 'preparedness' [in those years] ensured that against a nuclear Pearl Harbor there could be no defense. Planning for and fear of such a sneak attack was at the heart of nuclear strategy, of all those thoughts about 'the unthinkable.' With the possibility of a nuclear first strike, the ambush had escaped its familiar boundaries. Writ so large, it obliterated victory and sapped the last stand of all symbolic meaning. The president could no longer address the people after a "day of infamy"; he would have to do so beforehand [as Kennedy did]. ... Nothing could rally Americans for such a war. The mobilizing last stand had been replaced by a demobilizing one. After this Alamo, there would be no Texas; after this Little Big Horn, no Montana; after this Pearl Harbor, no Hawaii."
The dangers we're focused on have changed. We've now forgotten the Russians, though their arsenal remains almost as world-ending as ours and worry instead about stray missiles from North Koreans, nuclear weapons in the hands of terrorists, or an obliterating nuclear war in South Asia between India and Pakistan. But on this 49th post-August 6th, perhaps it's still worth thinking about those days at the end of a bitter global war when all of us were ushered into a new and frightening age that opened out for the first time in history on a potential landscape of species-ending destruction.
This -- a little personal tale of my own -- then is the first of at least three pieces touching on nuclear issues that I'll be posting between now and the end of next week. Tom
Hiroshima Story By Tom Engelhardt
Even though we promptly dubbed the site of the 9/11 attacks in New York City "Ground Zero" -- once a term reserved for an atomic blast -- Americans have never really come to grips either with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki or the nuclear age they ushered in.
There can be no question that, as the big bang that might end it all, the atomic bomb haunted Cold War America. In those years, while the young watched endless versions of nuclear disaster transmuted into B-horror films, the grown-ups who ran our world went on a vast shopping spree for world-ending weaponry, building nuclear arsenals that grew into the tens of thousands of weapons.
When the Cold War finally ended with the Soviet Union's quite peaceful collapse, however, a nuclear "peace dividend" never quite arrived. The arsenals of the former superpower adversaries remained quietly in place, drawn down but strangely untouched, awaiting a new mission, while just beyond sight, the knowledge of the making of such weapons spread to other countries ready to launch their own threatening mini-cold wars.
In 1995, fifty years after that first bomb went off over the Aioi Bridge in Hiroshima, it still proved impossible in the U.S. to agree upon a nuclear creation tale. Was August 6, 1945, the heroic ending to a global war or the horrific beginning of a new age? The Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the Hiroshima bomb, and a shattered school child's lunchbox from Hiroshima could not yet, it turned out, inhabit the same exhibit space at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC.
Today, while the Bush administration promotes a new generation of nuclear "bunker-busters" as the best means to fight future anti-proliferation wars, such once uniquely world-threatening weapons have had to join a jostling queue of world-ending possibilities in the dreams of our planet's young. Still, for people of a certain age like me, Hiroshima is where it all began. So on this August 6th, I would like to try, once again, to lay out the pieces of a nuclear story that none of us, it seems, can yet quite tell.
In my story, there are three characters and no dialogue. There is my father, who volunteered for the Army Air Corps at age thirty-five, immediately after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. He fought in Burma, was painfully silent on his wartime experiences, and died on Pearl Harbor Day in 1983. Then there's me, growing up in a world in which my father's war was glorified everywhere, in which my play fantasies in any park included mowing down Japanese soldiers -- but my dreams were of nuclear destruction. Finally, there is a Japanese boy whose name and fate are unknown to me.
This is a story of multiple silences. The first of those, the silence of my father, was once no barrier to the stories I told myself. If anything, his silence enhanced them, since in the 1950s, male silence seemed a heroic attribute (and perhaps it was, though hardly in the way I imagined at the time). Sitting in the dark with him then at any World War II movie was enough for me.
As it turned out though, the only part of his war I possessed was its final act, and around this too, there grew up a puzzling silence. The very idea of nuclear destruction seemed not to touch him. Like other school children, I went through nuclear attack drills with sirens howling outside, while -- I had no doubt -- he continued to work unfazed in his office. It was I who watched the irradiated ants and nuclearized monsters of our teen-screen life stomp the Earth. It was I who went to the French film Hiroshima Mon Amour, where I was shocked by my first sight of the human casualties of the A-bombing, and to On the Beach to catch a glimpse of how the world might actually end. It was I who saw the mushroom cloud rise in my dreams, felt its heat sear my arm before I awoke. Of all this I said not a word to him, nor he to me.
On his erstwhile enemies, however, my father was not silent. He hated the Japanese with a war-bred passion. They had, he told me, "done things" that could not be discussed to "boys" he had known. Subsequent history -- the amicable American occupation of Japan or the emergence of that defeated land as an ally -- did not seem to touch him.
His hatred of all things Japanese was not a ruling passion of my childhood only because Japan was so absent from our lives. There was nothing Japanese in our house (one did not buy their products); we avoided the only Japanese restaurant in our part of town, and no Japanese people ever came to visit. Even the evil Japanese I saw in war movies, who might sneeringly hiss, "I was educated in your University of Southern California" before they met their suicidal fates were, I now know, regularly played by non-Japanese actors.
In the end, I followed my own path to Hiroshima, drawn perhaps to the world my father so vehemently rejected. In 1979, as an editor, I published Unforgettable Fire, the drawings of Hiroshima residents who had lived through that day. It was, I suspect, the first time any sizable number of images of the human damage there made it into mainstream American culture. I visited Japan in 1982, thanks to the book's Japanese editor who took me to Hiroshima -- an experience I found myself unable to talk about on return. This, too, became part of the silences my father and I shared.
To make a story thus far, would seem relatively simple. Two generations face each other across the chasm of a war and an act that divided them. It is the story we all know. And yet, there is my third character and third silence -- the Japanese boy who drifted into my consciousness after an absence of almost four decades only a few years ago. I no longer remember -- I can't even imagine -- how he and I were put in contact sometime in the mid-1950s. Like me, my Japanese pen-pal must have been eleven or twelve years old. If we exchanged photos, I have no memory of his face, nor does a name come to mind. If I can remember half-jokingly writing my own address at that age ("New York City, New York, USA, Planet Earth, the Solar System, the Galaxy, the Universe"), I can't remember writing his. I already knew by then that a place called Albany was the capital of New York State, but New York City still seemed to me the center of the world. In many ways, I wasn't wrong.
Even if he lived in Tokyo, my Japanese pen-pal could have had no such illusions. Like me, he had undoubtedly been born during World War II. Perhaps in his first year of life he had been evacuated from one of Japan's charred cities. For him, that disastrous war would not have been a memory. If he had gone to the movies with his father in the 1950s, he might have seen Godzilla (not the U.S. Air Force) dismantle Tokyo and he might have hardly remembered those economically difficult first years of American occupation. But he could not at that time have imagined himself at the center of the universe.
I have a faint memory of the feel of his letters; a crinkly thinness undoubtedly meant to save infinitesimal amounts of weight (and so, money). We wrote, of course, in English, for much of the planet, if not the solar-system-galaxy-universe, was beginning to operate in that universal language which seemed to radiate from my home city to the world like the rays of the sun. But what I most remember are the exotic-looking stamps that arrived on (or in) his letters. For I was, with my father, an avid stamp collector. On Sunday afternoons, my father and I prepared and mounted our stamps, consulted our Scott's Catalog, and pasted them in. In this way, the Japanese section of our album was filled with that boy's offerings; without comment, but also without protest from my father.
We exchanged letters -- none of which remain -- for a year or two and then who knows what interest of mine (or his) overcame us; perhaps only the resistance boys can have to writing letters. In any case, he, too, entered a realm of silence. Only now, remembering those quiet moments of closeness when my father and I worked on our albums, do I note that he existed briefly and without discussion in our lives. He existed for both of us, perhaps, in the ambiguous space that silence can create. And now I wonder sometimes what kinds of nuclear dreams my father may have had.
For all of us in a sense, the Earth was knocked off its axis on August 6, 1945. In that one moment, my father's war ended and my war -- the Cold War -- began. But in my terms, it seems so much messier than that. For we, and that boy, continued to live in the same world together for a long time, accepting and embroidering each other's silences.
The bomb still runs like a fissure, but also like an attracting current -- a secret unity -- through our lives. The rent it tore in history was deep and the generational divide, given the experiences of those growing up on either side of it, profound. But any story would also have to hold the ways, even deeper and harder to fathom, in which we lived through it all together in pain, hatred, love, and most of all silence.
In this fifty-ninth year after Hiroshima, a year charged with no special meaning, perhaps we will think a little about the stories we can't tell, and about the subterranean stream of emotional horror that unites us, that won't go away whether, as in 1995, we try to exhibit the Enola Gay as a glorious icon or bury it deep in the Earth with a stake through its metallic heart. For my particular story, the one I've never quite been able to tell, there is a Japanese boy who should not have been, but briefly was, with us; who perhaps lives today with his own memories of very different silences. When I think of him now, when I realize that he, my father, and I still can't inhabit the same story except in silence, a strange kind of emotion rushes up in me, which is hard to explain.
Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is a co-founder of the American Empire Project (www.americanempireproject.com) and consulting editor at Metropolitan Books. He is the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of American triumphalism and the Cold War, and coeditor of History Wars, the Enola Gay and Other Battles for the American Past.
----
Hiroshima and Nagasaki
August 6, 2004
by Ralph Raico <mailto:rraico@earthlink.net>
a senior scholar of the Mises Institute
http://www.lewrockwell.com/raico/raico22.html
This excerpt from Ralph Raico's "Harry S. Truman: Advancing the Revolution in John V. Denson, ed., Reassessing the Presidency: The Rise of the Executive State and the Decline of Freedom (Auburn, Alabama: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2001), is reprinted with permission. (The notes are numbered as they are because this is an excerpt. Read the whole article.)
The most spectacular episode of Truman's presidency will never be forgotten, but will be forever linked to his name: the atomic bombings of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 and of Nagasaki three days later. Probably around two hundred thousand persons were killed in the attacks and through radiation poisoning; the vast majority were civilians, including several thousand Korean workers. Twelve U.S. Navy fliers incarcerated in a Hiroshima jail were also among the dead.87
Great controversy has always surrounded the bombings. One thing Truman insisted on from the start: The decision to use the bombs, and the responsibility it entailed, was his. Over the years, he gave different, and contradictory, grounds for his decision. Sometimes he implied that he had acted simply out of revenge. To a clergyman who criticized him, Truman responded, testily:
Nobody is more disturbed over the use of Atomic bombs than I am but I was greatly disturbed over the unwarranted attack by the Japanese on Pearl Harbor and their murder of our prisoners of war. The only language they seem to understand is the one we have been using to bombard them.88
Such reasoning will not impress anyone who fails to see how the brutality of the Japanese military could justify deadly retaliation against innocent men, women, and children. Truman doubtless was aware of this, so from time to time he advanced other pretexts. On August 9, 1945, he stated: "The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians."89
This, however, is absurd. Pearl Harbor was a military base. Hiroshima was a city, inhabited by some three hundred thousand people, which contained military elements. In any case, since the harbor was mined and the U.S. Navy and Air Force were in control of the waters around Japan, whatever troops were stationed in Hiroshima had been effectively neutralized.
On other occasions, Truman claimed that Hiroshima was bombed because it was an industrial center. But, as noted in the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, "all major factories in Hiroshima were on the periphery of the city - and escaped serious damage."90 The target was the center of the city. That Truman realized the kind of victims the bombs consumed is evident from his comment to his cabinet on August 10, explaining his reluctance to drop a third bomb: "The thought of wiping out another 100,000 people was too horrible," he said; he didn't like the idea of killing "all those kids."91 Wiping out another one hundred thousand people . . . all those kids.
Moreover, the notion that Hiroshima was a major military or industrial center is implausible on the face of it. The city had remained untouched through years of devastating air attacks on the Japanese home islands, and never figured in Bomber Command's list of the 33 primary targets.92
Thus, the rationale for the atomic bombings has come to rest on a single colossal fabrication, which has gained surprising currency: that they were necessary in order to save a half-million or more American lives. These, supposedly, are the lives that would have been lost in the planned invasion of Kyushu in December, then in the all-out invasion of Honshu the next year, if that was needed. But the worst-case scenario for a full-scale invasion of the Japanese home islands was forty-six thousand American lives lost.93 The ridiculously inflated figure of a half-million for the potential death toll - nearly twice the total of U.S. dead in all theaters in the Second World War - is now routinely repeated in high-school and college textbooks and bandied about by ignorant commentators. Unsurprisingly, the prize for sheer fatuousness on this score goes to President George W. Bush, who claimed in 1991 that dropping the bomb "spared millions of American lives."94
Still, Truman's multiple deceptions and self-deceptions are understandable, considering the horror he unleashed. It is equally understandable that the U.S. occupation authorities censored reports from the shattered cities and did not permit films and photographs of the thousands of corpses and the frightfully mutilated survivors to reach the public.95 Otherwise, Americans - and the rest of the world - might have drawn disturbing comparisons to scenes then coming to light from the Nazi concentration camps.
The bombings were condemned as barbaric and unnecessary by high American military officers, including Eisenhower and MacArthur.96 The view of Admiral William D. Leahy, Truman's own chief of staff, was typical:
the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. . . . My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make wars in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.97
The political elite implicated in the atomic bombings feared a backlash that would aid and abet the rebirth of horrid prewar "isolationism." Apologias were rushed into print, lest public disgust at the sickening war crime result in erosion of enthusiasm for the globalist project.98 No need to worry. A sea-change had taken place in the attitudes of the American people. Then and ever after, all surveys have shown that the great majority supported Truman, believing that the bombs were required to end the war and save hundreds of thousands of American lives, or more likely, not really caring one way or the other.
Those who may still be troubled by such a grisly exercise in cost-benefit analysis - innocent Japanese lives balanced against the lives of Allied servicemen - might reflect on the judgment of the Catholic philosopher G.E.M. Anscombe, who insisted on the supremacy of moral rules.99 When, in June 1956, Truman was awarded an honorary degree by her university, Oxford, Anscombe protested.100 Truman was a war criminal, she contended, for what is the difference between the U.S. government massacring civilians from the air, as at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the Nazis wiping out the inhabitants of some Czech or Polish village?
Anscombe's point is worth following up. Suppose that, when we invaded Germany in early 1945, our leaders had believed that executing all the inhabitants of Aachen, or Trier, or some other Rhineland city would finally break the will of the Germans and lead them to surrender. In this way, the war might have ended quickly, saving the lives of many Allied soldiers. Would that then have justified shooting tens of thousands of German civilians, including women and children? Yet how is that different from the atomic bombings?
By early summer 1945, the Japanese fully realized that they were beaten. Why did they nonetheless fight on? As Anscombe wrote: "It was the insistence on unconditional surrender that was the root of all evil."101
That mad formula was coined by Roosevelt at the Casablanca conference, and, with Churchill's enthusiastic concurrence, it became the Allied shibboleth. After prolonging the war in Europe, it did its work in the Pacific. At the Potsdam conference, in July 1945, Truman issued a proclamation to the Japanese, threatening them with the "utter devastation" of their homeland unless they surrendered unconditionally. Among the Allied terms, to which "there are no alternatives," was that there be "eliminated for all time the authority and influence of those who have deceived and misled the people of Japan into embarking on world conquest [sic]." "Stern justice," the proclamation warned, "would be meted out to all war criminals."102
To the Japanese, this meant that the emperor - regarded by them to be divine, the direct descendent of the goddess of the sun - would certainly be dethroned and probably put on trial as a war criminal and hanged, perhaps in front of his palace.103 It was not, in fact, the U.S. intention to dethrone or punish the emperor. But this implicit modification of unconditional surrender was never communicated to the Japanese. In the end, after Nagasaki, Washington acceded to the Japanese desire to keep the dynasty and even to retain Hirohito as emperor.
For months before, Truman had been pressed to clarify the U.S. position by many high officials within the administration, and outside of it, as well. In May 1945, at the president's request, Herbert Hoover prepared a memorandum stressing the urgent need to end the war as soon as possible. The Japanese should be informed that we would in no way interfere with the emperor or their chosen form of government. He even raised the possibility that, as part of the terms, Japan might be allowed to hold on to Formosa (Taiwan) and Korea. After meeting with Truman, Hoover dined with Taft and other Republican leaders, and outlined his proposals.104
Establishment writers on World War II often like to deal in lurid speculations. For instance: if the United States had not entered the war, then Hitler would have "conquered the world" (a sad undervaluation of the Red Army, it would appear; moreover, wasn't it Japan that was trying to "conquer the world"?) and killed untold millions. Now, applying conjectural history in this case: assume that the Pacific war had ended in the way wars customarily do - through negotiation of the terms of surrender. And assume the worst - that the Japanese had adamantly insisted on preserving part of their empire, say, Korea and Formosa, even Manchuria. In that event, it is quite possible that Japan would have been in a position to prevent the Communists from coming to power in China. And that could have meant that the thirty or forty million deaths now attributed to the Maoist regime would not have occurred.
But even remaining within the limits of feasible diplomacy in 1945, it is clear that Truman in no way exhausted the possibilities of ending the war without recourse to the atomic bomb. The Japanese were not informed that they would be the victims of by far the most lethal weapon ever invented (one with "more than two thousand times the blast power of the British 'Grand Slam,' which is the largest bomb ever yet used in the history of warfare," as Truman boasted in his announcement of the Hiroshima attack). Nor were they told that the Soviet Union was set to declare war on Japan, an event that shocked some in Tokyo more than the bombings.105 Pleas by some of the scientists involved in the project to demonstrate the power of the bomb in some uninhabited or evacuated area were rebuffed. All that mattered was to formally preserve the unconditional surrender formula and save the servicemen's lives that might have been lost in the effort to enforce it. Yet, as Major General J.F.C. Fuller, one of the century's great military historians, wrote in connection with the atomic bombings:
Though to save life is laudable, it in no way justifies the employment of means which run counter to every precept of humanity and the customs of war. Should it do so, then, on the pretext of shortening a war and of saving lives, every imaginable atrocity can be justified.106
Isn't this obviously true? And isn't this the reason that rational and humane men, over generations, developed rules of warfare in the first place?
While the mass media parroted the government line in praising the atomic incinerations, prominent conservatives denounced them as unspeakable war crimes. Felix Morley, constitutional scholar and one of the founders of Human Events, drew attention to the horror of Hiroshima, including the "thousands of children trapped in the thirty-three schools that were destroyed." He called on his compatriots to atone for what had been done in their name, and proposed that groups of Americans be sent to Hiroshima, as Germans were sent to witness what had been done in the Nazi camps. The Paulist priest, Father James Gillis, editor of The Catholic World and another stalwart of the Old Right, castigated the bombings as "the most powerful blow ever delivered against Christian civilization and the moral law." David Lawrence, conservative owner of U.S. News and World Report, continued to denounce them for years.107 The distinguished conservative philosopher Richard Weaver was revolted by
the spectacle of young boys fresh out of Kansas and Texas turning nonmilitary Dresden into a holocaust . . . pulverizing ancient shrines like Monte Cassino and Nuremberg, and bringing atomic annihilation to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Weaver considered such atrocities as deeply "inimical to the foundations on which civilization is built."108
Today, self-styled conservatives slander as "anti-American" anyone who is in the least troubled by Truman's massacre of so many tens of thousands of Japanese innocents from the air. This shows as well as anything the difference between today's "conservatives" and those who once deserved the name.
Leo Szilard was the world-renowned physicist who drafted the original letter to Roosevelt that Einstein signed, instigating the Manhattan Project. In 1960, shortly before his death, Szilard stated another obvious truth:
If the Germans had dropped atomic bombs on cities instead of us, we would have defined the dropping of atomic bombs on cities as a war crime, and we would have sentenced the Germans who were guilty of this crime to death at Nuremberg and hanged them.109
The destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a war crime worse than any that Japanese generals were executed for in Tokyo and Manila. If Harry Truman was not a war criminal, then no one ever was.
Notes
87. On the atomic bombings, see Gar Alperovitz, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb and the Architecture of an American Myth (New York: Knopf, 1995); and idem, "Was Harry Truman a Revisionist on Hiroshima?" Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations Newsletter 29, no. 2 (June 1998); also Martin J. Sherwin, A World Destroyed: The Atomic Bomb and the Grand Alliance (New York: Vintage, 1977); and Dennis D. Wainstock, The Decision to Drop the Atomic Bomb (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1996).
88. Alperovitz, Decision, p. 563. Truman added: "When you deal with a beast you have to treat him as a beast. It is most regrettable but nevertheless true." For similar statements by Truman, see ibid., p. 564. Alperovitz's monumental work is the end-product of four decades of study of the atomic bombings and is indispensable for comprehending the often complex argumentation on the issue.
89. Ibid., p. 521.
90. Ibid., p. 523.
91. Barton J. Bernstein, "Understanding the Atomic Bomb and the Japanese Surrender: Missed Opportunities, Little-Known Near Disasters, and Modern Memory," Diplomatic History 19, no. 2 (Spring 1995): 257. General Carl Spaatz, commander of U.S. strategic bombing operations in the Pacific, was so shaken by the destruction at Hiroshima that he telephoned his superiors in Washington, proposing that the next bomb be dropped on a less populated area, so that it "would not be as devastating to the city and the people." His suggestion was rejected. Ronald Schaffer, Wings of Judgment: American Bombing in World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 147-48.
92. This is true also of Nagasaki.
93. See Barton J. Bernstein, "A Post-War Myth: 500,000 U.S. Lives Saved," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 42, no. 6 (June-July 1986): 38-40; and idem, "Wrong Numbers," The Independent Monthly (July 1995): 41-44.
94. J. Samuel Walker, "History, Collective Memory, and the Decision to Use the Bomb," Diplomatic History 19, no. 2 (Spring 1995): 320, 323-25. Walker details the frantic evasions of Truman's biographer, David McCullough, when confronted with the unambiguous record.
95. Paul Boyer, "Exotic Resonances: Hiroshima in American Memory," Diplomatic History 19, no. 2 (Spring 1995): 299. On the fate of the bombings' victims and the public's restricted knowledge of them, see John W. Dower, "The Bombed: Hiroshimas and Nagasakis in Japanese Memory," in ibid., pp. 275-95.
96. Alperovitz, Decision, pp. 320-65. On MacArthur and Eisenhower, see ibid., pp. 352 and 355-56.
97. William D. Leahy, I Was There (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1950), p. 441. Leahy compared the use of the atomic bomb to the treatment of civilians by Genghis Khan, and termed it "not worthy of Christian man." Ibid., p. 442. Curiously, Truman himself supplied the foreword to Leahy's book. In a private letter written just before he left the White House, Truman referred to the use of the atomic bomb as "murder," stating that the bomb "is far worse than gas and biological warfare because it affects the civilian population and murders them wholesale." Barton J. Bernstein, "Origins of the U.S. Biological Warfare Program," Preventing a Biological Arms Race, Susan Wright, ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990), p. 9.
98. Barton J. Bernstein, "Seizing the Contested Terrain of Early Nuclear History: Stimson, Conant, and Their Allies Explain the Decision to Use the Bomb," Diplomatic History 17, no. 1 (Winter 1993): 35-72.
99. One writer in no way troubled by the sacrifice of innocent Japanese to save Allied servicemen - indeed, just to save him - is Paul Fussell; see his Thank God for the Atom Bomb and Other Essays (New York: Summit, 1988). The reason for Fussell's little Te Deum is, as he states, that he was among those scheduled to take part in the invasion of Japan, and might very well have been killed. It is a mystery why Fussell takes out his easily understandable terror, rather unchivalrously, on Japanese women and children instead of on the men in Washington who conscripted him to fight in the Pacific in the first place.
100. G.E.M. Anscombe, "Mr. Truman's Degree," in idem, Collected Philosophical Papers, vol. 3, Ethics, Religion and Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981), pp. 62-71.
101. Anscombe, "Mr. Truman's Degree," p. 62.
102. Hans Adolf Jacobsen and Arthur S. Smith, Jr., eds., World War II: Policy and Strategy. Selected Documents with Commentary (Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-Clio, 1979), pp. 345-46.
103. For some Japanese leaders, another reason for keeping the emperor was as a bulwark against a possible postwar communist takeover. See also Sherwin, A World Destroyed, p. 236: "the [Potsdam] proclamation offered the military die-hards in the Japanese government more ammunition to continue the war than it offered their opponents to end it."
104. Alperovitz, Decision, pp. 44-45.
105. Cf. Bernstein, "Understanding the Atomic Bomb," p. 254: "it does seem very likely, though certainly not definite, that a synergistic combination of guaranteeing the emperor, awaiting Soviet entry, and continuing the siege strategy would have ended the war in time to avoid the November invasion." Bernstein, an excellent and scrupulously objective scholar, nonetheless disagrees with Alperovitz and the revisionist school on several key points.
106. J.F.C. Fuller, The Second World War, 1939-45: A Strategical and Tactical History (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1948), p. 392. Fuller, who was similarly scathing on the terror-bombing of the German cities, characterized the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki as "a type of war that would have disgraced Tamerlane." Cf. Barton J. Bernstein, who concludes, in "Understanding the Atomic Bomb," p. 235:
In 1945, American leaders were not seeking to avoid the use of the A-bomb. Its use did not create ethical or political problems for them. Thus, they easily rejected or never considered most of the so-called alternatives to the bomb.
107. Felix Morley, "The Return to Nothingness," Human Events (August 29, 1945) reprinted in Hiroshima's Shadow, Kai Bird and Lawrence Lifschultz, eds. (Stony Creek, Conn.: Pamphleteer's Press, 1998), pp. 272-74; James Martin Gillis, "Nothing But Nihilism," The Catholic World, September 1945, reprinted in ibid., pp. 278-80; Alperovitz, Decision, pp. 438-40.
108. Richard M. Weaver, "A Dialectic on Total War," in idem, Visions of Order: The Cultural Crisis of Our Time (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1964), pp. 98-99.
109. Wainstock, Decision, p. 122.
--------
Peace Pilgrimmage arrives at Hiroshima
Melbourne Indymedia
06/08/2004
http://melbourne.indymedia.org/archives/archive_by_id.php?id=9247&category_id=13
After eight months and 4500 km of walking on the long road from Roxby Downs, the International Peace Pilgrimage (IPP) will arrive at Hiroshima Peace Park. The walk will join the commemorations at the Atomic Dome, to remember the hundreds of thousands of people who were killed by the atomic bomb on this day in 1945, and acknowledge the millions of others who continue to be affected by the nuclear industry globally.
August 6, 59 years since the devastation of the 'little boy' atomic bomb was wrought on Hiroshima, the nuclear machine continues to create new tragedies and invent new horrors. The message from the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is "NO MORE HIBAKUSHA". In Melbourne members of several anti-war and environmental groups assembled with others at Federation Square from 7.30am this morning to mark the 59th anniversary of the droppng of a nuclear bomb on Hiroshima.
At 8.15am August 6, 1945, a nuclear bomb was exploded 500 metres above the city of Hiroshima. It is estimated 140,000 people, mainly women, old men and children, died directly and in the few months after the bomb exploded. It's effects can still be seen in the survivors and their descendants today. Historical research shows the use of nuclear weapons could have been avoided, with far less loss of life on both sides, if diplomatic alternatives had been properly pursued. The USA continues to use nuclear weapons of mass destruction, as in depleted uranium munitions used in Iraq.
--------
How can Japan preserve the memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
Sachie Kanda
Japan Today
August 6, 2004
http://www.japantoday.com/e/?content=popvox&id=504
SachikoTashiwazaki, 23
"I actually saw some special TV programs about the anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki anniversary this week. I can see some media are working on this issue. However, a friend of mine said, 'I'm sick of these programs.' Many young Japanese people are not interested in what happened 59 years ago. We've got to change this attitude. We should watch more documentaries on the war and listen to stories of A-bomb survivors without being sick of hearing of them. It is very important to create such programs and stories as a personal matter, realizing that it is something that could happen to you and your family."
Takumi Miyaza, 22
"The best way to be more aware of the war is to go to Korea and China. We need to learn more about their feelings toward Japan. I think the news we saw the other day about the Chinese soccer fans booing the Japanese team is a good example of unresolved issues. There is still deep-rooted anti-Japanese sentiment in those countries. We do not often see that kind of feeling expressed by Chinese in Japan so much. However, I believe that we can also find something important in the hearts of Chinese and Korean people that many Japanese people have forgotten about."
Hitoshi Shimamura, 28
"When Japanese people hear what happened to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they can feel sorry for them and show great sympathy. But when they look at things like America's use of depleted uranium shells in Iraq, they also have to see that this is similar to what Japan experienced. I guess not many Japanese people even know about this issue. Therefore, I want more Japanese to take part in peace activities, support war victims and listen to their experiences that they actually do not want to reveal. When you hear those stories and how people's entire lives were destroyed and debased, you will feel something more than sorrow."
Shizuku Miura, 20
"I don't think we have forgotten about the A-bombs. Many Japanese know war is never the way to solve anything, and do not want to see any more war victims. People often say that young Japanese people don't know about the war because we haven't experienced such fear. However, you don't need to have experienced war to understand it. What's more important is to be more aware of the faulty notions that lead to war. By remembering that there was a war 60 years ago and that atomic bombs were dropped, the memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki will remain etched in our minds, and ensure that Japan will never embrace war. Otherwise we can't say we love peace."
Adachi, 30
"Since today's parents are not aware of the importance of preserving the memory of the A-bomb, there should be more movies related to the atomic bombings and exhibitions of war objects, photos, diaries and journals everywhere in Japan. That is the best way to touch ordinary people who have no war experience. When I was an elementary school student, I saw a cartoon movie called "Picadon" at school. That was the most horrible movie I ever saw. The illustrations were excessively realistic and made many students so sick they couldn't eat lunch. It may sound too harsh for small children, but I strongly think that such education will lead our children to learn what is good and bad."
Natsuko, 31
"Reminding us of the importance of the A-bomb is actually rather depressing especially when we hear horrible news everyday regarding the war. However, learning about what Japan did wrong which eventually led to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is valuable. The Japanese government should acknowledge the truth of our own mistakes and reeducate us again."
Tetsu Kamuro, 34
"War is not only the A-bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. War is always happening somewhere in the world everyday. If the media could report timely news with details such as the use of depleted uranium shells in Iraq, we would still be more aware of the present cruelty of war and human beings. We need to move on from what happened nearly 60 years ago. We should stop feeling sorry only for ourselves now because our experience is a global experience. It is time for Japan to pay more attention to the world, so please report more on current conflicts." Yoshimoto Seki, 36
"I've been doing research on nuclear power plants and I often see how politicians do not use their position to preserve the memory of the A-bomb and strive for peace. Every year on Aug 6, the mayor of Hiroshima gives a peace declaration. The current mayor, Tadatoshi Akiba, speaks very well on this subject and I personally like him very much. However, I want to tell him one thing. It's fine to speak out against war and nuclear weapons, but he also needs to talk about the hazardous nature of nuclear power plants when everyone all over the world is watching him. He could explain how much nuclear power plants have been damaging the environment and how they could eventually be used as a source for a bomb. Last year, TEPCO said we might have a power shortage due to the shutdown of some nuclear power plants, but that didn't eventuate. That is because they used a natural power plant that can produce as much power as a nuclear power plant does. However, the government has a vested economic interest in nuclear power plants. So do local economies. When a nuclear power plant was being built in Niigata, the small town flourished as construction workers went to bars and nightclubs every night. Once the plant was completed, they left the town. So the local government offered to host another TEPCO plant. There are many stories like that. I think those people really need to learn about the war. When the memory of Chernobyl - which happened in 1986 - is fading, how could the A-bombings of 60 years ago stay in our minds? Without experience, people learn nothing. Today's young people have never even heard of Chernobyl. We've got to show more cruel scenes of the war. People can grow by confronting death. That will influence how we live."
-------
Hiroshima mayor chastises U.S. for developing small nukes
Friday, August 06, 2004
By Eriko Sugita,
Reuters
http://www.enn.com/news/2004-08-06/s_26412.asp
HIROSHIMA, Japan - The mayor of Hiroshima rebuked Washington on Friday - the 59th anniversary of his city's atomic bombing by the United States - for wanting to develop small nuclear weapons that he feared would be easier to use.
Hiroshima Mayor Tadatoshi Akiba made the remarks at a ceremony attended by about 40,000 people, including Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi plus survivors and relatives of victims of the world's first atomic attack.
"The egocentric world view of the U.S. government is reaching extremes," Akiba told the annual memorial ceremony at the city's Peace Park, near where the bomb was dropped.
"Ignoring the United Nations and its foundation of international law, the U.S. has resumed research to make nuclear weapons smaller and more 'usable'."
The Peace Bell was tolled at 8:15 a.m. - the moment a U.S. warplane dropped the bomb on August 6, 1945 and destroyed the city - and there was a minute of silence.
"The morning of August 6, 59 years ago, was just another summer morning, but a single atomic bomb changed it into a morning that humankind will never forget," 11-year-old Koya Yurino told the assembly.
Paper cranes symbolizing peace were draped around the park and incense burned on prayer altars as Akiba placed three books containing the names of the bomb's victims under the park's arch-shaped cenotaph.
The names of 5,142 people who died recently were added to the list of victims, bringing the total number recognized by the city to 237,062. A few thousand names are added each year.
The bomb had killed some 140,000 people by the end of 1945, out of Hiroshima's estimated population of 350,000. Thousands more succumbed to illness and injuries later.
The southwestern city of Nagasaki was bombed three days after Hiroshima, leading to Japan's surrender and the end of World War II.
Changing Attitudes
Japan, where people are raised on stories of the suffering in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, has been staunchly pacifist and anti-nuclear since its defeat, and its postwar constitution renounces the right to go to war.
But with the average age of Hiroshima's survivors now well over 70, there are signs that support for the country to assume a greater global military role is growing.
Even talk of becoming a nuclear power is no longer taboo.
However, Koizumi repeated a pledge that Japan - the only nation to suffer an atomic attack - would work for nuclear disarmament.
"We will maintain the pacifist constitution under our strong resolve to never again repeat the tragedies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki," he said at the ceremony.
Under Koizumi, Japan has passed a law allowing its military to participate in the rebuilding of Iraq and has sent 550 soldiers to Iraq in its largest post-war dispatch of troops.
Koizumi's ruling party and the largest opposition party are both working on drafts to revise the constitution, whose Article Nine renounces war as a means of settling international disputes.
--------
Hiroshima's Goal Is a Nuclear-Free World
By Tadatoshi Akiba,
Mayor, The City of Hiroshima
August 6, 2004
(ENS)
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/aug2004/2004-08-06-insaki.asp
HIROSHIMA, Japan - "Nothing will grow for 75 years." Fifty-nine years have passed since the August sixth when Hiroshima was so thoroughly obliterated that many succumbed to such doom. Dozens of corpses still bearing the agony of that day, souls torn abruptly from their loved ones and their hopes for the future, have recently re-surfaced on Ninoshima Island, warning us to beware the utter inhumanity of the atomic bombing and the gruesome horror of war.
Mayor of Hiroshima Tadatoshi Akiba (Photo courtesy Office of the Mayor) Unfortunately, the human race still lacks both a lexicon capable of fully expressing that disaster and sufficient imagination to fill the gap. Thus, most of us float idly in the current of the day, clouding with self-indulgence the lens of reason through which we should be studying the future, blithely turning our backs on the courageous few.
As a result, the egocentric worldview of the U.S. government is reaching extremes. Ignoring the United Nations and its foundation of international law, the U.S. has resumed research to make nuclear weapons smaller and more "usable."
Elsewhere, the chains of violence and retaliation know no end: reliance on violence-amplifying terror and North Korea, among others, buying into the worthless policy of "nuclear insurance" are salient symbols of our times.
We must perceive and tackle this human crisis within the context of human history. In the year leading up to the 60th anniversary, which begins a new cycle of rhythms in the interwoven fabric that binds humankind and nature, we must return to our point of departure, the unprecedented A-bomb experience. In the coming year, we must sow the seeds of new hope and cultivate a strong future-oriented movement.
To that end, the city of Hiroshima, along with the Mayors for Peace and our 611 member cities in 109 countries and regions, hereby declares the period beginning today and lasting until August 9, 2005, to be a Year of Remembrance and Action for a Nuclear-Free World.
Our goal is to bring forth a beautiful "flower" for the 75th anniversary of the atomic bombings, namely, the total elimination of all nuclear weapons from the face of the Earth by the year 2020. Only then will we have truly resurrected hope for life on this "nothing will grow" planet.
The seeds we sow today will sprout in May 2005. At the Review Conference for the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) to be held in New York, the Emergency Campaign to Ban Nuclear Weapons will bring together cities, citizens, and NGOs from around the world to work with like-minded nations toward adoption of an action program that incorporates, as an interim goal, the signing in 2010 of a Nuclear Weapons Convention to serve as the framework for eliminating nuclear weapons by 2020.
Around the world, this Emergency Campaign is generating waves of support. This past February, the European Parliament passed by overwhelming majority a resolution specifically supporting the Mayors for Peace campaign. At its general assembly in June, the U.S. Conference of Mayors, representing 1183 U.S. cities, passed by acclamation an even stronger resolution.
We anticipate that Americans, a people of conscience, will follow the lead of their mayors and form the mainstream of support for the Emergency Campaign as an expression of their love for humanity and desire to discharge their duty as the lone superpower to eliminate nuclear weapons.
We are striving to communicate the message of the hibakusha around the world and promote the Hiroshima-Nagasaki Peace Study Course to ensure, especially, that future generations will understand the inhumanity of nuclear weapons and the cruelty of war. In addition, during the coming year, we will implement a project that will mobilize adults to read eyewitness accounts of the atomic bombings to children everywhere.
The Japanese government, as our representative, should defend the Peace Constitution, of which all Japanese should be proud, and work diligently to rectify the trend toward open acceptance of war and nuclear weapons increasingly prevalent at home and abroad.
We demand that our government act on its obligation as the only A-bombed nation and become the world leader for nuclear weapons abolition, generating an anti-nuclear tsunami by fully and enthusiastically supporting the Emergency Campaign led by the Mayors for Peace. We further demand more generous relief measures to meet the needs of our aging hibakusha, including those living overseas and those exposed in black rain areas.
Rekindling the memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we pledge to do everything in our power during the coming year to ensure that the 60th anniversary of the atomic bombings will see a budding of hope for the total abolition of nuclear weapons. We humbly offer this pledge for the peaceful repose of all atomic bomb victims.
-------- korea
Japan, NKorea may hold nuclear, kidnapping talks next week: official
TOKYO (AFP)
Aug 06, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040806085307.czoo9ny8.html
Japanese and North Korean officials may hold working-level talks as early as next week to discuss nuclear issues and Japanese kidnapped by Pyongyang, Japan's top government spokesman said Friday.
"The both parties have indicated their willingness to hold a meeting as early as next week," Chief Cabinet Secretary Hiroyuki Hosoda told a regular press conference.
"We have yet to finalise our discussions," over scheduling the meeting, he said.
He was responding to media reports which said officials from Tokyo and Pyongyang would meet in Beijing next Wednesday and Thursday.
Japanese officials were expecting to receive a status report on North Korea's re-investigation of the fate of 10 Japanese nationals who were kidnapped by North Korean agents and whom Pyongyang has said are dead, Kyodo News said.
The Beijing meeting would also be an opportunity to discuss North Korea's nuclear programs, major media said.
Hosoda's comment came a day after the Japanese cabinet approved the first food aid to North Korea in nearly four years, set to be delivered to the impoverished Stalinist state later this year.
The 125,000 tons of food is to be delivered through the World Food Program while seven million dollars' worth of medical supplies will be handled by the UN Children's Fund UNICEF and the World Health Organization (WHO).
The aid package worth some 47 million dollars is the first tranche of assistance promised to the North in May during a summit between Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi and North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il in Pyongyang.
-------- missile defense
Canada insists no decision on missile shield despite amending US pact
OTTAWA (AFP)
Aug 06, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040805224153.zg5ov2h2.html
Canada insisted Thursday that it had not covertly signed up to the US plan for a missile defense shield -- despite agreeing to extend joint air defense arrangements with Washington to facilitate the scheme.
Ministers said Canada had yet to decide whether to join the national missile defence system, which emerged as a political hot potato during the country's recent general election campaign.
The United States and Canada earlier announced they had extended the North American Aerospace Defense Command aerospace warning function to support missile defense.
The deal allows the command, known as NORAD, information on incoming missiles to be used by the future US missile defense program.
Foreign Minister Pierre Pettigrew said it made "good sense to amend the agreement so that this essential NORAD function can be preserved and Canada can continue to benefit from the security it provides to our citizens."
"This amendment safeguards and sustains NORAD regardless of what decision the government of Canada eventually takes on ballistic missile defense."
Defense Minister Bill Graham told reporters the move did not "affect or in any way determine the ultimate decision as to whether Canada will participate in missile defense."
Washington, keen to press on with constructing the missile defense system, a key plank of the Bush administration's defense policy, has been pressing Canada for a decision for over a year.
But the Canadian government has had to walk a political tightrope on the issue.
Advocates of the scheme say a decision not to take part would badly damage the country's prestige and make Canada largely irrelevant in the defense of its own continent.
But ministers realise that the scheme is highly unpopular in Canada, as is the Bush administration which is building it.
Ministers have relied on the tortuous position that they oppose any system that involves the "weaponization of space" -- a position observers say does not rule out current US plans for missile defense.
US State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said Washington looked forward to "continuing this longstanding defense cooperation" through NORAD.
The new deal "formally assigns" to NORAD the responsibility for providing the threat information under the missile defense mission, Boucher said.
Missile defense meanwhile thrust itself to the top of Secretary of State Colin Powell's agenda.
Powell was due to leave the US capital early Friday for a one-day trip to Greenland to sign a series of pacts intended to modernize a US military base which will support the missile defense program.
He will meet Danish Foreign Minister Per Stig Moeller and Greenland Deputy Premier Josef Motzfeldt to sign agrrements paving the way for an upgrade of radar facilities at Thule Air Base which will support the US missile defense program.
Thule served as a key listening post during the Cold War and is now considered essential to US missile defense plans.
As compensation to Greenland, where there was much opposition to the modernization and expansion plans, Copenhagen and Washington are to renew a 1951 treaty with Greenland recognizing it as an autonomous Danish territory.
----
Canada opens door for missile shield
By DREW FAGAN
Aug 06, 2004
Toronto Globe and Mail
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20040805.wxdnd0806/BNStory/National/
Canada and the United States have expanded military co-operation in a possible precursor to Ottawa joining the U.S. missile-defence program, though Defence Minister Bill Graham insisted Thursday that the Liberal government remains "a long way" from deciding whether to take that major step.
In an announcement that had been widely expected for weeks, Mr. Graham confirmed that the role of NORAD - the joint Canada-U.S. military organization with headquarters in Colorado - now includes transmitting radar and satellite monitoring to the U.S. command responsible for the missile-defence system.
Mr. Graham characterized this not as an inevitable step toward Canada's participation in the missile shield, but as a necessary step toward preserving the possibility that Canada can participate if it so chooses, with NORAD playing a central role. Ottawa is expected to make its decision this fall. "We're keeping all options open, the option both not to go in and the option possibly to go in," he said. "This does not have to be an incremental step to anything."
The first missile under the Bush administration plan was installed in Alaska a couple of weeks ago, but the controversial system, which has been plagued by technical glitches and delays, will not be operational until more tests are completed. The U.S. government plans to have about 10 interceptor rockets deployed by the end of the year at sites in Alaska and California.
North Korea is commonly cited by Bush administration officials as posing a potential threat of launching intercontinental missiles at North America. It tested a new, longer-range ballistic missile last week, though its range of about 4,000 kilometres is far short of being capable of crossing the Pacific.
The Americans would prefer to integrate missile defence into the existing North American Aerospace Defence Command, with the kind of Canadian participation that Canada now has within NORAD, such as having a Canadian hold the deputy commander post.
But if Canada balked, missile defence would be maintained under sole U.S. command, making NORAD increasingly marginal to the defence of North America.
Thursday's announcement, government officials said, was integral to protecting NORAD. Had Canada not agreed to the sharing of NORAD's radar and satellite information with U.S. Northcom, which is responsible for missile defence, Washington would have bypassed NORAD and set up a parallel system to monitor aerospace.
"My own view is that...the role of NORAD will probably be expanded over the years," Mr. Graham said. "What this does is preserve NORAD."
The Globe and Mail reported in late April that the Martin government had quietly made it known to Washington that it agreed to what it announced Thursday, but this was later denied by government officials who did admit then that Ottawa was "positively inclined" to take this step.
But Thursday's move remains simply the opening act, followed by deciding whether to join missile defence.
Prime Minister Paul Martin advocated this before taking office last December, but he has been much more cautious since. He sidestepped the issue during the election, and Liberal sensitivity about being viewed as becoming cozier with the Bush administration likely will only be exacerbated by the party's minority-government status.
The government could sign on to missile defence without seeking Commons approval, though the government did promise Thursday parliamentary "input" on the issue.
Conservative defence critic Gordon O'Connor called for a full debate when Parliament resumes in early October and a vote on any missile-defence deal.
He characterized Thursday's announcement as a "first step" toward Canadian involvement and said there is little doubt the Liberals will sign on. But he accused them of trying to play down the issue by making public a key move toward that end on a quiet August morning.
"This is going to change the strategic balance and defence policy," he said. "It needs to be debated."
There was a non-binding vote in the Commons 14 months ago on missile defence, in which a Canadian Alliance motion in favour of having NORAD take responsibility for command of a continental missile-defence system was approved 156 to 73. But 38 Liberal MPs voted against the motion.
The Bloc Québécois and NDP oppose Canadian involvement in missile defence.
NDP foreign affairs critic Alexa McDonough characterized Thursday's announcement as bringing Ottawa "a step closer...to Bush's missile-defence madness."
But Canadian participation is not inevitable, she said, calling for the Liberal government to facilitate a full debate nationwide before it makes up its mind.
-------- terrorism
Bush Administration Slammed For Inaction on 'Loose Nukes'
The Forward
By ORI NIR
August 6, 2004
http://www.forward.com/main/article.php?ref=nir200408041110
WASHINGTON - With the country on high alert for another Al Qaeda attack, the Bush administration is facing increasing criticism for allegedly not doing enough to keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of terrorists.
The 9/11 Commission and leading nonproliferation experts say that the administration has been too lax in securing nuclear weapons and materials in Russia and other parts of the former Soviet Union. Administration officials are expected to be grilled on the issue next week, during congressional hearings on the report of the 9/11 Commission.
The commissioners, in their final report, stopped short of directly assigning blame for the situation. They did, however, mention that "outside experts are deeply worried about the U.S. government's commitment and approach to securing the weapons and highly dangerous materials still scattered in Russia and other countries of the Soviet Union."
In contrast to the Bush administration, which has focused intensely on neutralizing the threat of nuclear material transfers from Middle Eastern governments to terrorists, the 9/11 report stresses the danger of unsupervised nuclear materials ending up in the hands of terrorists. A nuclear bomb, the report states, "can be built with a relatively small amount of nuclear material." A bomb made with highly enriched uranium or plutonium "about the size of a grapefruit," detonated by commercially available explosives "would level Lower Manhattan," the report warns.
Sensing Bush's vulnerability on the issue, the democratic presidential nominee, Senator John Kerry, has recently made the problem of "loose nukes" one of his main arguments in criticizing President Bush for his performance on national security. Experts who, for the most part, agree that Bush has not made the containment of "loose nukes" a high enough priority, expect the issue to emerge during debates between Kerry and Bush.
"Kerry and [his running-mate, Senator John] Edwards, are making this a line of attack, and they have a point," said Scott Parrish, editor of The Nonproliferation Review, a journal issued by the independent Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. A month ago, the center published an extensive report on nuclear terrorism, which criticized the administration for lacking a comprehensive plan to address the threat of terrorists with nuclear capability and for not making it a higher priority.
The administration needs to be more focused on the former Soviet Union, where many nuclear facilities lack minimal safety devices, said Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, an independent Washington think tank. "All the experts I know recommend that the most urgent task to prevent terrorist networks from getting their hands on such materials is to secure the stockpiles of these materials where they exist," Kimball said. "And the prime location is Russia and the former Soviet Union."
The main tool for securing the Russian and former Soviet nuclear stockpile, according to the 9/11 Commission's report, is the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, popularly known as the "Nunn-Lugar" program, named after the senators who sponsored the legislation in 1991. The program aims at destroying or converting Russian nuclear warheads, and securing stockpiles of nuclear materials and nuclear facilities in Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus. The program, at first, received $300 million to $400 million per year. Some conservatives criticized it as an inappropriate use of American dollars on a former foe, which in turn could free up Russian money to further develop weapon systems.
Before September 11, 2001, the Bush administration intended to cut funding for the program, but reversed course after the terrorist attacks against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The White House decided to maintain the $400 million figure, while promising to increase funding to a level of $1 billion for the next 10 years. In addition, the administration leveraged a pledge from members of the Group of Eight Industrialized Nations for a similar sum.
Most critics agree that the level of funding is now sufficient, but they also said the pace is too slow and that the scope is too narrow. "Ten years is too long," said Joseph Cirincione, director for nonproliferation at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and the author of "Deadly Arsenals: Tracking Weapons of Mass Destruction."
"We should be aiming to do that in the next four years. It's a perfectly reasonable timetable. Let's go out there and get this stuff," Cirincione said. "What we should be doing is implementing a very aggressive program, to go out and secure and eliminate all potential sources of nuclear weapons and materials that terrorists might attain" whether in the former Soviet Union, Afghanistan, Iran or more than 40 countries that run research reactors. "Would this be expensive? Yes. But you could do that annually for the price of about one moth of operations in Iraq: $3 billion to $4 billion a year."
Administration officials recently said that about 70% of nuclear facilities in Russia and the former Soviet republics meet the safety standards prescribed by the Nunn-Lugar program. But outside experts argue that the rate is as low as 40% to 50%.
Some experts criticized the 9/11 Commission for not going far enough in outlining the effort that is needed to curb and control nuclear proliferation, to prevent such materials from falling into the hands of terrorists.
The report concludes that preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons "warrants a maximum effort - by strengthening counter-proliferation efforts," including an expansion of the Proliferation Security Initiative, a program to detect nuclear materials in shipments at American ports, and continued support for the Nunn-Lugar program.
Some experts say that the commission didn't go far enough. Given its focus on the specter of nuclear terrorism, one could expect bolder recommendations. "These are relatively minor measures," said Carnegie's Cirincione. "It will be good to do all these things, but this is nowhere near a maximum effort. A maximum effort, said Cirincione and other experts, would be an aggressive, comprehensive global strategy that covers all nuclear facilities worldwide. "It's too bad that the commission pulled its punches for the sake of bipartisan consensus."
-------- treaties
Washington's Gift to Bomb Makers
August 6, 2004
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/06/opinion/06fri1.html
There is no bigger and more urgent threat to the security of every American than the possibility of nuclear bomb materials falling into the wrong hands. That is why it is astonishing, and frightening, that the Bush administration is now pushing to strip the teeth from a proposed new treaty aimed at expanding the current international bans on the production of weapons-grade uranium and plutonium. With talks on the new treaty set to begin later this year, the administration suddenly announced last week that it would insist that no provisions for inspections or verification be included.
This reversal of past American positions - ignoring Ronald Reagan's famous cautionary advice, "Trust, but verify'' - is all the more disturbing because it guts a treaty that could have significantly advanced President Bush's oft-stated goal of "keeping the world's most dangerous weapons out of the hands of the most dangerous regimes.'' After raising the alarm on this terrifying problem, the White House now says Americans and the rest of the world are better off trusting empty, unverified promises.
The agreement, the Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty, would, for the first time, ban all countries from producing highly enriched uranium or plutonium for nuclear weapons. It would cover the four countries that do not subscribe to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty: North Korea, Pakistan, India and Israel. And it would apply to the five officially recognized nuclear weapons nations, including the United States; they would be allowed to retain and use only their current inventories.
No treaty has ever been or will be foolproof. But a strong fissile materials treaty would help dry up international nuclear-trafficking networks - like the one set up by Abdul Qadeer Khan, the Pakistani bomb designer - and make it harder for North Korea to go into the business of exporting plutonium and enriched uranium. But the treaty could not achieve these vitally important goals without credible verification provisions, like on-site inspections.
The Bush administration argues, unpersuasively, that such inspections might interfere with making fuel for American nuclear submarines and might allow foreign inspectors to glimpse secret American nuclear technology. To the extent that these are legitimate concerns, it would be better to try to persuade other nations to grant narrowly tailored exemptions instead of eliminating inspections. Washington also claims that an enforceable treaty would generate a false sense of security and that it would be easier to get other countries to sign an unenforceable one. Those are generic arguments that can be deployed against any enforceable arms control treaty. They ignore the enormous positive trade-offs of a verifiable fissile materials treaty, like strict limits on the material available for making nuclear weapons.
We live in a world where no nation has a monopoly on bomb technology. The most effective remaining way to curb the spread of nuclear weapons to growing numbers of countries and terrorist groups is to impose strict, verifiable international controls on the production of nuclear bomb ingredients. The Bush administration prefers a treaty that endorses nuclear virtue but that then averts its eyes.
--------
You show yours, I'll hide mine
Guardian
by Simon Tisdall
08/06 2004
http://mathaba.net/x.htm?http://mathaba.net/0_index.shtml?x=64987
George Bush was not pulling his punches. In a definitive policy speech earlier this year on preventing the spread of weapons of mass destruction, the US president declared: "The greatest threat before humanity today is the possibility of secret and sudden attack with chemical or biological or radiological or nuclear weapons.
"America will not permit terrorists and dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world's most deadly weapons," he went on. "We're determined to confront those threats at source. We will stop these weapons from being acquired or built. We'll block them being transferred. We'll prevent them ever being used."
The US position, it seems, could hardly be clearer. So how to explain, and how conceivably to justify, a little-noticed demarche last week by Mr Bush's officials at the UN conference on disarmament in Geneva? What the US did, in effect, was to torpedo a new global treaty banning the production and supply of materials essential to the building of nuclear weapons.
It is known as the fissile material cut-off treaty. It has been under discussion for years, strongly supported by Britain and the EU. Its main aim is to strengthen the nuclear non-proliferation Treaty (NPT), the cornerstone of the international effort to curb the spread of WMD. It is specifically aimed at nuclear-armed states such as India, Pakistan and Israel which are not party to the NPT.
But by seeking a global halt to the production of highly enriched uranium and plutonium for weapons, its wider overall aim is to reduce the chance of such materials being obtained by irresponsible regimes or non-state terror groups.
While dismaying, the Bush administration's stance was not totally unexpected. Bill Clinton backed the fissile material treaty in 2000, but once in office the Bush administration dragged its feet. Last year in Geneva it announced a review of its position, thus delaying further talks.
Last week the US ambassador to the conference, Jackie Wolcott Sanders, finally gave the go-ahead for negotiations, but with a fatal caveat attached.
The US would back the treaty in principle, but it would not support the inclusion of binding monitoring, verification and inspection provisions.
A state department statement said the proposed inspection regime "would have been so extensive that it could compromise key signatories' core national security interests, and so costly that many countries will be hesitant to accept it".
But as the US knows very well, any new treaty is all but unenforcable without effective monitoring and verification. Inspections are essential, say arms control experts, if such treaties are to work. That is a view with which the British government, for example, wholeheartedly agrees.
"We believe that such a treaty should be established. We support it. It is a useful step towards curbing global proliferation," a Foreign Office spokesman said yesterday. "We continue to believe it should be verified. We do not take the same position as the US."
In private, officials are hard put to conceal their disappointment at the US stance.
Stated American concern about security and cost does not wholly explain it. At the nub of the issue is Washington's fundamental objection to opening up American military bases and industrial plants to international, especially UN, inspection.
For the neo-conservatives and ideologues around Mr Bush this is a visceral objection - even a matter of principle. Put plainly, they appear content to place the safeguarding of an uncompromised, untrammelled American sovereignty ahead of effective global arms control.
And they have plenty of form. In 2001, for this same basic reason, the Bush administration scuppered a proposed inspections regime to police the biological weapons convention, again to Britain's great dismay.
For much the same reason, perhaps, key aims of the 1997 chemical weapons convention (CWC) remain unfulfilled. Between them the US and Russia possess more than 97% of the world's known chemical weapons material, but neither will remotely meet the 2007 deadline for its full destruction, according to the US government accountability office. It says more inspections are needed to enforce the CWC, especially at dual-use chemical plants.
For much the same reason, the Bush administration has set aside the comprehensive test ban treaty and is pressing ahead, beyond international scrutiny and in defiance of the NPT, with the development of new generation nuclear weapons.
Iranians and North Koreans are under intense US pressure to cooperate with inspectors from the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency. But to Mr Bush, it seems, international verification procedures are a one-way street. What happened in Geneva last week underlined that.
The very same US government that went to war in Iraq because Saddam Hussein did not fully comply with UN weapons inspections unilaterally rejects similar control over its own WMD arsenal.
-----
Bush's pointless treaty
August 6, 2004
San Francisco Chronicle
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/08/06/EDGV682LKM1.DTL
WHILE HARDLY anyone was watching, the Bush administration has rejected provisions of an international treaty calling for inspections and verifications of nuclear weapons. It's a significant, unexpected and imprudent shift in U.S. policy that clashes sharply with the president's oft-stated support for global nonproliferation.
The Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty would ban the production of highly enriched uranium and plutonium for weapons. In the works for 10 years, it was the result of collaboration among 66 nations, in part to tighten control over India, Pakistan and Israel which until now had rebuffed any effort to curb their nuclear stockpiles.
But the White House tossed in a monkey wrench: In a dumbfounding announcement, the administration said it supported the treaty, but not its call for inspections and verifications, without which the treaty is meaningless. The announcement, coming as a whisper last week when the Democratic National Convention held much of the nation's attention, called such oversight too costly and intrusive, but offered few details.
This means the White House is declining to adhere to the kinds of inspections that it has long insisted upon for much of the rest of the world.
In the process, President Bush is contradicting his post-Sept. 11 pledge to make blocking the spread of nuclear materials a priority as a way to blunt the chances of terrorists obtaining weapons of mass destruction. It's a perplexing move that renders the treaty useless and adds to global insecurity.
-------- u.s. nuc weapons
History teaches that war policy is bankrupt
August 6, 2004
San Francisco Chronicle
John Nelson
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/08/06/EDG4983MLT1.DTL
As U.S. politicians debate the intelligence failures that preceded the Iraq invasion as well as the war in Afghanistan, they can take little comfort that history will judge these wars charitably. Today and Monday mark 59 years after the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima and a plutonium bomb on Nagasaki, and there is still no definitive historical judgment that this was the right thing to do.
Historians agree that Japanese military leaders surrendered because of, in the words of then-emperor Hirohito, a "new and most cruel bomb." But scholars, unlike war veterans, share less consensus about whether the bombs were necessary or the staggering losses of life justified. With Japan's major cities in ruins after months of devastating firebombs (more than 100,000 residents of Tokyo were killed over two days in March 1945), her once-powerful military battered with more than a million and a half deaths, and with the most basic daily provisions subject to rationing and shortages, it was only a matter of time before this defeated nation surrendered.
Legitimate questions persist whether the bombs were dropped to impress the Russians and halt their advances upon Japan's islands in the north. The decision may also have been colored by racism as well as by a desire to see the payoff of several years of top-secret scientific research.
Many of these issues surfaced again recently after the announcement of the death July 19 of Maj. Gen. Charles Sweeney, pilot for the mission that bombed Nagasaki. Some weeks after Japan's surrender in 1945, he visited both Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Standing in the devastation of the latter city, he wrote later, "I took no pride or pleasure then, nor do I take any now, in the brutality of war, whether suffered by my people or those of another nation. Every life is precious. But I felt no remorse or guilt that I had bombed the city where I stood."
I was living in Nagasaki during the 40th anniversary of the bombing in 1985 and remember the city inviting Sweeney to participate in the commemorations as a gesture of goodwill, healing and forgiveness. Sweeney declined the offer, stating at the time that he had done nothing that needed to be forgiven and that if he had it to do all over again, he would.
These extraordinary declarations, and the tragic anniversary of destruction they reference, reveal three points about war as a policy designed to advance and secure American power. Whether we support, contest or feign indifference, we should never underestimate how war policy can be subverted, derailed or otherwise convoluted by unpredictable variables. The consequences of the allied bombing of the Japanese islands in 1945, culminating at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, are still being played out in the geopolitics of the East Asian region.
Second, Sweeney's recent death reminds us that those charged with carrying out U.S. wars often believe what they are told about their purpose having greater value than the lives of those they injure or kill. For Sweeney to admit no remorse for the deaths of over 70,000 Japanese civilians does not vindicate his actions or the orders of his superiors. They indicate instead a shaky denial that governments are capable of staggering cruelty to human beings.
Finally, as we listen to presidential candidates advocate the need for a "strong America" led by a commander-in-chief not afraid to employ military might, we should understand this rhetoric for what it is: an emphasis on confrontation as a ploy for electoral support. Politicians who propose more military spending, more weapons and more of a bunker-mentality must look at the historical record and learn again that waging war as a matter of policy is not only a bankrupt idea but an inhuman design.
The United States gained Japan as an ally not because we defeated its armies but because we spent the time and effort to rebuild the country afterward. Those who say the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki led to a 59- year relationship of peace and cooperation are myopic in the extreme. Whatever we understand eventually from the Bush administration's wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, or from challenger John Kerry's Vietnam experience, it is clear already that suffering, destruction and death are legacies inappropriate to exploit as props in a presidential campaign. To acknowledge and then honor all the dead caused by U.S. wars abroad requires a different kind of courage, one drawn from the sobering lessons of history.
John Nelson is an associate professor in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of San Francisco.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
Battle Swirls on Security at A-Plants
August 6, 2004
By MATTHEW L. WALD
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/06/politics/06nukes.html
WASHINGTON, Aug. 5 - The nuclear power industry's trade association has hired the company that guards half of the nation's civilian reactors to train and manage "adversary teams'' that attack the plants in drills.
The decision, by the Nuclear Energy Institute, has drawn the disapproval of a government watchdog that has issued several reports in recent years critical of security at nuclear power and weapons plants.
"It is not an apparent conflict of interest, but a blatant conflict of interest," Danielle Brian, executive director of that group, the Project on Government Oversight, said of the company's dual roles in a letter to the chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
The added responsibilities of the company, the Wackenhut Corporation, were posted on the trade association's Web site in June but were little noticed until recently. They have led Peter D. H. Stockton, a security adviser to the secretary of energy in the Clinton administration and now the security expert for Ms. Brian's group, to complain that the attackers' trainers should be hired by the regulatory commission.
"This is a governmental function," Mr. Stockton said.
The industry group defended its decision, saying uniform selection and training by Wackenhut, which already performs attacking and defending roles at nuclear weapons plants, would improve standardization of security tests.
And, said Stephen D. Floyd, the association's vice president for regulatory affairs, while grading the tests is a government function, playing attacker is not.
"These folks are nothing more than players," Mr. Floyd said.
At the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Roy P. Zimmerman, director of the Office of Nuclear Security and Incident Response, said the companies that operate the reactors, and the commission itself, would be looking for any sign of cheating and that the choice of Wackenhut was not a problem for his agency.
"Tapping that pool of experience is not a surprise to us," Mr. Zimmerman said.
Eleven months ago, the Government Accountability Office, then called the General Accounting Office, issued a report that said attackers in security exercises were often undertrained and underarmed, while the defenders were unrealistically overstaffed. The attacking team in those exercises sometimes included guard trainers or off-duty guards from the plant being tested, or guards borrowed from other plants.
Mr. Floyd acknowledged that until now, most of the attackers had had training only in defense. In contrast, he said, Wackenhut, a subsidiary of Group 4 Securicor, a leading security services company based in Britain, is providing two trainers with extensive expertise in "hand-to-hand combat, urban assault, terrorist training, small arms and munitions" - the skills required, he said, to see if the defenders can withstand an attack of the kind envisioned by the regulatory commission.
But Wackenhut has had problems in running drills at weapons plants. In January, the inspector general of the Energy Department said that at Oak Ridge, Tenn., where the government stores weapons-grade uranium, Wackenhut attackers had told Wackenhut defenders which buildings were to be attacked, the targets at those buildings and whether a diversionary tactic would be used. The inspector general, Gregory H. Friedman, said the internal leaks raised doubts about the value of the tests.
Mr. Floyd said that for the tests at the civilian reactors, Wackenhut employees had signed nondisclosure agreements and were subject to dismissal if they violated them.
Representative Edward J. Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat who has focused on security issues at nuclear plants for more than 20 years, said allowing Wackenhut to test security at plants where it is the security contractor was like letting athletes conduct their own drug tests.
Mr. Markey said public confidence would be undermined both by that step and by the commission's decision, announced Wednesday, to keep reactor-security lapses secret so as not to alert terrorists to them.
The commission recently decided to step up the pace of "force on force" tests, and plans to conduct one every three years at each plant starting this fall. The adversaries use weapons that resemble laser tag guns.
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
Sudanese Suffer as Militias Hide in Plain Sight
August 6, 2004
By MARC LACEY
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/06/international/africa/06darfur.html?pagewanted=all
NYALA, Sudan, Aug. 5 - Sudan's government lined up 50 prisoners at the main jail here recently and offered them as evidence to the world that it was cracking down on the militias that have stained so much of the desert sand of Darfur, the country's western region, with blood.
But when the men spoke and when their court files were reviewed, it quickly became clear that many of them were not members of the militias, which have displaced a million villagers in the last year and a half and killed tens of thousands in what the United States Congress calls a genocide.
Among the group were petty criminals who had already been in jail as long as four years. One man's charge was drinking wine in a country that forbids it.
The United Nations Security Council has given Sudan until Aug. 30 to rein in the militias, called the Janjaweed, Arab tribesmen whom the government armed and then unleashed in Darfur to quell a rebellion among darker-skinned Africans that began in early 2003. Failure to disarm the militias could mean sanctions against the government in Khartoum.
But Janjaweed is a fluid identity, and diplomats here say the government has exploited the ambiguity. First it armed the militias, rallied them and set them loose in Darfur. Then it gave many of the same men uniforms and declared them upholders of the law. Sometimes the Janjaweed have served as law enforcement officers by day and reverted to pillaging at night.
The government says it has sent thousands of security officers to Darfur to impose order and plans to send thousands more. But whether the government is bringing the Janjaweed to heel, or even if it can, is far from clear.
"If you sent 200 soldiers out to get the Janjaweed, maybe 50 of them would probably be Janjaweed themselves,'' said Osman Mirghani, a prominent columnist for the Sudanese newspaper Al Rayaam who has written frequently and frankly about the conflict in Darfur, sometimes incurring the wrath of the government.
"A Janjaweed is a Janjaweed when he is on his horse with his gun, going to burn and kill,'' Mr. Mirghani said. "But when he comes back to his village and hides his gun he is no different than anyone else. Maybe he's a policeman during the day and a Janjaweed at night.''
Indeed, in many cases the government has provided the Janjaweed with uniforms, identification cards and commissions in the police, army or popular defense force, according to interviews with aid workers, local human rights advocates and others. As far as the government is concerned they are no longer Janjaweed.
"I'm a soldier now,'' said one such new recruit, a Arab teenager who was smiling as he cradled his assault rifle. He was speaking to his schoolteacher, a black African, who had seen him with Janjaweed leaders.
Without their guns and horses, without the head wraps they use to shield themselves from Darfur's searing heat and blowing wind, the Janjaweed blend easily into the local population. When not in government-issued camouflage uniforms, they wear the long white robes common among Sudanese.
Some sit behind desks when they are not pillaging. Others herd camels by day but do unspeakable things once the desert turns dark at night.
Further muddying things, the government accuses the rebels, who call themselves the Sudan Liberation Army and the Justice and Equality Movement, of using camels during some of their attacks, pretending to be Janjaweed in an attempt to smear officials in Khartoum.
To avoid confusion, some have stopped using the term Janjaweed altogether. The term itself is an amalgam of Arabic words that roughly translates as "a devil on horseback with a gun.'' No one would ever admit to being one.
" 'Janjaweed' is a catchall phrase that means different things to different people,'' said William Patey, the British ambassador to Sudan. "We need to be specific about what we mean, namely bandits, tribal militias or elements of the popular defense forces.''
Not all of the Arab fighters one encounters in Darfur have followed the government's script. Some are loyal only to themselves, roaming the countryside as criminals always have and taking advantage of the chaos. They take on anyone they encounter, including other Janjaweed.
As for the convicts squatting in the dirt in Nyala's jail, there were drug dealers, murderers and thieves. Just who was a Janjaweed militiaman remained a matter of interpretation.
None of the men would acknowledge having been a part of the loose bands of Arab fighters. It was far easier to pick out who had nothing to do with Darfur's current chaos. There were prisoners who had been arrested two, three, even four years ago. Many others were picked up for the kinds of theft, killing and other crime that has always been a part of this long-neglected part of Sudan.
There were six men, including two fathers and their sons, who were accused torching a village north of Nyala called Haloof, killing 23 villagers, wounding 9 others and stealing all of the residents' cows and goats.
"They say I am a Janjaweed,'' said Suleiman Muhammad Shariff, 74, an elder in an Arab tribe accused of attacking Haloof. "It's not true.''
Only the villagers who have been the victims of the Janjaweed's wrath, who have heard their horses coming and experienced their ruthless attacks, seem to have no trouble identifying the militiamen.
"A Janjaweed came right over my fence, pointed a gun at me and took my horse,'' said Abdallah Ibrahim, who was robbed last weekend right inside a camp for displaced people in Geneina, a town near Sudan's border with Chad. The very same day, another woman was shot by a man she considered a Janjaweed in the same camp. He made away with her cow.
Earlier that day a teenage boy was shot in the foot after three Janjaweed accosted him as he tended cattle outside the same settlement. They made away with the entire herd.
As Darfur is now, a fifth of the population has been displaced and is living in such camps. Most have been stripped of their belongings. Their villages have been torched to the ground. How many bodies remain buried in Darfur remains an unknown, although estimates range from 30,000 to five times that.
There have long been tribal clashes in Darfur between Arab animal herders and the black Africans who plant crops in the dry soil. Their different livelihoods have led to disputes over land, over stolen animals, over any number of infractions.
"We are camel herders, and we have always had guns to defend ourselves,'' said Juma Dagalow Musa, a tribal leader north of Nyala, where torched villages dot the landscape for miles.
Mr. Musa said he was no Janjaweed but understood why Arab tribes had friction with the black Africans. His tribe lost 1,400 camels in February and March of this year, he said, all pilfered by armed rebels from black African tribes. "We wanted to go recover them,'' he said, insisting that he had persuaded his tribal fighters to stay put.
Many fighters, all over Darfur, could not be contained.
The United States government has begun preparing a list of Janjaweed leaders, relying on information culled from private relief organizations working in Darfur. Others in Darfur are tallying their own informal Janjaweed rosters.
"There is no shortage of names,'' said one official who is tracking them. "There are thousands of them, but how many thousands is anybody's guess.''
At one squatter settlement in the remote reaches of Northern Darfur, a man who was forced from his village by the Janjaweed months ago keeps his own tally of local Janjaweed leaders, names he receives from word of mouth from area villagers.
The man, who whispered his name but insisted that it not appear in print, disappeared into a tiny makeshift hut and came out holding a well-worn notebook that he keeps hidden from the local authorities. He has become the camp's security monitor, a fact that he keeps quiet when government officials are around. He writes down Janjaweed offenses.
On July 14 a group of Janjaweed on camels and horses stole 30 animals. The next day a group of Janjaweed came near the camp and fired their guns into the air to prevent some people from collecting firewood. Two days later Janjaweed intimidated some people trying to plant seeds near the camp by firing into the air. The next day Janjaweed returned and stole 80 goats and a donkey.
At the top of this man's Janjaweed list was Musa Hilal, one of the men whose names Pierre-Richard Prosper, the American ambassador for war crimes issues, uttered in testimony before Congress. Mr. Hilal is said to control thousands of fighters and to enjoy close relations with top government officials.
"Musa Hilal is the man behind the Janjaweed around here,'' said the villager who logs the attacks.
Mr. Hilal, a tribal leader from farther north, in El Fasher, admits that he has rallied his Arab tribe's vast network of fighters against black Africans. But in conversations with reporters and diplomats, he rejects the term Janjaweed, which he says applies to outlaws, not agents of the government like him. " 'Janjaweed' is an insult,'' he told Reuters.
Mr. Hilal says he is acting on behalf of the government, protecting Arabs against the black African rebels. "They rebelled, threatened us, tried to sow discord between us,'' he said. "We retaliated, and we are criminals?"
Caught in the middle of the conflict have been villagers going about their lives. They accuse Mr. Hilal's militias of torching their huts and killing indiscriminately, as well as raping and looting at will. He says his fighters have focused their efforts on rebels, not civilians.
One thing is clear: it will be difficult for the government to turn back the clock in Darfur and take away all of the guns. Many allies of the Janjaweed are allies of the government, not people the authorities in Khartoum will be inclined to offend.
Perhaps more realistic than total disarmament, elders in Darfur say, is some kind of truce, but even that remains a tricky prospect, particularly given that there are countless Janjaweed militiamen whose identities are uncertain.
"Those are Janjaweed,'' a black African villager said along the main street in the town of Kitum, pointing to a pickup truck roaring past with men piled into the back. The truck was outfitted with a high-caliber gun, and many of the men wore camouflage.
-------- africa
Mass Killings Reported in Ivory Coast
By SIDIBE OUMAR
Associated Press Writer
Aug 6, 2004
http://ap.washingtontimes.com/dynamic/stories/I/IVORY_COAST_REBEL_KILLINGS?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
KORHOGO, Ivory Coast (AP) -- Dozens of boys and men suffocated in an airless, sweltering shipping container in which rebels locked more than 100 people for days, two survivors told The Associated Press, backing accounts of atrocities during factional fighting in Ivory Coast's rebel-held north.
With detainees packed in too tightly to move - or even breathe - one man, named Siaka, said he survived by gasping air through a small hole in the top of the container.
When the 40-foot-long by 9-foot-high container was opened, 75 bodies were pulled out, a second survivor, Amadou, told the AP on Friday.
"I thought I was going to die," said Amadou, a 25-year-old herdsman, speaking on condition he not be identified further. Surviving was "a miracle. It's due to God."
The accounts - along with others describing numerous missing men - support U.N. and Amnesty International findings on three newly discovered mass graves in rebel territory. The graves hold a total of 99 bodies, some of whom suffocated, the United Nations said Monday.
The U.N. Security Council called the killings a massacre.
"We were in difficult conditions: no water, no food, no air. Sometimes they pumped tear gas into the container," said Siaka, who also refused to allow his full name to be used for fear of reprisal.
The allegations represent the most serious charges of rights abuses lodged against Ivory Coast's rebels since they took control of the north in a nine-month civil war, which officially ended in July 2003.
The killings occurred during a flare-up of factional fighting in June, when the main rebel leader, Guillaume Soro, put down an uprising by followers of dissident Ibrahim Coulibaly. Soro's forces said just 22 people died in the uprising.
Rebel spokesman Alain Lobognon denied that the container was used to imprison people. He would not comment on the other allegations.
Rebels have controlled the north of cocoa-rich Ivory Coast - once one of West Africa's most stable and prosperous nations - since launching an unsuccessful coup attempt in September 2002.
The civil war that followed split the country between the mainly Muslim north and predominantly Christian and animist south.
Over the past year, troops and militias loyal to President Laurent Gbagbo have been accused of numerous abuses, including the killings of at least 120 people during and after an attempted March opposition rally in the commercial capital, Abidjan.
However, survivors and others now accuse the chief rebel movement of killing dozens of prisoners, many of them civilians, during and after the June uprising.
Amnesty International said it believes some of the 99 mass grave victims had their hands tied behind their backs before being beheaded, while others suffocated in shipping containers.
Korhogo residents said the yellow metal shipping container that once stood at the entrance of the town's rebel-held army base was regularly used as a prison by rebel commander Fofie Kouakou.
Siaka and Amadou said they were confined in the container before Coulibaly's uprising began June 20. They were locked up by Kouakou's men on unrelated complaints - Siaka in a violent family dispute, and Amadou in an alleged motorcycle theft. Fewer than 30 others initially were in the container with them, they said.
But after fighting broke out, more than 100 more men were quickly locked inside.
"We were 125 in there, and it became extremely hot," Amadou said. "We were hot and hungry. Some of us began collapsing in the container."
Rebel leaders opened the container two days later - at 3 a.m. on June 22, Amadou said. By that time, it was filled with dead. Kouakou's people immediately put inmates to work removing the corpses, Amadou and Siaka said.
"We took the dead and put them in a truck, and we counted 75 bodies," Amadou said, adding that one of his relatives was among the dead.
"When we finished counting the corpses, (Kouakou's men) took three of us to go with them and the bodies," Amadou said. "These three never came back."
Another Korhogo resident, Inza Kone, said nine members of his family - including a boy of 14 - disappeared after being arrested during fighting.
Two weeks later, local elders held a meeting with rebels to find out whether the youths were alive.
"They officially informed them that they were dead, but they didn't give us back the bodies," said Kone. "We are powerless."
-------- arms
Russian rail workers unearth World War II explosives
SAINT PETERSBURG (AFP)
Aug 06, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040806145746.e0vwz60y.html
Explosives experts rushed to a railway line near the Russian city of Saint Petersburg on Friday after workers unearthed a major cache of World War II explosives, an emergencies ministry official said.
The explosives, including 80 landmines, three shells and 22 grenades, were discovered by rail workers digging under the line some 30 kilometresmiles) outside Saint Petersburg near the village of Sapyornoye, an official at the ministry's regional headquarters told AFP.
Munitions dating from World War II continue to surface around Saint Petersburg, which was named Leningrad at the time. The city endured a 900-day siege at the hand of invading German forces between August 1941 and January
-------- asia
Central Asian, Russian militaries hold manouevres in Kyrgyzstan
BISHKEK (AFP)
Aug 06, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040806134359.pq09h67g.html
The militaries of three Central Asian countries and Russia practiced suppressing an armed terrorist incursion during a military exercise in Kyrgyzstan on Friday, Kyrgyz media said.
Friday saw the culmination of several days of joint exercises involving some 2,000 personnel from Russia, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Tajikistan as well as Russian airforce planes based near Kyrgyzstan's capital Bishkek.
The exercise aimed to "resolve questions of political and military cooperation ... in case of an attack on one country by illegal armed formations", Kyrgyz Defence Ministry Esen Topoyev told Kyrgyz public television.
The exercise in the north of the mountainous republic marked an increase in defence cooperation between Moscow and the Central Asian republics, that broke from Soviet rule in 1991.
It follows a series of extremist attacks in Kyrgyzstan's neighbour Uzbekistan and warnings of continued instability in nearby Afghanistan.
Russia opened a new air base at Kant in Kyrgyzstan in autumn 2003, just a few kilometres (miles) from another base used by US-led forces to support operations in nearby Afghanistan.
Kyrgyzstan experienced a series of incursions by Afghan-based rebels between 1999 and 2001 and is also a partner with Beijing in combating separatists in the neighbouring Chinese region of Xinjiang.
-------- business
Suit Accuses Halliburton of Fraud in Accounting
August 6, 2004
By GRETCHEN MORGENSON
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/06/business/06halliburton.html?pagewanted=all&position=
Four former finance employees at the Halliburton Company contend that a high-level and systemic accounting fraud occurred at the company from 1998 to 2001, according to a new filing in a class-action lawsuit on behalf of investors who bought the company's shares.
The filing accuses the company of accounting improprieties that go far beyond those outlined by the Securities and Exchange Commission in its civil suit against Halliburton, which the company settled on Tuesday, paying $7.5 million.
The charges in the complaint and in the S.E.C.'s action cover the two years when Vice President Dick Cheney was Halliburton's chief executive. But he was not named as a defendant in the new filing nor in the regulatory proceeding. S.E.C. officials said Mr. Cheney provided testimony and willingly cooperated in their inquiry and his lawyer, Terrence O'Donnell, said Mr. Cheney's conduct as chief executive of Halliburton was "proper in all respects." He added that the S.E.C. "investigated this matter very, very thoroughly and did not find any responsibility for nondisclosure at the board level or the C.E.O. level."
According to the new filing, the four former employees, who are not identified in the suit but were managers in financial or accounting positions, say that Kellogg Brown & Root, Halliburton's engineering and construction unit, inflated its financial results by overbilling for services, overstating its accounts receivable due from customers and understating accounts payable owed to vendors. The filing also noted that one former employee in the accounting department said superiors had told her to do "whatever it took" to make projects appear profitable and to meet Wall Street estimates for the company's earnings.
The filing also asserts that executives at Halliburton misled investors in the fall of 2001 about asbestos liabilities faced by the company's subsidiary, Harbison-Walker, which it had acquired in the September 1998 purchase of Dresser Industries. Even though the company had lost a major case in a Texas court and was ordered to pay $130 million to plaintiffs, top Halliburton executives told analysts unaware of the verdict that the news regarding its asbestos obligations was "positive" and that there had been "no adverse developments at all" relating to Harbison-Walker.
Only on Dec. 7, 2001, when the verdict became public, did investors learn of Halliburton's obligations as a result of it, the suit said. The company's stock plummeted, losing 42 percent of its value that day.
The suit names Halliburton as a defendant as well as four executives who it said had control over the company's accounting and the contents of its reports to investors. They are David J. Lesar, Halliburton's chief executive, who took over in that job when Mr. Cheney became vice president; Douglas L. Foshee, a former chief financial officer who is now chief executive officer of the El Paso Corporation; Gary V. Morris, a former chief financial officer who is retired; and Robert Charles Muchmore Jr., former controller of the company.
"What we found to be compelling about this is that there appeared to be a series of schemes designed to bolster Halliburton's financial health that did not allow people to really understand the true financial picture at the company," said David Scott, a lawyer at Scott & Scott in Colchester, Conn. "We found that this was not just one isolated event; it appears to be a course of conduct designed to deceive the public."
Halliburton called the lawsuit abusive and an effort to smear the company and extort money from its shareholders. In a statement, the company said: "On June 7, 2004, the federal court in Dallas preliminarily approved Halliburton's settlement of approximately 20 class-action securities cases (including two filed previously by Scott & Scott) and ordered that no further complaints be filed. Apparently hoping to generate publicity, while violating the spirit but not the letter of that order, Scott & Scott has filed a motion seeking the court's permission to file this latest complaint and attached the complaint to that motion as an exhibit.
"Thus," the statement continued, "they abuse the broad immunity from defamation actions enjoyed by litigants and get their publicity at the same time. It is also noteworthy that this is the third lawsuit arising out of the same general series of events filed by Scott & Scott. Many of their complaints have already been asked and already been answered. It is virtually a recycled lawsuit."
The court filing was made on Tuesday in United States District Court in Dallas, the same day the S.E.C. announced an enforcement action against Halliburton, Mr. Morris and Mr. Muchmore. The S.E.C. contended that the company had misled investors about its financial results in 1998 and 1999 by failing to disclose a change it had made to one of its accounting practices. As a result of the change, Halliburton's earnings were considerably higher than they would have been under the method the company had used previously.
Halliburton and Mr. Muchmore settled with regulators, neither admitting nor denying wrongdoing. The company paid $7.5 million in the settlement. Mr. Morris declined to settle and was sued by the commission in federal court in Houston.
Lawyers for Mr. Muchmore and Mr. Morris did not return phone calls seeking comment; neither did Mr. Foshee.
According to a quarterly filing it also made on Tuesday, Halliburton is under investigation by the Justice Department over possible overbilling on government services work done in the Balkans from 1996 through 2000, when Mr. Cheney was the company's chief executive. The filing also noted that the Justice Department and the S.E.C. were investigating a project in Nigeria in which Halliburton participated and which might involve illegal payments under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. The company said it was too early to assess the impact the inquiry might have. The four former finance officials at Halliburton cited in the Texas court document worked at the company from as early as 1989 until 2003 and were interviewed by investigators for Scott & Scott in the course of researching the case. In the complaint, the former employees describe an accounting department that was decidedly lax in its controls, employing an antiquated computer system in which entries were manually entered and that did not provide details of the invoices or payments underlying revenues or expenses. Such details allow outside auditors to test a company's financial statements.
One former employee said that manipulation of monthly profit and loss statements at K.B.R. "was systemic and indeed a matter of policy." The accounting improprieties were necessary, the filing said, because they helped conceal burgeoning problems related to Halliburton's exposure to asbestos claims.
Because customers of Kellogg Brown & Root paid the company over long periods of time for its engineering work, the Halliburton unit used project plans based on the contract price and the schedule for completion. These plans projected costs to be incurred monthly based on a percentage of the job completed and the profit margins expected. If the costs of a project began to exceed estimates associated with the job, the company's finance directors told project accountants to change the books before the entries went into K.B.R.'s accounting information system, according to the complaint.
One former employee cited in the filing said that the company would routinely overbill but not bother to collect. Neither did the company add to reserves for doubtful accounts, the former employee said. She noted that at one point, the company had $20 million in accounts receivable that were more than six months old. The reserve for doubtful accounts, meanwhile, was $700,000.
The filing stated that the alleged accounting fraud also enabled Halliburton executives to sell shares at inflated prices. Mr. Lesar sold shares worth $1.64 million during the period that the profit manipulations were made, the filing said. The complaint noted that Mr. Lesar's stock sales during the period amounted to twice the sales he had made in almost three years prior to 1998.
Mr. Scott, along with a partner, Neil Rothstein, specializes in class-action securities litigation.
As one of three firms appointed to the executive committee in the Halliburton class action, Scott & Scott has objected to the $6 million settlement announced last year by lead counsel for the class. Calling the settlement inadequate, Mr. Scott said: "The importance of the $7.5 million fine by the S.E.C. this week against the $6 million settlement is telling. What I can't understand is why there has not been a greater outcry among shareholders on the terms of this settlement."
David C. Godbey, the judge presiding over the case, is expected to rule later this month on whether the settlement is fair.
-------- iraq
COMBAT
Radical Cleric in Iraq Sets Off Day of Fighting
August 6, 2004
By ALEX BERENSON
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/06/international/middleeast/06IRAQ.html?pagewanted=all&position=
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Aug. 5 - The radical Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr called for a national uprising against American and allied forces Thursday morning, then backed off near midnight after a day of fighting between his guerrillas and American and Iraqi troops.
The heaviest fighting occurred mainly in Najaf, a Shiite holy city 100 miles south of Baghdad that is a stronghold for Mr. Sadr. A Marine helicopter was shot down there, but the crew members were evacuated safely, the United States military reported.
Baghdad, even in the Shiite slum neighborhood of Sadr City, appeared to be mostly quiet until 11:15 p.m., when three large explosions, probably from mortars, rocked the city's center. Small-arms fire followed.
One American marine and several insurgents were killed in Najaf, where marines fought alongside Iraqi policemen and National Guard troops. At least a dozen more soldiers and dozens of insurgents were wounded in both Baghdad and Najaf, though exact casualty counts were unavailable late Thursday night.
Near midnight, Mr. Sadr offered a tentative cease-fire, saying his guerrillas would stop fighting if American soldiers did the same, according to a spokesman for the group. The offer would renew a two-month-old truce between Mr. Sadr and the American military, a truce that had appeared on the verge of crumbling earlier Thursday.
Each side blamed the other for the apparent breakdown of the cease-fire, which comes less than two weeks before a national political conference that Mr. Sadr has said he will not attend.
While more confined than the widespread fighting in April and May, Thursday's attacks represented the most serious challenge yet to the interim Iraqi government, whose head, Ayad Allawi, has struggled to assert his authority since being named prime minister in June. Unlike moderate Shiite political leaders like Dr. Allawi, Mr. Sadr fiercely opposes the continuing American presence here and has tried twice since October to revolt against it.
Dr. Allawi, who has been traveling outside Iraq for most of the last 10 days, is eager to show his independence from the United States and to prove that Iraqi security forces can stop the growing violence here. But Thursday's clashes showed again that only American troops have the firepower to contain Mr. Sadr's Mahdi Army, a well-armed militia that has fighters across the southern half of Iraq.
During the afternoon, American jets swooped over Baghdad and appeared to drop several bombs on Sadr City, a giant Shiite slum in Baghdad. A military spokesman confirmed that an F-15 fighter had dropped at least one bomb.
Mr. Sadr, a 31-year-old cleric whose father, Muhammad, was revered by many poor Shiites, is a deeply polarizing figure here. Some Iraqis view him as a hothead, while others regard him as a courageous leader who has risked his life to defy the United States.
In interviews on Thursday, shopkeepers and residents in the Shiite neighborhood of Kadhimiya expressed contempt for what they said was the cleric's quickness to turn to weapons and intemperate speeches.
"He doesn't represent me," said Kasim Muhammad, a 25-year-old dress shop owner. "There isn't a house in Iraq that doesn't have someone dead because of wars, and he talks about carrying weapons."
Even in the chaos of kidnappings and car bombs that has roiled the country since the American occupation began last year, Mr. Muhammad remains firmly set against Mr. Sadr. Four families who live in his neighborhood have lost relatives in car bombings this year.
Last year, an Iraqi judge secretly ordered Mr. Sadr arrested for the murder of a more moderate cleric in April 2003, but the authorities hesitated to carry out the warrant for fear of provoking his followers. When the United States disclosed the warrant in April, nearly two months of clashes followed, ending only when the occupation authorities promised not to arrest him.
Baghdad, which has recently been racked by a spate of kidnappings of both Iraqis and Westerners, was very tense on Thursday as word of Mr. Sadr's call for an uprising spread. There are no reliable estimates of the exact size of the Mahdi Army, but in the past Mr. Sadr has shown he could bring thousands of armed men into the streets.
In Sadr City, masked Mahdi Army guerrillas controlled intersections and checked cars. Iraqi police officers and American soldiers remained outside the area for most of the day, and an Iraqi employee of The Times who entered the area twice during the afternoon said he had seen no signs of fighting.
But the Iraqi police reported several firefights in Sadr City during the late afternoon, and an American military spokesman told The Associated Press that seven soldiers had been wounded in two firefights in the area.
In Basra, a mostly Shiite city in the southeastern corner of Iraq, a spokesman for Mr. Sadr said the Mahdi Army had 1,000 guerrillas ready to fight, according to Reuters.
The fiercest fighting took place in and around Najaf, where at least seven insurgents were killed and at least 22 wounded, according to a military statement. The shrine of Imam Ali, a mosque in the center of Najaf that is among the holiest sites to Shiites, was slightly damaged in the fighting, The A.P. reported. In general, American troops have tried to avoid fighting around the shrine and other Shiite holy sites.
The truce between Mr. Sadr and the military has been unraveling for days. It first frayed Sunday, when the police arrested a representative of his in Karbala, near Najaf. On Monday, marines and Mahdi insurgents battled near a maternity hospital in Najaf, and several rebels were killed.
On Tuesday, American troops approached Mr. Sadr's house in Najaf, according to Dr. Salama al-Khafaji, a spokeswoman for a government-appointed council that mediates between the cleric and the American authorities. Fighting intensified Wednesday night, when troops again approached the house, Dr. Khafaji said.
"The Americans escalated the whole situation by coming back with their armored vehicles and trespassing," he said.
But the American military blamed Mr. Sadr for the breakdown. Marines were sent to Najaf's main police station at 3 a.m., after his forces attacked it with machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades, according to a military statement. The Iraqi police and national guard troops defended the station, and the marines did not fire shots or take any casualties, according to the statement.
"The attack is an overt violation of the cease-fire agreement reached in June between coalition forces and Moktada Sadr," the statement said. In addition, Mahdi Army insurgents recently kidnapped six Iraqi police officers in Najaf, according to the statement. Five have been released, but one remains captive, it said.
In a later military statement, Falah al-Nakib, the Iraqi interior minister, blamed Mr. Sadr's forces for the fighting.
"They attacked Iraqi police and we must respond," Mr. Nakib said. "We have the thugs isolated. Our police forces, supported by the multinational force, are doing their job."
But it was a watch seller in a shop near the Kadhim Shrine - the most holy in Baghdad for Shiites - who put the situation in the starkest term. Iraqis, said the seller, Safa Aswad Abbas, "are standing in a pit," and Mr. Sadr's followers "think America is a big devil."
"But if the devil is telling me, 'Give me your hand and I'll get you out,' why shouldn't I take it?" Mr. Abbas asked.
"Yes, it's the devil," he said, "but I'm dying in this pit."
Sabrina Tavernise and Iraqi employees of The Times, whose names have been withheld for security, contributed reporting for this article.
--------
Iraqi Cleric Urges Renewed Revolt
Sadr's Call Comes After Truce Ends in Najaf; U.S. Copter Downed
By Jackie Spinner
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, August 6, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A41429-2004Aug5?language=printer
BAGHDAD, Aug. 5 -- Rebel cleric Moqtada Sadr called on his supporters Thursday to rise up anew against U.S.-led security forces, his spokesman announced, after a fragile two-month truce in the holy city of Najaf ended with clashes that brought down a U.S. helicopter.
"This is a revolution against the occupation force until we get independence and democracy," the spokesman, Ahmed Shaybani, said in a telephone interview.
Sadr's militia, the Mahdi Army, said it had gained control of Najaf and three other southern cities -- Amarah, Nasiriyah and Basra -- where fighting has spread. Iraqi officials denied that the fighters had taken the cities. There was no independent confirmation.
Sadr's call for an uprising is his first significant test of Iraq's new interim government, which took office June 28, and signals the end to the uneasy peace that had settled over Iraq's long-oppressed Shiite Muslim majority in the southern part of the country.
It wasn't clear whether the call would result in a broad revolt. In April, Sadr rallied his supporters to strike against the U.S. occupation, leading to two months of clashes that left hundreds dead. Many here said they would listen closely to the messages Shiite clerics deliver during Friday prayer services for an indication of what might happen this time. But at the very least, the battles Thursday produced more anxiety in a country where the volatile security situation has already frayed nerves.
Sadr's followers also battled U.S. forces in the Sadr City district in Baghdad on Thursday, and gunfire could be heard at a nearby checkpoint.
[Separate attacks by Sadr's forces in Baghdad on Thursday wounded 15 American soldiers, the U.S. command said Friday, the Associated Press reported.]
The U.S. military and Iraqi police said the fighting in Najaf began when Mahdi Army fighters attacked a police station overnight. The military said Iraqi forces called for help to resist the attack.
"If they want it to be war, let it be," said Ghalib Hashim Jazaeri, the police chief in Najaf. "We have enough men and equipment to defeat them."
"We are inside the city," he said into his radio as gunfire and mortar rounds exploded. "We are chasing them. They left, escaped." The radio crackled.
Each side blamed the other for breaking a truce negotiated in June to end the two-month uprising.
"They broke the truce," Jazaeri said. "They want to occupy the city. We cannot let them do that. If they attack us, we will defend ourselves."
Mahdi Army fighters in the streets of Najaf shot off grenades and set up roadblocks with mortar tubes and tires. A voice over a loudspeaker coming from the shrine of Ali, one of the holiest sites in Shiite Islam, urged residents to take up arms to defend the city.
Shaybani denied that Sadr's followers had started the fight. He said the Iraqi police and National Guard and U.S. forces had broken the truce, which restricted U.S.-led forces from entering parts of the city, including areas near sacred sites.
Shaybani said the occupation forces surrounded the city about 2 p.m. Thursday. "We knew they wanted to invade it," he said. "We had and have to defend the holy city. We didn't want to violate the truce, and we are still committed to it. But they don't respect the word they gave. They want it to be war."
One U.S. soldier was killed and five were wounded in the fighting, the military said. Hussein Ali, a doctor at Najaf Hospital, said four Iraqi security officers and six civilians were killed in the battle, which wounded two Iraqi policemen and 18 civilians. The interim Iraqi government said eight Iraqi fighters were killed and 22 injured.
As a large plume of smoke rose from the city, a black U.S. helicopter tilted to one side and chugged slowly to the ground at an angle before it hit with a loud boom. Sadr's aides said the Mahdi Army shot down the aircraft, the Reuters news agency reported. The U.S. military said two crew members were wounded and had been evacuated.
In Basra, British soldiers engaged in a gun battle with members of the Mahdi Army after the soldiers were attacked by small arms fire. A British military spokeswoman said two militiamen were killed.
In Baghdad, Interior Minister Falah Naqib pledged to find and arrest Sadr.
"We will not negotiate," he said at a news conference. "We will fight these militias. We have power to stop these people, and we'll kick them out of the country."
Naqib said the decision for Iraqi forces to fight Sadr's militia came from the governor of Najaf province, not the U.S. military. On that point, Sadr's spokesman agreed.
"We were forced to do this after the governor started his stupid idea to invade the city," Shaybani said.
Also Thursday, insurgents attacked a police station in Mahawil, about 40 miles south of Baghdad. Two gunmen wearing police uniforms opened fire from a minivan as they approached guards outside the station. The gunmen jumped out of the van, and a third sped toward the station in another vehicle filled with explosives, killing five people and wounding 27, the Interior Ministry said. Assailants later attacked an Iraqi patrol in the city, killing one guardsman, the Associated Press reported.
In the northern city of Mosul, Iraqi security forces detained 13 suspected militants and confiscated the bodies of two others, the U.S. military said. The military said that one of the insurgents was caught as he tried to enter the Oprawi Hotel on the banks of the Tigris River and that the 12 others were arrested in a raid at a butcher shop believed to be harboring insurgents.
In other developments, the Central Criminal Court convicted two men on charges of possessing illegal weapons and sentenced each to four years in prison. U.S. soldiers said nearly 200 mortar rounds, artillery rounds, antitank rounds and mortar fuses had been found in the men's possession. Three brothers of the convicted men were found not guilty.
Special correspondents Saad Sarhan in Najaf and Bassam Sebti and Omar Fekeiki contributed to this report.
---------
Fierce Gunbattles Rage for a Second Day in Iraq
August 6, 2004
By SABRINA TAVERNISE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/06/international/middleeast/06CND-IRAQ.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Aug. 6 - Fierce gun battles raged for a second day today between militia loyal to the Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr and American and Iraqi forces in the southern city of Najaf, raising fresh fears of a more protracted struggle with the rebellious cleric.
American military commanders in charge of the Najaf operation said that 2 marines had been killed and 12 injured in the fighting, which began before dawn on Thursday and is playing out in a vast city cemetery. Fighters were firing from among the graves, the commanders said. There were reports that they had been hiding in tombs.
The commanders said an estimated 300 fighters had been killed, but a spokesman for Mr. Sadr put the number far lower, at about 40. Neither figure could be verified tonight.
Mr. Sadr has strongly resisted the American occupation, at times with weapons. His militia, known as the Mahdi army, fought American forces for about a month and a half this spring, but agreed to a cease-fire in June.
Today's fighting seemed to be a further sign that the agreement had been broken.
A spokesman for Mr. Sadr said Thursday night that he had offered to stop fighting as long as American forces did as well. But American commanders said today that they knew nothing of the offer and that their troops were still coming under fire from Mr. Sadr's fighters.
"The cemetery is now a field of terror in the city," Najaf's governor, Adnan al-Zorfi, said at a briefing for reporters. "This operation will never stop before all the militia leave the city."
Sporadic fighting was also reported in two other cities - Samarra in the Sunni triangle area northwest of Baghdad, and Nasiriya in the south, where 6 were killed and 13 wounded, according to the Iraqi Health Ministry. No foreign troops were injured.
Further complicating the situation, the most revered Shiite leader in Iraq, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, left Iraq today for England, where he was expected to receive treatment for a heart condition, said a spokesman in Lebanon, Sheik Hamid Khafaf. He walked unassisted down the steps of a jet at Heathrow Airport in London today.
Some saw political overtones in the departure. Being out of Iraq would allow Mr. Sistani, a moderate, not to take sides in the bruising battles between the Americans and Mr. Sadr.
In Najaf, marines from the 11th Marine expeditionary unit, based 30 miles east of the city and handling the operation jointly with Iraqi forces, fired at fighters from the ground and from helicopters, said Lt. Col. Gary Johnston.
Fighters shot back from behind graves in the cemetery, a vast expanse of above-ground tombs that measures three miles by two miles and is the holiest burial area for Iraqi Shiites.
The cemetery has been off limits to the American military as a religious place. But with no oversight, it has been turned into a warehouse for weapons. Numerous attacks on the nearby police station were staged from there, including kidnappings, commanders said.
"We are fighting them on close terrain but we are on schedule," said Col. Anthony Haslam. "You have to move very slowly because the cemetery has a lot of mausoleums and little caves."
The fighting in Najaf comes at a critical time for Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, who is trying to impose order in Iraq with an often ill-equipped and inadequately prepared Iraqi police force and National Guard. In Najaf, there are approximately 2,000 Iraqi police, a number roughly equal to the estimated force of fighters who have put the city under siege.
The Najaf police are armed with automatic weapons and pistols, but do not have longer-range weapons, such as rocket-propelled-grenade launchers, which are in plentiful supply among the fighters, said Colonel Haslam.
An even more troubling sign was the apparent influx of fighters from other cities. According to Colonel Haslam, the Marines received reports that militia men had come to Najaf on buses from Baghdad and from other cities in the south.
Some of today's attacks were particularly brazen. Militia fighters lobbed mortars at Mr. Zorfi's office building and kidnapped one of his security guards, Mr. Zorfi said. There was also a mortar attack on the office building of another Shiite cleric, Bashir al-Najafi.
But by this afternoon, the Marines had managed to cut a buffer zone between the police station and the cemetery, Colonel Johnston said, speaking at a briefing for journalists at the base, Forward Operating Base Duke. But it was an open front, and slow going, he said.
"It's a very fluid battlefield out there," he said.
The commanders also addressed the question of what set off the battle, a point of confusion in the chaos of Thursday's fighting. Colonel Haslam said marines had been on patrol with the Iraqi National Guard, when the guardsmen pointed out a group of about 10 men with rocket-propelled grenades, a few blocks from Mr. Sadr's home.
The marines moved toward the men and, Colonel Haslam said, the men started to shoot.
Colonel Haslam said Marines were not under orders to capture Mr. Sadr. A judge had previously issued a warrant for his arrest.
"We're not at war with Mr. Sadr," Colonel Haslam said. "He's not our mission."
The city was sealed off today as Iraqi police struggled to maintain control. Police officers blocked five main roads into the city, Colonel Johnston said. Residents reported that they had neither power nor phone service.
Mr. Zorfi said that American forces had taken control of the cemetery by night. He also said that about 1,000 people had been arrested and that an Iranian rocket had been found.
Friday is the Muslim day of worship, but prayers were canceled in Najaf because of the fighting. In nearby Kufa, a city that borders Najaf, an aide to Mr. Sadr delivered a stinging sermon.
"Mr. Yawer said that America is our partner," said the aide, Jabar al-Khafaji, referring to Iraq's president, Ghazi al-Yawer. "We say that America is our enemy. We refuse it as our partner."
In Baghdad, there were skirmishes in the immense Shiite slum of Sadr City throughout the day. Hundreds of fighters loyal to Mr. Sadr were on the streets, guarding makeshift checkpoints fashioned from burning tires and large pieces of wood. American tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles occasionally entered the area, but pulled back when they drew fire.
The Health Ministry reported that 20 people were killed and 114 injured in Thursday's fighting in the area.
Another kidnapping was reported today. Four Lebanese truck drivers were missing after traveling along the road west of Baghdad past Falluja, Agence France Press reported.
Tonight, a group of Shiite leaders who form an organization called the Shia House, which helped negotiated the first cease-fire, met in Baghdad in an emergency session with Iraq's national security adviser, Mowaffak al-Rubaie, to try to help defuse the situation in Najaf.
The American base near Najaf was largely empty this afternoon. Most marines were out fighting. A hastily arranged press trip began and ended in a tent because, the organizers said, there were not enough vehicles to provide a safe ride to the city.
In the sand and heat, a marine started a Humvee filled with bottles of water for fellow marines fighting in the city. The unit, he said, had arrived just two weeks ago.
"It's going to be a long battle," the marine, Cpl. John Bria said. "All we can think of now is to continue with the fight."
--------
Iraq set to use martial law in terror fight
By Donald Macintyre in Baghdad
independent.co.uk
06 August 2004
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=548354
The interim Iraqi government last night looked increasingly prepared to impose martial law on sections of the country as coalition and Iraqi forces fought fierce battles with armed insurgents loyal to the radical Shia cleric Muqtada Sadr.
There were strong hints that Iyad Allawi, the interim Prime Minister, could for the first time apply his emergency powers when he announces plans for tackling the spreading insurgency tomorrow.
An American UH-1 helicopter crash-landed after being hit in the holy Shia city of Najaf during fighting that Falah al-Nakib, Iraq's Interior Minister, said yesterday had claimed the lives of eight insurgents. Iraqi medics said seven civilians were killed. Mr Nakib told a swiftly convened news conference yesterday that he and Mr Allawi had taken "the necessary decisions to confront these challenges" and charged that the fresh uprising in Najaf and Wednesday's fighting in Mosul, in the north, were part of an "organised plan to dismember Iraq and kill the Iraqi people... All of these terrorists and killers are working for the same organisation regardless of which banners they carry or which hats they wear".
The hints followed a declaration in yesterday's Iraqi mediaby Sheikh Ghazi al-Yawar, the interim President, that "it is the time to use the new national safety law" to protect the country against insurgents. The battles in Najaf, the worst since a conditional truce two months ago, ended several weeks of fighting between Sadr and US forces, and triggered further violence when gunmen took control of parts of the Shia Baghdad suburb of Sadr City and wounded seven US soldiers.
In the south of the country, British soldiers were said by a spokesman for Sadr's forces to have killed one insurgent and injured three after they ambushed an Army patrol.
In Amarah, in the British military zone, insurgents fired at government buildings after Mehdi Army leaders appealed through mosque loudspeakers for its members to mobilise.
Mr Nakib and a senior US officer were adamant yesterday that the fighting in Najaf had started because Mehdi Army insurgents had attacked a police station in the city with mortars, rocket-propelled grenades and gunfire. The US military source said that Iraqi forces had called in US forces after repelling two attacks by the insurgents.
While Mr Nakib said Iraqi forces were ready to arrest "all criminals including him [Sadr]", the senior US officer here said its forces had not been pursuing the detention of Sadr, wanted in connection with the killing of a rival Shia cleric. The US military has denied that it deliberately surrounded Sadr's house during engagements on Tuesday.
Striking a bellicose note, Mr Nakib said the Iraqi police and supporting forces had gained "glorious victories" in the continuing fighting, and blamed Iraq's neighbours for fuelling the insurgency. He said Lebanese and Iranians were among those captured. He also criticised Arab television networks for their coverage of the insurgency. Mr Nakib said the transmission of hostage-takers' videos depicted Iraqis to the world as "savages".
There have been hints from Mr Allawi's allies that censorship could be imposed and even threats to close down al-Jazeera's Baghdad bureau unless its coverage is changed. Later, a spokesman for Mr Sadr said the cleric wanted to restore his truce.
The Ministry of Defence said last night that a British soldier died in Iraq. Pte Christopher Gordon Rayment, 22, who was serving with the 1st Battalion, The Princess of Wales' Royal Regiment, died yesterday in "a tragic accident" at Amarah.
-----
Shia cleric urges truce in Iraq
BBC
6 August, 2004
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3540660.stm
Radical Iraqi Shia cleric Moqtada Sadr has called for a truce to be restored after a day of heavy fighting between his militias and US troops in Najaf.
At least seven Iraqis and a US soldier died in Thursday's clashes and a US helicopter was shot down, injuring two.
But Mr Sadr's spokesman said the cleric wanted to renew the truce in the holy city agreed with US troops in June.
That deal came after Mr Sadr's Mehdi Army militia of mainly Shia Muslims began fighting US forces in April.
"Sadr announced that we are committed to the truce and that [US] forces must honour the truce," Mr Sadr's spokesman Ahmed al-Shaibany told to the Associated Press news agency in Najaf.
Spokesmen for the cleric in Baghdad also said Mr Sadr wanted to continue the ceasefire.
Hundreds died in the Shia uprising but Najaf has been relatively calm since the ceasefire came into force, and there was some concern that the latest fighting could unravel the truce, the BBC's Alastair Leithead in Baghdad reports.
Deserted streets
He says tension has been building in Najaf in recent days and fighting finally erupted on Thursday morning.
The helicopter's crew was recovered alive, the US military said
The governor of Najaf requested back-up from US marines after the main police station was attacked, the US military said, but a spokesman for Mr Sadr said US forces and Iraqi police had attacked first.
Iraqi hospital sources said at least seven Iraqis had been killed and dozens injured.
One US soldier was killed and five others wounded in an ambush on a convoy outside the city, the US military said.
A correspondent for AFP news agency said the streets of Najaf were deserted after the clashes in the city centre and at a cemetery.
Flashpoints
There were more clashes across Iraq on Thursday.
In Basra, at least two Mehdi Army members were killed in a 15-minute gunfight with UK troops.
A local Sadr spokesman, Sheikh Saad al-Basri, said the militia would fight a jihad against "foreign troops" and any Iraqi security forces who backed them after four men were arrested by the British.
In Baghdad, at least six people were killed and 20 others hurt when an attacker drove a minibus up to the police station and detonated explosives.
Separately, gunmen shot dead two police officers in the Mahawil area.
-------- israel / palestine
Israeli Pullback in Gaza Met With Palestinian Rockets
August 6, 2004
By GREG MYRE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/06/international/middleeast/06mideast.html
JERUSALEM, Aug. 5 - The Israeli military pulled back its forces in the northern Gaza Strip on Thursday after a five-week operation intended to stop Palestinian rocket fire. Within hours of the retreat, Palestinians unleashed a new round of salvos.
During the incursion, the Israelis destroyed buildings and flattened orchards, which militants have used for cover. About 20 Palestinians have been killed since tanks and other armored vehicles entered the area in and around the town of Beit Hanun in late June.
Standing amid orange and lemon trees that were bulldozed, Immidhat Hamad, 70, said: "These trees are my life. This is what I've done all my life, and it was ruined within minutes."
Mr. Hamad's wife, who noted that her extended family included 15 people, said, "I don't know how we'll live." She added that she was not aware of any Palestinian factions using her orchards to fire rockets.
Despite the Israeli presence, Hamas and other Palestinian factions were still able to fire rockets periodically at the Israeli town of Sederot, a short distance beyond Gaza's perimeter fence.
While Israel pulled its troops out of Beit Hanun and other areas in Gaza, the forces maintained a presence just outside the town, according to Palestinian residents. The military described the move as a "redeployment" and said the operation to prevent the rocket fire was continuing. But shortly after the Israelis pulled back, Palestinians fired at least six rockets. All landed in fields, causing no damage or injuries.
The Palestinians have fired more than 300 Qassam rockets from Gaza in the past few years, including more than 40 in the past month, according to the Israeli military. The Israelis entered northern Gaza after a rocket attack on June 28 that killed two Israelis, including a 4-year-old boy.
Meanwhile, Israel is pursuing a plan to link Jerusalem and the largest settlement in the West Bank, Maale Adumim, the settlement's mayor, was quoted as saying Thursday. The government did not comment publicly.
But Benny Kashriel, the mayor of Maale Adumim, told the newspaper Maariv that government ministries were working to expand the settlement westward and effectively connect it to Jerusalem, about four miles away. Such a move would go against the Middle East peace plan, which calls for a freeze on Israeli settlement activity.
Maale Adumim is in a delicate position because it is so large and so close to Jerusalem. The Palestinians want a capital in east Jerusalem, but Arab neighborhoods in that part of the city are increasingly surrounded by Jewish settlements, Palestinians say. "This is a flagrant violation of the promises Israel has made to President Bush," said Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator. "This is a land grab, and if the Israelis carry out this program, there will be nothing left to negotiate."
Israeli trucks and bulldozers were at work on Thursday on a new road on the western side of Maale Adumim. The settlement, which has about 30,000 residents, already serves as a suburb of Jerusalem.
"Contiguity between Maale Adumim and Jerusalem is necessary," Yuval Steinitz, who heads the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee in Parliament, told Israeli radio.
Earlier this week, Israel's Defense Ministry confirmed a separate plan to build another 600 homes in Maale Adumim. The United States State Department responded by urging Israel to stick by its pledge to halt settlement expansion. On Thursday, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon told the American envoy Elliott Abrams that Israel was not planning to connect Maale Adumim to Jerusalem, the Israeli media reported.
Also on Thursday, the Israeli military said it would open the border crossing between the Gaza Strip and Egypt on Friday, a move that would permit an estimated 2,000 stranded Palestinians to return home. Israel has kept the crossing closed since July 18, saying it was concerned about a possible attack. Palestinians stranded at the terminal on the Egyptian side of the border include pregnant women and some who had gone for medical treatment in Egypt.
In another development, Israel will permit some Palestinian police officers in the West Bank to resume carrying weapons in public for the first time in more than two years, The Associated Press said, citing Israeli officials. Neither side announced an agreement, though Mr. Erekat, the Palestinian negotiator, said the two sides were trying to arrange a meeting for Friday.
"We can't be expected to take control of security if our police can't be on the streets with their weapons," Mr. Erekat said.
--------
Israel Reopens Border Crossing Between Egypt and Gaza
August 6, 2004
By GREG MYRE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/06/international/middleeast/07MIDEAS.html?hp
JERUSALEM, Aug. 6 - Israel today opened a border crossing between the Gaza Strip and Egypt that had been closed for nearly three weeks, allowing most of the more than 2,000 stranded Palestinians to return home.
Israel closed the Rafah crossing on July 18, saying it believed Palestinians were planning to attack the site. Since then, Palestinians who were in Egypt have been unable to return to Gaza.
The better-off Palestinians were able to turn back and wait out the delay at hotels in Cairo or elsewhere in Egypt. But many of the travelers are poor and spent the entire time at a cramped, sweltering terminal building on the Egyptian side of the border.
Many had to sleep outside, and the terminal had only limited toilet and washing facilities. A large number of the Palestinians had gone to Egypt for medical treatment, and some were still ailing as they tried to return home.
Khalil Abu Foul, a doctor with the Palestinian Red Crescent, was given special permission to cross from Gaza to the Egyptian side, and treated the stranded Palestinians for the past two weeks.
One woman gave birth, two had miscarriages and many suffered from illnesses related to diarrhea and high blood pressure, said Dr. Foul, who was among those returning to Gaza today.
"For the first three days I was treated like a stray dog. After that the Egyptians provided us with food, medicine and blankets," said Waffiah al-Sharif, 57, who was returning to her home in Gaza after visiting relatiaves in New Zealand.
Abu Muhammad al-Salahiat, 40, said that his father and aunt, both of them elderly and ailing, went to Egypt for medical treatment, and both died in Cairo during the past two weeks. At midday today, he was still waiting for the bodies to be returned.
"They are both dead. Why won't they let the bodies cross?" said an exasperated Mr. Salahiat.
Egypt had called on Israel to reopen the border for humanitarian reasons, and the United States also raised the issue.
Israel offered to let a limited number of Palestinians pass through a separate crossing along the Israeli-Egyptian border.
But Palestinian officials rejected the proposal, saying it was a violation of the existing agreement on the border crossing. In addition, the Israeli proposal would have permitted just 200 Palestinians to return home each day. Palestinian authorities also expressed concerns that Israel might be planning to permanently close the Rafah crossing.
Palestinian officials said around 1,500 travelers had returned to Gaza as of this evening and the rest were expected soon.
On the Gaza side of the border, Palestinians who were unable to go to Egypt simply remained at home, and there was no backlog of stranded travelers at the crossing point.
In a separate development, Israel's defense minister, Shaul Mofaz, said that some Palestinian policemen in the West Bank would be allowed to carry their weapons in public for the first time in more than two years.
The Palestinian prime minister, Ahmed Qurei, recently raised the issue, saying the Palestinian Authority could not combat the growing chaos on the streets unless there was an armed police force.
Mr. Mofaz told Israel radio that he was also concerned about "a situation of anarchy that could spread and create chaos on the Palestinian side."
The defense minister said that the Palestinian police would be allowed to carry only pistols and clubs, and that officers would have to be approved individually by Israel. The policy will be implemented gradually, and is reversible, Mr. Mofaz said.
Taghreed El Khodary contributed reporting from Gaza for this article.
--------
Uprooted trees, razed houses... Israel leaves its calling card in Gaza
06 August 2004
independent.co.uk
By Eric Silver and Sa'id Ghazali in Jerusalem
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=548358
The Palestinians of Beit Hanoun in the northern Gaza Strip began to count the cost of a month-long Israeli invasion as the troops finally pulled out yesterday, leaving a trail of anger, despair and devastation behind them.
More than 42,000 olive, citrus and date trees had been uprooted, according to the local council. Altogether, 4,405 acres of orchards, vineyards and vegetable fields were flattened.
Officials accused the army of demolishing 21 houses and damaging a further 314. Five factories and 19 wells were also destroyed. They said the loss could reach as high as £70m.
The Israelis said they went in to stop Hamas militants firing rockets at Sderot, a town of 24,000 across the border inside Israel. One salvo killed a three-year-old boy and a middle-aged man there five weeks ago. A house was damaged earlier this week, and two more rockets fell on open ground yesterday.
Before pulling out, the army distributed leaflets with a cartoon showing rockets bouncing back at Beit Hanoun. "Terror," it read, "will kill you."
Two weeks ago Hamas gunmen shot dead a youth whose family tried to stop them firing rockets from their backyard for fear of reprisals, but the blockade may yet rebound on Israel.
Basel al Masri, a farmer who lost an acre and a half of grape vines, said: "Everybody here agrees that the militants should not fire from a densely populated area. But after this massive destruction, the people of Beit Hanoun will tell them to come and fire rockets from the tops of our houses."
Abdullah Musleh estimated that it would cost $400,000 (£220,000) to rebuild his floor tile factory. "They have no justification for doing this," he said.
"It is deliberate destruction of our economy. They have destroyed everything, three automatic pressing machines, the offices, the cement containers, even the marble floors under the machines. My 15 workers will be unemployed."
Abdel Kareem Abu Jarad and his extended family of 26 had their two-storey home commandeered as a base for the army. When they heard that the soldiers had gone they returned, only to watch a bulldozer razing the building.
Mr Abu Jarad said: "No rockets were fired near our house. There is no justification for all this brutality."
All their savings, $7,000 and 25,000 shekels (£6,500 altogether) in cash, had gone. Mr Abu Jarad said he suspected the soldiers of stealing them.
Captain Jacob Dallal, a military spokesman, said the orchards and buildings were used as a shelter for militants. "We don't want to be there," he added. "We just don't want the [missiles] to be fired from there. If the terrorist groups operate from among the civilian population and use private property to launch attacks, they also have to be accountable."
The Israeli media reported yesterday that Mousa Arafat, the Palestinian security chief, had met secretly with his Israeli opposite number to try to stop the rocket firings. But the people of Beit Hanoun have lost faith in their leaders.
Three Palestinian ministers set up a tent there yesterday to assess the damage but five gunmen burst in and ordered them to leave.
"We didn't see you when the Israeli army was destroying Beit Hanoun," one of them shouted through a loudhailer. "Go away. We don't want you here." As the locals applauded, the ministers left.
-----
Gaza's breadbasket left in ruins after Israel ends five-week offensive
AFP
August 6, 2004
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/040805/1/3m7ws.html
The Israeli army left a trail of devastation in Beit Hanun after a five-week siege and occupation of the Gaza Strip's traditional breadbasket which failed to put a halt to rocket attacks by Palestinian militants.
Tanks and armoured vehicles began leaving the centre of town at first light and had completed their pullout four hours later, residents said. Troops had also withdrawn from around the nearby town of Jabaliya and its refugee camp.
An Israeli military spokesman confirmed that forces were being "redeployed" but did not elaborate. "This is a redeployment, not a withdrawal. Our operations to prevent the firing of Qassams (makeshift rockets) will continue," he told AFP.
However the military later said that two more rockets landed in southern Israel on Thursday. An umbrella militant organisation, the Popular Resistance Committees, claimed responsibility for the firing of the rockets which landed harmlessly in the Negev desert.
And the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of the hardline Hamas movement after whom the rockets are named, said the Israeli pullout was "a victory for the resistance."
"The Zionist enemy has failed to stop our rockets which have liberated Beit Hanun," the group said in a statement.
Twenty Palestinians were killed during the course of the operation, which initially saw tanks seal off the entrance to Beit Hanun.
They later moved into the centre of the town and expanded their operations to include Jabaliya, where three Palestinians were shot dead by Israeli forces on Wednesday.
Defence Minister Shaul Mofaz had ordered troops into Beit Hanun, home to some 30,000 Palestinians, in the aftermath of a rocket attack on the southern Israeli town of Sderot which killed two people, including a three-year-old boy.
Residents said that much of Beit Hanun's infrastructure had been smashed in the course of the operation as troops demolished buildings, tore up roads and razed orange groves which had been used as cover for the firing of the Qassam rockets.
Palestinian housing minister Abdelrahman Hamad, who comes from Beit Hanun, said the latest incursion had caused some 40 million dollars' worth of damage to homes, farms and general infrastructure.
He said that vast swaths of farmland in the northern Gaza Strip had been damaged or destroyed by the incursion.
"We cannot say that Israel has gone for good as they have redeployed to the hills to the east and can come back any time," he told AFP.
"They have left a huge amount of destruction. As you know, Beit Hanun is the only real source of farming and citrus fruits in Gaza, and now it's a desert."
Beit Hanun is renowned for its orange and lemon trees, but hundreds could be seen smashed to pieces on a tour of the area on Thursday morning.
The tarmac on the roads had been churned into rubble by tanks which had effectively added two extra lanes by trundling down the pavements.
At least 30 houses were totally destroyed with residents trying to pick through the rubble to retrieve clothes and possessions.
Kifar al-Majdalawi was trying to retrieve some of her family's belongings from the wreckage while holding her three-month-old baby. It was the first time she had been able to venture outside for several weeks.
"I bought this just before they came, and now look at it," she said tearfully as she retrieved a baby's shawl from underneath the rubble.
"This is inhuman. Just imagine how they (the Israelis) would react if we did this to them."
Majdalawi said that she had been forced to take shelter with relatives but even then the army had herded 10 people into one room while they took up positions in other parts of the house.
Although both Mofaz and chief of staff Moshe Yaalon had publicly pledged that troops would continue to operate in the area until the rocket attacks ceased, reports have said that many officers favoured a pullout.
The head of the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian refugees cited the Israeli operation in Beit Hanun in ordering all foreign staff based in its Gaza City headquarters to temporarily move to Amman on Wednesday.
Although troops had left the area, a hot air balloon could be seen flying overhead with cameras directed towards the town.
-------- nato
Russia, irked by NATO enlargement, expels Lithuanian envoy
MOSCOW (AFP)
Aug 06, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040806114519.phu29dth.html
Russia expelled another Lithuanian envoy on Friday amid continued anger in Moscow at NATO's expansion to include the three former Soviet Baltic republics.
The Lithuanian military attache, Lieutenant Colonel Sigitas Butkus, was declared persona non grata in Russia "due to activities damaging to Russia's interests", Russia's foreign ministry said in a statement.
Butkus has been given 48 hours to leave Russia, it said.
The move followed Lithuania's expulsion of three Russian diplomats and the tit-for-tat expulsion by Russia of three Lithuanian diplomats this spring. Similar incidents have also occurred between Russia and the other two Baltic republics Latvia and Estonia.
"We see the Russian actions as a reciprocal measure for the expulsion a month ago of three Russian diplomats out of Lithuania," Lithuania's Deputy Foreign Minister Albanas Januska told AFP.
He said Moscow was also refusing to accredit the replacement for Buktus, and that the Lithuanian foreign ministry would name another candidate.
Foreign Minister Antanas Valionis was quoted Friday by the Baltic News Service (BNS) as describing the three Russians deported in July from Vilnius as having engaged in "activity incompatible with diplomatic status".
Moscow has strongly objected to the accession of the three Baltic republics to NATO in March. Its protests have grown even louder since NATO decided to station warplanes in Lithuania to patrol the three countries' airspace.
Earlier this week Estonia complained that a Russian spyplane had infringed its airspace, a charge that Moscow denied.
-------- pakistan / india
Pakistan, India discuss Siachen demilitarisation
Defence secretaries hold hour-long one-to-one meeting;
Pakistan favours troops' pullback
August 06, 2004
The News International
http://jang.com.pk/thenews/aug2004-daily/06-08-2004/main/main1.htm
NEW DELHI: Top defence officials from India and Pakistan met on Thursday to find ways to demilitarise the Siachen glacier in their first high-level military contact in seven years on the issue, officials said.
A nine-member Pakistani team led by Defence Secretary Hamid Nawaz Khan began talks with the Indian side, led by its Defence Secretary Ajai Vikram Singh on a 1990 proposal to pull out troops from the 6,300-metre high glacier.
An Indian defence ministry spokesman declined to give details after the two sides wrapped up the Thursday's session of talks but said a joint communique would be issued after the discussions ended on Friday.
Singh and Khan smiled and shook hands before sitting down for one-on-one talks. "The talks went off well... A scheduled 10-minute one-to-one meeting between the two defence secretaries stretched well past 50 minutes. Preliminary talks focused on various confidence-building measures and issues governing our respective stands on Siachen," an Indian defence ministry official told AFP.
The two sides are looking for ways to build on a ceasefire that has held since November on the Siachen glacier. "The idea is to inch toward durable peace, but this will happen in degrees," said another defence ministry official. "Everyone is treading very carefully on this."
Sources close to the talks said the Pakistan favoured a pullback of troops to the level of the ceasefire reached after 1971 war, however, India does not want a demilitarisation of the glacier to be linked to the dispute over Kashmir. "(Just as) we want the demarcation of the Actual Ground Position Line (AGPL) in Siachen, we are looking forward to a similar demarcation of boundary in Sir Creek," another official said.
"This two-day meeting is crucial for both sides because the results will have a bearing when we meet on Sir Creek island," the Indian official said, as Khan called on Defence Minister Pranab Mukherjee.
-----
India, Pakistan hold new round of talks on strategic Kashmir glacier
NEW DELHI (AFP)
Aug 06, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040806071434.kam48pkj.html
India and Pakistan Friday held a second day of talks on how to demilitarise the strategic Siachen glacier in Kashmir, a Himalayan region that both claim, a defence ministry spokesman said.
The two-day talks are the first high-level military contact in seven years between the nuclear-capable rivals on the Siachen glacier, which at 6,300 metres (20,700 feet) is considered the world's highest battlefield.
The spokesman did not give details about the talks. However, Indian television reports said differences persisted between on the demarcation of the glacier.
Pakistan is believed to favour a pullback of troops to the level of a ceasefire reached after the countries' last full-fledged war in 1971. However, India does not want a demilitarisation linked to the dispute over Kashmir.
A ceasefire has been in place on the glacier, where India holds the high ground, since a border truce was reached in Kashmir in November.
Another Pakistani military team will begin two days of talks Friday on Sir Creek -- a disputed water body between India's western Gujarat state and Pakistan's Sindh province.
The talks are part of a dialogue revived in January. India and Pakistan met Tuesday and Wednesday on building cultural and people-to-people ties, although they did not announce any major agreement.
More discussions are scheduled in August on trade and cracking down on drug trafficking.
The two countries came close to war after the Indian parliament was attacked in December 2001 by Islamic rebels New Delhi said were sponsored by Islamabad. Pakistan denied the charge.
--------
Pakistan Pressures Al Qaeda
Military Operation Results In Terror Alert and Arrests
By Kamran Khan and Dana Priest
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, August 6, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A43940-2004Aug5?language=printer
KARACHI, Pakistan, Aug. 5 -- An intense Pakistani military operation directed at suspected al Qaeda hideouts along the Afghan-Pakistan border has led to the seizure of a number of al Qaeda suspects and the discovery of a cache of computer information that contributed to last weekend's decision to increase the terror alert in several U.S. cities, Pakistani officials said Thursday.
The Pakistani operation has employed sophisticated American eavesdropping technology and computerized identification systems, they said. Three wanted al Qaeda operatives have been arrested, and computer files were found with detailed surveillance reports on terrorist targets and information about the whereabouts of other al Qaeda members, according to the officials.
The military effort has forced the fighters out of the rugged remote tribal areas, just inside Pakistan, and into more urban areas, where they are more visible and vulnerable to capture, they said.
The operation is being paid for with millions of dollars from the CIA, supported with equipment from the National Security Agency and carried out by Pakistani soldiers and intelligence units. It has netted more than 100 suspects in recent days, the officials said. Eighteen detainees have been identified by the officials as al Qaeda members, according to Faisal Saleh Hayat, Pakistan's interior minister.
"We have a bead on some people," a U.S. military officer said in a comment echoed throughout the U.S. government on Thursday.
The heightened security alerts in the United States came after data seized in Pakistan suggested that the group was targeting five financial buildings in New York, Washington and Newark.
One Pakistan intelligence official said: "U.S. assistance comes in the shape of incredible data and analysis based on electronic and signal intercepts of al Qaeda suspects all over the world. Their information is also based upon the detailed debriefing of the arrested suspects and a scientific follow-up of these debriefings held at unidentified locations."
In London, Scotland Yard announced the arrest of Babar Ahmad, a British subject of Pakistani descent, on a U.S. extradition request from the U.S. District Court in Connecticut. Ahmad, 30, is accused of soliciting funds and property through the Internet for "acts of terrorism in Chechnya and Afghanistan," including political murder between 1998 and the end of 2003, U.S. officials said. They said that Ahmad had been under surveillance for several years but that information obtained in other counterterrorism operations in the past week allowed them to make the arrest.
Late Tuesday, British authorities arrested 12 people, including a key al Qaeda figure, Eisa Hindi, and several others who have since been identified as members of the organization. According to U.S. officials, Hindi is suspected of helping to produce, before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, the surveillance of the five buildings that led officials on Sunday to raise the terror alert level.
Also on Thursday, Saudi Arabia's security forces arrested a leading militant, Faris Zahrani, Saudi-owned al-Arabiya television reported. The report said Zahrani did not resist when he was arrested in southern Saudi Arabia. Zahrani was on a list of that country's 26 top wanted militants with suspected links to al Qaeda.
Meanwhile, a Pakistani intelligence officer said that "there was a definite link" between a June 10 attack on a Pakistani corps commander, in which 11 troops were killed, and the arrest two days later of Mussad Aruchi, a suspected al Qaeda operative. The commander, Lt. Gen. Ahsan Saleem Hayat, was not hurt.
Aruchi is reportedly a nephew of Khalid Sheik Mohammed, one of the planners of the Sept. 11 attacks. Aruchi was arrested in Karachi on June 12. The operation was supervised by the CIA, and the agency provided crucial information indicating his location, Pakistani intelligence sources said.
Aruchi possessed information about U.S. financial targets as well as the names of his associates. He had old street maps of New York City and addresses of other significant buildings, along with a number of compact disks containing information useful to investigators.
Aruchi's arrest, according to Pakistani officials, led authorities to Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan in the city of Lahore on July 13. Khan's e-mail traffic has helped lead authorities to other al Qaeda suspects.
The interrogations of Khan and Aruchi then led officials to Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, who was captured on July 25. Ghailani is a Tanzanian wanted by the United States in connection with the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. A laptop computer seized with him contained maps and messages, apparently from scouts who had entered some of the targeted locations in the United States.
These documents were produced before the Sept. 11 attacks. U.S. officials have said they included updated information on one building as late as January 2004, but the officials were not certain whether it amounted to new surveillance or whether it was information publicly available.
In most cases, Pakistani officials said, once suspects have been captured, the CIA has taken control of the interrogations and custody of the computer files and other documents.
The intensity of the recent fighting in Waziristan, a northwestern tribal region bordering Afghanistan, has surprised Pakistani officials. Thousands of troops have been fighting in Waziristan for two months, when the military launched an offensive against the suspected hideout of Osama bin Laden's deputy, Ayman Zawahiri. Although Zawahiri has not been located, the fierceness of the resistance indicated to Pakistan troops that they were likely attacking an area populated by major al Qaeda suspects.
"We had fairly solid intelligence that at least Ayman al Zawahiri was roaming in this region," said a senior Pakistani intelligence official. "Once we penetrated the area, we didn't find Zawahiri, but we definitely confronted and killed many future Zawahiris in this area."
"The Pakistanis are pounding away at Waziristan," one senior U.S. national security official said.
Thirteen Pakistani troops, including three officers, were killed Thursday when a military helicopter crashed in Waziristan, near the garrison town of Kohat. A suicide bomber attacked the house of a senior military commander in the town last month, killing two senior intelligence officials. At least 100 Pakistani troops and 200 people, including local tribesmen, non-Pakistani Arabs and other foreigners, have been killed in the region. Authorities said hundreds of people have fled their homes.
After a fierce rocket attack Wednesday night on military checkpoints in the tribal town of Shikai, authorities imposed economic punishment on the community, restricting the flow of local produce -- apricots, plums and dry fruit -- into local markets.
"The situation is still explosive because al Qaeda elements and their local supporters are running hit-and-run operations in a different terrain," said a Pakistani intelligence officer based in Peshawar.
Priest reported from Washington. Correspondent Glenn Frankel in London contributed to this report.
-------- russia / chechnya
Georgian Vows Peaceful Solution With Russia
August 6, 2004
nytimes
By STEVEN R. WEISMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/06/international/europe/06geor.html?ex=1092756273&ei=1&en=397d8044a924ceb1
ASHINGTON, Aug. 5 - President Mikhail Saakashvili of Georgia warned the Bush administration on Thursday that Russia was trying to assert greater control over his country, a former republic in the old Soviet Union. Despite rising tensions, however, he said he would seek to resolve differences with Moscow peacefully. "Georgia cannot and will not solve this problem with violence," said Mr. Saakashvili, in a visit to the United States that coincided with renewed charges and countercharges over Russia's involvement in the drive for secession in two Georgia provinces. "We have the patience to wait to unify Georgia by peaceful means."
Mr. Saakashvili, a 36-year-old reformer who took power last year after the ouster of Georgia's long-serving president, Eduard A. Shevardnadze, met with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld shortly after his arrival on Wednesday. On Thursday, he met with Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser.
His meetings came after he threatened to sink ships approaching one of Georgia's two secessionist provinces, Abkhazia, which is on the Black Sea. The threat, issued Tuesday, included warnings against ships carrying Russian passengers, including summertime vacationers, according to the Russians.
Russia's defense minister, Sergei B. Ivanov, said Mr. Saakashvili's threat amounted to piracy.
The Bush administration, which has been close to Mr. Saakashvili and welcomed his country's contributions of some 200 troops to Iraq, has declined to take sides in his dispute with Russia and instead urged leaders of the two countries to try to resolve their disputes without threats of force.
Secretary of State Powell also sought to reduce tensions surrounding the latest exchange between Russia and Georgia. "There is a bit of tension there," Mr. Powell said after his meeting with Mr. Saakashvili. "But I don't think they're on the verge of a crisis of the kind that's sometimes suggested."
Mr. Powell said the United States would continue to try to "calm this situation down, remove tensions and the propensity for provocation and get back to dialogue."
A senior State Department official said: "This is an issue that needs to be resolved peacefully. That is a message that has been constantly reiterated to both sides."
In Moscow, Russia's lower house of Parliament assailed Mr. Saakashvili's recent statements as tantamount to "belligerence, and at times blatant aggression," Reuters reported. "Georgia has chosen to resolve the existing problems by force but with total disregard for other interested parties," the statement said.
But Mr. Saakashvili, speaking at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said that it was Russia that was threatening violence by sending ships to Georgia laden with drugs, contraband and arms for rebels in the restive provinces.
"Since when does Russia own a piece of Georgia so that they can infringe on our own territorial integrity?" he asked, adding that many in Russia continued to view Georgia as a part of their country.
The spiraling tensions in Georgia come at an awkward moment for the Bush administration, which has described warm American relations with President Vladimir V. Putin in Moscow is one of its major foreign policy achievements.
The administration has not only managed to win Russian acceptance of the American invasion of Iraq but also acceptance of the expanding presence of American military forces in what used to be the old Soviet bloc of nations.
--------
Russia, irked by NATO enlargement, expels Lithuanian envoy
MOSCOW (AFP)
Aug 06, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040806114519.phu29dth.html
Russia expelled another Lithuanian envoy on Friday amid continued anger in Moscow at NATO's expansion to include the three former Soviet Baltic republics.
The Lithuanian military attache, Lieutenant Colonel Sigitas Butkus, was declared persona non grata in Russia "due to activities damaging to Russia's interests", Russia's foreign ministry said in a statement.
Butkus has been given 48 hours to leave Russia, it said.
The move followed Lithuania's expulsion of three Russian diplomats and the tit-for-tat expulsion by Russia of three Lithuanian diplomats this spring. Similar incidents have also occurred between Russia and the other two Baltic republics Latvia and Estonia.
"We see the Russian actions as a reciprocal measure for the expulsion a month ago of three Russian diplomats out of Lithuania," Lithuania's Deputy Foreign Minister Albanas Januska told AFP.
He said Moscow was also refusing to accredit the replacement for Buktus, and that the Lithuanian foreign ministry would name another candidate.
Foreign Minister Antanas Valionis was quoted Friday by the Baltic News Service (BNS) as describing the three Russians deported in July from Vilnius as having engaged in "activity incompatible with diplomatic status".
Moscow has strongly objected to the accession of the three Baltic republics to NATO in March. Its protests have grown even louder since NATO decided to station warplanes in Lithuania to patrol the three countries' airspace.
Earlier this week Estonia complained that a Russian spyplane had infringed its airspace, a charge that Moscow denied.
-------- spies
Sri Lanka's army spy chief seeks retirement amid controversy
COLOMBO (AFP)
Aug 06, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040806074443.n45vl9cb.html
The head of Sri Lanka's military intelligence has asked for early retirement amid allegations that security forces were providing covert support to renegade Tamil rebels, official sources said Friday.
Brigadier Kapila Hendavitharan sent in his early retirement papers to army chief Shantha Kottegoda who is yet to take a decision on allowing the head of the Directorate of Military Intelligence (DMI) to quit, the sources said.
Neither men were immediately available for comment, but the move follows Tamil Tiger allegations that the DMI provided support to the breakaway Tiger leader V. Muralitharan, better known as Karuna.
Karuna led an unprecedented split in the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in March and went underground five weeks later, disbanding some 5,000 to 6,000 fighters, after an onslaught by the guerrilla leadership.
The main Tiger group has been trying to track down Karuna and has killed dozens of his loyalists. The rebels have accused the government of hampering peace moves through its alleged backing of Karuna.
The government had denied officially-sanctioned military support to the Karuna faction, but admitted that several officers may have been acting on their own.
Sri Lanka's peace broker Norway has said the internecine Tiger clashes were a serious threat to the fragile peace process which has been on hold since April last year.
More than 60,000 people have died in the Tigers' three-decade campaign to create a separate homeland for the island's Tamil minority.
-------- un
DIPLOMACY
Security Fears Are Slowing U.N. Return to Baghdad
August 6, 2004
By WARREN HOGE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/06/international/middleeast/06nati.html
UNITED NATIONS, Aug. 5 - John C. Danforth, the American ambassador to the United Nations, said Thursday that he hoped an international protection force could be in place in Iraq next month to permit the United Nations to return to Baghdad, but he acknowledged that finding countries willing to participate was proving difficult and frustrating.
A Security Council resolution on Iraq, adopted unanimously on June 8 by the 15-member panel, authorized a distinct force, estimated at about 4,000, within the overall American-led multinational force charged with the responsibility of protecting United Nations staff and equipment in Iraq.
In creating the force, the United States and Britain had hoped to gain the involvement of countries that had not participated in or supported the military action in Iraq but were now eager to see the United Nations expand its presence in there.
Mr. Danforth said the effort to enlist such help had been a central preoccupation of his first month on the job, and he described conversations on the issue as maddeningly circular.
He had discovered, he said, that the only way forward was if "there is sufficient security for all these people who want to be in there."
"But they don't want to go in there if there is no security," he said. "And so it just keeps going around and around in a circle."
For the short term, he said, only the Americans, the British and the multinational force are able to provide security.
Secretary General Kofi Annan has said repeatedly that he needs more assurances of protection than that if he is to send United Nations international staff back in.
The United Nations has been running its Iraq operation out of offices in Amman, Jordan, since Mr. Annan removed international staff members from Iraq in October after the bombing of the agency's headquarters in Baghdad on Aug. 19, which killed 22, including the mission chief, Sergio Vieira de Mello.
Mr. Annan's worry over sending international staff back led him to insist that the Security Council resolution on Iraq include the words "as circumstances permit" in the section referring to when the United Nations would be returning in large numbers.
The United Nations is presently charged with helping plan elections set for January and assisting in the creation of a new constitution.
One of the concerns about the stalled effort to produce a protection force is that, under the terms laid down by the agency's electoral division head, Carina Perelli, voter registration across the country should begin in September.
Mr. Annan said Wednesday that Mr. Vieira de Mello's successor, Ashraf Jehangir Qazi, a veteran Pakistani diplomat, and a small team of aides would arrive in Baghdad next week before a national conference scheduled for Aug. 15.
Talks have been held with, among others, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Nepal, Pakistan and Ukraine, but Mr. Annan said Wednesday that he had no "firm commitments" from any country. "We haven't had much success attracting governments to sign up," he said.
Asked why people were resisting, Mr. Danforth said: "Security. In other words, what we want is security protection for U.N. personnel, but the security people themselves would be vulnerable, and I think that is something that is of great concern."
Mr. Danforth implied that even though the United States had made it clear that it wanted the United Nations fully engaged in Iraq, some people still did not take seriously the American desire to internationalize the effort there. "Some people say, 'Well, the U.S. wants to go it alone,' " he said, "but it is absolutely untrue, we don't want to go it alone. The opposite is the case."
He said that everyone felt that the future of Iraq was an international responsibility that would be best fulfilled by having the United Nations back in Baghdad. "But it is only going to do that if there is sufficient security, so around and around it goes," he said.
--------
UN Bureaucrats Angry Over Iraq's Refusal to Pay Dues
August 6, 2004
Inter Press Service
by Thalif Deen
http://www.antiwar.com/ips/deen.php?articleid=3253
UNITED NATIONS - Iraq's U.S.-installed interim government, which is planning to spend some two billion dollars on its military this year, has declared it is too poor to pay 14.6 million dollars it owes the United Nations.
"Iraq was not in a position to pay what it owed to the United Nations, although it hopes to do so next year, when oil production has increased," the interim government says in a letter to the U.N. Committee on Contributions, transmitted through the Iraqi Mission to the United Nations.
The committee has accepted the argument that the government in Baghdad is unable to pay the accumulated arrears because of "the devastation wrought (to Iraq) by more than two decades of war and the effects of a decade of international sanctions."
"The argument is ridiculous, to say the least," a U.N. official told IPS, speaking on condition of anonymity.
"The (U.S.-run) former Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), which is now being accused of misspending hundreds of millions of dollars in Iraq's oil revenues, did not think it fit to pay the country's U.N. dues even while it was pleading for U.N. assistance to help the reconstruction of Iraq," he added.
The letter also says that living standards in Iraq have fallen sharply and the country faces a high level of unemployment. "Although Iraq has enormous potential, with large oil reserves, hydroelectric potential and a skilled population, the immediate problems of reconstruction are vast."
Additionally, the letter says the country has been saddled by the previous regime with external debts amounting to about 120 billion dollars.
The non-payment of U.N. dues puts Iraq, with the world's second largest oil reserves - amounting to over 112 billion barrels - in league with some of the planet's poorest nations, including Benin, Chad, Somalia, Liberia, Niger and Tajikistan, who are also deemed deadbeats.
All of these countries are also on the verge of losing their voting rights in the General Assembly for non-payment of their accumulated assessed contributions.
Striking a note of sarcasm, Jim Paul of the New York-based Global Policy Forum told IPS, "The Iraqi government should perhaps ask Halliburton to help them out."
The California-based U.S. company, with ties to U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney, received billions of dollars in Iraqi contracts, some without competitive bidding.
"The fact of the matter is that paying your annual dues to the United Nations is of symbolic importance, even though the amount is ridiculously small," added Paul.
He said that Iraq's excuse to not pay its dues is perhaps a message it wants to convey to the United Nations: "You guys did not go along with the United States and the United Kingdom" on the invasion of Iraq, "and now you don't have even your people in Iraq because of security reasons."
"It is a way of sticking its finger in the eye of the United Nations", Paul said. In effect, the Iraqi government is saying: "the United Nations is not one of our priorities," he added.
"With all the billions of dollars U.S. taxpayers are spending on Iraq, the 14 million dollars should be peanuts," he added.
The U.N. committee says it recognizes "the exceptional problems faced by Iraq and the complex transitional process under way, and has concluded that the failure of Iraq to pay the minimum amount necessary to avoid the application of Article 19 (of the U.N. Charter) was due to conditions beyond its control".
As a result, the interim government has been given till June 30, 2005 to pay its 14.6 million dollars in accumulated dues.
Article 19 says a U.N. member state "which is in arrears in the payment of its financial contributions to the organization shall have no vote in the General Assembly if the amount of its arrears equals or exceeds the amount of the contributions due from it for the preceding two full years."
After the United Nations imposed sanctions on the former government of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein in August 1990 for invading neighboring Kuwait, Baghdad stopped paying its U.N. dues.
Last week, the CPA's auditor general released a report critical of how the body kept accounts when it was in charge of running Iraq from May 2003 through June this year.
The CPA used money seized from the Hussein government and Iraq's oil revenues to pay for 1,928 contracts worth more than 847 million dollars.
The report said that in one glaring case, officials of the former CPA did not have any records to justify spending 24.7 million dollars to replace Iraq's currency. There were also excess charges of more than three million dollars on an oil pipeline repair contract.
The auditors also found that 29 of the 43 contracts had incomplete or missing documentation. "We were unable to determine if the goods specified in the contract were ever received, the total amount of payments made to the contractor, or if the contractor fully complied with the terms of the contract," they wrote.
-------- us
RESCUE TEAMS
Copter-Borne Medics: Disciplined Ballet, Choreographed to Save G.I.'s
August 6, 2004
By JOHN F. BURNS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/06/international/middleeast/06medi.html?pagewanted=all&position=
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Aug. 5 - For days, an unnatural quiet had settled on the Army's 45th Medical Company, one of four airborne medical evacuation units supporting 130,000 American troops in Iraq.
Little was heard of the three rings on the radios carried by the standby crews for the Black Hawk helicopters, signaling casualties requiring urgent airlift after a bomb or an ambush or a firefight somewhere out in the 125-degree heat of the Iraqi summer.
But the dog days of August, and the long hours of watching James Bond movies and Nascar races on the Pentagon's TV channel, ended abruptly for the unit on Thursday, about the time crews were rotating out for lunch at the Taji military base, a few miles out in the scrubland beyond Baghdad's northwestern outskirts.
After weeks of relative quiet, American troops were taking casualties in renewed fighting in Najaf and in Sadr City, strongholds of the rebel cleric Moktada al-Sadr.
For Chief Warrant Officer Joseph E. Carroll, 33, of Boulder, Colo., co-pilot of "Medicine Man 23," one of the 12 Black Hawks the company flies in Iraq, the fighting brought a return to the tightly disciplined, hair-trigger routines that have taken the unit through nearly 1,400 missions, carrying more than 2,000 sick or wounded American and Iraqis, since it arrived from its base in Germany six months ago.
Running to the helicopter with another pilot, a crew chief and a flight medic, Mr. Carroll had the helicopter airborne in barely three minutes, headed out for a First Cavalry Division base known as War Eagle, on the edge of Sadr City, where medics waited with five American soldiers who had sustained shrapnel wounds when they were hit by a rocket-propelled grenade.
Barely 20 minutes after takeoff from Taji, the Black Hawk, with red crosses on its nose and fuselage denoting an unarmed air ambulance, was racing back west across the Tigris River, low and fast to guard against ground fire, for a touchdown beside the American-run Ibn Sina military hospital in Baghdad's heavily protected Green Zone.
Within an hour, Black Hawks and Humvees delivered 15 wounded soldiers to the hospital, setting off frenetic activity in the trauma center, a 100-yard dash for medics who pushed the stretcher trolleys from the landing zone, adjusting intravenous drips as they raced across the burning tarmac to the center's glass doors.
At least two of the soldiers were scheduled for neurosurgery for shrapnel and gunshot wounds to the head, and others faced painful days, possibly weeks, recovering from less life-threatening wounds to the neck, chest and legs.
But by nightfall, all 15 had been stabilized, and a number were walking around, and even preparing to return to their units. In a war in which more than 900 soldiers have died and nearly 6,000 have been wounded, the day's toll, though worse than on many recent days, was still far below the worst that Ibn Sina's medical teams knew, back in April, when Mr. Sadr, the cleric, ignited an uprising that on some days sent dozens of wounded Americans to the hospital.
According to Maj. Christopher M. Knapp, 40, of Muskego, Wis., the unit commander, only about 1 percent of the wounded soldiers carried aboard the helicopters have died on board. Col. John J. Donnelly, chief of staff of the Army's Second Medical Brigade, said the death rate among wounded soldiers is about 8 percent in Iraq, down from 15 percent in Vietnam.
For Mr. Carroll and more than 100 other crewmen at Taji, Thursday was one more day to tick off in a slow countdown to the end of their 12-month hitch here. Flying medevac missions is an intensely hazardous undertaking in Iraq, where the unarmed Black Hawks have frequently come under ground fire.
"I've seen tracer fire going past the nose of the aircraft at night, so close that after we've landed we have had to check the rotors for damage," Mr. Carroll said, relaxing between missions at Taji, a huge American encampment that used to be the headquarters of Mr. Hussein's armored units, and a site for secret weapons development projects.
Other pilots described making steep, terrain-hugging turns after coming under rocket fire, or seeing the launch smoke, then hearing the boom, from surface-to-air missiles fired by insurgents crouching on rooftops or hiding in palm groves. Some even described people throwing stones, though for every account of hostility from people on the ground there were others describing Iraqis waving as the helicopters fly by, and even, in one case, a village where the words "We love you America" had been traced in the dirt.
To Mr. Carroll, as well as other crewmen, the risks of being shot down are offset by what they describe, after months of escaping damage or injury in flight, to be the insurgents' amateurishness with weapons.
"The Iraqis have shown that they don't have any marksmanship," he said.
Other pilots are less confident, and say the unit has been riding its luck. In January, shortly before the 45th Medical Company arrived, another unit flying Black Hawks lost an aircraft, with nine soldiers killed, when a rocket-propelled grenade caused the pilot to pull sharply away from his flight path, striking power lines that brought the helicopter down.
One of those killed was Chief Warrant Officer Aaron A. Weaver, a pilot who survived the bloody 1993 ambush in Somalia recounted in the movie "Black Hawk Down," then contracted cancer, before recovering and returning to flying in Iraq. Mr. Weaver was flying to Baghdad as a passenger, for a cancer check-up, when he was killed.
Facing an enemy with scant respect for the Geneva Conventions, which prohibit attacks on ambulances, is far from the only challenge.
In Iraq, there are sudden sandstorms, children's kites that fly almost invisibly from myriad rooftops, and the searing heat, now at its worst, which degrades avionics systems, exhausts crews and causes huge thermals that can turn any flight into a succession of gut-wrenching bumps.
But worst of all are the power lines that sweep across the landscape, many of them poorly mapped, or not mapped at all. Compounding the threat, many lines were looted for their copper wire after the American invasion last year. Many of these have now been repaired, so that aircrews can be confronted, without notice, with power lines that have suddenly reappeared.
Traveling aboard the Black Hawks, over three days of day and night missions, a reporter embedded with the unit listened as the crew's "backenders," the crew chief and the flight medic. watched through the open hatches where Black Hawks ferrying soldiers into combat have machine guns.
"Wires right at two o'clock, two miles," one crew chief urged over his headset, as the helicopter flew south toward a base near Al Mussayib to pick up two marines injured when their Humvee hit a land mine.
On another mission, to pick up an American soldier with suspected appendicitis from the prison at Abu Ghraib, the pilots asked the backenders to keep a special eye out for anybody on the ground preparing to fire a weapon.
Otherwise, the crews' exchanges as they skimmed low across the terrain betrayed little tension. Rarely if ever venturing outside the Taji base, except aboard the helicopters, they have their own perspective on Iraq.
In their world, Mr. Hussein's ousted regime is ever-present, in the form of the huge palaces that loom over Iraqi cities' desultory stretches of two- and three-story concrete buildings. The palaces, bombed and derelict now, or converted into American military bases, serve as helpful reference points along the ever-varying flight paths the pilots follow, especially in Baghdad.
But from the air, too, more starkly than on the ground, there is also the new world of Iraq beyond Mr. Hussein, a world where almost every roof has a satellite television dish, banned by the ousted dictator except for his acolytes; where markets that were once nearly deserted for lack of spending power are now crowded from dawn to dusk; where almost every open space, as the sun sets, is busy these days with men and young boys playing pick-up games of soccer.
"Down there, right now, that's the new Iraq", said Capt. Roderick P. Stout, 28, of Gainesville, Fla., commanding a flight that carried the soldier from Abu Ghraib to the Ibn Sina hospital. "They're out there playing, they're out there shopping. That's good."
--------
G.I. granddaddies: Vietnam vets bring jungle-tested grit to new tour in Iraq
August 06, 2004
The Christian Science Monitor
By Ann Scott Tyson
http://csmonitor.com/2004/0806/p01s04-woiq.html
BALAD, IRAQ - Dodging high-voltage wires and enemy fire over the dense palm groves of central Iraq, John Sharkey, helicopter pilot and chief warrant officer, feels a tinge of nostalgia - for Vietnam.
Perhaps the oldest Army pilot in this war zone, the wry, 61-year-old New Yorker is the dean of a small, unlikely cadre of gray grandfathers crisscrossing Iraq on daily missions. Combat veterans of the eclectic "Catfish" brigade, the Mississippi National Guard's 185th Aviation Group, they nurse aloft some of the Army's longest-flying aircraft with a deft instinct that only comes with experience. Having weathered the defining conflicts of the modern American military, these leather-skinned fliers came to the desert less out of principled conviction than personal loyalty. With somewhat jaded detachment, they view Iraq through the discerning, gritty lens of past wars.
"Vietnam - that was a far galaxy," says Chief Sharkey one evening at dusk before climbing into his CH-47 Chinook on the humming flight line of Camp Anaconda here. "It was a war we shouldn't have gone to," he says, recalling two tours with the Marines in Vietnam from 1968 to 1970, dropping 500-lb. bombs and napalm as an F-4 Phantom pilot.
Yet if they believe the war in Vietnam was fought for the wrong reasons, Sharkey and his buddies contend the Iraq war is being fought the wrong way - with far too many restrictions. Almost wistfully, they speak of zipping out over the Southeast Asian jungles with little more than a map and a mission to draw enemy fire.
"In that war there were jungle rules, and you could do what you had to," Sharkey says. "Now you have a lot of staff people in front of computer screens micromanaging things. They are control freaks - but by doing that they essentially lose control."
It's a frustration shared by many long-timers - and some younger troops - who complain that today's military imposes an overload of paperwork, regulations, and politically driven cautiousness.
"Everyone's trying to sanitize war too much, to make it bloodless," says Chief Warrant Officer George Huseman, a UC-35 Cessna pilot from Dallas. "Our guards have seen people setting up rockets but by the time they get permission to fire, the rockets have already gone off," he says.
Red-tape hampers missions and dampens initiative, some veterans contend, inadvertently creating new risks. Stringent rules aimed at divvying up the use of air space, for example, force some pilots to fly at higher altitudes where they are more easily targeted by insurgents with surface-to-air missiles. "We basically ignore them and fly where we need to fly," Sharkey says, adding, "What are they going to do, send me home?"
Indeed, with thousands of hours airborne - compared with mere hundreds for the average active-duty pilot - the experienced guardsmen know that whatever they lack in muscle mass and youthful bravado, they make up for with well-honed flying skills.
"I've got 7,000 hours of flight time. When you've flown so much, you don't think about things, you feel them," says Col. Bradly MacNealy, a Mississippi Delta catfish farmer and commander of the 2,300-strong brigade. A hodgepodge of guard and reserve units from 24 states, such as the "Voodoo" Black Hawk battalion from Louisiana and the "Sky King" Chinook company from Hawaii, it's the first National Guard aviation brigade in history to deploy to a combat zone, Colonel MacNealy says.
Such experience means the guardsmen are generally more skilled at flying in darkness and clouds and over featureless terrain where pilots must rely on instruments rather than visual clues to navigate, he says. And by varying routes and maneuvering around enemy fire, the brigade has maintained a stellar safety record: Out of some two dozen aircraft downed since the Iraq war began, the Catfish have lost none.
"We've had a lot of close calls," says MacNealy after shinning down the tail section of his 20-year-old Black Hawk, which needed a shove to get the rear rotor blade moving.
With such solid accomplishments, they bristle at any suggestion they are "weekend warriors" inferior to their active-duty counterparts, and resent existing discrepancies in pay, retirement, and benefits. "We don't have the same benefits, but we take the same bullet," says Chief Warrant Officer Bob Percy, a C-12 pilot and LAPD policeman from Los Alamitos, Calif.
"What are a bunch of old [men] like us doing over here anyway?" asks Chief Percy in exasperation, saying he and other reservists and guardsmen cannot draw retirement benefits until they turn 60 - unlike active duty soldiers who earn retirement after 20 years of service.
For that reason, many active duty soldiers retire in their forties, while many guardsmen stay on into their fifties - or even extend until the age of 62, as Sharkey did.
Why do they do it? "I have a bond with the people I worked with. If they're going somewhere, you don't want them going without you," explains Sharkey, a retired Aloha Airlines pilot who joined the Hawaii guard nearly a quarter century ago.
Chief Warrant Officer Don Clayton, a cattle farmer from Collierville, Tenn., who was shot down three times in his OH-6 over Vietnam, agrees. "They're my kids, and I want to take care of them," he says of the younger men he mentors. More mellow and sagacious, he says, older pilots tend to ask "what if - instead of running headlong into a booby trap."
The Catfish regale each other with the same folksy jibing you'd hear from veterans around the shuffleboard at a VFW post. "I get all the old man jokes.... I feel like granddaddy," says Chief Clayton.
Still, while they've relinquished a bit of their egos, they haven't lost their pride. "I feel honored to be here," says Chief Warrant Officer Tom Walker, a Sherpa pilot from Albany, Ga. "I feel even if we have gray hair, or no hair, we still have something to contribute."
-----
Corruption in the Corps?
August 6, 2004
Antiwar.com
by William S. Lind
http://www.antiwar.com/lind/?articleid=3251
In an earlier column, "Two Marine Corps," I alluded to the increasing corruption I see at Quantico and in Headquarters Marine Corps. A number of Marines have asked me what I meant by that. Are Marines taking envelopes of money under the table? Are defense contractors flying them to Vegas for free weekends of poker, booze and floozies?
Well, floozies are usually a big draw with Marines, but that is not the kind of corruption I am talking about. Even most Congressmen know better than to take money under the table; it is much safer to wait until they retire, then get paid off by the interests they served, often with well-remunerated positions on boards of directors.
The corruption I had in mind is more subtle, and perhaps also more dangerous. It is corruption of institutional purpose.
When I first came to Washington in 1973 to join the staff of Senator Robert Taft, Jr. of Ohio, I assumed naïvely that our armed forces defined themselves in terms of winning battles, campaigns and wars. Senator Taft thought that is what they should be about, which is why working for him was both a pleasure and an honor. But I quickly discovered that for three of the four, victory was defined less in military than in bureaucratic and political terms. The Army, the Navy and the Air Force had already lost sight of their institutional purposes. What they were about, at senior levels, was selling programs and getting money from Congress. Whether the program had any relevance to war was not important, so long as it sold.
My wake-up call came when the Navy approached the Senate Armed Services Committee, on which Senator Taft served, with a request for $1.4 billion (in 1974 dollars) for a nuclear-powered "Strike Cruiser." Senator Taft and I had the same response: How do you fight the Soviet Navy, which was largely a submarine navy, with nuclear-powered cruisers? The Navy had no answer, and Taft led the fight to kill the program. The ship was never built, and the Navy has hated me ever since.
At that time, and for many years more, up until the mid-1990s, there was one service that stood out as an exception to the corruption of institutional purpose: the Marine Corps. At all levels, including the most senior, the Marine Corps was still about war, not money. When I began writing on maneuver warfare in 1976, Marines of every rank were interested. They weren't quite sure what I was talking about - there was then very little literature in English on the evolution of German military doctrine - but if it pertained to war, they felt they should learn. That joint effort of civilians, Marines, and Air Force Colonel John Boyd culminated in the adoption of maneuver warfare as the Marine Corps' official doctrine when Al Gray became Commandant.
Sadly, the Marine Corps is no longer an exception. As has long been true with the other services, now, if you talk about war at Quantico or HQMC - especially Fourth Generation war, the kind of war Marines are fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan - you are neither right nor wrong, you are simply irrelevant. Fourth Generation war does little to justify programs and increase budgets, so it is not of interest. The "real world" is the world of budget politics, not war.
As I said, this type of corruption, corruption of institutional purpose, is subtle. Few Marines, or soldiers, sailors, or airmen for that matter, ever make an explicit, conscious choice to become corrupt in this way. They merely accept the rules of the game as given and play by them, and that is all it takes. As members of hierarchical, bureaucratic organizations, they have been encouraged since their first day at OCS to play by the rules. Thinking about whether those rules were valid was "above their pay grade" - and still is, even when they become generals.
Ironically, corruption of institutional purpose was one of the reasons the Soviet Union fell. It is inherent in socialism, because it is a natural tendency of government bureaucracies. Absent an annual balance sheet that shows either black or red ink, there is little mechanism to keep an institution's focus on the outside world where its intended purpose lies.
A friend of mine who holds a senior position in the Pentagon gives a briefing around the building in which one slide says, "The Pentagon now controls the world's largest planned economy." No one blinks. It is fair to say that the American armed forces are now little more than the Soviet refrigerator industry in odd-looking green or blue suits? With individual exceptions, at senior levels and in major headquarters, I think it is. There, the only difference I now see between the Marine Corps and the rest is that the Marines' dysfunctional refrigerators are somewhat smaller.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- homeland security
Besieged D.C. Both Resentful And Resigned
By Jo Becker and Clarence Williams
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, August 6, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A43787-2004Aug5?language=printer
Navigating his taxi through five of the new checkpoints set up around the U.S. Capitol, E. Ini pleasantly greeted the police officers who glanced inside his cab yesterday before waving him through. But as he drove by a bomb-sniffing dog poised beside an SUV with its tailgate open for inspection, Ini said he felt a profound sense of loss.
"During the Cold War with the Soviet Union, you didn't see this kind of thing," the 49-year-old Nigerian immigrant said. "Fear shouldn't grip the nation like this. It's demoralizing that a few people could cause a wall of change that affects the city's character and image of this country."
In neighborhood diners and retail stores, on talk radio and in the backs of cabs, a set of decisions this week by the federal government to erect police checkpoints throughout the city and close a major District street has struck a nerve.
For some, it's a necessary precaution in light of new terrorism threats. "It's just a part of being in the world's capital," said Rey Laygo, manager of Gandel's Liquors, a deli and convenience store on Pennsylvania Avenue SE.
For others, though, it reinforces a sense of powerlessness and vulnerability. Beyond the traffic delays and minor inconveniences, the new security around the city has evoked long-standing frustrations over its lack of representation in Congress and over that body's ability to unilaterally set or veto city policy.
"There's a sense that if you had two senators up there and a vote in the House of Representatives, the Congress would be loath to shut down streets without the okay of the city," said Mayor Anthony A. Williams (D). "This is a city built on freedom, not on order and efficiency, and we don't often weigh the balance accordingly. Now we're creating this fortress."
The order to close a portion of First Street NE and to set up more than a dozen security checkpoints around the Capitol was announced by U.S. Capitol Police on Monday over the loud objections of Williams and other city officials, who were not consulted.
Since then, the federal government has erected more checkpoints -- first near the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund and yesterday around the Federal Reserve Building. They also announced that they would block off the sidewalk on 15th Street NW alongside the Treasury building but stopped short of restricting truck traffic on parts of the street.
In the neighborhoods around Capitol Hill, where security is tightest, residents greeted the new measures with a mix of resignation and anger.
Walking his Rottweiler along Second Street NE, just blocks from the barricades, Darryl Payden complained that the new measures were imposed without any notice or input from the neighbors.
"It's once again the big dog telling the little dog what to do," the 43-year-old firefighter said. "It's whatever Congress tells us to do."
Standing outside Union Station and waiting for a Metro bus, Juanita Carey noted that the federal government has not rushed in to secure her against the drugs and gunfire she said plague her neighborhood near Central Avenue and the Prince George's County border in Southeast.
"When we need help, we don't get" any, said the 42-year-old pharmacy worker.
Those sentiments were mild compared with what listeners had to say on WPFW's talk radio program Wednesday morning. Callers inundated the station with complaints of "Gestapo tactics" and fear that the District is turning into a "police state." One caller complained that police who stopped a bus and checked out the passengers also stopped an Arab man in a car while they let a white man whiz by on a bicycle. Adding to the racial overtones of the debate, said host Ron Pinchback, is the fact that the federal officials imposing the new measures are white while the mayor, the police chief and other city leaders who oppose the measures are African American.
"This is tantamount to martial law," he said. "A lot of people are wondering out loud whether this would have been approached the same way if this was a white-run city."
Ron Walters, a professor of government and politics at the University of Maryland and a student of racial politics in the District, said such sentiments aren't surprising.
"All this . . . is to some extent a reminder that blacks feel that, while whites of some status will be given a pass, the people who will be stopped and harassed are people of color," he said.
Federal officials have said that the new measures are needed to protect residents in light of recent information that terrorists might be targeting financial institutions in Washington and elsewhere and because intelligence assessments suggest that the Capitol remains a likely target of attack.
"It's expensive, it's inconvenient, but it's safe," said Capitol Police Chief Terrance W. Gainer, who issued the order to block First Street. "You put your seat belt on. It's less comfortable, but it's safer. You lock your door before you leave the house because you don't want to get burglarized. We're trying to maximize safety."
As Laticha Romeo waited for a bus to take her from one job at a Popeye's near the Capitol to another at the Navy Yard, she said the new checkpoints make sense. "You never know if it could happen today or tomorrow," said Romeo, 27. "I think they did what they thought was best."
Capitol Hill resident Malien Lane, 20, said she has seen slayings in her neighborhood and has been robbed at gunpoint, so the heavily armed police officers don't make her feel more edgy or safe. "It bothers my friends but not me," Lane said.
Gerard Jacobs, director of the Disaster Mental Health Institution at the University of South Dakota, said residents will become inured to the extra security measures, just as citizens of other countries have.
"It's easier to deal with if people keep in mind that these efforts are being made for their safety," he said.
It's also easier if you don't have to live with it. Tourists wandering the Capitol yesterday said they had no problem with the added security. Robbie Williams, a 35-year-old Los Angeles resident, and his two sons played "find the sniper," scanning rooftops in the hope of spotting armed law enforcement officers.
"It makes me feel comfortable to know that everything is being checked," he said.
But highly visible security can have a detrimental effect for those who must live with it day to day, according to some experts. Rather than make some people feel safer, it can make them feel as though they live in the center of a bull's-eye.
"We can create a neo-medieval society that will profoundly affect our economy, our politics and society itself," said Brian Jenkins, a terrorism expert and senior adviser at the Rand Corp., a nonprofit think tank. "But we are bordering on creating an atmosphere of terror without the benefit of terrorists."
Exactly how many security checkpoints or how big a police presence it takes to provoke this kind of reaction is unclear, experts said.
"But there's a point at which all this extra security makes people feel less secure, because it reinforces the sense that we are not in a safe place, that we are targets and victims," said Anie Kalayjian, a professor of psychology at Fordham University and author of "Disaster and Mass Trauma."
For Deat LaCour, an organizational consultant, the District may have already reached that point. With signs posting the threat level and intercom reminders telling Metro passengers to watch for suspicious people and packages, the District is "no longer the same place it was."
"The general environment is hostile," said LaCour, 36, as he waited for a fish dinner at Kenny's BBQ on Maryland Avenue NE. "People, whether they know it or not, are on guard."
Jean Claude LeLen, who lives on G Street NE, agreed.
"I think the terrorists are winning," said LeLen, 45. "Liberty should be doing whatever you want, whenever you want."
Staff writers Sari Horwitz and Arielle Levin Becker contributed to this report.
--------
Passport ID Technology Has High Error Rate
By Jonathan Krim
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, August 6, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A43944-2004Aug5?language=printer
The State Department is moving ahead with a plan to implant electronic identification chips in U.S. passports that will allow computer matching of facial characteristics, despite warnings that the technology is prone to a high rate of error.
Federal researchers, academics, industry experts and some privacy advocates say the government should instead use more-reliable fingerprints to help thwart potential terrorists.
The enhanced U.S. passports, scheduled to be issued next spring for people obtaining new or renewed passports, will be the first to include what is known as biometric information. Such data, which can be a fingerprint, a picture of parts of eyes or of facial characteristics, is used to verify identity and help prevent forgery.
Under State Department specifications finalized this month for companies to bid on the new system, a chip woven into the cover of the passport would contain a digital photograph of the traveler's face. That photo could then be compared with an image of the traveler taken at the passport control station, and also matched against photos of people on government watch lists.
The department chose face recognition to be consistent with standards being adopted by other nations, officials said. Those who drafted the standards reasoned that travelers are accustomed to submitting photographs and would find giving fingerprints to be intrusive.
But federal researchers who have tested face-recognition technology say its error rate is unacceptably high -- up to 50 percent if photographs are taken without proper lighting. They say the error rate is far lower for fingerprints, which could be added to the chip without violating the international standard.
The new system would differ from U.S. requirements for many foreign travelers, who are fingerprinted when they apply for visas to visit the United States. The visitors then have their fingers scanned when they enter the country to compare against the data on the visa.
Similar requirements are to be imposed for travelers from countries whose citizens do not need visas to come to the United States, who will be fingerprinted when they arrive in the country.
"I don't think there's a debate," said Charles L. Wilson, who supervises biometric testing at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, an arm of the Commerce Department. "Fingerprints are much better."
The concerns come at a time of heightened terrorism alerts and urgent calls for changes in national security from the commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Among its many recommendations were quick adoption of biometric passports and more secure drivers' licenses, though the commission did not specify which type of data should be used.
Last weekend, government sources told The Washington Post that a South African woman was under investigation for possible terrorist connections after she apparently walked or swam across the Mexico-U.S. border last month. The South African passport she presented to authorities at McAllen-Miller International Airport in Texas appeared to have been altered, the sources said, leading to her detention.
The State Department settled on face recognition as the biometric to comply with specifications set by the International Civil Aviation Organization, a Montreal-based standards agency affiliated with the United Nations.
In seeking to have countries use one common biometric to aid anti-terrorism efforts, the international group designated face recognition two years ago in part because it would be easiest for most countries to implement and it was deemed the least likely to raise privacy concerns.
"Facial photographs do not disclose information that the person does not routinely disclose to the general public," the group said in a final technical report issued in May. "The photograph . . . is already socially and culturally accepted internationally."
But while the agency set face recognition as a standard, it said countries could add one or two other approved biometrics: fingerprints and scans of the eye's iris. Several European countries are considering adding fingerprints to their passports.
With expiration dates varying among U.S. citizens, it will take years for the new system to affect everyone who holds a passport. Critics ask why the department is not adding fingerprints now -- even if they are not immediately used -- rather than starting over again later.
"The biometric that makes most sense is the fingerprint with proper privacy and security guidelines," said Ari Schwartz, associate director of the Center for Democracy and Technology, a think-tank on digital policy issues. "By not taking this opportunity today, the State Department is really missing out."
Frank E. Moss, deputy assistant secretary of state for passport services, emphasized the importance of having a global standard for identity verification. The U.S. government will consider adding biometrics in the future, Moss said, but he added that several countries expressed privacy concerns over the use of fingerprints.
Moss said adding fingerprinting stations at passport application offices would be a serious logistical burden, with roughly 8 million new or replacement passports issued each year.
Moss said the State Department will not take new digital photos. Instead, applicants for new or replacement passports will submit photos as they do now, and the department will digitize them.
Passport-photo vendors have been given updated specifications for taking the pictures, to help provide proper illumination and other specifications to maximize the effectiveness of the face-recognition methods, Moss said. The department hopes the program will pay for itself through a surcharge of about $10 per passport.
Rebecca Dornbusch, deputy director of the International Biometric Industry Association, said that the U.S. view has long been that fingerprint technology is preferred but that it was important to be in harmony with the international standard.
"The important thing to recognize is that it is an improvement," Dornbusch said of the face-recognition requirement. But she said her organization is encouraging the State Department to "continue to implement as many biometrics as they can, so they can ensure . . . the most secure protection."
But James L. Wayman, director of biometric identification research at San Jose State University in California, said face recognition is not reliable enough to be useful.
"Facial recognition isn't going to do it for us at large scale," Wayman said. "If there's a 10 percent error rate with 300 people on a 747, that's a problem."
According to tests by the National Institute for Standards and Technology, two fingerprints provide an accuracy rate of 99.6 percent. With face recognition, if the pictures are taken under controlled circumstances with proper illumination, angles and facial expression, the accuracy rate was 90 percent.
"The numbers would be better today, but they are not going to be comparable with fingerprints," Wilson said. Even a person's aging can affect results, especially with children.
Dennis Murphy, a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security, which employs passport-control agents, said the agency has not yet determined how images of travelers will be taken to compare against the photos on the embedded chips.
He said the department will put out its own request for bids for equipment -- probably something similar to a Web camera -- that visitors would look into for a photograph. The bid documents, he said, will specify standards for making the face-recognition match as accurate as possible.
Murphy declined to comment on the State Department's decision not to include fingerprint data in the passports.
Some said the government feared a potential backlash.
"The simple answer is that they don't want to put in a fingerprint biometric because they don't want to deal with the political recriminations" said Robert D. Atkinson, a member of a national security task force at the nonprofit Markle Foundation, which studies digital issues. Atkinson also heads the Progressive Policy Institute, a part of the Democratic Leadership Council.
Privacy advocates argue that taking fingerprints is no more invasive than face recognition, and certainly not more than other Bush administration initiatives launched since Sept. 11, 2001, that have sought to link databases of buying habits, bank accounts and other personal information to try to predict terrorist activity. The fingerprint data could be placed on the passport chip but not saved in a database, they said, removing the concern over a central government repository. The data on the chip is simply matched against a finger scan when the traveler arrives at the passport control station.
"My passport belongs to me," said Ian "Gus" Hosein, a senior fellow at Privacy International, a Britain-based advocacy group. "They should not be using this as a back door to international databases."
--------
Confusion Mounts Over Threat
U.S. Seeks Balance Between Raising Alerts, Protecting Sources
By John Mintz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, August 6, 2004; Page A08
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A43830-2004Aug5.html
Americans should prepare for more confusion, uncertainty and cynicism as the government continues to learn how to balance its need to raise alarms about a possible terrorist attack without revealing classified information or compromising sources, according to homeland security experts.
Nearly three years after the attacks on New York and Washington, Department of Homeland Security officials long ago lost the ability to simply ask for the public's trust when they suddenly announce new security measures based on intelligence they cannot release, said retired Col. Randall Larsen, a top homeland security consultant to government and the private sector.
Larsen cited Prussian military theorist Karl von Clausewitz, who posited 170 years ago that all armies suffer from two disabilities: "fog and friction" -- lack of information and miscommunication among units.
"Now that all Americans are part of the troops on the battlefield of the U.S. mainland in this war, we're all going to have to live with some of the same ambiguity that war fighters deal with," Larsen said. "Often, things aren't going to be clear to us."
Frank Cilluffo, a former Bush White House counterterrorism official who now heads homeland security programs at George Washington University, said that terrorism alerts such as last Sunday's are designed in part to encourage the public to stay alert for the specific threats at hand.
"The last thing we want is for those responsible for conveying threat information to start second-guessing themselves, which could create a chilling effect" and persuade U.S. officials to stop issuing public warnings, he said. "Stopping the flow of information to the public, which can play such a key role in fighting this war, would not be good for the country."
The confusion began Sunday when senior U.S. intelligence officials described a "treasure trove" of intelligence showing that al Qaeda operatives had cased five major financial institutions in Washington, New York and New Jersey. The next day, the public learned that almost all the al Qaeda surveillance files, taken from a computer seized in Pakistan days before, were compiled in 2000 and 2001. Some critics said this showed officials had overstated the threat.
On Tuesday, intelligence officials, speaking confidentially, responded that they had relied on "multiple streams of intelligence" that they could not reveal -- including interrogations of al Qaeda members in custody and captured documents -- that buttress their belief that terrorists were plotting attacks on financial sites.
On Wednesday, two local police chiefs said they did not know of any new intelligence specific to Washington, beyond what was released publicly. But at the same time, intelligence officials pointed to the dismantling of an apparent al Qaeda cell in Britain that was actively planning attacks on the United States.
Some government officials acknowledged that they could have avoided much of the skepticism if they had said Sunday, when Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge first raised the terrorism threat level for three cities' financial sectors to orange, or "high risk" of attack, that almost all the documents the CIA recovered were at least three years old.
But a senior U.S. intelligence official, speaking only on the condition that he or she not be named because the underlying information is classified, acknowledged exasperation at the skepticism expressed by some members of the public when they learned the age of the surveillance files.
"We were doing what we thought was our job, to uphold our sworn duty to protect people [by releasing the information], and now we're being criticized for doing it," the official said. "The detail and specificity of the [computer] reports was so striking and dramatic that we felt we had no choice" but to warn officials and the public in Washington, New York and Newark.
On Wednesday, U.S. Capitol Police Chief Terrance W. Gainer and D.C. Police Chief Charles H. Ramsey said they were not aware of the other streams of intelligence that convinced federal officials that an attack on Washington could be in the offing.
Gainer said that "beyond what Secretary Ridge has said, there is no specific intelligence about an imminent strike in Washington. . . . There is not some smoking gun." Gainer said he had wanted to close streets on Capitol Hill for a long time and that the information he received from the Homeland Security Department was enough to justify that move, which has caused considerable criticism from city officials and the public.
Ramsey said, "There was nothing in the information to cause the kind of reaction we have with street closings and checkpoints. There is not an imminent threat." Ramsey added that he was not uncomfortable with the amount of information he had, merely upset at the decision to close streets and erect checkpoints near the Capitol.
Staff writer Sari Horwitz contributed to this report.
-------- police
Supporters question arrest of mosque leaders
Two held in missile-launcher sting
Aug. 6, 2004
The Associated Press
Jim Mcknight
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5611215/
WASHINGTON - Supporters of two mosque leaders arrested on terror-related charges insist the men are peace lovers came to the United States for freedom and opportunity, and were merely entangled in the government's overreaching attempt to ferret out terrorists.
Yassin Aref, 34, the imam of Masjid As-Salaam mosque, and 49-year-old Mohammed Hossain, a mosque co-founder, were arrested early Thursday when police raided the storefront mosque and the men's homes in a modest part of New York's capital.
According to an FBI affidavit, the men laundered money for what they thought was to be the purchase of the shoulder-fired missile launcher, supposedly to be used to assassinate a Pakistani ambassador at his country's consulate across from the United Nations in New York.
In fact, the purchase of the RPG-7 grenade launcher and the assassination scheme were part of a sting operation, a ruse the men were made to believe by a convicted felon cooperating with federal prosecutors, authorities said. In return, the informant was to get a reduced prison sentence on document fraud charges.
Local coverage • WNYT-TV, Albany reports At a news conference, Deputy Attorney General James Comey acknowledged there never was a real threat of any attack. "This is not the case of the century," he said.
Still, the accused men's families refused to believe they would participate in such a thing.
"It's totally wrong and totally false and totally a lie," said Hossain's wife, Mossamat.
Wife says suspect a businessman, not a terrorist Choking back tears, she said her husband is a businessman, not a terrorist. She recounted having to wake the couple's five children in the middle of the night and whisk them out of the house as at least half a dozen agents swept in.
Rashid Abdulhaqq Hamzah, a trustee of the mosque, believes the raids were politically motivated.
"I think George Bush is having problems in the election," he said.
Comey said that besides removing two potentially dangerous people from the streets, the case was meant to send a message to terrorists and those who support them.
"Anyone engaging in terrorist planning would be very wise to consider whether their accomplice is not really one of our guys," he said.
Hossain came from Bangladesh in 1985. After years of washing dishes and other kitchen work, he bought the Little Italy pizzeria in 1994, according to a profile published this summer in the Times Union of Albany.
"I'm proud to be an American," he told the newspaper. "When I was in high school in Bangladesh, I looked at a map of America and I dreamed of coming to this great land."
'A family man' Aalim Ammar said he has known Hossain for several years.
"He's a good man. He's a family man," Ammar said. "I've never seen him get angry."
Aref is a native of Kurdistan and came to the United States three years ago from Syria, where he was a student, according to his wife, Zuhor Jalal. Aref, who has three children, also has a job driving an ambulette.
"We come for freedom and job," Jalal said.
Hamzah and other mosque members described their imam as a gentle man.
"He's a peaceful man that teaches us about Islam," Hamzah said. "The only reason we were created was to worship God, not to blow things up, not to buy things for terrorists."
The three-year-old storefront mosque has several hundred members, many who come for daily prayers. on Thursday morning, members found federal agents blocking access and later found several interior doors smashed open.
The arrests were unrelated to the Bush administration's terror alerts over the weekend indicating al-Qaida may be plotting attacks against U.S. financial buildings, Comey said.
U.S. Magistrate David Homer ordered the two men held without bail pending a hearing Tuesday. The men are charged with money laundering, conspiracy to commit money laundering and conspiracy to conceal material support for terrorism. Both could face up to 70 years in prison and a $750,000 fine.
Meeting videotaped According to the FBI affidavit, Hossain approached the FBI informant in the summer of 2003 about getting a fraudulent New York driver's license. In subsequent meetings, the informant told Hossain that he imported weapons from China, the affidavit said.
At a videotaped meeting on Nov. 20, the informant showed Hossain a picture of an RPG-7, a fairly rudimentary anti-tank weapon developed by the Soviet Union in the early 1960s. The two discussed using such a weapon, according to the affidavit.
The FBI said its informant told the men he was affiliated with Jaish e-Mohammed, an Islamic extremist group in Pakistan that the U.S. government has designated a terrorist organization.
Authorities said the men were paid $65,000 in checks and cash to buy a missile and disguise the source of the money involved.
Two U.S. law enforcement officials who spoke only on condition of anonymity said Hossain and Aref have ties to a group called Ansar al-Islam, which has been linked to al-Qaida. However, there were no references to Ansar al-Islam in the court papers.
Comey declined to discuss the possibility of any such ties.
-------- prisons / prisoners
Guantánamo Detainees Begin Hearings
August 6, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/06/politics/06gitmo.html
GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba, Aug. 5 - A 31-year-old Afghan prisoner told a United States military panel on Thursday that he had joined the Taliban and was forced to carry a rifle but "wasn't going to fight anyone."
The prisoner was among 10 at Guantánamo granted hearings to determine whether they are enemy combatants not protected by the Geneva Conventions or whether they should be sent home. The hearings are the first chance in over two years for the 585 prisoners to challenge their indefinite detention at the United States Naval Base in Cuba. The Supreme Court ruled in June that they had the right to contest their detention in United States courts.
Another Afghan granted a hearing on Thursday, a 49-year-old man, was said by the United States military to have been conscripted into the Taliban army. Reporters covering the hearings may not name the prisoners.
The panels of three military officers conducting the reviews must submit their decisions to military legal officials and the admiral in charge of the new "enemy combatant status reviews."
-------
Court: Stateless can be held indefinitely
August 06, 2004
(UPI)
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20040806-064936-8603r.htm
Adelaide, Australia, Aug. 6 (UPI) -- Australia's highest court, in a ruling affecting asylum seekers, said such people can be held indefinitely in immigration detention centers.
The court said the Migration Act gave the Government that power, the Australian reported. The case related to asylum-seekers who are stateless or lacked identification.
The decisions on both grounds could see 13 people previously released hauled back into detention, the report said.
Abbas Mohammad Hasan al-Khafaji, 31, was re-detained Friday in Adelaide. He was one of two failed asylum-seekers who, unable to leave the country and facing the prospect of life in detention, took their cases to the nation's highest court.
Born in Palestine, Khafaji lived most of his life in Kuwait before arriving in Australia in January 2000 and is considered stateless.
Ahmed Ali al-Khateb fled to Syria from Iraq in 1980 and arrived in Australia in December 2000 without identification.
The Government has so far been unable to find a country that will accept the two men. It argued they should remain in detention.
Immigration Minister Amanda Vanstone said the decision proved immigration detention was lawful in Australia.
--------
US opens up Guantanamo tribunals for first time
AFP
August 6, 2004
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/040805/1/3m856.html
With their feet shackled and wrists handcuffed, two Afghan "war on terror" detainees made their case for freedom to tribunals opened up to observers for the first time.
The tribunals refused both men the right to call witnesses to back their cases that they had not fought against the United States or had been forced to join the Taliban.
Facing criticism over the detention camp at the Guantanamo Bay US naval base in Cuba, US military authorities started the tribunals last week to review whether the two Afghans and 583 other inmates were properly classified as "enemy combatants" when captured.
The tribunals are being held in a cramped, prefabricated hut in Camp Delta, which has been the prison for the Taliban and al-Qaeda detainees for more than two and a half years.
Journalists were allowed to watch the proceedings for the first time when the Afghans, both wearing distinctive orange suits and with their feet chained to the floor, appeared before the three-member military panel.
The tribunal was held in a windowless room about 6.2 metres (20 feet) by three metres (10 feet) in a portable hut set up in the camp, which is surrounded by razor wire, with a forest of cactus beyond.
There was just enough space for the detainee, an officer who represents him, an interpreter, a military representative, stenographer and three tribunal members.
Under strict US Defense Department media rules none of the inmates can be identified and only unclassified evidence is heard by reporters and the detainee.
The cases of 10 detainees have now been heard but five of them have refused to attend.
One 31-year-old man admitted Thursday he had been with the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2001 but said he would have been "crazy" to fight US forces.
"I surrendered myself to the Americans because I am believing that Americans are for human rights," he told the tribunal through a translator.
According to the few details given by the US military, the man was a member of the Taliban, was armed with a Kalashnikov rifle and was with a Taliban leader when captured in the northern Afghan city of Kunduz by forces of Northern Alliance warlord Abdul Rashid Dostam in late 2001.
The man said he was hurt in US bombing raids launched in Afghanistan after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States by Osama bin Laden's group.
After treatment, he returned to his home region of Kunduz in northern Afghanistan.
"After some time in Kunduz, I heard on the radio that the Americans are coming to get Osama bin Laden.
"There should be a difference between someone who surrenders himself and someone who fights Americans. I surrendered," he said.
The detainee asked that a witness be allowed to testify on his behalf, but was told such testimony would be irrelevant to the tribunal's task which is to determine whether he was an "enemy combatant".
The second inmate, a 49-year-old man, asked that three witnesses be called to support his contention he was forced to join the Taliban. The tribunal president again said this was irrelevant to the proceedings.
The man said that in October 2001, the Taliban had forced him to leave his house and join them.
He said he never took part in fighting and did not have a weapon and that the Taliban leaders in the house where he was kept in the city of Kunduz also decided to surrender to Dostam's forces.
The Northern Alliance at first kept the prisoners in a container and several died from suffocation and heat exhaustion, he testified.
If the tribunals go in their favour, the inmates from 40 countries, including Australia, Britain, France, Morocco, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Yemen, could be released.
But Navy Secretary Gordon England warned on Wednesday that not many could expect to return home.
Civilian lawyers have condemned the tribunals as unfair because there is no independent legal representation.
But top US defence officials have insisted the hearings are "fair" and "professionally run".
-------- terrorism
U.S. Ties British Detainee to Terror Recruitment
August 6, 2004
By CHRISTINE HAUSER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/06/politics/06CND-TERR.html?hp
A man arrested in Britain this week at the request of the United States is suspected of trying to recruit fighters and of monitoring American naval vessels near the Persian Gulf to assess their vulnerability to attack, an American prosecutor said today.
The prosecutor, Kevin J. O'Connor, the United States attorney for Connecticut, provided the first details of the arrest in central London on Thursday of the man, Babar Ahmed, 30, the latest in a series of arrests that appear to have grown out of the discovery of Al Qaeda-related computer files discovered in Pakistan last week.
When Mr. Ahmed's arrest was announced on Thursday, American officials said he was being sought in connection with the files containing surveillance reports of financial institutions in New York, New Jersey and Washington that have prompted fears of an attack.
The United States attorney's office in Connecticut had previously issued the warrant for Mr. Ahmed on charges accusing him of using Web sites in the United States and e-mail to solicit money from Americans for terrorist causes. American officials said they would press for Mr. Ahmed's extradition by Britain to the United States.
Mr. Ahmed appeared in a British court today and was ordered held in custody. Asked if he would agree to extradition, Reuters quoted him as telling the court, "I don't want to go."
At a news conference today in New Haven, Mr. O'Connor said the sealed complaint charged that Mr. Ahmed had maintained and operated a number of Web sites from 1997 to 2003.
"The main purpose of all of these sites was to solicit financial support for terrorist organizations, including the Taliban and the Chechen mujahedeen, as well as to recruit individuals to travel to Afghanistan and Chechnya for the purpose of waging jihad against the perceived enemies of Islam, including the United States," Mr. O'Connor said.
He said the charges against Mr. Ahmed included conspiracy to launder money, to kill people in a foreign country and to provide material support to terrorists. The charges carry a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison, Mr. O'Connor said.
Mr. Ahmed also conspired to support designated terrorist organizations, an offense carrying a maximum possible imprisonment of 10 years, Mr. O'Connor said.
Another charge is solicitation to commit crimes of physical violence, which carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison.
The Web sites also provided information about how to sneak into Afghanistan through Pakistan, how to provide supplies like gas masks, night-vision goggles, clothing and hand-warmers to fighters, and that he solicited funds to support such causes, Mr. O'Connor said.
The complaint sets out details of searches, including one that it said uncovered a floppy disk in Mr. Ahmed's residence containing classified plans for American naval movements in 2001 in the Strait of Hormuz, at the entrance to the Persian Gulf.
Mr. O'Connor said that the information on the disk describes the vulnerability of the ships to attack, because they have "nothing to stop a small craft with rocket-propelled grenades" except missiles.
Mr. Ahmed was communicating with a sailor aboard one of the ships, but no charges against that person were announced and Mr. O'Connor declined to provide further details.
Tom Ridge, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, announced this week that the terror alert level had been raised to orange, the second highest, after disclosing information at least three years old of an orchestrated surveillance operation at five institutions in New York City, New Jersey and Washington.
Another terror suspect, known as Abu Issa al-Hindi, is also in custody in Britain, for what senior government officials said on Thursday was his direction of the surveillance of the five financial institutions during 2000 and 2001, and for preparing the detailed reports about them that have prompted fears of an attack.
Mr. Hindi was described by the officials as by far the most important Qaeda figure detained as part of that effort.
Some senior American officials said they believed that Mr. Ahmed and Mr. Hindi had access to the computer records found in Pakistan.
A 25-year-old Pakistani computer engineer at the center of the inquiry, Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan, was arrested by Pakistani authorities on July 13. He has led Pakistani investigators and the Central Intelligence Agency to the computers on which the surveillance reports were found, and has told Pakistani interrogators that he relayed messages to Al Qaeda figures outside the country.
--------
2 Mosque Leaders Are Arrested in Plot to Import Missile and Kill Diplomat
August 6, 2004
The New York Times
By ERIC LICHTBLAU and JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/06/nyregion/06missile.html?adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1091840434-yHkg2qyBdgUipwL6nAVhvA&pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, Aug. 5 - Two leaders of a mosque in Albany have been arrested in a government sting operation on charges that they took part in what they thought was a plot to import a shoulder-fired missile and assassinate a Pakistani diplomat in New York City, law enforcement officials said on Thursday.
Officials charged that the two leaders, Mohammed M. Hossain and Yassin M. Aref, conspired with a man who claimed to have ties to Islamic terrorists in laundering $50,000 in payments for a Chinese missile that he showed them. In fact, the contact turned out to be an undercover informer for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the RPG-7 missile was a disabled weapon owned by the federal government.
The sting operation, similar to past undercover efforts in Newark, San Diego and Houston involving black-market missile and weapons sales, reflected the Justice Department's increasingly aggressive attempts to identify and infiltrate groups that it suspects may offer support to terrorists.
Deputy Attorney General James Comey said that while the arrests were not "the crime of the century," they do send a message "to anyone considering terrorist activity" that they could be dealing with undercover agents. "We really do want the bad guys to worry that anybody they deal with might be one of our people," he said in announcing the Albany arrests.
But some Arab-American leaders said they were concerned that Mr. Hossain, 49, and Mr. Aref, 34, may have been victims of ethnic profiling and entrapment in the government's campaign against terrorism.
"There's always a concern that people may be targeted for a sting operation like this solely because they are Muslims," said Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Washington. "It's a perplexing case, and the question we have is whether the government got these men to do something they otherwise wouldn't have done."
Mr. Comey said he expected that a defense lawyer would likely charge that the government had entrapped the two men into committing illegal acts, but he said he was not worried that such a defense would hold up in court.
Law enforcement officials said the two men were the subject of a long-running intelligence investigation into suspected ties to extremist groups overseas, including Ansar al-Islam, a militant Iraqi group with links to Al Qaeda. Officials would give no details of the pair's purported ties to Ansar al-Islam but said prosecutors would likely present information about their overseas dealings in federal court in Albany on Tuesday, when a judge considers whether they should be detained pending trial.
In Albany, relatives, friends and acquaintances of both men insisted they were innocent. Mr. Hossain, a native of Bangladesh who owns a popular pizza parlor in downtown Albany, is one of the founders of the Masjid as-Salam Mosque in Albany, and he recruited Mr. Aref, a Kurd from Iraq, to be the imam of the mosque, officials said.
The two men were arrested in a raid by federal and local agents that began Wednesday night after an investigation that lasted more than a year, officials said. Looking tired and dazed, they were escorted into a federal courtroom in Albany on Thursday afternoon by United States marshals while their wives and friends filled the benches, shoulder to shoulder with dozens of journalists. Both defendants had full beards and wore traditional Muslim tunics.
The wives of the two men wept quietly as the hearing proceeded. One member of the mosque, Sajid Ahmed, 32, a native of India who has lived in Albany for 25 years, said that Mr. Hossain and Mr. Aref were religious people who regularly attended prayers at the mosque and that their arrests had shocked many of their fellow worshipers.
Mr. Ahmed said the idea of Mr. Hossain being involved in an anti-American terrorist plot seemed odd. Mr. Hossain told his friends he loved America and kept an American flag in his restaurant. He was also well known for giving to the poor, in keeping with his Muslim beliefs, Mr. Ahmed said.
"It was very surprising to me," Mr. Ahmed said. "I think they were being nice to some other people and they got entrapped in this case."
But Gov. George E. Pataki pointed to the arrests as evidence that federal, state and local authorities are actively trying to prevent terrorist attacks.
"The fact is there are terrorists among us who want to engage in acts to attack us again and to take away our freedom," he said. "I just want to reassure the public here in Albany and in New York and across America that our government, our administration in Washington, this state government and local officials are taking this threat to our freedom very seriously."
Documents filed in the case say that Mr. Hossain first approached the government's confidential informer in the case in the summer of 2003 because Mr. Hossain wanted his help in getting a fraudulent state driver's permit for his brother. The two discussed religion, politics "and different types of jihad," according to the criminal complaint in the case, although Mr. Hossain also said that "now was not the time for violent jihad." They also discussed ways of making money from jihad, prosecutors said, and Mr. Hossain asked the informant for a loan.
The relationship led to numerous meetings and conversations in the coming months, many of which took place in Mr. Hossain's pizzeria and were tape-recorded by the informant, the government said.
In one meeting at the informant's business last November, the informant showed Mr. Hossain a shoulder-fired, surface-to-air missile and later told him that he imported such weapons from China to provide to his "brother mujahidiin," the complaint said.
With Mr. Aref's participation, the men arranged a scheme to launder cash from missile sales and possibly make it appear as if the money were generated from Mr. Hossain's rental properties, the government said. As part of the plan, the government said, the informant gave Mr. Hossain and Mr. Aref $40,000 in cash that he claimed were the proceeds from the missile importation, and he received $25,000 in checks made payable to his own business.
In separate meetings in January and February, the complaint said, the informant told Mr. Aref and Mr. Hossain that he was working for an Islamic extremist group in Pakistan called Jaish-e-Mohammed and that he was sending the shoulder-fired missile to New York City to use against the Pakistani ambassador in retaliation for Pakistan's support of the United States.
But in fact, Mr. Comey said, the plot was a ruse from the start. The two men were charged with concealing material support for terrorism, which carries a maximum penalty of 15 years in prison, and participating in a money-laundering conspiracy, with a maximum of 20 years, officials said.
According to property records, the mosque on Central Avenue in Albany is owned by the North American Islamic Trust. Prosecutors and federal law enforcement agents on Thursday did not address the issue of who owned the mosque, and it remained unclear whether that was why they targeted it.
But the Albany area came under the scrutiny of federal investigators after 9/11. A man named Ali Mounnes Yaghi, a Jordanian immigrant and also an Albany pizzeria owner, who, according to The Times-Union newspaper, in Albany, helped establish a mosque on Central Avenue, was questioned about the attacks. He was later cleared of being linked to terrorism and deported, the newspaper reported.
Eric Lichtblau reported for this article from Washington and James C. McKinley Jr. from Albany. Al Baker contributed reporting from Albany.
--------
N.Y. Home Searched In Anthrax Probe
Agents Investigate Bioterrorism Lecturer
By Michael Powell and Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, August 6, 2004; Page A03
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A42835-2004Aug5.html
NEW YORK, Aug. 5 -- Federal agents investigating the deadly anthrax attacks of 2001 on Thursday searched the home of an Upstate doctor who founded an organization that teaches medical and defense professionals how to respond to biological terrorist attacks.
Dozens of agents, some clothed in protective suits, descended on the home of Kenneth M. Berry in the small town of Wellsville, which sits on the Pennsylvania border, south of Buffalo. Agents searched another home in the beach community of Lavallette on the New Jersey shore. Officials did not identify that house's owner.
A senior Justice Department official, who declined to be identified, played down the significance of the searches. The effort, the official said, was "more about trying to clear the guy than anything else."
A spokeswoman for the FBI, Debra Weierman, confirmed that the searches were related to the agency's investigation of the 2001 anthrax attacks, which killed five people and sickened 17. The search warrants are sealed, and FBI officials said there is no risk to public health and safety.
"This is strictly being conducted by the FBI and U.S. postal officials, as the complement of agencies on the Amerithrax task force," Weierman said, adding that the searches would be completed Thursday.
One law enforcement official said agents were "tying up some loose ends" and added: "They're going back and trying to make sure there's nothing there that they missed." Another official said Thursday's searches represented "nothing earth-shattering."
The anthrax case has confounded the FBI for nearly three years. Letters containing the deadly bacteria arrived in the fall of 2001 at news media and government offices, including those of Senate Democratic leader Thomas A. Daschle (S.D.) and Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) only weeks after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Attorney General John D. Ashcroft named bioweapons expert Steven J. Hatfill as a "person of interest" in the case, but no charges have been brought against anyone and there are no named suspects. Hatfill is suing the government over his treatment.
Berry, 48, worked for five years as an emergency room physician in Wellsville before resigning in October 2001. He lists himself as the former president of an organization of emergency physicians.
In 1997, he founded a nonprofit organization, PREEMPT Medical Counter-Terrorism. According to his Web site, the organization trains medical personnel to respond to bioterrorism. On the site, Berry lists himself as a consultant to the Defense Department on the subject of weapons of mass destruction, a claim that could not be confirmed Thursday. Federal law enforcement officials, however, also portrayed Berry as someone with expertise in bioterrorism and anthrax.
Berry did not respond to telephone messages or e-mails sent to him Thursday.
Joseph Pelych, a lawyer who has represented Berry in the past, but not in the anthrax matter, said last night: "I haven't spoken to Dr. Berry in some time. I think at this point it would be premature and speculative that he even needs representation. I just like to caution people not to rush to judgment."
According to the PREEMPT Web site, Berry gave a presentation in June at a biodefense conference in Gothenburg, Sweden, that included substantial information on how to construct bioshields and sensors as a defense against aerosol attacks involving anthrax bacteria, smallpox virus and other pathogens.
In a 1997 interview with USA Today, Berry advocated wide distribution of anthrax vaccine, especially to people living in major cities. He spoke out shortly after the Pentagon announced it would begin inoculating military personnel against anthrax bacteria.
Berry, a graduate of the American University of the Caribbean School of Medicine, says on his Web site that he has considerable experience in forensic investigations of aircraft accidents, including the TWA flight 800 crash off New York's Long Island in 1996.
PREEMPT's Web site features praise from former U.S. senator Sam Nunn (D-Ga.), who is quoted as having said in 1997: "Dr. Berry has been one of the leaders within the emergency medical community in recognizing the potential threat of use of weapons of mass destruction against American cities."
An aide to Nunn who spoke with the former senator Thursday said that Nunn probably met Berry at a conference but that "he can't remember specifically."
Eggen reported from Washington. Staff writers Ceci Connolly, Allan Lengel, Thomas E. Ricks and Helen Dewar and researchers Julie Tate and Richard S. Drezen contributed to this report.
--------
Two Leaders of Mosque Arrested in Albany Sting
Pair Is Held in Alleged Plot To Sell Grenade Launcher
By Jonathan Finer and Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, August 6, 2004; Page A03
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A42168-2004Aug5.html
ALBANY, N.Y., Aug. 5 -- Authorities announced Thursday they had arrested two leaders of an Albany mosque and charged them in a sting operation with helping a government informant who purportedly wanted to sell a shoulder-fired grenade launcher to terrorists.
Yassin Muhiddin Aref, 34, the imam, or spiritual leader, of the Masjid as-Salam mosque, and Mohammed Mosharref Hossain, 49, who worships at the mosque, were charged in U.S. District Court here with concealing material support for terrorism and participating in a money-laundering conspiracy.
Deputy Attorney General James B. Comey said at a Washington news conference that the arrests sent "a disrupting message" to potential terrorists. "Anyone engaging in terrorist planning would be very wise to consider whether their accomplice is not really one of our guys," he said.
He also stressed that the case does not involve an actual terrorist plot and is not related to the current alert about al Qaeda attacks. "The terrorist plot in this case is one that the government's agent, the cooperating witness, represented to be underway. It was not real," he said.
Federal officials said the arrests follow a year-long FBI investigation in which Aref and Hossain agreed to launder money for the informant, who told them that the weapon he was selling would be used against a Pakistani diplomat in New York City as punishment for that country's cooperation with U.S. anti-terrorist activities.
Members of both men's families denied the charges. "What they are saying is absolutely, 100 percent false," said Hossain's wife, Mossamat.
Police kept watch in front of the small brick mosque on Central Avenue, a diverse thoroughfare that leads to the New York state capitol.
Later in the day, just before evening prayer, Faisal Ahmad, whose father is the president of the mosque, said at a news conference that he hoped the community would not rush to judgment. "Let us follow the due process of law and let not the actions of a few individuals be used to brush an entire community as terrorists," he said.
Charles Wilder, 41, sitting on a stoop across the street from the mosque, said the arrests showed that "terrorism can happen anywhere, even a little town like Smallbany."
But many who worship at the mosque said they do not believe the charges.
"This is about politics. This is about scaring people," said a Sudanese immigrant who runs a nearby grocery store. Asked why he would not give his name, he said, "I don't want them coming to me next."
Those who know the two men expressed shock at the allegations.
Hossain "comes across as this great American; his life was the American dream," said Cleo Junco, 55. She owns a building a few blocks from the mosque where she said Hossain lives with his wife and five children. Hossain owns a local pizza parlor and, according to an Albany Times Union profile, immigrated from Bangladesh in 1985.
Junco said that after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Hossain gave her son a copy of the Koran. "He wanted us to see that Islam is not a belligerent religion," she said.
Court documents say that at a videotaped meeting Nov. 20, the informant showed Hossain a picture of an RPG-7, an antitank weapon, and talked about using it. The unidentified informant, a convicted felon working for the government, told Hossain and Aref he was affiliated with Jaish-e-Mohammed, an Islamic extremist group in Pakistan that the United States has designated a terrorist organization, according to court records. The men were allegedly paid $65,000 in cash for their participation.
Law enforcement sources also said Hossain and Aref have ties to Ansar al-Islam, the Iraq-based terrorist group with links to al Qaeda, but court documents make no mention of such connections.
Eggen reported from Washington. Researcher Julie Tate also contributed to this report.
-------- torture
Iraqi Prison Abuse Not a Strategy, Officer Says
By Josh White
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, August 6, 2004; Page A16
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A43913-2004Aug5.html
FORT BRAGG, N.C., Aug. 5 -- A top military intelligence commander who worked at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq said Thursday that abuse of detainees at the facility was not part of an official interrogation strategy and instead represented "unacceptable behavior."
Capt. Carolyn A. Wood spoke publicly for the first time at a preliminary court hearing here, testifying via telephone that her military intelligence unit did not encourage the sexual humiliation and physical abuse of detainees that touched off an international scandal. Wood said her command -- and other senior officers in Iraq -- signed off on some controversial interrogation tactics but said that such methods were carefully applied and never involved physical contact.
Wood said she approved of using physical training exercises and stress positions to wear down detainees at least once or twice between August and December of 2003, but she said she never had a request to keep a detainee naked or to use humiliation. She said she was floored when she saw photographs that implicated several soldiers in the abuse of naked and shackled detainees.
"Words can't describe my reaction," Wood testified in a call from Arizona, where she is based. "I was shocked. I was very disappointed. I was outraged."
But Wood said at least one of the officially approved methods of harsh interrogation -- the use of muzzled military dogs -- appears to have been misapplied. She said Col. Thomas M. Pappas, commander of the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, told her he was bringing in the dogs shortly before she left the base, and photographic evidence and statements from dog handlers at Abu Ghraib indicate that unmuzzled dogs later were used to frighten detainees during interrogations. The dogs were brought within inches of detainees' faces, and at least one detainee was bitten.
When asked whether the use of unmuzzled dogs would be inappropriate, Wood said: "Yes, I believe it would. But it would have to be very close and unmuzzled."
Capt. Brent Fitch, a staff judge advocate and Pappas's legal adviser, testified that he saw one or two requests each week for deviations from the standard set of interrogation tactics, requests that needed approval from Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, then the highest-ranking U.S. officer in Iraq. Fitch said military intelligence officials also kept International Committee of the Red Cross investigators from seeing certain prisoners at Abu Ghraib on a "temporary" basis, using a provision of the Geneva Conventions that allows them to secretly hold detainees for a "real imperative necessity." He said about eight such prisoners were kept from the ICRC during a visit in December.
Four members of the military intelligence unit at Abu Ghraib testified during the third day of a preliminary court hearing for Pfc. Lynndie R. England, 21, a member of the 372nd Military Police Company who is charged with abusing detainees at the prison last year. Military prosecutors presented evidence that military intelligence did not condone abusive behavior, but there was scant evidence Thursday that England played much of a role in it.
England's face has become synonymous with the abuse, as the picture of her holding a detainee on a leash has thrust her into the spotlight. But evidence Thursday again pointed to Spec. Charles A. Graner Jr. as a leader of the abuses. England has been characterized as a lackadaisical administrative clerk who was enamored of Graner and spent many late nights hanging around the prison's Tier 1 to be with him.
Special Agent Tyler Pieron, who investigated the abuse, testified that Graner "was the ringleader of the abuse."
Defense attorneys for seven MPs charged with the abuse have said military intelligence ordered the MPs to soften up the detainees, but Pieron said he could not confirm those claims.
" 'They told us to do it,' " Pieron said the MPs told him. "We never could find out who 'they' was. There was no one they could say who told them to do it."
Wood said that she does not believe that any military intelligence soldiers instructed the MPs to abuse prisoners, but she did acknowledge that the interrogators kept their identities concealed while on the cellblock.
Spec. Israel Rivera, a military intelligence soldier who witnessed some of the abuse, disclosed another irregularity at the prison: He said MPs smuggled in a local resident named Ali, who set up a restaurant and cafe. There, Rivera said, the man illegally sold liquor and ran a prostitution ring until intelligence officers had him removed.
-------- POLITICS
-------- investigations
Senator Is Described as a Likely Source of Intelligence Leak
August 6, 2004
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/06/politics/06leak.html
WASHINGTON, Aug. 5 - A two-year investigation into how the news media obtained classified intercepted messages has found that Senator Richard C. Shelby, the Alabama Republican and former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, was almost certainly a source, a government official familiar with the inquiry said Thursday.
The investigation remains open, but the Justice Department is unlikely to file criminal charges against the senator, the official said. For now, the department has turned its findings over to the Senate Ethics Committee. A spokesman for Mr. Shelby, Virginia Davis, confirmed that the ethics panel was looking into the matter.
Mr. Shelby left Thursday for an official trip to Australia and Southeast Asia and could not be reached, Ms. Davis said. In a statement, she said the senator, who served on the intelligence panel for eight years, and spent more than five as its chairman, "has a full understanding of the importance of protecting our nation's secrets, and he has never knowingly compromised classified information.''
She added, "He is unaware of any evidence to the contrary."
The leak investigation stems from news reports in June 2002 about two messages intercepted by the National Security Agency just before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The messages, in Arabic, were not translated until a day after the attacks, and said: "The match is about to begin" and "Tomorrow is zero hour."
At the time, the messages were widely interpreted as referring to the Sept. 11 attacks, though the commission investigating the attacks has since concluded they more likely referred to a Taliban offensive against the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan. The messages were reported by CNN and published in The Washington Post, which reported the findings of the Justice Department's inquiry on Thursday.
Intercepted messages are considered among the most highly sensitive of all classified information, and the leak generated immediate outrage in Washington. The chairmen of the House and Senate intelligence panels, Representative Porter J. Goss, Republican of Florida, and Senator Bob Graham, Democrat of Florida - who no longer leads his committee - took the unusual step of asking the Justice Department to investigate.
Mr. Shelby, 70, has been a senator since 1987 and is chairman of the Banking Committee. While on the intelligence panel, he was instrumental in conducting the joint House-Senate inquiry into the Sept. 11 attacks. A former Democrat, he has clashed with the Bush administration on a variety of issues, and was an outspoken critic of George J. Tenet, the former director of central intelligence.
The inquiry into his handling of the classified messages, which occurred after his chairmanship, is one of several similar investigations that have captivated Washington in recent months. A federal prosecutor, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, is trying to learn who leaked the identity of an undercover C.I.A. officer, Valerie Plame, and is expected to announce soon whether he will file charges.
And the Justice Department is conducting a criminal investigation to determine whether Samuel R. Berger, national security adviser to President Bill Clinton, broke federal laws on the handling of classified information when he removed documents from the National Archives. That investigation prompted Mr. Berger to resign as a foreign policy adviser to Senator John Kerry, the Democratic presidential nominee.
David Johnston contributed reporting for this article.
-------- propaganda wars
59 Years Later: The Legacy of Hiroshima
How the Press Was Spun: Part V.
Managing the news at the dawn of the Atomic Age, a special daily report all this week.
By Greg Mitchell
(August 06, 2004)
Editor & Publisher
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/columns/pressingissues_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000600449
Clearly, with publication on Sept. 5, 1945, of the first stories by American reporters who had briefly visited Hiroshima, U.S. officials had a public relations problem on their hands. The lid on Hiroshima was starting to come off.
On Sept. 5, General MacArthur ordered all American reporters out of Tokyo. Isolated and closely watched in nearby Yokohama, they would not be able to rush off on their own for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as Wilfred Burchett had done earlier that week. Just as the order came down, however, a second reporter was making his way independently to one of the atomic cities.
After years of covering the Pacific war, George Weller of the Chicago Daily News had no use for what he later called "General MacArthur's censors, his public relations officers and his military police." Censorship, he felt, was prolonged "long after the slightest pretext for it existed," and he was appalled by "the conformists" of his own profession who went along with the guided tours of prison camps, "away from where the war had been decided a month before."
So, on Sept. 5, Weller jumped at a chance to cover the one officially approved story to the south -- a visit to a kamikaze base in Kyushu. Weller noted on a map that it was connected by railroad to Nagasaki.
The next day Weller shook off his Army escort at the kamikaze base, and slipped into Nagasaki. In many ways, his experience duplicated that of Wilfred Burchett in Hiroshima, except that he had the city to himself for three days, not one, before the junketing reporters arrived. But Weller made one mistake that Burchett avoided: He sent his lengthy report directly to MacArthur's headquarters in Tokyo for clearance.
This would be the last he ever saw of the story. It would never appear in print in any form, despite the fact that Weller felt rather dispassionate about (and indeed, endorsed) the atomic bombings. Weller had bluntly described the physical and medical effects of the Nagasaki bomb, however. By sending his story directly to the censorship office he felt he was giving the MacArthur command "the least possible excuse to hold up my research."
Weller would later summarize his experience in two words. Referring to MacArthur's censors, he wrote: "They won."
The Pentagon, meanwhile, had not yet issued to the press an estimate of Japanese casualties in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. An Air Force public-relations officer urged General Curtis LeMay to suppress any figures on civilians killed, as it would, he feared, "make us look like barbarians. ..." LeMay should release the figures "at the right time," he advised, and that time would be after the U.S. collected "atrocity stories about what Japs did to our B-29 crews when they were shot down." On Sept. 5, the same day that the first articles from Hiroshima appeared, Secretary of State James Byrnes released a report of more than 200 atrocities committed by the Japanese during the war.
A confluence of events on Sept. 9 suggests that American officials, right up to the White House, had indeed initiated a public-relations campaign to counter the first articles from Hiroshima.
The War Department, after weeks of delay, finally allowed The New York Times to publish the exultant first-person account of the Nagasaki bombing mission by embedded reporter W.L. Laurence. The same day, Laurence happened to be touring the Trinity test site with General Leslie Groves and physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer.
The top-secret area finally had been opened to journalists. Two weeks earlier, President Truman's secretary, Charles G. Ross, had sent a memo to the War Department urging the military to recruit a group of reporters to explore the test site. "This might be a good thing to do in view of continuing propaganda from Japan," Ross wrote.
Now General Groves was personally escorting some of the newsmen near ground zero. His driver, a young soldier named Patrick Stout, spent several minutes in the crater of the blast and was photographed, smiling.
Laurence's account of this visit (delayed three days due to a censorship review) disclosed quite frankly why he and thirty other journalists had been invited: to "give lie to" Japanese propaganda "that radiations were responsible for deaths even after" the Hiroshima attack, he wrote. General Groves had expressly asked the reporters to assist him in this effort, and they did not disappoint him. Geiger counters showed that surface radiation, after nearly two months, had "dwindled to a minute quantity, safe for continuous human habitation," Laurence asserted.
He did introduce one bit of contrary information: the reporters had been advised to wear canvas overshoes to protect against radiation burns.
But Laurence was keeping a lot to himself. Embedded with the Manhattan Project for months, he was the only reporter who knew about the fallout scare surrounding the Trinity test: scientists in jeeps chasing a radioactive cloud, Geiger counters clicking off the scale, a mule that became paralyzed.
Here was the nation's leading science reporter, severely compromised, not only unable but disinclined to reveal all he knew about the potential hazards of the most important scientific discovery of his time. The press tour, in fact, had "an oddly reassuring effect," The New York Times observed in an editorial.
Later, a scientist informed the young soldier, Patrick Stout, who stood in the crater during the press tour, that he had been exposed to dangerous levels of radioactivity. Twenty-two years later Stout became ill and was diagnosed with leukemia. The military, apparently acknowledging radiation as the cause, granted him "service-connected" disability compensation. Stout died in 1969. Greg Mitchell (gmitchell@editorandpublisher.com) is the editor of E&P and co-author (with Robert Jay Lifton) of "Hiroshima in America," from which this week's columns were adapted. Mitchell also served as adviser to the new documentary, "Original Child Bomb," which in June shared the grand prize at the Silverdocs film festival.
----
Whitewashing Hiroshima:
The Uncritical Glorification of American Militarism
by Gary G. Kohls, MD
August 6, 2004
LewRockwell.com
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig5/kohls1.html
Back in 1995, the Smithsonian Institute was preparing an honest but aggressive display dealing with the 50th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Amid much right-wing reactionary wrangling, from various ultrapatriotic veterans groups all the way up to the Newt Gringrich-dominated Congress, the Smithsonian was forced to eliminate that painful but historically important part of the story - the Japanese civilian perspective. So again we had another example of powerful politically conservative ultrapatriotic groups influencing public policy - and messing with history because they didn't have the courage to face up to unpleasant historical truths.
The historians did have a gun to their heads, of course, but in the mêlée, the media and the public overlooked a vital historical point. And that is this: The two bombs did not have to be used to end the war and there wouldn't have been a bloody American invasion of Japan. American intelligence, with the full knowledge of President Truman, was fully aware of Japan's desperate search for ways to honorably surrender weeks before the order was given for the American-led nuclear Holocaust that was Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
American intelligence data, revealed in the 1980s, show that a large-scale US invasion (planned for no sooner than November 1, 1945) would have been unnecessary. Japan was working on peace negotiations with the Allies through its Moscow ambassador in July of 1945. Truman knew of these developments because the US had broken the Japanese code years earlier, and all of Japan's military and diplomatic messages were being intercepted. On July 13, 1945, Foreign Minister Togo said: "Unconditional surrender (giving up all sovereignty) is the only obstacle to peace." Truman knew this, and the war could have ended by simply conceding a post-war figurehead position for the emperor, a leader regarded as a deity in Japan. That concession was refused by the US; the Japanese continued negotiating for peace; and the bombs were dropped. And, ironically, after the war, the emperor was allowed to remain in place. So what were the real reasons for 1) the refusal to accept Japan's offer of surrender and 2) the decision to proceed with the bombings?
Shortly after WWII, military analyst Hanson Baldwin wrote: "The Japanese, in a military sense, were in a hopeless strategic situation by the time the Potsdam demand for unconditional surrender was made on July 26, 1945." Admiral William Leahy, top military aide to President Truman, said in his war memoirs, I Was There: "It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons. My own feeling is that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages." And General Dwight Eisenhower agreed.
Truman proceeded with the plans, but he never officially ordered the Nagasaki bomb that followed Hiroshima. There are a number of factors that helped Truman make his decision.
1. The US had made a huge investment in time, mind and money ($2,000,000,000 in 1940 dollars) to produce the bombs, and there was no inclination - and no guts - to stop the momentum.
2. The US military - as did its citizens - had a bloodthirsty appetite for revenge because of Pearl Harbor. Mercy wasn't the mind-set of these professed Christians, and the missions were accomplished - with glee.
3. The Nagasaki bomb was a plutonium bomb and Hiroshima's was uranium. Scientific curiosity certainly was a major factor at Nagasaki. The decision to use both had obviously been made well in advance. The three day interval was unconscionably inadequate - Japan being in shambles in its communications and transportation capabilities - and no one, not even the Japanese high command, fully understood what had happened at Hiroshima.
4. The Russians had proclaimed their intent to enter the war with Japan 90 days after V-E Day, which would have been Aug. 8, two days after Hiroshima. Indeed, Russia did declare war on August 8 and was marching across Manchuria when the innocent civilians of Nagasaki were incinerated. The US didn't want Japan surrendering to anybody else, especially an upcoming enemy, so the first nuclear "messages" of the infantile Cold War were sent. Russia indeed received less of the spoils of war, and the two superpowers were mired in mutual moral and economic near-bankruptcy for the rest of the century - with no end in sight.
5. An estimated 80,000 innocent civilians - plus 20,000 young, essentially weaponless Japanese conscripts - died instantly in the Hiroshima bombing. Hundreds of thousands of others suffered agonizing burns and infections for the rest of their shortened lives, and generations of the survivor's progeny inherited horrible radiation-induced illnesses, cancers and premature death. What has been covered up is the fact that 12 American POWs, Navy pilots, their existence well known to the US command, were killed in a Hiroshima jail on Aug.
6. The 75,000 Nagasaki victims were virtually all innocent civilians, except for the inhabitants of an allied POW camp near Nagasaki's ground zero. They were instantaneously incinerated, carbonized and evaporated by a scientific experiment carried out by obedient, unaware soldiers. The War Dept. knew of the existence of the POWs but, when informed, simply replied: "Targets previously assigned for Centerboard (atomic bomb mission code name) remain unchanged."
So the end of the war in the Pacific was just one more myth in a long list of myths we have been fed by our military and political leaders, war being glorified in the process. A short list of some of the others include the covered-up military actions (and frequently CIA-orchestrated atrocities) in Korea, Viet Nam, Laos, Cambodia, Granada, Panama, Iraq, the Philippines, Chile, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Haiti, Colombia, etc., etc. But somehow we still hang on to our shaky "my country right or wrong" patriotism, desperately wanting to believe that our nation only works for peace, justice and democracy and not mainly for the form of capitalism that has been corrupted to its core. While it is true that the US military has faced down a few despots, with natural heroism and sacrifice from the physically, psychologically and spiritually dead and dying American soldiers, more often than not our methods of rationalizing the atrocities of war are identical to those of the "godless communists" or "evil empire" on the other side of the battle line. August 6 and 9, 1945 are just two more examples of the brutalization of innocent civilians in "total war," whether it is called "'regretful' collateral damage" or "friendly fire."
The time has come for Americans to stand up for real justice and real peace (rather than the fake variety of our unaffordable "armed truces" that we have all over the world) by acknowledging the whole truth of history and owning up to the numerous censored-out American war crimes and crimes against humanity, that have been perpetrated in our names over the last half-century. And then we need to start accepting the consequences of our nation's actions, like the courageous and honorable people we claim to be. Doing what is right for the whole of humanity for a change, rather than just what is advantageous for us already over-privileged Americans, would be real honor, real patriotism and an essential start toward real peace.
August 6, 2004
Gary Kohls, MD [send him mail], an associate of Every Church a Peace Church, is a practicing physician in Duluth, MN.
----
At Journalist Convention, Bush Defends Terror-Threat Alert
August 6, 2004
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Bush.html?hp
STRATHAM, N.H. (AP) -- President Bush challenged Democratic rival John Kerry on Friday to give a yes-or-no answer about whether he would have supported the invasion of Iraq ``knowing what we know now'' about the failure to find weapons of mass destruction.
``I have given my answer,'' Bush told a cheering crowd. ``We did the right thing and the world is better off for it.''
Kerry's campaign said he already had answered the question -- and then criticized Bush's handling of the war anew.
Kerry voted to give Bush the authority to send troops to Iraq. ``As John Kerry has said previously, it was right to hold Saddam Hussein accountable and we're glad he's gone,'' said Susan Rice, the Democrat's senior adviser for national security affairs.
She said that Bush had ``rushed into war without our allies, without a plan to win the peace and without properly equipping our troops.''
With persistent violence and climbing casualties, Iraq has become a problem for Bush, turning what once was believed to be an asset for his re-election campaign into a vulnerability. Only about four in 10 Americans support the president's handling of Iraq, polls show, and just a third say he has a clear plan to deal with the situation. Nevertheless, Bush tried to put Kerry on the defensive.
``Now, there are some questions that a commander in chief needs to answer with a clear yes or no,'' Bush said. ``My opponent hasn't answered the question of whether, knowing what we know now, he would have supported going into Iraq. That's an important question and the American people deserve a clear yes or no answer.''
Bush said America was safer because Saddam Hussein sits in a prison cell. ``Even though we did not find the stockpiles that we thought we would find, we did the right thing,'' the president said. ``He had the capability and he could have passed that capability on to our enemies.''
Bush also said Kerry's criticism of his Iraq policies merely shows the Democrat doesn't understand who America is up against.
``My opponent said something the other day I strongly disagree with -- he said that going to war with a terrorist is actually improving their recruiting efforts,'' Bush said, referring to a remark Kerry made Monday.
``Now, that's upside-down logic,'' Bush said. ``It shows a misunderstanding of the enemy.''
Anti-American forces were training in the 1990s, Bush said. ``They don't need an excuse for their hatred, and it is wrong to blame America for the anger and evil of the killers.''
``We don't create terrorists by fighting back. We defeat the terrorists by fighting back,'' he said.''
Bush spoke to several hundred cheering supporters at a political picnic.
Kerry, a Democratic senator from Massachusetts, said Monday, ``The policies of this administration, I believe and others believe very deeply, have resulted in an increase of animosity and anger focused on the United States of America.''
``The people who are training terror are using our actions as a means of recruitment,'' he said.
The Democrat has pointed out that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld asked in a memo earlier this year whether terrorists were being created faster than the United States could capture and kill them.
Bush's trip to New Hampshire offered a glimpse of high emotions on both sides of the presidential election.
Two groups tried to shout each other down as Bush's motorcade rounded a bend onto a farm, one contingent shouting ``Four more years!'' and the other ``Three more months!''
As always, Bush's team carefully weeded out the dissenters, and ``four more years!'' was the only cry heard in a pasture-turned-political venue here.
But polls show this state is a dead heat this year and Bush tried to tip it back his way with his seventh visit as president.
From New Hampshire, Bush flew to his family's home in Kennebunkport, Maine, where his nephew, George P. Bush, is to be married on Saturday.
--------
Rumfeld: No way to stop all terrorism
August 06, 2004
(UPI)
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20040806-045941-2510r.htm
Chicago, IL, Aug. 6 -- U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said there's no way to defend against every potential terrorist attack because terrorists can strike anytime anywhere.
He said the way to defeat terrorists is get them before they attack you. They can hit "anytime, in anyplace, using any technique."
Rumsfeld said the war in Iraq had captured and killed terrorists. "People ask 'well how are we doing?' The answer is pretty darn well," he told CLTV, a cable news outlet.
The Pentagon chief said it could take 5 to 10 years to change the culture in the U.S. intelligence community and that it won't be easy.
"These things are fundamental and important," Rumsfeld said in response to a question about recommendations of the 9-11 Commission.
Protesters from the Chicago Coalition Against War & Racism stood on buckets with plastic bags over their heads outside the Four Seasons Hotel, where Rumsfeld spoke to the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations and the Commercial Club of Chicago.
The protest was peaceful and no one was arrested.
-------- us politics
Powell Denies Rift Over Iraq Invasion
Secretary Defends the War, Says U.S. Got Rid of 'a Horrible Dictator'
By Peter Slevin and Jim VandeHei
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, August 6, 2004; Page A06
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A43733-2004Aug5.html
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell delivered a spirited defense of U.S. foreign policy and the war in Iraq, telling a convention of minority journalists in Washington yesterday that he was "solidly behind" the use of force against Saddam Hussein.
Speaking to Unity: Journalists of Color hours after Democratic presidential nominee John F. Kerry told the gathering that the Iraq war represented a failure of diplomacy, Powell replied: "We haven't had a failure in Iraq. We have gotten rid of a horrible dictator."
Asked about his experience being on the losing end of important foreign policy debates, Powell said "there was no split" over the invasion of Iraq once the Bush administration concluded Hussein had violated the final demands from the U.N. Security Council.
"I can assure you that I have in no way been constrained, contained or kept on the outside of our discussions," Powell said.
Kerry took a brief detour from his travels in the Midwest to address Unity, a consortium of four minority journalism associations. He focused attention on domestic issues and divisions of race, class and ethnicity, and he promised to run a more inclusive White House.
He pledged to fund federal programs that target a broad array of groups, from Native Americans to Filipino American veterans to Hispanics and African Americans without health care. He also promised to use his White House pulpit to press for an increase in the number of minorities holding prominent media jobs.
Noting that people of color are "only a tiny fraction" of editors, anchors and executives, Kerry challenged management to do better. He promised to appoint Federal Communications Commission members who will see that "small and minority-owned broadcasters are not consolidated into extinction."
The blue-blooded Democrat from Massachusetts, competing against an equally well-heeled president raised in Connecticut, told Unity he is the candidate who can best connect with minorities in the United States.
"Above all, who is truly committed to bridging the divides in this country that continue to separate, sometimes willfully, intentionally and politically . . . race from race, group from group, region from region?" Kerry asked. "I am also aware -- how can you live in America and not be aware? -- of the special challenges facing people of color."
In one of Kerry's biggest applause lines, he said every black vote would count in future elections. In 2000, many black voters were denied the right to vote as a result of breakdowns in registration and vote-counting systems.
"The harsh fact now is that in the last election more than 1 million African Americans were disenfranchised in one of the most tainted elections in history," Kerry said. "We have to see to it in November that every vote counts -- and every vote is counted."
Kerry measured his words carefully when asked to discuss actor Bill Cosby's admonition that black Americans take greater personal responsibility for their children instead of blaming others or the government if their children do not succeed. He said the comedian was being "excessively exclusive" by focusing on personal responsibility without acknowledging the protective role government must play.
"I am talking about these people who cry when their son is standing there in an orange [prison] suit," Cosby said in May remarks that created an intense debate. "Where were you when he was 2? Where were you when he was 12? Where were you when he was 18, and how come you didn't know that he had a pistol? . . . In all of this work, we cannot blame white people."
"I understand exactly where Bill is coming from in his comment," Kerry said. "It may be excessively exclusive in the breadth of it, in the sense that it sort of targets just the responsibility side, but that's an important side."
Kerry said government and society are to blame, too, for not providing adequate assistance and protections to minorities.
"We also need to do the things we need to do as a society to empower those people, have plans for those kids, to make the world safer," Kerry said. "It's all of us together."
President Bush is to address the Unity convention today.
After Kerry departed and Powell's turn came, the secretary of state insisted that Bush administration's foreign policy is more multilateral than its critics at home and abroad contend -- and more effective. He said that if the United States had not deposed Hussein, the Iraqi leader would have developed unconventional weapons.
"We would have faced those weapons at another time, at another place," Powell said.
Before the invasion, Powell expressed doubts in administrative channels about the wisdom of the war and the president's understanding of its implications, but he said yesterday that he was "solidly behind what the president found he had to do last spring when he undertook Operation Iraqi Freedom."
"And I'm pleased that that dictator is gone," added Powell, who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the 1991 Persian Gulf War. "He's been a thorn in my side for the last 12 years, too, I can assure you."
-------- ENERGY
-------- alternative energy
Bioenergy Producers Compete for $150 Million in Subsidies
August 6, 2004
WASHINGTON, DC, (ENS)
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/aug2004/2004-08-06-09.asp#anchor4
The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) will make payments totaling up to $150 million to commercial bioenergy - ethanol and biodiesel - producers who increase their production between October 1, 2004, and September 30, 2005, Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman announced Wednesday.
"Increased bioenergy production helps strengthen the income of soybean, corn and other producers and lessens U.S. dependence on traditional energy sources," Veneman said.
Payments will be based on bioenergy production increases from eligible commodities compared to the same time period a year earlier.
Eligible commodities are barley, corn, grain sorghum, oats, rice, wheat, soybeans, cotton seed, sunflower seed, canola, crambe, rapeseed, safflower, sesame seed, flaxseed, and mustard seed.
Also eligible under the program are cellulosic crops, such as switchgrass and hybrid poplars, as well as fats, oils, and greases - including recycled fats, oils and greases - derived from an agricultural product, and any other animal byproduct that may be used to produce bioenergy.
To be eligible under the program, ethanol producers must produce and sell ethanol commercially and have authority from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to produce ethanol for fuel or sell denatured ethanol rendered unfit for beverage use.
Biodiesel producers must produce and sell biodiesel commercially, be registered and in good standing with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and must also meet the biodiesel standard set by the American Society for Testing and Materials.
In FY 2003, ethanol producers expanded production by 607 million gallons, and biodiesel producers by 18.5 million gallons.
For the first two quarters of FY 2004, ethanol production increased 280.9 million gallons, while biodiesel production grew by 6.9 million gallons.
Signup for the fiscal year (FY) 2005 Bioenergy Program is underway and will continue until August 31. Apply online at: http://www.fsa.usda.gov/daco/bio_daco.htm
----
Sunny California Flirts With Million Solar Homes Proposal
August 6, 2004
SACRAMENTO, California, (ENS)
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/aug2004/2004-08-06-03.asp
As part of his environmental campaign promises last year, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger said he would increase the state's use of solar power, with the goal of "50 percent of new homes equipped with solar photovoltaics by 2005."
The governor will fall short of that goal, but he is on the way if he adopts a new "Million Solar Homes" proposal made by the California Environmental Protection Agency on Monday.
The draft plan was presented by Drew Bohan, under-secretary of the Cal-EPA, at a workshop held at the Department of Water Resources, the agency used to bail out California during the energy crisis of 2001.
California would add solar power to a million homes in the next 10 years, paid for by a surcharge on ratepayers' electricity bills of 25 to 30 cents each month.
By the time the surcharge expires in 10 years, it will have raised about $1 billion in funding for the solar initiative.
Another element in the plan is a lift of the current net metering cap to five percent of peak energy demand, allowing homeowners to sell excess electricity back to the grid.
And finally, builders would be required to construct five percent of homes including solar power in 2010, a figure that would reach 50 percent by 2020. This provision is meant to provide a backstop should incentives fail to work in the early years.
Environment California's clean energy advocate, Bernadette Del Chiaro, praised the proposal as a solid step forward toward achieving cleaner air and energy independence for California.
"This is so far ahead of any other state ... there's no comparison," Del Chiaro said.
According to administration sources, Schwarzenegger has yet to approve this plan, so Environment California gave the governor more incentive to undertake the program. The group placed an ad in Monday's edition of the "Los Angeles Times" addressed to the "Solarnator Governor" a reference to Schwarzenegger in his film role as the Terminator. "Keep your promise to build solar homes," the ad demands.
"This political ad shows how deeply Californians want the governor to come through on his promise to build solar homes," said Del Chiaro. "Ultimately we hope the governor will play the role of the action hero standing up to powerful special interests and putting his muscle into policies, such as the one unveiled today, that will truly bring us solar homes."
Environment California says that to cope with its energy crunch, builders should make solar power a standard feature, just like we do with double-paned windows and insulation.
The group is sponsoring a bill authored by State Senator Kevin Murray, a Los Angeles Democrat, that would require that solar photovoltaic (PV) systems be included as a standard feature on 15 percent of new homes built beginning January 1, 2006 increasing by 10 percent each year until 55 percent is reached in 2010.
The California Energy Commission already offers cash rebates to consumers who install solar panels. Payments from the Emerging Renewables Program are intended to reduce the net cost of solar generating equipment, stimulating sales.
The Million Solar Homes initiative would encourage the solar market, which has had its ups and downs in California. In 1998, BP Solar, one of the world's largest solar electric companies, built a manufacturing facility in Fairfield, where its thin film solar panels were made.
The flexible panels, approved by Cal-EPA, can be used as a substitute for glass in windows, skylights, and other architectural features, giving planners, designers and architects a new range of design and construction options, to the benefit of the environment.
But in November 2002, BP Solar decided to close the Fairfield solar plant and convert it into a warehousing and distribution plus sales and marketing facility.
On the exit from thin film manufacturing, Harry Shimp, BP Solar president and CEO, said, "We have worked very hard with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and other partners on the research and development of thin film technology. However, while the technology continues to show promise, lack of material demand and present economics do not allow for continued investment."
Today, the most widely utilized solar panels in California are manufactured by Shell Solar in Camarillo, California. The Camarillo plant features the world's largest rooftop thin film photovoltaic array, dedicated last September. The 245 kilowatt solar electric array is made of CIS thin film, a new way of making solar modules.
Copper, indium and selenium are applied in thin layers to glass with a vacuum process. This technique is used for coating window glass but is relatively new to the solar industry.
In his remarks at the rooftop dedication, Chairman of the California Energy Commission William Keese stressed the importance of the private sector and government partnering to encourage renewable energy technologies.
"Advances such as this help California move toward our goal of generating 20 per cent of our electricity from renewable sources by 2010," Keese said.
Go to a practical solar site at: http://www.solarexpert.com/index.html
----
California EPA wants to spur solar-home development
Friday, August 06, 2004
By Don Thompson,
Associated Press
http://www.enn.com/news/2004-08-06/s_26408.asp
SACRAMENTO, Calif. - California officials are proposing that half of all new homes in the state be running on solar energy in 10 years, an effort spurred by $100 million in annual incentives paid for by electricity consumers.
The move comes three years after the state suffered through an energy crisis that left utility customers paying off billions in debts incurred when wholesale electricity rates hit record-high levels.
The plan proposes that the state give rebates to home builders who install solar panels on new homes, and incentives for installing panels on existing homes, according to a copy of the California Environmental Protection Agency draft.
The program would be paid for with a new monthly utility bill surcharge of about 25 to 30 cents per household, projected to raise $1 billion before the surcharge ends in 10 years. But homeowners would be free to sell excess solar energy back to electricity companies, leaving them with no net cost.
"Each month, the homeowner would save more money in reduced electricity charges than the homeowner would have to pay on the solar mortgage," according to the draft presented by EPA Undersecretary Drew Bohan.
Environmental groups said the proposal would once again make California a national trendsetter while encouraging technical advances that would help make solar power more affordable worldwide.
"This is so far ahead of any other state ... there's no comparison," said Bernadette Del Chiaro of Environment California. The state already is the world's third-largest market for solar technology, but would start to catch up with leaders like Japan and Germany, she said.
The solar power installations would be the equivalent of 36 new, 75 megawatt natural gas plants and would avoid pumping 50 million tons of carbon dioxide into the air from the accompanying combustion, the EPA estimated.
The incentives should be enough to get solar panels on 40 percent of new homes by 2010 and 50 percent by 2013, the EPA projects. If the incentives aren't enough, the proposal would require panels on 5 percent of homes by 2010 and half of new homes by 2020. Proponents estimate 1.2 million homes would be producing solar energy by 2017, including 884,000 new and 313,000 older houses.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who ran on a pledge of getting California homes to use solar power, has not endorsed the plan.
"My hope is he comes out even stronger" by increasing the incentives and mandates, and applying the requirements to commercial buildings as well, said Del Chiaro. "There's no guarantee the builders will take advantage of incentives, even though the incentives are great."
Many environmentalists also are backing solar home incentives in pending legislation.
A solar incentive bill, approved by the Senate and pending in an Assembly committee, would require that 15 percent of new homes come with solar panels by 2006. The requirement would increase by 10 percentage points a year until it would mandate that 55 percent of homes come solar-equipped by 2010.
The building industry opposes the legislative solar homes bill, but said the incentives proposed by the energy commission are the way to encourage technological and economic improvements that will make widespread use of solar energy more realistic.
"It's a much more sensible approach than an outright mandate," said Tim Coyle, senior vice president of the California Building Industry Association. He said home solar systems can cost $17,000 to $20,000 and currently won't pay for themselves since customers would typically pay $120 a month and receive about $70 in benefits.
-------- ACTIVISTS
Obituaries: Gloria Emerson, 75, who wrote angrily about war and its victims
Craig R. Whitney
The New York Times
Friday, August 06, 2004
http://www.iht.com/bin/print.php?file=532824.html
NEW YORK Gloria Emerson, a journalist and author who wrote with angry dignity about the effects of war on Americans, Vietnamese and Palestinians, was found dead by friends and the police on Wednesday morning in her apartment in Manhattan. She was 75 and left no immediate survivors.
The medical examiner's office said it had not ruled on the cause of death.
Her physician, Karen Brudney, said Emerson had been suffering from Parkinson's disease, which she feared would leave her unable to write, and she left many notes at the apartment indicating that she had taken her own life.
Both as a foreign correspondent for The New York Times in Vietnam in the early 1970s and later as a writer of nonfiction books and a novel, Emerson wrote passionately about ordinary people and soldiers ground up by the machinery of war in places like Vietnam, Gaza and Algeria.
War as she wrote about it was not ennobling but debasing, a misery that inflicted physical suffering and psychic damage on civilians, children and soldiers on both sides.
Her literary model was Graham Greene, whose dark portrayal of the early days of the American war in Vietnam influenced her articles and style. "Loving Graham Greene" was the title she gave her novel, published in 2000.
She was working in the London bureau of The New York Times in 1969 when, as she wrote in an obituary she left with a covering note that was dated Tuesday, "Ms. Emerson requested that she be sent to Vietnam because she had been in that country in 1956 and wanted to go back to write about the Vietnamese people and the immense unhappy changes in their lives, not a subject widely covered by the huge press corps who were preoccupied with covering the military story."
Her articles from Vietnam brought to life the people whose "hearts and minds" the United States went to war to win.
Her literary voice was always gravely serious. In person, she was precise in speech and eccentrically funny.
She was constantly giving money to veterans, refugees and street beggars. She could be possessive and domineering, especially toward the photographers whose work she thought would outlast her articles published with them; the words she compared to ice cubes that melted in the sun. As Emerson put it in her own obituary: "Her dispatches from Vietnam won a George Polk Award for excellence in foreign reporting, and, later, a Matrix Award from New York Women in Communications." Her nonfiction book on the war, "Winners Losers," won a National Book Award in 1978, but she described it as "too huge and somewhat messy."
"Gaza, a Year in the Intifada," about a year she spent with Palestinians, was published in 1991.
"The book provoked hostility among friends, and others felt it was anti-Israel, but Emerson insisted this was not the reason for writing it," she explained later, in the obituary she left behind. "She hoped to provide a primer for those who felt the situation in the Middle East was too complicated or too controversial to understand."
He was 65.
The Asian correspondent for Der Spiegel for more than 30 years and a regular contributor to Corriere della Sera and La Repubblica, Terzani helped shape how the world viewed Asia through his dispatches and his six books.
His overarching theme was the high social and cultural costs of Asia's embrace of the West's materialism. A man of leftist persuasions, he railed against communists as often as capitalists for their treatment of the people they had pledged to liberate.
He chronicled the demise of ancient Asian arts, architecture, religion, literature and way of life as a traveler as much as a political journalist. Terzani witnessed the fall of Saigon, the destruction of old Beijing, the breakup of the Soviet Union and India's repudiation of its Gandhian heritage to become a nuclear power.
His personal charm spilled into his dispatches and his books and made him a folk hero in his native Italy.
In his last years his anger was directed against the United States and its wars against Afghanistan and Iraq. His "Letters Against the War," published in 2002, was a best-seller in Italy.
--------
War Crimes Trial Victoria Square, ChCh Aug. 7
Scoop Media
6 August 2004
http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/PO0408/S00061.htm
A War Crimes Trial to indict George W. Bush, Tony Blair and John Howard will be held in Victoria Square, Christchurch, New Zealand on Saturday August 7, 2004 from 12 to 1pm.
Actors wearing Bush, Blair and Howard masks will be handcuffed and confined to a cage, while being charged.
The Judge, played by Larry Ross, will read the indictment. The prosecutors - Clair Dann and Moana Cole and two witnesses from Iraq will present the charges about the war crimes. Darren Kemp will play the Defence Counsel.
The war crimes will include; pre-meditation of the Iraq war well before 9/11, planning it, and lying to justify the illegal war, bombing, invasion, murder, imprisonment, torture and maiming, poisoning the land with depleted uranium, destroying Iraqi buildings and infrastructure, and violating the articles of the UN Charter, The Nuremberg Tribunal and International laws. The jury will be the audience who attend this 'People's Court'.
Spokesperson Larry Ross said:
"Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, was not making nuclear weapons, had no links with Al Qaeda and was no threat to the US, UK and Australia. These were all lies the 3 accused used to justify an invasion of Iraq, which they deceptively called, "a war on terrorism".
Although Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator - like so many of the US-created and supported dictators since World War II, that was no excuse for making war on Iraq and killing, torturing and terrorising the population.
A number of the war crimes, culminating in the illegal imprisoning and torture of Iraqis, have enraged the Arab world. They have created a seed bed for many more terrorists and for opposition to direct US rule, or to US-dominated client rule, and have laid the foundations for more US-led wars, including a war on Iran.
The accused should be tried by the International Criminal Court and reparations paid to victims by the US, UK and Australia.
We want New Zealand to remove it's military from Iraq and work with other nations for replacement of Western forces in Iraq with temporary Arab forces, to maintain order, help with reconstruction, and with setting up a genuine Iraq democracy.
A simple but thought provoking message from the trial, that we will send overseas, and suggest be used in the US, UK and Australia is "Don't Vote For A War Criminal".
We don't believe that war criminals should occupy the top positions of three great nations - the United States, Britain and Australia."
Larry Ross, on behalf of the Peace Action Network.
Email: nuclearfreenz@lynx.co.nz
----
Peace pastor faces penalties for Iraq trip
By STEVE STRUNSKY
Associated Press
August 6, 2004,
http://www.newsday.com/news/local/wire/ny-bc-nj--peacepastor-penal0806aug06,0,7511582.story?coll=ny-ap-regional-wire
NEWARK, N.J. -- The Rev. Frederick Boyle lost his New Jersey ministry, half his pay, and 25 pounds, all for his opposition to the war in Iraq.
The pacifist Methodist could lose much more _ his freedom and more in fines _ on charges that he violated a U.S. Treasury Department ban on travel to Iraq.
"They have sent me a prepenalty notification letter in which they say they intend to fine me $10,000," said Boyle, the bearded, graying former pastor of Titusville United Methodist Church.
Boyle, 55, attracted widespread attention when he traveled to Iraq in March to protest the consequences of an imminent bombardment of Baghdad.
Last February, he ate a communion wafer to end a 22-day hunger strike he had staged in protest of what human rights groups said were abuses of Iraqi civilians by U.S. troops.
The threatened $10,000 fine would be a civil penalty. Boyle's lawyer, Jonathan Hafetz, said the pastor also could face criminal penalties of $1 million fine and 12 years in prison if he is prosecuted and convicted of knowingly committing the violations he is charged with civilly.
Since breaking the fast, the 6-foot pastor has regained his normal weight of 160 pounds.
Boyle's anti-war activism was shunned by his former parishioners. He was transferred to St. Paul's United Methodist Church in Nyack, N.Y., a part-time ministry averaging 10 worshippers per service, where his pay was cut in half.
He gave his first sermon there on July 4.
"I did have to tighten my belt," said Boyle, referring to the pay cut, not the fast. "In the world according to Frederick, my public activism and standing up for what I believe would have been Jesus' position should have gotten me a position in a church with a 1,000 people."
Instead, it got him into trouble with the Office of Foreign Assets Control, which had placed restrictions on travel and business dealings with Iraq before Boyle made his trip. Thursday was the deadline for Boyle's response to the June 22 prepenalty notice.
"While in Iraq, you planned to join a group shielding the government of Iraq facilities from possible U.S. military action," the notice read. "You also engaged in travel-related transaction, expending currency for the purchase of food, lodging, transportation, and souvenirs."
The notice followed Boyle's refusal in June 2003 that he report his travel and expenses in Iraq to the agency.
Hafetz said that to threaten a fine without holding a hearing violates Boyle's constitutional rights.
"This is a proceeding that violates the most fundamental principles of due process," said Hafetz, who is handling the case for free on behalf of the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey.
Hafetz concluded his response to the federal government by writing, "the Iraqi sanctions are unlawful and OFAC may not impose a monetary penalty or any other sanction against Reverend Boyle."
Molly Millerwise, a treasury spokeswoman, said the agency would not comment on any individual case.
She said prepenalty notices are typically sent out 30 days before a fine is imposed, and that the agency sometimes drops the matter, depending on the response.
The department also refers some cases to the Justice Department for criminal prosecution.
At least three others are in a similar predicament.
Judith Carpova, a 59-year-old freelance journalist who splits her time between Hudson County, N.J., and the Hudson Valley in New York State, also faces a $10,000 fine. Her lawyer, Michael Sussman, said Carpova's response, also due Friday, was similar to Boyle's.
"We're basically all on the same page," Sussman said.
--------
Puerto Rican Kayakers Carry Enviro Message Against All Odds
August 6, 2004
VIEQUES, Puerto Rico, (ENS)
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/aug2004/2004-08-06-09.asp#anchor8
Members of the enviromental group Amigos del Mar (Friends of the Sea) are carrying out a series of environmental awareness activities centering on the ecological integration of the Caribbean region despite the defection of the captain of their vessel, Francis Cruz.
They had planned a five day journey by kayak from Anegada to Puerto Rico.
Cruz left the group of five environmentalists stranded on the island of Tortola Tuesday, taking all their provisions and the kayaks they had planned to use to make their journey.
Environmental leader Alberto de Jesus (Tito Kayak) said, "Today we cannot get to Anegada as we had programmed. And without a doubt this journey will be much more difficult than we had planned. Although we are in unfavorable conditions and without economic resources, we maintain our high spirits and our determined will to continue until the end of this journey."
Chiri Vassallo of Vassallo Enterprises, sponsor of the event and the owner of the motor launch and both kayaks was not informed of the action by his employee, Cruz. Other members of the group could not guess at his motive for leaving.
"We will not stop," said de Jesus. "It will be difficult. Much more difficult. We have neither the equipment nor enough of the necessary provisions. We don't even have an escort launch for security. But we will continue our journey until the journey's end."
"We will continue with our pledge to take our message of solidarity with the regional integration of Caribbean Islands into environmental struggles," he said. "Friday we will be in Culebra, Saturday in Vieques and on Sunday we will arrive at Hucares Beach in Naguabo on the main island of Puerto Rico."
-------
------- OneList (submissions from subscribers)
------- Depleted Uranium Keeps On Killing!
-----------
Posted
without profit or payment for research and educational
purposes only,
in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107.