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NUCLEAR
Diplomacy Fails to Slow Advance of Nuclear Arms
Sudan says Eritrean soldiers massing along common border
US mulling 'many means' to keep nukes out of Iran
Rice Says World Is Determined to Prevent a Nuclear-Armed Iran
Iran says developing new missile as measure against Israel
UN nuclear inspectors return to Iraq
Iran's Looming Missile-cum-Nuclear Threat Sparks Fresh Tensions
Israel Distributes Radiation Pills
Army starts distributing radiation antidote
Bikini and the Hydrogen Bomb: A Fifty Year Perspective
Russia Concerned on Threat from U.S. Defense Shield
Al Qaeda's Pre-Election Plot
Ukraine starts commercial operation of new nuclear power unit
Ukraine Launches New Atomic Reactor
Nevada Ponders Superfund Status for Mine
MILITARY
Bomb Kills 2 Soldiers in Afghanistan
6 G.I.'s Wounded in Afghan Attacks
Sudan Accepts African Troops, but No Peacekeepers, in Darfur
Arab League Says Sanctions Would Worsen Sudan Crisis
Agent Orange, the Next Generation
Marines, Insurgents Clash for Third Day
Marines Pushing Deeper Into City Held by Shiites
Iraqi Leader Appeals to Militants in Visit to Battle-Torn Najaf
Iraq Issues Warrants for Chalabi, Nephew
Outlaw Militia Plays Role of Ad Hoc Police Force
Sadr Aide Says Iraqi PM "Acting Like Saddam"
Two Palestinians Quit Cabinet Posts; Gaza Youth Is Killed
Israeli finance minister plans 300m dollar cut in defense budget
Ordered to just walk away
The lies that led to war
Kurds Are Seizing Property of U.N. In Iraq,
Hearing Recesses in England Case
Rwandan Accused in Genocide Wins Suit for U.N. Pay
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Iraq Reinstates Capital Punishment
Iraq Reimposes Death Penalty for Certain Crimes
Iraq Death-Penalty Decision Condemned
Homeland Security badge unites agencies
What, Us Worry? The New State of Disbelief
New Alert Shows That Intelligence Weaknesses Remain
New Technology Filling Defense Arsenal
Officials: Capitol Among New U.S. Terror Targets
Impervious Shield Elusive Against Drive-By Terrorists
Sensing the Eyes of Big Brother, and Pushing Back
Concerns with Patriot Act mount
Terror Suspect's Arrest Opens New Inquiries
Impervious Shield Elusive Against Drive-By Terrorists
U.S. Says Man Had Ties to Plot to Disrupt Vote
POLITICS
Terror suspect tells of 'abuse'
Iraq Orders Al Jazeera to Close Office in Baghdad for a Month
Iraqi Leader Orders Temporary Closing of Al Jazeera's Bureau in Baghdad
Kerry Defends Position on Iraq
Congress Split on Pace of Intelligence Reforms
OTHER
Homeless, Advocates Worry About Convention
IMF considers more loans to Turkey
ACTIVISTS
Iraq is the new Vietnam as pop protest returns to the airwaves
Lab rally to mark atomic bombings
ACLU SUIT: Police deny spying claims
-------- NUCLEAR
Diplomacy Fails to Slow Advance of Nuclear Arms
August 8, 2004
New York Times
By DAVID E. SANGER
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/08/politics/08nuke.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
KENNEBUNKPORT, Me., Aug. 7 - American intelligence officials and outside nuclear experts have concluded that the Bush administration's diplomatic efforts with European and Asian allies have barely slowed the nuclear weapons programs in Iran and North Korea over the past year, and that both have made significant progress.
In a tacit acknowledgment that the diplomatic initiatives with European and Asian allies have failed to slow the programs, several senior administration and intelligence officials say they are seeking ways to step up unspecified covert actions intended, in the words of one official, "to disrupt or delay as long as we can" Iran's efforts to develop a nuclear weapon.
But other experts, including former Clinton administration officials, caution that while covert efforts have been tried in the past, both the Iranian and North Korean programs are increasingly self-sufficient, largely thanks to the aid they received from the network built by Abdul Qadeer Khan, the former leader of the Pakistani bomb program. "It's a much harder thing to accomplish today," said one senior American intelligence official, "than it would have been in the 90's."
Mr. Khan has also worked against the Bush administration in North Korea. A new assessment of North Korea has come in one of three classified reports commissioned by the Bush administration earlier this year from the American intelligence community. Circulated last month, the report concluded that nearly 20 months of toughened sanctions, including terminating a major energy program, and several rounds of negotiations involving four of North Korea's most powerful neighbors have not slowed the North's efforts to develop plutonium weapons, and that a separate, parallel program to make weapons from highly enriched uranium was also moving forward, though more slowly.
The desire to pursue a broader strategy against Iran's nuclear ambitions is driven in part, officials say, by increasingly strong private statements by Israeli officials that they will not tolerate the development of an Iranian nuclear weapon, and may be forced to consider military action similar to the attack against a nuclear reactor in Iraq two decades ago if Tehran is judged to be on the verge of making a weapon. (In contrast, North Korea's neighbors, especially South Korea and China, are seeking stability first, and disarmament as a longer-term goal, diplomats from the region say.)
"The evidence suggests that Iran is trying to keep all of its options open," said Robert M. Gates, the director of central intelligence under President Bush's father, who recently headed a detailed study of Iran that was critical of what it called the administration's failure to engage the country. "They are trying to stay just within their treaty obligations" while producing highly enriched uranium, said Mr. Gates, who is now the president of Texas A&M University, "and I think they can go with a weapon whenever they want to."
Mr. Gates and other outside experts were interviewed at a four-day conference on the challenges of nuclear terrorism and the spread of other unconventional weapons held at the Aspen Institute last week. Separately over the past few weeks, five senior officials from the administration and Asian and European nations, all with varying access to the intelligence about the Iranian and North Korean programs, were interviewed about the current status of those programs. Not surprisingly, their judgments about the exact progress the two countries have made were not always in accord.
The new report on North Korea, which has circulated among senior American officials and has been described to The New York Times, appears to have been written far more cautiously than the National Intelligence Estimate that erroneously described advanced weapons programs in Iraq. It describes in detail vast gaps in American knowledge. For example, it acknowledges that the whereabouts of North Korea's stockpile of more than 8,000 spent nuclear fuel rods has been a mystery since early 2003, but also concludes that the North has had plenty of time to reprocess the rods into enough fuel for six to eight additional weapons. North Korea is judged to have two to six weapons already.
For its part, Iran has begun to assemble the necessary ingredients and perhaps the same crude, Chinese-origin bomb design that the Khan network sold to Libya - and may be just a few years away, intelligence experts have said.
Taken together, the intelligence conclusions pose both security and political challenges for President Bush, who is visiting here this weekend to attend a wedding and visit his parents at their seaside estate.
Mr. Bush has said he will not "tolerate" either country becoming a nuclear power, ignoring, at least publicly, the near certainty that North Korea has already reached that status. But he has never defined that term, or set deadlines. He is already under attack by the Democratic presidential candidate, Senator John Kerry, for allowing both countries to move forward in their programs while the White House concentrated on the one member of what Mr. Bush has called the "axis of evil," Iraq, that turned out to have virtually no evidence of a continuing program.
While the intelligence report on North Korea, which has also been described to some allies, was cautiously worded - the product, said to one official who has seen it, of "a chastened intelligence community" - it makes it clear that North Korea now probably has enough weapons-grade plutonium to test a weapon in the future, which would allow it to demonstrate its capacity. While it retained raw nuclear material under a 1994 accord with the Clinton administration, that material was under close surveillance until the inspectors were thrown out on Dec. 31, 2002.
"The conventional wisdom now is that they have completely reprocessed all of it," said Gary Samore, who headed nonproliferation efforts at the National Security Council under President Bill Clinton and has conducted a detailed assessment of North Korea for the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. "They had a huge window of opportunity when we were invading Iraq, and they appear to have made maximum use of it."
He noted that many analysts in the intelligence agencies believed that a "whiff" of a nuclear byproduct detected by an American spy plane off the coast of North Korea last year was evidence that the reprocessing was under way. But others note that the experiment was never successfully repeated. They say it is possible North Korea ran into difficulty in the chemical process of converting spent fuel into bomb material. "You can't assume a linear progression," said one senior American official.
Mr. Bush has said little recently about the Iranian and North Korean nuclear programs, in sharp contrast to his regular recitations about the danger posed by Iraq in the period before the war last year. When he and his aides do speak about the problem in public, they still refer to progress but mostly progress in getting other countries to put pressure on Iran and North Korea.
"It's very frustrating," said one former official who left the Bush administration recently and believes that the administration has failed to draw clear "red lines" beyond which North Korea would not be allowed to expand its arsenal. The official noted that Mr. Bush and his aides had been talking as if North Korea and Iran would follow the model of Libya, which disarmed earlier this year in an effort to re-integrate its economy with the West. But, the official argued, Iran does not need to do that because it has robust trade with Europe, and North Korea still receives considerable aid from China.
In the past two weeks Iran announced that it was resuming the production of centrifuges needed to produce highly enriched uranium though it has said it is still "suspending" actual enrichment activities. While the United States has threatened to take the issue to the United Nations Security Council, it has yet to win support from many allies.
North Korea has publicly rejected a new American initiative to allow international aid to flow gradually to the country in return for speedy disarmament and giving inspectors the right to examine any suspected site.
Several of Mr. Bush's aides have said they expect little concrete progress before the presidential election. The Iranians appear to be betting that Mr. Kerry, if elected, would talk directly to their leaders. Mr. Kerry has also said he would engage in bilateral discussions with North Korea; Mr. Bush has insisted on multilateral talks.
"They are doing what they can to delay the Iranian program and preparing military options," said one official who has dealt with the Israeli government on the issue, providing no details about what they might be. But it is unclear that the Israelis have the military reach to strike Iran's facilities. Moreover, American intelligence officials say, Iran learned from the Iraqi experience and has spread its nuclear facilities around the country, including in crowded urban areas as a defense against such a strike.
-------- africa
Sudan says Eritrean soldiers massing along common border
KHARTOUM (AFP)
Aug 08, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040808124837.k3tx0i4u.html
Sudan has accused neighboring Eritrea of reinforcing its troops along their border to support an imminent offensive by Sudanese opposition forces based on Eritrean soil, the Sudan Media Center reported Sunday.
The Center, an information outlet with close ties to the government, quoted the governor of the eastern state of Kassala, General Farouq Ahmed Nour, as saying that the move "comes in the context of a plot aimed at escalating military operations" in the east of the country.
The aim of the plan, he claimed, was to support an offensive planned by eastern Sudanese opposition forces based in Eritrea.
"The Eritrean reinforcements indicate a major plan expected to be carried out by rebel forces consisting of the Free Lions, the Darfur rebels and the Beja Congress backed by the government of (Issaias) Afeworki," Nour said.
The governor added that the opposition forces were being trained and armed by Eritrean authorities.
"The eastern front has now become a target of Eritrean military operations against Sudan," Nour asserted. As a result of these developments, Sudanese forces stationed in and around the Gulsah border area have been instructed to remain there indefinitely, according to Nour.
He also pointed out that those forces have been placed on a higher state of alert. "We have taken the necessary arrangements to face any emergency," said Nour.
Khartoum has consistently accused Asmara of supporting opposition groups bent on overthrowing the government of President Omar el-Beshir, a charge Eritrea vehemently denies.
The latest charge comes as Sudan is under strong international pressure over its heavy-handed treatment of unrest in Darfur, which lies in the west of the country neighboring Chad.
-------- iran
US mulling 'many means' to keep nukes out of Iran
WASHINGTON (AFP)
Aug 08, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040808140118.p1yt4j7n.html
White House national security adviser Condoleezza Rice on Sunday said the United States could not rule out taking covert action against Iran to disrupt its nuclear weapons program.
"We will use many means to try to disrupt these programs," Rice told NBC television. "The president will look at all the tools that are available to us."
Rice was asked about a New York Times report that quoted unnamed senior US officials as saying they were seeking to step up covert actions against Iran "to disrupt or delay as long as we can" Tehran's nuclear weapons drive.
"We are having diplomatic successes, but these are very tough problems," Rice said.
"For a long time ... we were the only who ones who seemed to think that Iran really did have an aggressive program to try to develop nuclear weapons," she said.
"We are now getting stronger (International Atomic Energy Agency) action against them. We believe in September we will get a very strong statement out of the (IAEA) board that Iran will either be isolated or it will submit to the will of the international community."
US Secretary of State Colin Powell said last month that it was "more and more likely" that Iran would be referred to the UN Security Council by the IAEA as a possible prelude to sanctions.
The United States has accused Iran of wantonly flouting international calls to curb its nuclear activities, saying Tehran is engaged in a "direct challenge" to the UN's nuclear watchdog.
The European Union's "big three" -- Britain, France and Germany -- have been pressing Iran to cease working on the nuclear fuel cycle in exchange for increased trade and cooperation and the guaranteed supply of nuclear fuel from abroad.
Such work is permitted under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), but fears persist that once fully mastered, a country possessing such technology can easily divert it into military usage.
Many diplomats believe that even if Iran is not working on nuclear weapons now, it would like to have the option in the future. Tehran, meanwhile, denies charges it is seeking to develop a nuclear bomb.
Iran has agreed to temporarily suspend enrichment pending the completion of an International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) probe, but is working on other parts of the fuel cycle and has recently resumed making centrifuges used for enrichment.
----
Rice Says World Is Determined to Prevent a Nuclear-Armed Iran
August 8, 2004
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-US-Iran.html?hp
WASHINGTON (AP) -- With Iran stepping up its nuclear program, a top White House aide said Sunday the world finally is ``worried and suspicious'' over the Iranians' intentions and is determined not to let Tehran produce a nuclear weapon.
National security adviser Condoleezza Rice also said the Bush administration sees a new international willingness to act against Iran's nuclear program. She credited the changed attitude to the Americans' insistence that Iran's effort put the world in peril.
She would not say whether the United States would act alone to end the program if the administration could not win international support.
Iran's foreign minister, Kamal Kharrazi, announced a week ago that his country had resumed building nuclear centrifuges. He said Iran was retaliating for the West's failure to force the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency to close its file on possible Iranian violations of nuclear nonproliferation rules.
Kharrazi said Iran was not resuming enrichment of uranium, which requires a centrifuge. But, he said, Iran had restarted manufacturing the device because Britain, Germany and France had not stopped the investigation by the International Atomic Energy Agency.
``The United States was the first to say that Iran was a threat in this way, to try and convince the international community that Iran was trying, under the cover of a civilian nuclear program, to actually bring about a nuclear weapons program,'' Rice said on CNN's ``Late Edition.''
``I think we've finally now got the world community to a place, and the International Atomic Energy Agency to a place, that it is worried and suspicious of the Iranian activities,'' she said. ``Iran is facing for the first time real resistance to trying to take these steps.''
Bush, in his 2002 State of the Union address, included Iran with North Korea and Iraq in an ``axis of evil'' dedicated to developing nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction.
Since then, North Korea has publicly resumed its nuclear development program. In Iraq, invading U.S.-led forces have found no such programs after President Saddam Hussein was deposed.
Iran announced in June that it would resume its centrifuge program. Afterward, the U.S. official whose job is to slow the global atomic arms race, Undersecretary of State John R. Bolton, told Congress that Iran was jabbing ``a thumb in the eye of the international community.''
On NBC's ``Meet the Press,'' Rice reasserted that the world has fallen in line on Iran and said she expects next month to get a very strong statement from the IAEA ``that Iran will either be isolated, or it will submit to the will of the international community.''
She also said, ``We cannot allow the Iranians to develop a nuclear weapon. The international community has got to find a way to come together and to make certain that that does not happen.''
(SUBS 11th graf, `Bush, in his xxx to correct 2003 to 2002)
--------
Iran says developing new missile as measure against Israel
By Gideon Alon,
Haaretz, and The Associated Press
08/08/2004
http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/spages/461582.html
Iranian Defense Minister Ali Shamkhani said Saturday that Iran is developing its Shihab-3 missile as a measure against Israel's missile power, which Tehran concluded tests of last year.
The missile is thought to be capable of carrying a 1,000-kilogram warhead over a distance of some 1,300 kilometers, allegedly bringing Israel within missile range.
While Shamkhani denied any kind of nuclear military activity by Iran, he said his country would not leave its people without defense.
"That's why we have to invest on nuclear defense preparation," he added without elaborating.
Last week, the commander of the Air Force's Air Defense Corps, Brigadier General Ilan Biton, briefed the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee on the successful test of the Arrow anti-missile system. Biton noted that "the Arrow has very good capabilities to disable Scud missiles, but its ability to intercept Iranian made long-range Shihab missiles was merely 'good.' There is room for improving the capabilities," he said.
MKs attending the meeting had said they understood from Biton's briefing that the Arrow did not provide protection from Shihab missiles, but only from Scuds and long-range Katyusha rockets. The director of the Israeli plant that manufactures the Arrow told the committee that Israel currently has a stock of a few dozen operational missiles.
The White House has been trying to haul Iran before the United Nations Security Council based on accusations that the Persian state has been trying to build nuclear weapons against its Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty obligations. Iran maintains its nuclear program is entirely peaceful, geared toward production of nuclear energy.
-------- iraq / inspections
UN nuclear inspectors return to Iraq
The search for WMDs in Iraq has proven futile
Sunday 08 August 2004,
Agencies (Aljazeera)
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/887734B9-B166-47C7-A17B-817A62BD33DC.htm
UN nuclear inspectors have visited Iraq to complete an inventory of the country's declared nuclear material.
The visit - the first since last year's US-led invasion of Iraq - was aimed at ensuring that declared nuclear material already under International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards was not being used for undeclared activity.
IAEA spokesman Melissa Fleming said the visit had nothing to do with weapons inspections.
"WMD? It was not the purpose of their trip," she said.
Inspectors from the IAEA and the United Nations Monitoring Verification and Inspections Commission (UNMOVIC) left Iraq just before the US-led attack on the country in March last year.
Pretext for war
Although the war was fought under the pretext of unearthing and destroying Iraq's stockpile of weapons of mass destruction, no such weapons have been found and many analysts predict none will be found.
IAEA Director-General Muhammad al-Baradai said the mission was essential "to draft the final report on the absence of WMDs in Iraq so that the international community can lift the remaining sanctions on Iraq".
The IAEA and UNMOVIC were the two UN agencies charged with searching for WMDs in Iraq. The IAEA led the search for nuclear weapons while UNMOVIC looked for biological and chemical weapons.
----
Iran's Looming Missile-cum-Nuclear Threat Sparks Fresh Tensions
DEBKAfile
Special Military Report
August 8, 2004,
http://www.debka.com/article.php?aid=888
Saturday night, August 7, Iranian defense minister Admiral Ali Shamkhani came out with a disturbing announcement. He said Iran will soon test an improved version of its new ballistic Shehab-3 missile whose 1300-km range covers every part of Israel.
"These improvements do not only concern its range, but other specifications as well," said the Iranian minister, adding "The Israelis are trying hard to improve the capacity of their missiles, and we are also trying to improve the Shehab-3 in a short time." He offered no details on either upgrade, saying only: "We will improve the missile and when we test it, in the very short future, we will let you know." If attacked, Iran would not leave its people without defense, he stressed.
Shamkhani also denied any Iranian cooperation with North Korea in missile technology - as suggested in Washington - stressing that the Islamic Republic does not need it.
In between emphasizing defense, Shamkhani issued a dire warning to Israel not to dare attack its nuclear sites.
DEBKAfile notes that the Shehab-3 missile's first unveiling was accompanied by the pledge: "We will wipe Israel off the map," a theme that recurs every Friday sermon in Iran's mosques and its official pronouncements. In view of the Tehran hardline regime's admitted strategic commitment to Israel's destruction, Iran's nuclear program combined with the development of its Shehab-3 is seen by policymakers in Jerusalem as the greatest threat to Israel's existence since 1948.
Iran's processing facilities for enriching the uranium necessary to building nuclear weapons are carefully dispersed in several subterranean sites. They are built in bunkers, often tens of meters deep, under densely populated urban centers, in the hope of deterring the Americans and the Israelis from attacking them.
Nonetheless, the Iranians do not feel safe. The defense minister believes Israel is developing a new type of depth bomb able to penetrate buried sites or wipe out electronics with electro-magnetic energy bursts. Tehran's defense specialists are also keeping a watchful eye on the war tactics employed by the US military before, during and since the invasion of Iraq and against the Iraqi guerrilla war. They regard the Iraq precedent as a potential dress rehearsal for a possible US military operation against Iran.
Iranian military chiefs avidly read American publications on new weaponry - for instance, US Air Force research on a 9.5 tonne Massive Ordnance Air-burst Bomb capable of hitting mountain bunkers, whose warhead is as powerful as a small nuclear bomb. This weapon is designed to replace the biggest conventional US bomb, the 7.5 tonne Daisy Cutter, used at least twice in Afghanistan against mountain caves.
The Iranians are also worried by the airborne GBI-28 bunker busters the Americans used in the capture of Baghdad and in another airborne or cruise missile-carried BLU-114B bomb that is capable of knocking out the electricity grids of whole cities. There are reports of an "E-bomb" under development, whose microwave beams can massively damage electronic circuitry over a large area.
International media, furthermore, have reported at least one Israeli Dolphin submarine carrying cruise missiles with nuclear warheads to be lurking in waters just outside the Persian Gulf between the Indian Ocean and the Gulf of Aden. Israel's Ofek 4 spy satellite is also able to track Iran's nuclear activities.
Iran is concerned by these new weapons and devices because they are armed with deep underground penetration capabilities, or geared to crippling electric and electronic systems in urban areas. Iran's subterranean nuclear plants are therefore potentially vulnerable - even in their subterranean lairs under cities. Iran's regime and military leaders live in fear of waking up one morning to find that an Israeli or an American strike has wiped out their nuclear option just when it is closest to their grasp.
Although Tehran's highly effective procrastination maneuvers have paid off so far in keeping diplomatic, military and economic hurdles at bay, defense minister Shamkhani finds it necessary to issue a warning threat to Israel. In the last ten days, these threats have intensified as a result of certain key developments inside Iran.
One, According to DEBKAfile's Iranian sources, Iran's radical spiritual ruler Ali Khamenei convened a high-powered secret conference Sunday, August 1, to underline a policy of nuclear brinkmanship in the face of the US-led international outcry against its nuclear weapons program. The decision to tough it out was endorsed by the assembled leadership group of former president Hashemi Rafsanjani, secretary of the national security council and liaison on nuclear matters with international institutions Hassan Rouhani, Iran's former delegation to the IAEA Ali Akbar Salehi, head of foreign affairs commission of NSC Seyyed Hossein Moussavian and also defense minister Shakhmani.
A tough line against America automatically begets a doubly aggressive attitude towards Israel.
Two, Some of the new Shehab-3 missiles have been deployed secretly in central Iran - both as a shield for the nuclear plants against air, ground or naval attack and as a retaliatory option against attackers.
Knocking out this deployment would leave the industry susceptible to attack and nullify Iran's deterrent.
The comment by Israel's air defense commander that Israel's Arrow II anti-missile missile system successfully tested last week against a Scud would not be effective against an Iranian multiple warhead Shehab 3 was taken with a pinch of salt by the ayatollahs who live in suspicion of trickery. But it does leave teasing questions about what Israel can do to prevent the deployment of the soon-to-be tested improved Shehab-3 batteries pointing in the direction of the Jewish state.
Sunday, August 8, the New York Times reported: American intelligence officials and outside nuclear experts have concluded that the Bush administration's diplomatic efforts with European and Asian allies have barely slowed weapons programs in Iran and North Korea over the past year and both have made significant progress. Senior administration and intelligence officials, the paper reports, say they are seeking ways to step up unspecified covert actions.
The NYT report is sourced to Kennebunkport, the Bush family's summer residence.
The Shakhmanei threat and this report come together with the distribution in southern Israel Sunday, August 8, of Lugol radiation antidote capsules to people living in the triangle formed by Israel's nuclear center at Dimona, Arad and Eilat on the Red Sea. Home Command soldiers are handing these iodine dose packages - not to be opened until ordered - round homes in Dimona, Yeruham, Arara, Kseifa and Bedouin Negev settlements. Instructions in Hebrew, Arabic, English, Russian and Amharic are attached. Distribution centers will also stock the antidote and extra doses made available for growing families.
Lugol is being handed out in case of an accidental leak from the Dimona reactor, say Israeli officials. They are talking less about the danger of nuclear fallout from a possible strike by an Iranian Shehab-3 missile.
In the 1991 Gulf War, Saddam Hussein did shoot a Scud missile against Dimona. It carried a warhead packed with cement for smashing through the reactor's dome but missed its target and fell in the sand without causing damage.
-------- israel
Israel Distributes Radiation Pills
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
August 8, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Israel-Radiation-Pills.html
DIMONA, Israel (AP) -- Israeli soldiers began distributing radiation sickness pills Sunday in towns near one of Israel's two nuclear reactors, as a precautionary measure in case of radioactive leaks.
Security officials said the tablets have long been held in storage for distribution in case of emergency, but after two years of talks with Israel's Atomic Energy Commission, the Cabinet recently decided that those in risk areas should have the pills at home, to cut down on reaction time in the event of an accident.
Distribution began Sunday in Dimona, where one reactor is located, and in other nearby towns and villages in southern Israel's Negev desert, a military statement said. Security officials said a further round was planned at a later date for the area near the Nahal Sorek plant, southwest of Jerusalem.
Dimona resident Tali Peretz told Israel Army Radio the distribution should have been ordered years ago.
``It shouldn't take a committee two years to reach the very simple conclusion that it is not possible at a moment of crisis distribute the tablets to almost 200,000 residents,'' she said.
The pills are an iodine compound that blocks absorption of radioactive material by shutting down the thyroid gland.
The army statement made a point of stressing the safeguards surrounding Israeli nuclear facilities.
``Reactors in Israel are operated and maintained in accordance with the highest safety standard and are continuously supervised by professionals,'' it said.
Israel has had nuclear technology for decades but refuses to comment on reports it has nuclear bombs, saying only that it will not be the first country to introduce nuclear weapons to the region.
In 1986, former Dimona technician Mordechai Vanunu provided photographs and descriptions of the reactor to The Sunday Times of London. Based on Vanunu's material, experts said at the time that Israel has the world's sixth-largest stockpile of nuclear weapons.
Vanunu was released in April after serving 18 years in an Israeli prison for treason. He remains subject to restrictions, including a ban on meeting foreigners and leaving the country.
----
Army starts distributing radiation antidote
August 8, 2004
By Nir Hasson,
Haaretz Correspondent,
http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/spages/461606.html
The IDF Home Command started distributing Lugol, an antidote to radiation, in areas close to the Nuclear Research Center in Dimona on Sunday. The antidote is intended to protect residents from radioactive fallout from any missile attack on the nuclear station, or in case of a reactor accident. The pills are iodine capsules that reduce the absorption of radioactive iodine and bolster the body's immune system. They will be distributed every day for the two weeks between 4 P.M. and 8 P.M.
The pills are being distributed in Dimona, Yehorham, Ar'ara and Kseifa, and the unrecognized Beduin villages Al-Hawashla, Abu-Krinat, Al-Azzma and others in the Negev. In the second stage, a few weeks later, the pills will be distributed in Arad and the towns and communities of the Dead Sea and the Arava - Neveh Zohar, Hatzeva, Not Hakikar, Idan and Tamar.
The mayor of Arad, Motti Brill, objects to the pills being distributed in his town. A former engineer in the Nuclear Research Center, Brill says that based on his personal knowledge of the center, there is no need for Lugol pills and the distribution would seriously damage Arad's image.
Soldiers will provide each family with the pills and a leaflet in Hebrew, Arabic, English, Russian and Amharic explaining their purpose and how to keep them. The Home Front Command cautioned people not to open the packages or take the pills unless they get explicit instructions to do so.
Every person will get a pack of five Lugol capsules and family packages will include extra tablets according to the IDF estimate of a family's projected growth in the next five years, a Home Front officer said. Packets of pills will be distributed to public institutions, schools, hotels and plants. "Each citizen will have an extra pill waiting for him somewhere in case the incident happens in the morning when people are not home," the officer said.
Dimona resident Tali Peretz told Israel Army Radio the distribution should have been ordered years ago.
"It shouldn't take a committee two years to reach the very simple conclusion that it is not possible at a moment of crisis distribute the tablets to almost 200,000 residents," she said.
-------- pacific
Bikini and the Hydrogen Bomb: A Fifty Year Perspective
August 08, 2004
by Tomaki Juda and Charles J. Hanley
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=17&ItemID=6005
[2004 is the fiftieth anniversary of the Hydrogen Bomb test at Bikini that has rendered the island and nearby atolls uninhabitable ever since. Two earlier Japan Focus articles portrayed the impact of the blast on the crew of the Japanese fishing boat Lucky Dragon, and the subsequent course of the anti-nuclear movement. The two articles presented here detail the consequences of atomic and hydrogen bomb testing on Bikini and neighboring atolls, including the consequences for displaced people, the continued failure of the U.S. government to clean up the radioactive islands, and the long stalled negotiations with the U.S. government to compensate the people of Bikini.]
"If Bravo had been set off in Washington and the fallout headed northeast, everyone from Washington to Boston would be dead": Statement by Senator Tomaki Juda on the 50th Anniversary the H-Bomb Test on Bikini
Today, March 1, is the 50th anniversary of the Bravo shot -- the largest U.S. nuclear test in history. It is a sad day for us and for our friends and relatives all around the Marshall Islands. That test, that day -- like radiation itself -- still lingers in the Marshall islands after half a century, and, like radiation, it will not go away.
Most people here know the story of our people. It is in history books, government reports, and films. Next Saturday, March 6, will mark the 58th anniversary of the day that we were moved off our islands by the U.S. Navy for Operation Crossroads, the first tests of atomic weapons after World War II.
We were first moved to Rongerik, where we nearly starved to death, then to Kwajalein, and then finally to Kili in 1948. Sadly, Kili remains home to most Bikinians, and life there remains difficult. Kili is a single island, while Bikini Atoll has 23 islands and a 243-square mile lagoon. Its land area is more than nine times bigger than Kili. To make matters worse, our population is 15 times larger today than what it was in 1946. Kili has no sheltered fishing grounds, so our skills for lagoon life are useless on Kili. In the past, we sailed our outrigger canoes to lands, fish and islands as far as the eye could see. Today, we are prisoners, trapped on one small island, with no reef and no lagoon.
Meanwhile, between 1946 and 1958, the United States tested 23 atomic and hydrogen bombs at Bikini, including the 1954 Bravo shot, which was, at the time, the largest manmade explosion in the history of the world. It is hard to imagine the deadly force of Bravo:
It was equal to the force of nearly 1,000 Hiroshima bombs.
It created a fireball four miles wide that vaporized the entire test island and parts of two others, leaving a hole in Bikini's lagoon one mile wide and 200 feet deep.
It destroyed most of the buildings on an island 14 miles across the lagoon to the south.
It was so powerful that it caused the concrete detonation bunker on Eneu Island, 24 miles away, to move off its foundation.
At Kwajalein, 250 miles away, there were high winds, and the buildings shook as if there had been an earthquake.
As we all know, there was a so-called "unexpected" shift in the winds, sending fallout east instead of north, right over Bikini Island and downwind to Rongelap and Utrik.
The deadly fallout covered an area of 7,000 square miles. How large an area is that? Let's put it this way: If Bravo had been set off in Washington and the fallout headed northeast, everyone from Washington to Boston would be dead.
In fact, President Eisenhower told a press conference in late March of that year that U.S. scientists were "surprised and astonished" at the size of the Bravo shot.
And what about our people? We have been exiles from our homeland since 1946, except for a brief period after President Lyndon Johnson announced in 1968 that Bikini was safe and the people could return. Many of us returned and lived there until 1978, when medical tests by U.S. doctors revealed that we had ingested the largest amounts of radioactive material of any known population.
History sadly repeated itself in late August 1978, as U.S. ships once again entered our lagoon and the Bikini people packed up and left. What went wrong? AEC scientists estimated the dose of radiation we would receive on Bikini, but they made an error in arithmetic, which threw off their calculations by a factor of 100. "We just plain goofed," one of the scientists told a reporter at the time.
Only one good thing resulted from Bravo. It was so awful and frightening that it set off a huge international debate that eventually led to the U.S. moratorium on atmospheric nuclear testing and the U.S.-Soviet Union Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty signed by President Kennedy shortly before he was killed in 1963.
The tragedy of Bravo continues to haunt our people today. Fifty years have gone by, but Bravo is still with us. From March 1, 1954 until today, our islands remain heavily contaminated with radiation. We wait and we wait, not knowing when we can return home.
Now you know why March is a time of sadness and memory for the people of Bikini. Thank you.
This article appeared at YokweOnline, February 29, 2004. Hon. Senator Tomaki Juda, youngest son of King Juda, who was the traditional Bikini leader, was elected Mayor in 1972 and served until 2000 when he was elected Senator.
"The megatonnage [of U.S. nuclear tests in the Marshall Islands] was equal to exploding 1.6 Hiroshima atomic bombs a day for 12 years": Bikinians Hope to Return Home after Fifty Year Exile
By CHARLES J. HANLEY
EJIT, Marshall Islands. A harmony of soulful voices and hopeful words drifted up from the whitewashed church and out over the island.
"Standing ... Standing ... I'm standing on the promises of God."
Women with flowers in their hair, men in neat Sunday shirts, joined in the hymn to a promised future. Children crowding the concrete floor listened. Beneath a pew, in the morning heat, a dog lay panting.
The pastor, stepping up to his pulpit, commended the 100-strong congregation for their undying faith. We are like the children of Israel, Lannij Johnson told the people of Bikini.
But outside, in the church's shadows, another Bikinian sounded a less faithful note.
"The children of Israel wandered in the desert for only 40 years," Alson Kelen, 36, reminded a visitor. Already the people of Bikini _ "the children of America," they call themselves _ have wandered for 58, and their journey, more than ever, looks like an exodus without end.
On March 17 in Washington, 7,000 miles east of here, the U.S. House of Representatives unanimously adopted a resolution hailing the half-century "strategic partnership" with these people of the mid-Pacific, a partnership in which they lost their home islands to U.S. nuclear bomb tests, and from which they fear Washington may soon walk away.
The resolution noted "the cost of preserving peace." But the U.S. government, after $191 million disbursed since the 1970s, is offering nothing new to the Bikinians, no further compensation to revive hopes that Bikini atoll might be purged of lingering radioactivity, and Bikinians might return to the abandoned islands.
Jack Niedenthal, Bikinian by marriage and a spokesman for the islanders, believes that Washington, while spending billions elsewhere around the world, has not repaid its debt here.
"When you look at what they're doing in Iraq, in Afghanistan ..." He paused. "We're their friends, and here we sit a half-century later. We're sitting here."
The House resolution commemorated the day, March 1, 1954, when the United States set off a hydrogen bomb test, dubbed Bravo, at the western end of Bikini atoll -- 23 coral islands ringing a 25-mile-wide lagoon in the northern Marshalls. It was the biggest U.S. nuclear blast in history.
The islanders had been evacuated eight years earlier, at the start of the U.S. testing program. Their chief, known by the single name Juda, said then they were agreeing to it because he'd been told that the bombs would produce "kindness and benefit to all mankind," and his people could return after the tests.
Because of shifting winds, and because U.S. bomb-makers had vastly underestimated the power of the monstrous Bravo explosion, it unexpectedly dumped heavy fallout on the main island of Bikini, and even farther away on inhabited atolls, Rongelap and Utrik, whose people have been afflicted by severe medical problems ever since.
In all, between 1946 and 1958, the United States detonated 67 nuclear tests in the Marshall Islands, then a U.S. protectorate under the United Nations. The megatonnage was equal to exploding 1.6 Hiroshima atomic bombs a day for 12 years. Twenty-three tests took place at Bikini, and four of its islets were vaporized.
By 1948, the wandering Bikinians had been settled on rockbound Kili, a tiny, undesirable island in the southern Marshalls, where they grew dependent on U.S. handouts of canned food. In the 1970s, reassured by U.S. scientists, some returned to Bikini, but they were re-evacuated in 1978, having absorbed dangerous amounts of radioactive cesium. The Americans had mistakenly judged Bikini to be safe.
Many of those evacuees landed here on uninhabited Ejit, a palmy, half-mile-long island in Majuro atoll, capital of the Marshalls, which today are an independent nation closely tied to the United States.
By island standards, life here is comfortable -- telephone, electricity, even $25-a-month cable television for those who can afford it. But the water supply, via catchment rainwater, often runs low, and the simple cinderblock housing is cramped, in a settlement one can walk across in three minutes.
Because of a high birthrate and marriages to people from other islands, the count of "official" Bikinians has exploded, to more than 3,000, since Chief Juda led 167 off the island in 1946. About 1,000 live on isolated Kili, some 400 on Ejit, and others on the main island of Majuro or in the United States, where 300 students are in schools.
In exile, a culture of atomic victimhood has evolved.
Ejit's schoolchildren, in their rudimentary classrooms, sport orange T-shirts emblazoned with an atomic bomb's mushroom cloud, a Bible, and the trusting motto ascribed to Juda: "Men Otemjej Rej Ilo Bein Anij," Marshallese for "Everything is in the hands of God."
Those hands will lead them back to Bikini, islanders believe. And "if it is cleaned completely, they would go back 100 percent," said the late chief's son, Tomaki Juda, 60, the Bikini senator in the Marshalls' legislature.
Younger generations hear almost mythical tales of a pristine Bikini, where fish abounded in the lagoon, and outer islands covered with coconut, pandanus and breadfruit trees fed the people.
"Yes, I'd like to live there," Rosalina Jakeo, 25, told a visitor to Ejit, where she was found idly strumming a ukulele outside her house. "Compared to this" -- she gestured around crowded Ejit -- "it's a nice place."
After church, Jake Risino, 19, said she'd often heard from her parents about Bikini, 500 miles away, and she'd like to go there. "It's my home." But what about the 1-year-old daughter on her hip? No, she said, "I want her to get educated and go to America."
Younger Bikinians, like Risino, are quick to discard the dream and recall the reality when asked about the future.
"It would be kind of scary to live there," said a Bikinian schoolteacher, Berman Caleb, 25. "I don't know if it's safe."
More and more, America is the promised land.
A few Bikinians have congregated -- for work, through family connections -- in such places as Springdale, Ark., and Costa Mesa, Calif.
But people here say the shy, poorly educated islanders aren't likely to emigrate individually in great numbers, even though Marshallese have open access to the United States and even minimum-wage jobs there might multiply their incomes.
Over the years, Washington financed a patchwork of compensation funds for Bikinians and other Marshall Islanders affected by nuclear testing, including years of medical monitoring and care for Rongelap and Utrik islanders who developed high rates of cancer and other medical problems.
One remaining trust pays $220 a quarter to each Bikinian -- $4,400 a year for a family of five.
That trust was drawn from $75 million in reparations payments made under a "compact of free association" that the Marshall Islands negotiated with Washington in gaining independence in 1986. This was to be a "full and final" payment on all nuclear claims.
Other U.S. money enabled the Bikinians in the mid-1990s to do preparatory work for a "big scrape" -- removal of 15 inches of cesium-laced topsoil from 100 acres of Bikini island, the atoll's main living area. But that work halted when the Bikinians opted for a strict U.S. standard for decontamination, a more expensive approach.
Then, in 2001, a Majuro-based Nuclear Claims Tribunal, created under the compact, held that the Bikinians should be awarded an additional $563 million in damages, including $251 million for restoring Bikini.
Because that tribunal had less than $10 million available, the Marshall Islands government petitioned Congress, asking that the U.S. government make those payments. In 2002, Congress asked the Bush administration to review the request.
The administration is expected to finally report on the issue this summer, said Brian Kennedy, spokesman for the House Resources Committee, which has jurisdiction. He said the committee would then decide "how and if" to take action.
A State Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the petition had been put aside for two years as government experts dealt with a higher priority: renegotiating general financial aid for the Marshalls after the 15-year accord expired in 2001.
Niedenthal sounds pessimistic. "It looks like the U.S. is walking away from things," said the 46-year-old Harrisburg, Pa., native and one-time Peace Corps volunteer in the Marshalls.
He said he also was worried by another new development: The U.S. Energy Department has cut funding for its field missions to check radiation and the environment in Bikini.
"They shut it down without telling us," said Hinton Johnson, an Ejit member of Bikini's governing council.
Energy Department spokesman Jeff Sherwood confirmed in Washington that environmental sampling at Bikini was suspended, saving $1.5 million this year, while a backlog of earlier work is analyzed. But he says it will be resumed at some undetermined point.
A leading champion of the Bikinians is the president of the Marshalls, Kessai Note, a Bikinian himself, first elected in 2000 to lead this nation of scattered atolls and 57,000 people.
The Americans "could have done more to help the Bikinians," Note, 53, said in an interview at his Majuro office. At a Bikinian funeral the night before, he said, "I spoke of injustice. These are people who have been away from their homeland for 50 years. That's a lifetime. And it doesn't look like they'll return anytime in the near future."
Kelen Joash, 74, a Sunday regular at Pastor Johnson's church, has more faith.
"America can do it," said Joash, who was 16 when taken from Bikini. "Maybe it can't be Bikini, but maybe the U.S. can find someplace else for us -- big enough for a growing population."
After all, he added, reaching back to hopeful words first heard when he was young, "we're the children of America."
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Russia Concerned on Threat from U.S. Defense Shield
10.08.2004
Moscow News
http://www.mosnews.com/news/2004/08/10/starwars.shtml
Russia says a United States deal with Denmark to upgrade a radar in north-western Greenland has raised fresh security concerns over Washington's planned missile defense shield, known as 'son of star wars', Reuters reports.
In 2001, Moscow argeed to a U.S. decision to abandon the bilateral 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and develop a missile defense system after Washington said it wanted to defend itself against strikes from states like Iran or North Korea.
"The United States has more than once assured us that the future missile defense system will not be targeted against Russia," Reuters quoted the Russian Foreign ministry as saying in a statement. "However, the very geography of the radar in Greenland gives us reasons to think that even at this stage the U.S. missile defense could potentially threaten Russia's national security."
The deal, which the United States signed Friday, allows Washington to upgrade the Thule radar to use it in a chain of similar U.S. installations stretching from Alaska to Australia designed to avert potential missile attacks against North America.
Reports earlier this year that Washington planned to deploy elements of its missile shield on the territories of new NATO members in Eastern and Central Europe alarmed Moscow.
"Russia will carefully analyze the situation from the point of view of its own security and reserves the right to take all appropriate measures to maintain it on an appropriate level," Reuters quoted the ministry statement as saying.
The Russian military has said it does not believe the U.S. missile shield will be effective and said it will not be a major security problem for Moscow in the next 25-30 years.
-------- terrorism
Al Qaeda's Pre-Election Plot
Exclusive: With an eye on striking America, bin Laden's network is hard at work. On the trail of its targets and tactics
August 8, 2004
Newsweek
By Daniel Klaidman and Evan Thomas
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5636197/site/newsweek/
Aug. 16 issue - It's called the president's Daily Threat Report (PDTR), or, in bureaucratic shorthand, the Putter. The document is so secret that only about a half-dozen people in the U.S. government are allowed to see it. When the Putter contains especially sensitive information, a red stripe runs down the side. At 6:40 a.m. on Friday, July 30, Fran Townsend, the president's homeland-security adviser and counterterror chief for the national-security staff, opened up her red-striped Putter and received a jolt.
For several months, the U.S. government had been picking up reports from its spies, electronic intercepts and "liaison services" (friendly intelligence services) of a Qaeda plot to strike the American homeland before the November election. High-level Qaeda operatives had been traveling from around the world to the outlaw wilds along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, apparently to meet and plan, NEWSWEEK has learned. These terror summits had an uncanny resemblance to the Qaeda meeting in Malaysia in January 2000 that firmed up the 9/11 plot. But no one seemed to know the essential details: What were the targets? When would Al Qaeda strike? And were the attackers already in the United States?
The Friday-morning Putter revealed that an undercover operation on the far side of the world was starting to bear fruit. In mid-July, the Pakistanis, working with the CIA, had arrested a Qaeda operative named Mohammed Neem Noor Khan and "flipped" him-turned him into an undercover agent who could lead investigators right into the Qaeda network. The 25-year-old computer engineer was a Qaeda facilitator, a midlevel logistics man who knew and communicated with the top operatives meeting to plan an attack on the United States. In an interview with NEWSWEEK, Townsend recalled thinking, "This is the real deal"-a chance to crack the plot.
It was the break the Feds had been praying for, but, unfortunately, also a chance to further bewilder the American public, who have been made fearful, cynical or just plain dizzy by trips up and down the threat ladder. In an effort to sort out what to believe, NEWSWEEK spoke with most of the senior intelligence officials involved in assessing what they call the "pre-election" plot. Constrained by secrecy and a desire to put a positive spin on the story, these officials were not entirely forthcoming, but they did reveal enough to gauge the seriousness of the Qaeda plot. The more difficult question is whether the public revelations not only unduly frightened the American people but, in the long run, made them less safe. U.S. officials firmly deny it, but a knowledgeable British source argues that, by going public, Bush administration officials compromised an ongoing surveillance operation that ultimately could have uncovered more about Al Qaeda operations around the world. Top U.S. intelligence officials do concede that they are often faced with difficult trade-offs-move now, and disrupt the plot? Or keep watching and waiting in hopes of learning more?
There can be little doubt that Al Qaeda is trying to strike the American homeland before Nov. 2. "We are in the midst of Al Qaeda efforts to attack the U.S. on a scale as big or larger than 9/11," says John Brennan, chief of the Terrorist Threat Integration Center, the interagency operation that consolidates threat information (and produces the Putter). The decision to raise the threat level to Code Orange ("high") last week was not, as partisans and conspiracists suggested, a Republican political stunt intended to slow John Kerry as he came out of the Democratic convention. But the announcement was clumsily handled, and the confusing press accounts that followed mostly obscured a larger and more important story.
The uncomfortable truth is that a frantic, multibillion-dollar, global intelligence effort has not been able to answer-definitively, at any rate-the scariest and most basic question: are there Qaeda operatives inside the United States? "We have to assume there are," says Townsend. "But we don't know. The reports are mixed." Certainly, at least a few Qaeda operatives have entered America at some point since 9/11. The FBI is hotly investigating whether Khan was one of them. And Khan's arrest has already led to the detention of some major Qaeda operatives in England and Pakistan, and will flush out still more in days to come.
But will the current crackdown roll up a sleeper cell in America? Or did the news of his arrest tip off other operatives, still unknown, who have gone to ground, possibly inside the United States? Presumably, the targeted institutions are now safe, or at least safer. But do the terrorists have a Plan B to simply shift to a different set of targets? Even with Osama bin Laden on the run and much of its former leadership dead or in jail, Al Qaeda's central command remains surprisingly strong. But have some of its operating cells simply slipped below the radar?
Townsend, a no-nonsense former mob prosecutor who wears Jimmy Choo spike heels (which typically go for about $450 a pair) and a bejeweled ring shaped like an American flag, is one of a core group of top officials who devote their lives to heading off the next attack. After reading the Putter that Friday morning, Townsend picked up the secure phone and called FBI Director Robert Mueller. "I was just about to call you," said Mueller, who had been reading his own copy of the Putter. From her basement office in the West Wing, Townsend hastened upstairs to see her boss, national-security adviser Condoleezza Rice. They had barely begun to talk when President George W. Bush, out on the campaign trail, called in from Air Force One. He, too, had been briefed on the alarming intel, and he began asking questions, trying to make sure, Rice told NEWSWEEK, "that we were on top of it."
By midmorning, most of the key officials from the CIA, Defense and Homeland Security were seated in the White House Situation Room or piped in by videophone. Khan, it turned out, owned a laptop computer with a trove of information on its discs and drives. The CIA was still working feverishly to download and decode the computer's files, reported Acting CIA Director John McLaughlin, but the initial findings were ominous. Al Qaeda, it appeared, was aiming at financial targets in New York and a city in a foreign country (NEWSWEEK sources declined to identify which one). By the next day, Saturday, July 31, the CIA had identified five buildings: the New York Stock Exchange in downtown Manhattan and the midtown Citigroup building; the Prudential Financial building in Newark, N.J., and the World Bank and International Monetary Fund in Washington, D.C. The buildings had been carefully cased: Al Qaeda scouts had delivered pages of detail on traffic patterns and structural weaknesses. McLaughlin later told NEWSWEEK that he was struck by the "sophistication" and "professionalism" of the reports.
The decision to go public was a no-brainer, several top officials insisted to NEWSWEEK. "It would have been unconscionable not to tell the New York Stock Exchange, or the World Bank, or Citigroup 'People have been casing your buildings and you need to be concerned about security'," says Rice. But the administration bungled the alert. On Sunday, Aug. 1, Tom Ridge, the decent, well-intentioned but politically tone-deaf head of the Department of Homeland Security, coupled his announcement of the buildings targeted by Al Qaeda with a plug for the president's antiterror policies. Ridge's sense of urgency and risk was underscored when police carrying machine guns began patrolling the streets and subways around the targets as well as the area around the Capitol in Washington. Civilians naturally assumed that Qaeda agents had been recently lurking nearby and might still be there, with bombs ready to blow up.
Only the next day did the press learn that the buildings had been cased three or four years earlier-before 9/11. (At a press briefing that Sunday, a "senior intelligence official" did say that the casing operation "dates from before 9/11," but he went on to emphasize that Al Qaeda planning "probably continues even today," and most reporters failed to pick up on the nuance.) The headlines on Tuesday were full of "never mind" stories, downplaying the risk, which in turn set out the government spinners to insist that no, no, the threat really was serious. On Wednesday, the papers were full of warnings that Al Qaeda typically takes years to plan and stage an operation. The fact that Al Qaeda had cased the buildings some years before might only mean that it was finally ready to attack.
No wonder the public was confused. In fairness to the government, officials have to walk a fine line. They can't fail to warn the public of a genuine threat (and get blamed for it later); at the same time, they don't want to create panic or blow sensitive ongoing operations. Mixed signals-and wrong guesses-are inevitable. Perhaps the only way to understand what the government knows-and does not know-about the threat is to start at the beginning, with the first disclosures that Al Qaeda might still have sleeper cells in the United States after 9/11 or be trying to recruit or infiltrate new martyrs and helpers for another "spectacular" against the American homeland.
The operational mastermind of the 9/11 plot was a man named Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, referred to in government documents as "KSM." In March 2003, KSM was captured in Pakistan. Subjected to the classified but presumably persuasive interrogation methods of the CIA, KSM began talking-but selectively. Intelligence officials believe that he was most interested in protecting the identities of Al Qaeda operatives inside the United States. "He would throw out a bone to delude people into believing he was cooperating," says one former senior U.S. law-enforcement official who regularly reviewed the interrogation reports. (According to the 9/11 Commission Report published last month, an internal agency analysis was titled "Khalid Shaykh Mohammed's Threat Reporting-Precious Truths Surrounded by a Bodyguard of Lies.")
KSM did lead investigators to an Ohio truckdriver named Iyman Faris, who had a cockamamie scheme to cut down the Brooklyn Bridge (abandoned when the "weather is too hot"-i.e., police surveillance was too intense, and the cables proved too thick for wire cutters). But he was cagey about his plans for post-9/11 attacks, insisting, for instance, that a list of ZIP codes found in his notebook was only to help him find some e-mail addresses.
KSM coughed up some other names. "Foremost among these individuals is Abu Issa al-Britani, a Pakistani-born extremist who holds a passport from the United Kingdom," reads a secret FBI report obtained by NEWSWEEK. Al-Britani is better known as Esa al-Hindi, trained in bin Laden's terror camps and the author of a fiery tract, "The Army of Madinah in Kashmir," which exhorts martyrs to join the worldwide jihad with "stealthy modern-day war stratagems," including "germ warfare."
In 1999 and again in 2000, KSM-and, possibly, Osama bin Laden himself-dispatched al-Hindi as part of an advance team to case targets in New York. In the summer of 2000 several Qaeda men-including a pair of the 9/11 hijackers, Muhammad Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi-were cruising about New York looking for symbols to destroy. They were instructed to inspect what their instructions called "Jewish areas" like the Diamond District in midtown, as well as the New York Stock Exchange. According to the intelligence document obtained by NEWSWEEK, al-Hindi was also "cleared for an operation against London's Heathrow airport that was scheduled for June 2003." (The Heathrow attack never came off.)
KSM was apparently interested in recruiting African-Americans inside the United States. According to the intelligence document, al-Hindi noticed that a local British imam employed African-American bodyguards with families in Montana. "KSM tasked him with traveling to Montana to recruit the bodyguards' family members," according to the report, which does not reveal whether al-Hindi may have succeeded in this somewhat bizarre mission.
Since 9/11, al-Hindi has been living in Britain at least some of the time. Once his name surfaced in the KSM interrogations last year, he became a figure of considerable interest to U.S. and British intelligence. An elusive man who uses different aliases, he has apparently been the subject of on-and-off surveillance. After the Pakistanis and CIA captured Khan in mid-July, al-Hindi's name popped up again-potentially as a central player in the "pre-election" plot.
It appears that al-Hindi was the author of some of those detailed surveillances of the five financial institutions. Was he also a key figure in alleged new plots to blow them up? Though the casing was done before 9/11, the CIA was able to determine that the reports on the surveillance were actually written up after the attacks-and that someone called them up on Khan's computer as recently as last January. NEWSWEEK has learned that someone accessed what one senior government official guardedly (and vaguely) referred to as "preparatory material" as recently as two or three weeks ago.
A British intelligence source, speaking on background to NEWSWEEK, was indignant that Americans blew a chance to secretly watch al-Hindi while he continued to move around and make contact with other Qaeda operatives. An old intel rule is "Let the plot run." Historically, the British have been astonishingly patient, even coldblooded, about not revealing their sources. During World War II, British intelligence allowed U-boat wolf packs to attack convoys rather than prematurely reveal that the Allies had broken the German codes.
A senior U.S. intelligence official tells NEWSWEEK that the British did not know al-Hindi's whereabouts when his name came up in the meetings of top officials two weekends ago. Indeed, they were worried that he might actually accelerate plans to strike once his casing reports were revealed. (The British found al-Hindi on Tuesday and arrested him, along with a dozen others suspected of Qaeda ties.) According to all the top federal officials interviewed by NEWSWEEK, there was no real debate. Regardless of the risk of alerting al-Hindi or others, the public must be notified of the threat. The only question was how.
Cooperation between the Feds and local officials has long been a source of miscommunication or misunderstanding. Since 9/11, the Feds have tried to work more closely with the locals, though old tensions die hard (at a White House counterterror meeting observed by NEWSWEEK, a senior official asked a staffer, "Have we shared with the state and locals?" The answer came back, "Maybe more than we should"). Still, almost as soon as the Putter made its rounds of Washington high officialdom on Friday, July 30, the decision was made to bring New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly into the loop.
The Feds regard Kelly as a bit of an independent operator. After the Madrid bombings in March, Kelly sent New York City detectives to Spain to learn important details, like the type of cell phones used by the terrorists. The presence of New York City cops at the overseas crime scene did not endear them to the FBI, in part because the New York cops apparently got there first. "We want every bit of information that we can get to better protect the city. We're very parochial. We're focused on New York," Kelly told NEWSWEEK.
On Sunday, Aug. 1, when Kelly heard, via videophone, Tom Ridge's plan to go public with the threat, the New York police commissioner was unenthusiastic. Kelly refused to comment about what was said on the call, but a New York law-enforcement source familiar with the discussion said, "Ridge was rolling with that 'the president has to level with the American people' kind of crap." At the meeting, Kelly worried aloud that naming the targets would not make the city any safer.
But in Washington, officials argued that keeping a low profile-by, for instance, alerting just the security officers for the targeted institutions-wouldn't work. The story would inevitably leak and cause an even bigger fuss because the government would be accused of hiding dangers from the public.
The U.S. government cannot come right out and admit this, but following the old rule of waiting and watching may not be tenable, given how little the intelligence community really knows about Al Qaeda and its possible presence inside the United States. Interviewed by NEWSWEEK, Townsend said that the intelligence community believes Al Qaeda has filled the positions vacated by KSM and others captured or killed. The talent level may not be as high, she says, but the organization goes on. The CIA and its foreign counterparts have identified some of the Qaeda operatives, but they are in the dark about others.
Gary Bald, the assistant FBI director for counterterrorism, told NEWSWEEK that the bureau has "over 500" Qaeda-related cases in the United States. Many of these will, as bureau officials say, "wash out." Most of the others are not suspected "sleeper" agents but possible sympathizers and facilitators. In recent weeks, the FBI has been knocking on a lot of doors in Muslim neighborhoods in the United States, asking questions like "Do you know of any Muslims who have had access to hazardous materials?" (Some Arab groups encourage cooperation; others advise silence and calling a lawyer.)
But the bureau has had a hard time getting a fix on an actual Qaeda network. Staffers on the 9/11 Commission debated, sometimes hotly, whether the 9/11 hijackers had the benefit of a support network inside the United States. The report cites "worrisome evidence" that two of the key 9/11 hijackers may well have had accomplices. The intelligence community is feverishly looking for links between these possible Qaeda supporters and the new plots against U.S. financial institutions. Khan, the computer engineer captured in Pakistan, was in e-mail or phone contact with several people in America, says a senior intelligence official, but "it might have been his completely innocent great-aunt," says the official.
The FBI has long been reluctant to investigate mosques in the United States, but last week agents arrested an Islamic cleric who had been caught in a sting operation seeking to fund the purchase of a shoulder-fired missile launcher. The Feds have long had their suspicions about the imam, Yassin Muhiddin Aref, whose phone and e-mail were tapped by federal investigators. He was overheard speaking to contacts in Ansar al Islam, a terrorist group based in Iraq with ties to Al Qaeda. (U.S. troops found an address book at the Ansar al Islam camp with Aref listed as a "commander.") But his Kurdish dialect was so obscure the Feds had trouble getting quick translations.
So it goes in the shadow wars. Every morning, when she arrives at her basement office in the West Wing shortly after 6:30 a.m., Fran Townsend hopes to have more news of breakthroughs appear in her red-striped Putter. Her office is a tad morbid: a giant overhead photo of the hole left of the World Trade Center after 9/11 decorates her walls; a model of the Twin Towers, with gashes in the side, sits on her desk. She is known for pushing the bureaucracy; her motto, she says, is "Get it done." The mother of two children, ages 9 and 2 1/2, she is away from home a lot. But, Townsend says with a smile, "I'd rather fight the fight today so my kids don't have to worry about it."
With Mark Hosenball, John Barry and Michael Isikoff in Washington, Peg Tyre and Mehammed Mack in New York, Rana Foroohar, Sarah Sennott and Emily Flynn in London
-------- ukraine
Ukraine starts commercial operation of new nuclear power unit
08.08.2004,
ITAR-TASS
http://www.itar-tass.com/eng/level2.html?NewsID=1109848&PageNum=0
NETESHIN, Khmelnitsky Region, August 8 (Itar-Tass) - Ukraine on Sunday received an additional reliable power source. On an instruction from Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma who flew to Neteshin, the city of Ukrainian nuclear power specialists, they put into commercial operation the second power unit of the Khmelnitsky nuclear station. From now on, the unit started supplying electricity to the Ukrainian energy system.
On giving the order of "raising the capacity of the second power set up to the commercial load", Kuchma said that "Ukraine has confirmed once again its high technological potential by putting into operation the new power block at the Khmelnitsky nuclear station".
The commissioning of the second power unit at the Khmelnitsky station gives a possibility to generate annually 6-6.5 billion kilowatt-hours of safe and cheap electricity. According to managing director of the Khmelnitsky power station, "the state of security of power unit No. 2 was confirmed by implementation of measures on raising security and modernization".
The second power block of the station will run on improved fuel TVS-A and will be a pioneer among Ukrainian reactors VVER-1000 with the first full load of a new fuel. Ukraine purchased improved assemblies from the Russian TVEL company, supplying nuclear fuel to 13 countries, including Western Europe, the CIS and the Baltics. Around 17 percent of the world nuclear fuel market belongs to this Russian company, a monopoly in production of advanced nuclear fuel for power stations.
--------
Ukraine Launches New Atomic Reactor
August 8, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Ukraine-Nuclear.html
KIEV, Ukraine (AP) -- Ukraine, the site of the world's worst nuclear accident, launched a new atomic reactor Sunday, and a second reactor is set to open later this year, a news agency reported.
President Leonid Kuchma, joined by other top officials, attended the startup of reactor No. 2 at the Khmelnitskyi plant in western Ukraine.
Kuchma gave the order to the reactor's staff to ``raise the capacity of the .... power unit up to the commercial load,'' the ITAR-Tass news agency reported.
A new reactor at the Rivne nuclear power plant, also in the west, is set to be completed later this year.
The European Union pledged to finance safety upgrades at both reactors through an $83 million loan. The money will be in addition to a $42 million program recently approved by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development for the same purpose.
Ukraine has committed to modernizing its 13 operating nuclear reactors. The former Soviet republic shuttered Chernobyl, site of the 1986 accident, but is asking Western donors for an additional $350 million to replace a shelter securing the destroyed reactor.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- nevada
Nevada Ponders Superfund Status for Mine
August 8, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/science/AP-Uranium-Cleanup.html
RENO, Nev. (AP) -- Pressured by a ranking senator from Nevada and the Environmental Protection Agency, Gov. Kenny Guinn says he might reconsider his opposition to a federal Superfund cleanup declaration for a huge abandoned mine contaminated with toxic waste and uranium.
Guinn, other state officials and local politicians have contended that the Nevada Division of Environmental Protection is making progress at the former Anaconda copper mine bordering Yerington, an agricultural town in northern Nevada, and that one-time Anaconda parent Atlantic Richfield Co. is cooperating.
They also fear the stigma of the area being labeled a Superfund site, a designation that would turn over responsibility and enforcement authority to the federal government.
Federal experts, however, said the recent discovery of unusually high levels of radiation in soil samples at the mine is a sign that federal help is needed.
``We realize the cleanup is going to be much more significant than any of us anticipated,'' said Bob Abbey, Nevada director for the U.S. Bureau of Land Management.
Guinn's spokesman, Greg Bortolin, told The Associated Press last week that the Republican governor ``is open-minded and is receptive to the possibility of a Superfund listing as a result of the information that continues to come to light.''
Senate Minority Whip Harry Reid, D-Nev., said state regulators lack the muscle to force ARCO to clean up the hundreds of acres of toxic waste, some of it radioactive, Reid said.
``This is big business overwhelming a little state and the state doesn't have the power to fight them,'' said Reid, the second-ranking Democrat in the Senate.
``This is a cesspool full of very, very toxic substances and (ARCO) should write a check to clean it up. The only way they will do that is if it is declared a Superfund site,'' Reid said.
Dan Ferriter, ARCO's environmental manager in charge of the site, took exception to Reid's criticism, saying the cleanup already is subject to ``fairly extreme'' regulatory oversight.
``We are doing much, much more than would be required for a mine closure by the state of Nevada and we are doing more than we would at most Superfund sites,'' Ferriter said Friday.
Early groundwater tests at the 3,600-acre site showed uranium at up to 200 times the U.S. drinking water standard, apparently the result of decades of chemical processing of copper ore in acid leaching ponds. Uranium was also present in the copper ore.
One new soil sample shows alpha radiation levels nearly 200 times more than natural background levels, and four other samples are in the range of 25 to 90 times normal, the BLM reported last month. More tests are pending.
Anaconda Copper Co. mined the site from 1953 to 1978. ARCO is responsible for the cleanup because it once owned Anaconda and a more recent owner of the site has gone bankrupt. ARCO has spent about $50,000 since January testing wells and providing bottled water to about 40 households near the mine, Ferriter said.
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
Bomb Kills 2 Soldiers in Afghanistan
Reuters
Sunday, August 8, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A48720-2004Aug7.html
KABUL, Afghanistan, Aug. 7 -- Two U.S. soldiers and their Afghan interpreter were killed Saturday when their vehicle struck an improvised explosive device in southern Afghanistan, a statement issued by the U.S.-led military said.
A third soldier was wounded in the blast in Ghazni province, south of Kabul, the capital, according to the statement. The wounded soldier was flown to Kandahar airfield hospital and was in stable condition.
About 20,000 U.S.-led troops are stationed in Afghanistan hunting for Taliban and al Qaeda fighters, including Osama bin Laden.
Officials also said two people died Friday in an attack on a convoy of election workers. At least 30 gunmen shot at vehicles from the joint Afghan-U.N. electoral body as they passed through Char Cheno, a district of central Uruzgan province, Gov. Jan Mohammed Khan told the Associated Press. A dozen people have been slain preparing for the Oct. 9 elections.
Khan said two members of the voter registration team were killed and all four vehicles were destroyed after being strafed with assault-rifle and machine-gun fire.
The United Nations identified the victims as Mohammed Hashim, a training officer, and driver Mohammed Hussein. A third worker was missing.
The United Nations condemned "the murderous attack," spokesman Manoel de Almeida e Silva said.
--------
6 G.I.'s Wounded in Afghan Attacks
August 8, 2004
By CARLOTTA GALL
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/08/international/asia/08kabul.html?pagewanted=all
KABUL, Afghanistan, Aug. 7 _ - Two American soldiers and their Afghan interpreter were killed on Saturday when the vehicle in which they were traveling in hit an "improvised explosive device" in southern Afghanistan, a statement issued by the American military said, according to Reuters.
A third soldier was wounded in the blast in Ghazni province, around 160 miles southwest of Kabul, the statement said.
Six American soldiers were wounded Friday in two attacks by suspected Taliban insurgents in Zabul Province, in the south, the American military announced Saturday.
In Uruzgan Province, a four-vehicle convoy of election workers on a mission to register voters was ambushed by suspected Taliban fighters on Friday, and two workers were killed, according to Afghan officials quoted by The Associated Press.
The provincial governor, Jan Muhammad Khan, said all four of the vehicles were destroyed when at least 30 militants opened fire with assault rifles and machine guns. Guards in the convoy shot back, forcing the attackers to retreat, and one guerrilla was captured, Mr. Khan said.
A man identifying himself as a Taliban spokesman, Abdul Latif Hakimi, called Agence France-Presse and claimed responsibility for the attack.
In one of the attacks on American soldiers on Friday, four were wounded when about 10 insurgents attacked their convoy with rocket-propelled grenades in a remote mountain area, Day Chopan, where the Taliban still have a presence. The soldiers returned fire.
Two soldiers were badly wounded and were awaiting evacuation to the American military hospital in Germany, the military said.
In the other attack, insurgents set off a roadside bomb near Zabul's provincial capital, Qalat, as an American Humvee was passing, The Associated Press reported.
Two soldiers were lightly wounded in the attack, but they quickly returned to duty.
-------- africa
Sudan Accepts African Troops, but No Peacekeepers, in Darfur
Sunday, August 8, 2004
By Nima Elbagir
Reuters
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A48722-2004Aug7.html
KHARTOUM, Sudan, Aug. 7 -- Sudan will allow African troops to protect observers in the country's troubled western region of Darfur, Foreign Minister Mustafa Osman Ismail said Saturday, but he stressed that any peacekeeping role would be limited to Sudanese forces.
"We have to make a distinction between three categories. The presence of observers, the presence of protection forces for those observers and the presence of peacekeeping forces," Ismail said in Khartoum, the capital, when asked whether Sudan would accept African peacekeepers. "We don't have a problem with either the first or the second categories. As far as the third category is concerned . . . this is the responsibility of the Sudanese forces."
Ismail said that Darfur was a regional problem and that Sudan was discussing it with organizations such as the African Union and the Arab League, due to hold an emergency meeting Sunday.
As many as 50,000 African villagers have been killed and 1.5 million displaced in Darfur by an Arab militia, called the Janjaweed, that has terrorized the region. U.N. and U.S. officials have called the situation the worst humanitarian crisis in the world.
Under the terms of a U.N. Security Council resolution, Sudan has about three weeks remaining to demonstrate that it is serious about disarming the Janjaweed, or face possible sanctions.
The African Union is proposing sending as many as 2,000 troops to protect its cease-fire monitors in Darfur and to serve as peacekeepers, but has yet to send an official request to the Sudanese government.
Ismail said he had signed a Sudanese-U.N. pact pledging safe areas for the villagers uprooted by the fighting, which U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan sent to Security Council members on Friday. The pact also pledges to work to disarm the militia and stop actions by Sudanese government troops in civilian areas.
The pact was expected to be signed Monday, but Ismail said that "it was signed in the early hours of Friday morning in my office."
Human rights and aid groups accuse the Arab-led government of arming and supporting the Janjaweed, initially to suppress a rebellion by two African groups that took up arms last year to protest discrimination against the region's African tribes.
The government denies the charge and says the Janjaweed are outlaws.
A U.N. investigator said Friday that the Sudanese government was largely to blame for the Darfur humanitarian crisis and responsible for large numbers of killings in the region.
Ismail said the Sudanese advisory council for human rights would reply to the investigator's report in due course.
Also Saturday, the governor of one state in the region, Northern Darfur, said 210 African rebels had surrendered. But a spokesman for a rebel group, Bahar Idriss Abu Garda, said the statement was "totally wrong."
Abu Garda said the government and the Janjaweed had attacked civilians and rebel troops four days ago in violation of a cease-fire agreement signed by both sides in early April.
--------
Arab League Says Sanctions Would Worsen Sudan Crisis
August 8, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-sudan.html
CAIRO (Reuters) - The Arab League said on Sunday it opposed sanctions against Sudan, which faces an unspecified U.N. embargo if it does not take action to rein in marauding militias in its western Darfur region.
Sudan has about three weeks left to show it is serious about disarming Arab militias in Darfur, where the United Nations estimates violence has killed 50,000, or face unspecified sanctions under a U.N. Security Council resolution.
But the Arab League said sanctions would ``would only result in negative effects for the whole Sudanese people and complicate the crisis in Darfur.''
Sudanese First Vice President Ali Osman Mohamed Taha told the BBC Sudan was doing its best to meet the deadline, but ``due to logistical problems and limitations we have at the moment, I don't think the time frame is practical.''
Darfur rebels accuse Khartoum of sending the Arab militia, known as Janjaweed, to crush their uprising and force non-Arabs off their land. The U.S. Congress has called the Janjaweed campaign a genocide.
Fighting in Darfur has displaced one million people and left two million short of food and medicine, creating what the United Nations has called the world's worst humanitarian crisis.
The Cairo-based Arab League, where Arab ministers on Sunday held an emergency meeting on Darfur, rejected in a statement hints of any ``forced foreign military intervention in the area.'' Both Britain and Australia have said they could send troops to Darfur.
Khartoum and the United Nations have agreed a plan to disarm the Janjaweed and other outlawed groups, improve security in Darfur and address the humanitarian crisis.
Jan Pronk, the U.N. secretary-general's special representative to Sudan, told the meeting it was also up to two Darfur rebel groups to contribute to security and to ``exercise restraint.''
``The government of Sudan has made commitments, the ball is in the government of Sudan's court to fulfil those commitments,'' he added.
PEACE TALKS
A long-smoldering conflict between nomadic Arab herders and African villagers erupted in early 2003 when the Darfur rebels took up arms against Khartoum.
Efforts to bring the parties to negotiations broke down in July when Khartoum would not meet rebels' terms for talks.
The Arab League called on the rebel Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) and Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) to drop the terms, which included the disarmament of the Janjaweed.
The African Union said on Sunday that Khartoum and the two rebel groups had agreed to resume talks in Nigeria on Aug. 23.
SLA leader Abdel Wahed Mohamed Ahmed al-Nur told Reuters from Darfur he would send a high-level delegation to the talks, but JEM Secretary-General Bahar Idriss Abu Garda said rebel leaders were due at a conference in Germany on Aug. 23.
The AU said its chairman, Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo, would mediate the talks between Khartoum and the rebels, resuming a dialogue started in Addis Ababa on July 15.
Sudanese Foreign Minister Mustafa Osman Ismail said the government would participate in the talks without conditions.
The 53-member AU is proposing to send up to 2,000 troops to protect its cease-fire monitors in Darfur and serve as peacekeepers. But Sudan said on Saturday that while African troops could protect AU monitors, its own troops would handle peacekeeping.
The Arab League called on its members, especially those who are members of the African Union, to take part in the AU team observing the April 8 cease-fire between the rebels and the government.
Ismail told the Arab ministers Khartoum had deployed 10,000 police and 40,000 soldiers in Darfur.
-------- chemical weapons
Agent Orange, the Next Generation
August 8, 2004
By WILLIAM GLABERSON
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/08/nyregion/08orange.html?pagewanted=all&position=
n 1984, after years of battles over science and damage tabulations, seven American chemical companies settled a huge class-action suit by Vietnam veterans who claimed that the defoliant Agent Orange caused cancer, birth defects and a nightmarish brew of other health problems.
The companies paid out $180 million. By 1997, after the last payments had been made, 291,000 people had received benefits. The settlement was reached after a federal judge persuaded the companies to buy themselves out of protracted litigation. It was called a landmark legal peace on a brutally contentious issue, and it was supposed to be the final word from the courts on Agent Orange, a defoliant containing the deadly substance dioxin.
But today, a new cast of plaintiffs, this time Vietnamese as well as American, has returned to the same American court seeking justice and dollars. One suit filed on behalf of as many as four million Vietnamese says their land and people were so poisoned by Agent Orange that supplying it to the military amounted to war crimes by the chemical companies.
In other suits, American veterans say they have only now come to learn of their devastating health problems, with the money gone.
The claims are more than empty reminders of an old fight. Judge Jack B. Weinstein, whose aggressive handling of the Agent Orange case in Federal District Court in Brooklyn in the 1980's brought him wide attention and considerable anger, has said that the Vietnamese suit raises serious issues. The United States Supreme Court has said that the new cases by American veterans cannot be automatically barred.
The chemical companies say fairness dictates that the time for the legal battle they thought they had ended a generation ago has come and gone. They claim the science still does not prove that Agent Orange was responsible for any of the medical horrors its name has long brought to mind.
Whatever the fate of the suits, the revival of the Agent Orange battle means that these days, there are ghosts in the Brooklyn federal courthouse - of a divisive war, of modern battle tools, of hard feelings by people in two countries who were caught up in combat long ago.
"Doesn't it ever end? When will Agent Orange become history?'' said Kenneth R. Feinberg, a Washington lawyer who was a special master in the Agent Orange case 20 years ago and recently ran the 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund.
Lawyers for Dow Chemical, Monsanto, Hercules and more than a dozen other chemical companies named in the legal battle say that the claims of war crimes by the companies are unsupportable. They note that the companies were ordered by the Pentagon to make Agent Orange and say that if there is to be any compensation to Vietnam, it should be a result of negotiations between the two governments.
The lawyers also say that the new suits are as baseless as the old. A lawyer for Dow, Andrew L. Frey, said in an interview that people suffering life's random hardships sued because "it's human nature to look for something to blame.''
But in recent interviews in Vietnam and the United States, people who say they are victims of Agent Orange echoed one another in the strength of their conviction that a wrong is yet to be fully righted.
In a sparsely furnished Hanoi apartment, one of the Vietnamese plaintiffs, a doctor, described working since the war with people she believed were victims of Agent Orange. Many were spurned for years, said the doctor, Phan Thi Phi Phi, because of a belief in Vietnam that people who had malformed children were paying the price of their ancestors' immoral lives.
Dr. Phi Phi, a small woman who spoke softly, said she was a victim herself. During the war she worked in a mobile hospital in an area of South Vietnam that was a target of American spraying. She had four miscarriages, she said, and nearly died. Agent Orange, she said, "destroys human life for many generations.'' Joe Isaacson, a school administrator and Vietnam veteran from Toms River, N.J., has been fighting cancer since the 1990's. His simmering anger about Agent Orange sounded much like Dr. Phi Phi's. "We didn't know,'' he said, "that it was more dangerous than the enemy.''
In a modest house on a quiet street in Haiphong, east of Hanoi, a frail former soldier for North Vietnam, Nguyen Van Quy, remembered the acrid odor when it rained along the Ho Chi Minh trail. That smell, he said, was a sign that Agent Orange had killed all life, down to the roots of plants that hungry soldiers ate in the wide, dead areas along the trail.
Mr. Quy, 49, has cancer and two children born with birth defects. Someone, he said, should be held accountable. "Somehow,'' he said, "our misery, our hardship can be lessened.''
By telephone from Cape Coral, Fla., not long after Mr. Quy had spoken in Haiphong, Daniel R. Stephenson remembered the foul smell too, and the black hillsides. He is a Vietnam veteran who struggles with the pain of multiple myeloma that he believes came from exposure to Agent Orange. "It'll kill vegetables, but it'll also kill other things, too,'' he said.
Judge Weinstein, now 82, has said over many years that he does not believe lawyers can prove that Agent Orange causes specific diseases, other than a minor skin irritation. He repeated that recently in a tentative ruling on the claims of Mr. Isaacson and Mr. Stephenson.
But lawyers for the plaintiffs argue that there is new scientific evidence about the dangers of Agent Orange that was not available in the 1980's. Gerson H. Smoger, a lawyer for Mr. Stephenson and Mr. Isaacson, said Judge Weinstein's understanding of the scientific information was outdated.
William H. Goodman, a New York lawyer handling the suit for the Vietnamese, said his clients deserved to present their case against Agent Orange. "We have generation after generation suffering from its consequences,'' he said.
The scientific issue remains one of the most debated over Agent Orange. In recent years, the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences has said there is an "association" between exposure to Agent Orange and some diseases, including soft-tissue sarcoma and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.
Guided partly by the institute's list of diseases, the Department of Veterans Affairs gives Vietnam veterans compensation for many illnesses that it presumes were caused by exposure to Agent Orange. But the chemical companies say the "association" finding provides nothing like the clear proof required to establish in court that Agent Orange is the cause of any serious disease.
The Institute of Medicine also says there is inadequate evidence to determine an Agent Orange association with many of the diseases cited by veterans, including many types of cancer and most birth defects.
But some public health experts say it would be wrong for the courts to assume that the level of scientific knowledge has remained static. Since the 1984 settlement, said Jeanne Mager Stellman, a Columbia University public health professor, "There is much more evidence about dioxin-contaminated herbicides.''
Dr. Stellman, who was a consultant to the special master in the Agent Orange case years ago, added that most experts agree that Agent Orange is one of the planet's most deadly substances. As they did in the 1980's, the chemical companies argue that the courts need not decide the issue of what the health effects of Agent Orange may be. They say the companies cannot be held liable because they were ordered by the Pentagon to make Agent Orange. Under sovereign immunity, the American government cannot be sued; government contractors are often shielded from suits as well.
In February, Judge Weinstein said he planned to rule for the companies. He said his decision would take effect in October unless he was persuaded to change his mind. He said the companies were contractors who were ordered to supply herbicide that met specifications set by the military. Plaintiffs' lawyers have long said the chemical companies knew more than the government about the dangers of Agent Orange and should not qualify for protection.
Judge Weinstein said he planned to rule that the veterans could not proceed with their case against the chemical companies because of the government-contractor shield. He added that he thought it doubtful that the Supreme Court, which permitted the veterans' case to go forward by a 4-to-4 vote, "has fully considered the significance of reopening these Vietnam War issues."
But Judge Weinstein also said from the bench this spring that he was not sure whether, when considering the war-crime claim, the "I was told to do it" argument could protect the chemical companies.
The companies' lawyers answered that chemical executives could not possibly have intended to commit war crimes when they supplied Agent Orange in the 1960's since, even now, there is debate about whether it is as harmful as the suits claim.
Judge Weinstein said he expected to make his final rulings in October and they would likely set the stage for appeals in both the veterans' and the Vietnamese cases.
The veterans' suits before Judge Weinstein involve only Mr. Stephenson and Mr. Isaacson. But there are at least nine other cases in Federal District Court in Brooklyn filed by other veterans who say they became ill after the settlement fund was depleted. Judge Weinstein said hundreds of other cases could follow.
The companies say that reopening the case will reduce the chances of settlements in other cases. Businesses offer settlements in mass injury cases, they say, to ensure total peace - and the end of litigation. "If future claimants are not bound by settlements, companies will be more likely to litigate than settle,'' said William A. Krohley, a lawyer for Hercules. In the Brooklyn courthouse, the cases are moving at the slow pace of the law. In other places, people who say Agent Orange devastated their lives are trying to make sense of the legal battle that is a remnant of a long-ago war.
Mr. Isaacson, 56, the New Jersey school administrator, has non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. He was grateful, he said, that his 17-year-old daughter was healthy. He was an Air Force crew chief who worked on the planes that sprayed Agent Orange to clear away the jungle. "I am sure,'' he said, "there could have been other methods that wouldn't have hurt the veterans."
In Haiphong, Mr. Quy, the former North Vietnamese soldier, seemed weak as he mentioned the acrid spray from the American planes.
Listening as he spoke was his teenage son, whose face moved in spasms, and his daughter, who could not speak. His wife, Vu Thi Loan, cried quietly. "We were unlucky,'' she said. "We have to endure our hardship and there is no other way.''
Doan Bao Chau contributed reporting from Vietnam for this article.
-------- iraq
Marines, Insurgents Clash for Third Day
Iraqi Leader Offers Amnesty to Fighters
By Jackie Spinner
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, August 8, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A47644-2004Aug7?language=printer
BAGHDAD, Aug. 7 -- Clashes between U.S.-led forces and fighters loyal to Shiite Muslim cleric Moqtada Sadr continued for a third day in the holy city of Najaf and the large Shiite slum in Baghdad called Sadr City, where gunmen set up illegal checkpoints and ran openly through the streets with weapons.
Officials at three hospitals in Najaf said 23 civilians were killed and 121 wounded in the day's fighting, which subsided at night. It was the fiercest combat in months and posed a daunting challenge to Iraq's interim government as it struggles to bring stability to a country wracked by a violent, persistent insurgency.
As part of a plan to defuse the situation, Prime Minister Ayad Allawi on Saturday offered amnesty to insurgents who turn in their weapons and provide information to local police. The amnesty program, which Allawi had promised since taking office on June 28, will last 30 days and will not apply to those suspected of major crimes such as murder, rape and destruction of property. It also does not apply to people already in custody.
In another development, the interim government closed the Baghdad offices of Arab satellite network al-Jazeera for a month, banning it for allegedly inciting violence.
On Saturday night, nearly a dozen bombs exploded in the center of the capital near the fortified compound that houses the interim government and the U.S. Embassy. Such late-night explosions have become more frequent in recent days; two hotels in Baghdad housing foreign journalists and contract workers were attacked Thursday and Friday nights. No one was injured.
In Najaf, an uneasy calm settled over the city after dark. Members of Sadr's militia left the vast Wadi al-Salam cemetery, where they had taken up positions during the last three days to launch rockets and grenades. The Marines, who had been fighting the militants along with the Iraqi police and National Guard, said large caches of weapons, including rocket-propelled grenades and explosive-making materials, were found in the cemetery.
The Marines said Sadr's militia had used the cemetery as an operating base, violating the conditions of a truce negotiated in June after a two-month uprising that left hundreds dead.
The militia, known as the Mahdi Army, "kidnapped their enemies, including innocent civilians, bringing them to the cemetery for torture, execution and burial," the U.S. military said in a statement.
Ghalib Hashim Jazaeri, Najaf's chief of police, said Iraqi security forces staged an unsuccessful raid on Sadr's home in Najaf on Saturday, the Los Angeles Times reported. "We surrounded the house, but he was not at home," he said.
U.S. and Iraqi security forces said fighting broke out on Thursday after members of the militia attacked an Iraqi police station. As the Iraqi forces asked for help from the Marines, the violence escalated rapidly, spreading to other cities in the south and to Sadr City in the capital.
Through his associates, Sadr called on his militia to rise up against the U.S. military and its allies. Insurgents responded, taking to the streets and battling coalition forces.
It was not clear whether the fighting had ended in Najaf on Saturday night or would resume at daybreak. The streets were virtually empty as the sun went down, except for a group of gunmen who chanted Sadr's name as they rode around in the back of a U.S. military truck that they apparently had seized. The city had no electricity or power, and a large market in the center of the city was burned to the ground.
The U.S. military said Friday that more than 300 militant fighters were killed in the first two days of clashes. A spokesman for Sadr in Baghdad denied the claim.
Allawi said Iraqi security forces arrested more than 1,200 people in connection with the fighting. He said the military operations were not aimed at Sadr or his followers and that he did not believe the insurgents were members of Sadr's Mahdi Army -- a statement that angered some of Sadr's top associates.
"We think these are gangs, and they use his name as cover," Allawi, a Shiite, said at a news conference. "I have been receiving positive messages from Sadr. That is why we don't think the people that are committing the crimes in Najaf and elsewhere are his people."
Ahmed Shaibani, Sadr's spokesman in Najaf, denounced Allawi, saying if he were a true Shiite Muslim, he would not participate in the U.S.-backed interim government. "He should support the Islamic resistance whether it is Sadr or another resistance," Shaibani said in a telephone interview. "He is the prime minister of an Islamic country."
A group of influential Shiite political leaders also lashed out at Allawi and the interim government for not backing Sadr and his militants. Members of the Shiite Political Council, formed three months ago to represent 38 political parties, urged the government not to respond to the militia forces with violence.
"We ask the government not to lose its balance when facing the incidents in Najaf city," said Abdul Karim Muhammadawi, a former member of the now-disbanded Governing Council, and current member of the Shiite political group. "We tell the government that this case should be solved through political solution not military."
Ali Yassiri, Sadr's political coordinator in Baghdad, said the interim government should negotiate for peace. "It has been three days now of abusing human rights," he said. "A huge terrorist activity is being imposed on Najaf City and Sadr City. We put responsibility on the U.S. government and occupation and the governor of Najaf," who ordered the militiamen out of the city.
Al-Jazeera covered the developments in Najaf on Saturday, broadcasting live images of Sadr's militia members toting guns. It also broadcast a video that appeared to show an American man being beheaded but turned out to be a hoax.
Iraqi government leaders have complained repeatedly about al-Jazeera's practice of broadcasting videos showing kidnapped foreigners, alleging that the Qatar-based channel has ties to the captors.
On Saturday, the government shut down al-Jazeera's Baghdad offices. Allawi said an independent committee had been reviewing al-Jazeera's coverage of Iraq for a month and determined that it was contributing to the escalating violence.
Falah Naqib, Iraq's interior minister, accused the network of becoming "a venue for the terrorist, criminal factions."
"Instead of being a neutral means of reflecting truth, it opted to . . . spread fear among the peaceful Iraqi citizens," Naqib said at a news conference. "They give a bad picture on Iraq. They encouraged the criminals to increase their operations. We want to protect our people from Jazeera."
Jihad Ballout, a spokesman for the network, asked the government to reconsider the decision. "It badly affects the media and the Arab audience," Ballout said. "Nevertheless, we will try our best to cover the Iraqi field one way or another, because the Arab audience is interested in the situation in Iraq."
On the streets of Baghdad, there was mixed reaction to news of the government's actions against al-Jazeera.
Sabri Aleyesker, 47, who sells women's shoes in the Karada commercial district, said he watched al-Jazeera because it was not a mouthpiece for any one group or government. The government "closed it because they speak the truth," Aleyesker said.
But Saad Alfartousy, 37, said blocking al-Jazeera was "the best thing our government has done."
"They don't like Iraq, and they make the Iraqi people angry, and they push them to fight," he said. "Thank God, a thousand times, that they closed this channel."
Special correspondents Saad Sarhan in Najaf and Bassam Sebti, Luma Mousawi and Omar Fekeiki in Baghdad contributed to this report.
--------
Marines Pushing Deeper Into City Held by Shiites
August 8, 2004
By JOHN F. BURNS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/08/international/middleeast/08iraq.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Aug. 7 - American marines drove deeper into the heart of the Shiite holy city of Najaf on Saturday as they fought Moktada al-Sadr's rebel militiamen, and there was little sign that American commanders, who said they were taking orders from the new Iraqi government, intended to heed appeals for a cease-fire from clerics and others claiming to represent Mr. Sadr.
In three days of fighting, including mostly sporadic battles on Saturday, the marines and supporting units from the new American-trained Iraqi security forces have pushed well into the old city, an area the Americans had avoided in their months of on-and-off fighting with the Mahdi Army, Mr. Sadr's black-uniformed militia. The main battleground has been an ancient cemetery alongside the Imam Ali mosque, a golden-domed shrine that is one of the holiest places for the world's Shiite Muslims.
Reports from Najaf told of a city now largely deserted, at least in the center, where American commanders say they have killed more than 300 militiamen. But spokesmen for Mr. Sadr say the toll is only 40.
The American command in Baghdad said Saturday afternoon that the latest casualty figures from the battlefront showed that two marines and one American soldier had been killed, and that fewer than 20 had sustained serious wounds.The leader of Iraqi forces in the fight, Gen. Ghalib Hadi al-Jazaery, said Saturday that his troops had surrounded Mr. Sadr's house in Najaf in an attempt to capture him, but that the cleric was gone.
Much hangs on the Najaf fighting, and on lower-intensity skirmishes in the past 72 hours in other urban areas across central and southern Iraq, where Mr. Sadr's firebrand populism attracts support among young, mostly impoverished Shiites. The central question appears to be whether the decision to confront the militiamen, and to do it in an area of the highest religious sensitivities, will win the support of Iraq's Shiite majority or provoke a potentially crippling backlash against the interim government of Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, which took formal power from the Americans when the country resumed its sovereignty on June 28.
On Saturday, after remaining silent during the first 48 hours of fighting, Mr. Allawi gave a news conference in Baghdad in which he appeared intent on reinforcing his appeal to Iraqis as the strongman many have said they wanted during the 15 months of lawlessness and insurgency that followed the American invasion last year.
He turned aside appeals for a cease-fire, saying prisoners taken during the fighting included "more than 1,000 criminals," at least 400 of whom had been released from prisons under an amnesty declared by Saddam Hussein six months before he was toppled from power.
"What has occurred in Najaf is pitiful," the 59-year-old prime minister said. Referring to the militiamen, he continued: "These attacks have aimed at destabilizing the government. These people are trying to deprive our people of their freedom and progress. Our country has gone through too many wars, and too much hardship, and I'm confident our people will choose the path towards peace and prosperity."
Specifically, Mr. Allawi described the fighting as an attempt to undermine the new government's efforts to improve security, to strengthen the flagging economy and to prepare for parliamentary elections scheduled by the end of January. A fully elected government is planned by January 2006. At one point, he invited Mr. Sadr, the rebel cleric, to abandon reliance on his militia and to run in the January elections, something Mr. Sadr has hitherto contemptuously rejected.
Mr. Allawi, a Shiite who trained as a physician and joined Mr. Hussein's ruling Baath Party as a student, but defected to the exiled opposition 20 years ago, showed some of the political deftness he will need if he is emerge from the tangled machinations of Shiite politics as a contender for power in the elections.
He suggested at the news conference that the militiamen fighting in Najaf, whom the Americans say have mostly worn the black outfits of Mr. Sadr's militia, might not be Sadr loyalists at all, but "people using his name."
Mr. Allawi said he had been receiving "positive messages from Moktada al-Sadr," but he gave no details and did not clarify whether he was referring to private communications or to discussions that were held in Baghdad earlier on Saturday between representatives of Mr. Sadr and the United Nations. In Tehran, the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, condemned the new wave of violence in Iraq, especially in the Shiite holy city, The Associated Press reported.
"The United States has reached a dead-end in Iraq and is acting like a wolf caught in a trap," he said, "trying to terrify some by either brawling or showing its claws. But the Iraqis' will and determination will not let the U.S. gulp down a big morsel such as Iraq," he was quoted as saying.
Beheading Tape Was a Hoax
SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 7 (AP) - An American who made a hoax videotape of his beheading at the hands of Iraqi militants said Saturday that he did it at a friend's house in California using fake blood.
The man, Benjamin Vanderford, 22, said he began distributing the video on the Internet months ago in hopes of drawing attention to his campaign for city supervisor. When his political aspirations waned, he thought the video would serve as social commentary.
"It was part of a stunt, but no one noticed it up until now," Mr. Vanderford said. "I did this for a couple of reasons. One is to attract attention. But two is to just make a statement on these type of videos and how easily they can be faked." On the tape, Mr. Vanderford sat on a chair in a dark room, his hands behind his back, trembling and rocking back and forth. Then the tape showed a hand with a knife cutting at the man's neck, but did not show any militants.
"We need to leave this country alone; we need to stop this occupation," he said on the video, adding that he had been offered for exchange with prisoners in Iraq. "Everyone's going to be killed this way."
The videotape was posted on a militant Web site and broadcast on Arab television on Saturday.
Alex Berenson contributed reporting from Najaf for this article.
--------
Iraqi Leader Appeals to Militants in Visit to Battle-Torn Najaf
August 8, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iraq.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
NAJAF, Iraq (AP) -- Protected by about 100 guards, Iraq's interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi visited the war-shattered city of Najaf on Sunday, calling on Shiite militants to lay down their weapons after days of fierce clashes with U.S. forces.
Nearby, gunfire and explosions echoed through the streets, marking the fourth day of clashes in this holy city and other Shiite areas of Iraq. Hours later, U.S. helicopter gunships pounded the massive Najaf cemetery, a militant hideout and the scene of much of the fighting, witnesses said.
Scattered attacks across the country Sunday killed at least 19 Iraqis and wounded dozens of others, including four U.S. soldiers. A U.S. soldier also died Saturday in ``a non-combat related incident,'' the military said Sunday.
Throughout the night, explosions -- apparently from mortar barrages -- rocked a downtown Baghdad neighborhood where foreign journalists and contractors stay. There were no immediate reports of injuries.
As the violence continued, the government reinstated the death penalty in its latest effort to beat down the 15-month-old insurgency -- marked by car bombings, sabotage, gunbattles and kidnappings -- that has destabilized the country and held back reconstruction efforts.
``It is our human obligation toward our people and country, who are being threatened day and night by the terrorists and organized crime, to bring stability and security to them,'' Human Rights Minister Bakhtiar Amin said.
Also Sunday, Iraq's chief investigating judge said arrest warrants had been issued for Ahmad Chalabi, a former Governing Council member with strong U.S. ties, on counterfeiting charges, and for his nephew Salem Chalabi, head of the Iraqi tribunal trying Saddam Hussein, on murder charges. He is a suspect in the June murder of a top finance ministry official.
Meanwhile, militants said they had abducted Faridoun Jihani, the Iranian consul to the Iraqi city of Karbala. The kidnappers, who called themselves the ``Islamic Army in Iraq,'' warned Iran not to interfere in Iraq's affairs, but did not threaten Jihani or make any demands, according to Al-Arabiya television.
The Iranian Foreign Ministry confirmed Jihani disappeared Wednesday night on the road from Baghdad to Karbala.
Jihani, shown in a video sent by the militants to Al-Arabiya, would be the second senior diplomat taken hostage in recent weeks, following the brief kidnapping of Egyptian diplomat Mohammed Mamdouh Helmi Qutb last month. Scores of other foreigners have been kidnapped as leverage to force foreign troops and businesses from the country.
Most troubling for the government, however, was the Shiite violence that began Thursday after the collapse of a series of truces that ended a two-month uprising in early June. The U.S. military says hundreds of militants have been killed in the latest violence; the militiamen put the number far lower.
Though a deadline for militants to withdraw from Najaf, the center of the worst violence, expired Saturday, masked gunmen still patrolled the streets of the old city Sunday. The Mahdi Army militia of Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr also controlled the Imam Ali Shrine compound, one of the most revered sites in Shiite Islam.
The U.S. military said it had renewed an offensive Sunday against Mahdi Army militants who were using the city's massive cemetery as an operations base and weapons depot. Witnesses said the military attacked the cemetery with helicopter gunships. Military spokesmen said they were taking care to minimize damage.
Many nearby residents fled their homes. Power was out in the old city, which was surrounded by U.S. troops and Iraqi forces, residents said.
At least two Iraqi national guardsmen were killed and 15 people injured during Sunday's fighting, hospital officials said.
Allawi, who was protected by a mix of U.S. forces, foreign security contractors, Iraqi national guardsmen and Iraqi police, firmly rejected compromise with the militants during his brief visit Sunday morning.
``We think that those armed should leave the holy sites and the (Imam Ali Shrine compound) as well as leave their weapons and abide by the law,'' he said. Some 400 yards away, gunfire and explosions rang out from clashes. U.S. helicopter gunships circled overhead.
``The situation will be defused soon,'' he said.
Allawi's delegation did not meet with al-Sadr, and the cleric's aides rejected his demands.
``We hoped his visit would have calmed the situation and that he would have come with something new, but he did not do that,'' said Ahmed al-Shaibany, an al-Sadr aide. ``He confronted the Mahdi Army with bad talk, especially his call to leave the city and turn over their weapons, which is strange and can never happen.''
In violence in other Shiite areas, a U.S. Army OH-58 observation helicopter made an emergency landing in Baghdad near the Sadr City neighborhood after being attacked, said U.S. Capt. Brian O'Malley of the 1st Brigade Combat Team. No casualties were reported.
The helicopter, with its cockpit destroyed and covered in dust, was hauled away by the military.
The Mahdi Army later attacked a Baghdad district council building with rocket-propelled grenades and gunfire, wounding three U.S. soldiers, O'Malley said.
Clashes in Sadr City killed four people and injured seven Sunday, the Health Ministry said.
In the southern city of Amarah, a gunbattle between al-Sadr militants and police killed four Iraqis and wounded 23 others, the Health Ministry said.
Iraqi officials said they had reluctantly reinstated the death penalty, suspended by the U.S. occupation administration, as an important weapon against militants and hard-core criminals.
``This is not an open door to execute anyone and everyone, or people whom the government dislikes. This is not Saddam's law,'' Minister of State Adnan al-Janabi said.
It was unclear how the new death penalty law would affect Saddam, currently awaiting trial on war crimes charges. It was also unclear whether the death penalty would apply to people who had committed crimes during its suspension.
The announcement came a day after the government issued a limited amnesty to persuade minor criminals to abandon violence.
In other violence Sunday:
-- Mortar explosions in central Baghdad late Sunday wounded at least 11 people.
-- Insurgents attacked a U.S. patrol in Muqdadiyah, north of Baghdad, wounding one U.S. soldier, said Maj. Neal O'Brien, a military spokesman. The troops killed one attacker.
-- Also in Muqdadiyah, masked gunmen attacked police, killing one policeman and three civilians, said local police chief Col. Amer Kamel.
-- Near Samarra, U.S. soldiers killed two people who were trying to plant a roadside bomb and wounded a third.
-- A roadside bomb exploded in the northern city of Kirkuk, killing one woman and injuring three children, police said. Another roadside bomb, in Baqouba, killed an Iraqi National Guard soldier, a hospital official said.
--------
Iraq Issues Warrants for Chalabi, Nephew
August 8, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iraq-Arrest-Warrants.html
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- Iraq has issued arrest warrants for Ahmad Chalabi, a former Governing Council member with strong U.S. ties, on counterfeiting charges, and for his nephew Salem Chalabi -- head of the tribunal trying Saddam Hussein -- on murder charges, Iraq's chief investigating judge said Sunday.
The warrant was the latest strike against Ahmad Chalabi in his removal from the centers of power. A longtime Iraqi exile opposition leader, he had been a favorite of many in the Pentagon but fell out with the Americans in the weeks before the U.S. occupation ended in June.
Both men denied the charges, dismissing them as part of a political conspiracy against them and their family.
Salem Chalabi, named as a suspect in the June murder of Haithem Fadhil, director general of the finance ministry, called the accusation ``ridiculous.'' His uncle said the charges were ``outrageous'' and ``manufactured lies.''
Ahmad Chalabi was somewhat marginalized when he was left out of the new interim government that took power June 28 but has since worked to reposition himself as a Shiite populist. At the helm of the war crimes tribunal for Saddam, the Ivy League-educated Salem Chalabi remains a central figure in Iraq.
``They should be arrested and then questioned and ... if there is enough evidence, they will be sent to trial,'' Judge Zuhair al-Maliky said.
In Washington, the Bush administration had no comment about the charges against the Chalabis. ``This is a matter for the Iraqi authorities to resolve and they are taking steps to do so,'' White House spokeswoman Suzy DeFrancis.
The warrants, issued Saturday, accused Ahmad Chalabi of counterfeiting old Iraqi dinars, which were removed from circulation after the ouster of Saddam's regime last year.
Iraqi police backed by U.S. troops found counterfeit money along with old dinars during a raid on Chalabi's house in Baghdad in May, al-Maliky said. He apparently was mixing counterfeit and real money and changing them into new dinars on the street, the judge said.
The accusation is not Ahmad Chalabi's first brush with legal problems. He is wanted in Jordan for a 1991 conviction in absentia for fraud in a banking scandal. He was sentenced to 22 years in jail, but has denied all allegations.
The men were out of the country Sunday but promised to return to Iraq to face the allegations.
``I'm now mobilized on all fronts to rebuff all these charges,'' Ahmad Chalabi told CNN from Tehran, Iran, where he was attending an economic conference. ``Nobody's above the law, and I submit to the law in Iraq ... despite my serious and grave reservations about this court.''
``I don't think ... that I had anything to do with the charges so I'm not actually worried about it,'' Salem Chalabi told CNN from London. ``It's a ridiculous charge, that I threatened somebody ... there's no proof there.''
If convicted, Salem Chalabi, 41, could face the death penalty, which was restored by Iraqi officials on Sunday, al-Maliky said. His uncle, who is in his late 50s, would face a sentence determined by trial judges.
Born in Baghdad, the younger Chalabi studied at Yale, Columbia and Northwestern University and holds degrees in law and international affairs. He served as a legal adviser to the interim Iraqi Governing Council and was a member of the 10-member committee framing the basic transitional law for the new interim government.
But Ahmad Chalabi's star has steadily declined. He was once considered Washington's most likely choice for Iraqi president after Saddam's fall, but he was never popular in Iraq and ended up without a job in the new government.
A frequent guest on news talk shows in the United States, Ahmad Chalabi had significant, and controversial, influence on America's Iraq policy before the war. His network of Iraqi exiles in the Iraqi National Congress provided the Bush administration, and some news organizations, with reports on Saddam's purported weapons of mass destruction programs.
Those weapons were cited by the United States and Britain as the primary justification for the Iraq war. When no significant weapons stocks were found, Chalabi became a liability. He has continued to insist that the weapons exist.
Chalabi also was accused recently of informing Iran that the United States had broken its secret intelligence codes, a charge he branded as ``stupid.'' And around the time of the raid on his house, U.S. officials privately complained that Chalabi was interfering with a U.S. inquiry into money skimmed from the U.N. oil-for-food program by pursuing his own probe.
As relations with his American backers soured, he has tried use the fallout to enhance his stature among Iraqis, many of whom saw him as an American puppet.
``I've risen higher in the esteem of my people and I'm now much better positioned politically in the country, because I'm in sympathy with my people. This is what it is all about,'' Chalabi said Sunday.
Among his campaigns to win favor with Iraqis have been purging Baath party members from the Iraqi government and attempting to set up an exclusively Shiite political party. He recently played peacemaker in ending violence in the Shiite holy city of Najaf in June.
--------
SECURITY
Outlaw Militia Plays Role of Ad Hoc Police Force
August 8, 2004
By SOMINI SENGUPTA
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/08/international/middleeast/08mahdi.html
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Aug. 2 - The Mahdi Army, a militia loyal to the radical Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, is one of the biggest thorns for Americans in Iraq, periodically erupting in violent challenges to the American-backed interim government. But even when truces are declared, the militia is at hard at work on the streets of Sadr City, a slum neighborhood here in the capital.
At midnight recently, as the stench of rotting chicken parts rose from market stalls, members of the Mahdi Army reported to work.
Dressed in black shirts, their faces hidden behind ski masks, they stood as sentries at the gates of their neighborhood. They held guns and flashlights. The glowing orange tips of their cigarettes were like fireflies in a neighborhood plunged into darkness by a power cut.
No car passed without inspection at their checkpoint. They opened trunks. They ordered drivers to step out.
In one car, they found cans of beer, which they poured into the gutter before letting the driver go. Out of the blackness came the sound of each can being opened and emptied, and then being crushed underfoot. An Iraqi police truck stopped; there was a consultation with the militiamen, and the truck moved on. The black-shirted men drove off into the night to take their posts across Sadr City.
The Mahdi Army has emerged in recent months as a powerful paramilitary force that has not only taken charge of policing Shiite enclaves like this one but has also been aiding Iraqi security forces in crackdowns against looters and kidnappers, according to Mahdi Army members and civilians in other parts of Baghdad.
Officially, the militia is an outlaw group. An arrest warrant was issued for Mr. Sadr in April by an Iraqi court in connection with the killing of a rival Shiite cleric.
A spokesman for the Interior Ministry, which controls police and security forces, said there was no official cooperation with the Mahdi Army but acknowledged that its members sometimes worked with local law enforcement groups on security.
"In various parts of the country, they have been helpful," Sabah Khadim, the ministry spokesman, said in an interview. "When we have sufficient security forces, this government will have Iraq under control. There will be no other militias."
The apparent cooperation between the Mahdi Army and the state security forces signals the inability of the Iraqi government to control Mr. Sadr's militia, leaving it trying to make deals with the group.
Prime Minister Ayad Allawi has allowed Mr. Sadr to resume the publication of his newspaper, which Americans closed this spring, prompting clashes in the south. The government has not pressed the arrest warrant for Mr. Sadr.
It has also dangled an offer of an amnesty for some of his fighters and repeatedly invited Mr. Sadr to take part in a national conference to plan Iraq's political future. Mr. Sadr has rejected both.
The government's approach has not brought peace. On Thursday, American forces and the militia began fierce fighting, which has continued through Saturday across several cities in the south, and there have been skirmishes in Sadr City. The American military estimated the death toll among the fighters at more than 300. Mr. Sadr's forces said it was about 40. Iraqi government officials sharply criticized the militia and what they said were foreign supporters of the group.
Mr. Sadr's group called for a fresh uprising against the American-led coalition. "I say 'America is our enemy,' " said Sheik Jaber al-Khafaji, reading a statement from Mr. Sadr during Friday Prayer in Kufa, the city adjacent to Najaf, Mr. Sadr's base. "I warn Iraqi police not to attack any peaceful demonstration."
In Sadr City recently, a Mahdi Army commander who called himself Haji Abu Mustafa - a name that means he is the father of Mustafa and has been to Mecca - both bragged and lamented about the militia's work with the Iraqi authorities. His group, he said, had retrieved 140 stolen cars and handed over 180 gang members to the police in recent months. He would not reveal much about his group's tactics except to say that Mahdi Army members, posted on each block in this neighborhood, were well placed to collect tips on wrongdoers and miscreants. The neighborhood police, he said, relied on the militia's capabilities but failed to give it credit.
He said the new government had initiated joint operations since coming into power June 28, but he said the Mahdi Army had set up patrols in Sadr City under its own command soon after the ouster of Saddam Hussein and the breakdown of law and order. At the time, the militia was under orders not to provoke the American military but to slip into Sadr City's warren of trash-filled alleys if tanks approached.
The militia has since mobilized in other parts of town, including the pro-Hussein enclave called Haifa Street, Mr. Mustafa said. At the request of the government authorities, he said, Mahdi Army members conducted raids on suspected criminal safe houses and turned over suspects to the police.
Mr. Khadim, the Interior Ministry spokesman, denied such cooperation. Residents of Haifa Street recalled that members of the militia had come into the neighborhood in late July and had used a police raid to do a bit of looting themselves.
Anwar Kareem, a policeman who lives in the area, said the militia members took his watch and money, and a Syrian lawyer, Marwan Tawfiq, recalled them bursting into his home and accusing him of being a terrorist.
--------
Sadr Aide Says Iraqi PM "Acting Like Saddam"
AFP
8/8/2004
http://www.turkishpress.com/turkishpress/news.asp?ID=24014
BAGHDAD, Aug 8 (AFP) - A Baghdad-based aide to Moqtada Sadr accused Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi on Sunday of acting like former dictator Saddam Hussein and wanting to eliminate the radical Shiite Muslim cleric and his movement.
"Iyad Allawi was acting like Saddam the dictator when he went to Najaf today," Sheikh Abdul Hadi al-Darraji told AFP by telephone from his base in the cleric`s northeast Baghdad stronghold of Sadr City.
"He praised the governor there for orchestrating the first episode of Najaf`s destruction and gave the green light for the next operation."
Allawi made a surprise visit to Najaf Sunday accompanied by the interior and defense ministers and Muwafaq al-Rubaie, the national security advisor.
He met with Najaf governor Adnan al-Zorfi and tribal leaders, saying his government was determined to rid Najaf of the influence of the militia, calling them outlaws and criminals.
Allawi had said on Saturday that most militiamen fighting in Najaf had no connection to Sadr and invited the cleric to join next year`s elections.
Darraji said this was "pure trickery" on the part of Allawi.
"Allawi has shown his true colours. He is determined to eliminate Sayed Moqtada and the movement he represents," said Darraji, using a religious honorific.
He said Sadr is currently inside Najaf and that his supporters throughout Iraq were determined to defend him.
Another Sadr aide in Baghdad`s mostly Shiite Kadhimiya district echoed a the sentiment.
"Those fighting now in Najaf and elsewhere have abandoned their families and lives to defend a leader whom they believe truly represents them," said Sheikh Raed al-Khademi.
Fierce clashes broke out in Najaf on Thursday between Sadr`s loyalists and US and Iraqi forces and the violence has spread to Sadr City and some central and southern Shiite cities.
-------- israel / palestine
Two Palestinians Quit Cabinet Posts; Gaza Youth Is Killed
August 8, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/08/international/middleeast/08mide.html
RAMALLAH, West Bank, Aug. 7 (AP) - Two Palestinian cabinet ministers announced their resignations on Saturday, part of a growing crisis over the refusal of the Palestinian leader, Yasir Arafat, to carry out reforms and share power.
One of the cabinet members, Justice Minister Nahed Arreyes, said he was stepping down because important powers had been taken from him. He did not mention Mr. Arafat by name, but several months ago Mr. Arafat created a rival agency to the Justice Ministry and continues to control the judiciary.
In Gaza, Israeli troops shot and killed an unarmed Palestinian teenager close to the border between the Gaza Strip and Israel, Agence France-Presse reported. An Israeli Army spokeswoman said the youngster was shot on the Israeli side of the border after he and another Palestinian had cut through the fence.
The resignations of the two ministers underscored the growing crisis in the Palestinian Authority. Last month, Prime Minister Ahmed Qurei stepped down, then withdrew his resignation after Mr. Arafat promised to give him more powers. However, there has been no evidence that Mr. Arafat has made any changes.
The justice minister, Mr. Arreyes, apparently was frustrated by Mr. Arafat's attempts to block judicial reform. Several months ago, Mr. Arafat appointed a Judicial Council, headed by a loyalist, that has taken over important ministry functions.
In an interview, Mr. Arreyes said he no longer had authority over prosecutors. "The prosecution should be under the control of the Justice Ministry, according to the law," he said. "My resignation comes as a protest against the incorrect position of the prosecution."
The other cabinet member who resigned was Planning Minister Nabil Qassis, who said he was quitting to accept a job as president of Bir Zeit University in the West Bank.
--------
Israeli finance minister plans 300m dollar cut in defense budget
JERUSALEM (AFP)
Aug 08, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040808154836.sb8y3wi8.html
Israeli Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu unveiled plans Sunday for a 300 million dollar reduction in defense spending as part of 1.3 billion dollar worth of cuts in the coming annual budget.
Netanyahu told reporters the ouster of Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq meant that Israel can now contemplate a smaller outlay on defense spending, even though the defense ministry is in fact asking for a rise in its budget.
"Cutting the defense budget is preferable to cutting the budgets of the other ministries which have been through difficult times in recent years," he said.
The Israeli economy has been through a lengthy period of recession but Netanyahu said that a recovery was around the corner.
He forecast that per capita income would rise by 38 percent in 2004 after falling 0.7 percent in the previous 12 months.
Netanyahu is also planning to cut national insurance payments and tighten qualifications for benefits in his 58 billion dollar budget but he also plans to increase payments for the elderly.
The finance minister provoked a lengthy round of industrial action with his last budget and the opposition Labour party leader Shimon Peres, which is expected to join a new broad-based coalition government, is expected to fiercely battle his proposals.
Netanyahu has spoken out against Labour joining the government after Peres denounced his "swinish" capitalist policies.
-------- prisoners of war
Ordered to just walk away
Saturday, August 07, 2004
MIKE FRANCIS,
Oregon Live
http://www.oregonlive.com/special/oregonian/iraq/index.ssf?/base/front_page/1091880082213032.xml
BAGHDAD -- The national guardsman peering through the long-range scope of his rifle was startled by what he saw unfolding in the walled compound below.
From his post several stories above ground level, he watched as men in plainclothes beat blindfolded and bound prisoners in the enclosed grounds of the Iraqi Interior Ministry.
He immediately radioed for help. Soon after, a team of Oregon Army National Guard soldiers swept into the yard and found dozens of Iraqi detainees who said they had been beaten, starved and deprived of water for three days.
In a nearby building, the soldiers counted dozens more prisoners and what appeared to be torture devices -- metal rods, rubber hoses, electrical wires and bottles of chemicals. Many of the Iraqis, including one identified as a 14-year-old boy, had fresh welts and bruises across their back and legs.
The soldiers disarmed the Iraqi jailers, moved the prisoners into the shade, released their handcuffs and administered first aid. Lt. Col. Daniel Hendrickson of Albany, Ore., the highest ranking American at the scene, radioed for instructions.
But in a move that frustrated and infuriated the guardsmen, Hendrickson's superior officers told him to return the prisoners to their abusers and immediately withdraw. It was June 29 -- Iraq's first official day as a sovereign country since the U.S.-led invasion.
The incident, the first known case of human rights abuses in newly sovereign Iraq, is at the heart of the American dilemma here.
In handing over power, U.S. officials gave Iraqis authority to run their own institutions -- even if they made mistakes. But officials understand that the United States will be held responsible when the new Iraqi authorities stumble.
"Iraqis want us to respect their sovereignty, but the problem is we will be blamed for leaving the fox in charge of the henhouse," said Michael Rubin, a former adviser to the interim Iraqi government who is now a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. "We did not generally put good people in."
An Oregon guardsman who witnessed the day's events, Capt. Jarrell Southall, provided The Oregonian with a written account of the incident. Other guardsmen interviewed in Iraq corroborated Southall's account on the condition that their names not be used.
The U.S. Embassy in Iraq confirmed the incident occurred and disclosed for the first time that the United States raised questions about the June 29 "brutality" with Iraq's interior minister.
The embassy declined to say what response was received in the meeting between the minister and James Jeffrey, the second-ranking U.S. diplomat in Iraq, saying it would be "inappropriate" to discuss "details of those diplomatic and confidential conversations."
The embassy, in a written statement, said U.S. soldiers are "compelled by the law of land warfare and core values to stop willful and unnecessary use of physical violence on prisoners." The U.S. soldiers involved in the incident, it said, "acted professionally and calmly to ease tensions and defend prisoners who needed help."
The June 29 confrontation between U.S. troops and Iraqi officials at the Interior Ministry has been mentioned in news accounts in the United States and Britain. But details about the prisoners' injuries, the actions of the Oregon Guard and the high-level American decision to leave the injured detainees in the hands of Iraqis has not been previously reported.
For their part, the Oregon guardsmen of the 2nd Battalion, 162nd Infantry left the Interior Ministry confused over their roles in the murky job of nation building. Hendrickson, a Corvallis police officer, refused to discuss details of the incident but said:
"Oregonians should be proud of the actions taken by the 2/162 on June 29."
The Oregonians intervene
When U.S.-led forces drove Saddam Hussein from power in April 2003, the Iraqi army was disbanded, and the country's social order collapsed. Looting was common and petty crime skyrocketed. Local thugs settled scores and exacted bribes with impunity. The rise in crime, coupled with the wave of car bombings and kidnappings, undermined the legitimacy of the provisional government.
In late June, on the eve of the transition of power, Iraq's prime minister in waiting, Ayad Allawi, announced a crackdown on crime. Police and security forces rounded up about 150 people in a seedy east Baghdad neighborhood. Many Iraqis cheered the action, which netted a collection of immigrants and poor Iraqis.
The Iraqi police took those arrested to a compound on the grounds of the Interior Ministry.
On the morning of June 29, Oregon guardsmen set off from their base near the Interior Ministry on routine neighborhood patrols.
Lookouts climbed towers ringing the base, and scouts took their usual positions in hidden vantage points around the neighborhoods of east Baghdad, looking for threats and signs of trouble.
One of the scouts posted in a tall building squinted through his rifle scope at the courtyard adjoining the Interior Ministry. He saw a man in plainclothes standing over a handcuffed and blindfolded prisoner. The guardsman watched through his rifle scope as the man reared back and brought what appeared to be a stick or metal rod down on the prisoner, who was lying on the ground.
The scout took pictures through his scope and considered his options.
The Oregon guardsman did not speak for this story. But others who spoke with the soldier said he radioed battalion headquarters to report the beating. According to one soldier, he said he would begin shooting the Iraqi guards if someone didn't intervene.
That message was passed to Lt. Col. Hendrickson, the battalion's commander, who gathered soldiers from the unit's headquarters company and a translator. Soon after, Hendrickson led a procession of Humvees from the guards' Patrol Base Volunteer to the Iraqi compound.
The squad of armed and armored Oregon guardsmen pushed into the detention yard "basically unchallenged," according to the written account by Southall, a Newark, Calif., middle school teacher who serves with the Oregon Guard.
Southall said he was speaking as an individual and not as a military officer. Senior Army officers have instructed soldiers not to discuss the incident.
According to Southall and other soldiers, the guardsmen began by separating the prisoners from the Iraqi policemen.
Some of the detainees said they had been held for three days with little water and no food. "Many of these prisoners had bruises and cuts and belt or hose marks all over," Southall said. At least one had a gunshot wound to the knee.
"I witnessed prisoners who were barely able to walk," Southall said.
The Oregon soldiers moved the prisoners into the shade of a nearby wall, cut them loose and handed out water bottles. They administered first aid when necessary and gave intravenous fluids to at least one dehydrated prisoner.
At about that time, U.S. military police arrived on the scene and began disarming the Iraqi policemen and moving them farther away from the prisoners, according to Southall.
Hendrickson demanded through the interpreter to speak with someone in charge of the Iraqi policemen. Two men came forward.
"One was a well-dressed obese man who told LTC Hendrickson that there was no prisoner abuse and that everything was under control and they were trying to conduct about 150 investigations as soon as possible," Southall said. The other, smaller man, who Southall said identified himself as "Maj. Ahmed," claimed he was responsible for outside security only and that those responsible for any prisoner abuse were inside the building.
Hendrickson then led some of the Oregon guardsmen inside to investigate further.
"There were several rooms within the building," Southall said. "One room, about 20 by 20 feet squared, contained even more prisoners, all in the same sad shape as the prisoners found in the outer area. There were about 78 prisoners crowded in this little room with no available furniture, no air conditioner, no water or food or restrooms available."
Southall said one prisoner claimed the Iraqi police arrested him at a market and confiscated his passport even though he had "paid a tremendous bribe" to the arresting officer. Others, many of whom appeared to be non-Arab shopkeepers and workers, said they had been detained for lack of proper identification.
The Oregon guardsmen walked into the adjoining office, where they saw several Iraqis sitting around a table smoking cigarettes.
"There was a tightly bound and gagged prisoner crumpled at the feet of these men," Southall said. "There was a recently eaten tray of food . . . and a nice water cooler that was standing upright in good order. This room was heavily air conditioned, which was a stark contrast to the rooms that contained prisoners."
The men in the room said they had not beaten anyone. They asserted, however, "that these prisoners were all dangerous criminals and most were thieves, users of marijuana and other types of bad people," according to Southall's account.
As U.S. soldiers continued to fan out in the building, they found more bound-and-gagged prisoners, and "hoses, broken lamps and chemicals of some variety," which could have been used as torture devices, Southall said.
Hendrickson radioed up the chain of command in the Army's 1st Cavalry Division, relaying what he had seen and asking for instructions. As the soldiers waited, Southall said, the Iraqi policemen began to get "defiant and hostile" toward the Americans.
It wasn't long before the order came: Stand down. Return the prisoners to the Iraqi authorities and leave the detention yard.
That order infuriated the Oregon guardsmen, who viewed themselves as protectors of the abused prisoners. Nonetheless, the soldiers obeyed. None of the soldiers interviewed for this story said which U.S. general gave the order.
In the preceding weeks, the guardsmen had been bombarded with images of Americans abusing Iraqi prisoners at the Abu Ghraib detention center. Those images, which continue to reverberate through the Arab world, had been replayed frequently on the televisions at Patrol Base Volunteer.
The guardsmen who later gave their account of that day said they wanted Americans to know about the actions they took to protect unresisting prisoners -- and that they were ordered by U.S. military officials to walk away.
"The guys were really upset," said one soldier. Said another who talked to them immediately afterward, "They were really moved by what they'd seen."
Hendrickson referred questions about the episode to Brig. Gen. Jeffrey Hammond of the 1st Cavalry. The story of what happened June 29 "needs to be told," Hammond acknowledged when interviewed by The Oregonian. But he said that, "because of the nature of this issue, it's being handled at a higher level than me."
What happened to the prisoners after the Americans departed is not clear. Guardsmen interviewed for this story said they've watched the detention facility closely since then, and that many of the prisoners were released soon after the raid on the detention facility.
The soldiers said they have not seen any further prisoner abuse occur there.
On July 12, Iraqi Prime Minister Allawi ordered another sweep of poor, crime-ridden east Baghdad neighborhoods. Afterward, Iraq said Allawi's crackdown had netted more than 500 "killers, robbers, car thieves and kidnappers."
U.S. officials say how Iraq handles the complaints about the roundups will be a test of the country's fragile institutions. The new Iraqi constitution bans "torture in all its forms, physical or mental," as well as "cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment."
The country now has a minister of human rights. Government ministries have also assigned inspectors general to examine allegations of wrongdoing.
The U.S. Embassy's statement cast the United States as a supporting player in building a government that is accountable. "The role of the United States," it said, "is to assist the sovereign Iraqi government as it continues on its path toward providing its citizens the opportunities and protections available through a free and representative society."
But Robert Kagan, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, said the United States gave the Iraqis sovereignty over a country that lacked functioning institutions and faced daunting security problems.
"We didn't want to put in enough forces to defeat the insurgency," Kagan said. "Now we hand it to the Iraqis, and we're surprised at how they do it?"
Stephen Engelberg of The Oregonian contributed to this report.
Mike Francis: 503-294-5955; mikefrancis@news.oregonian.com
-------- spies
The lies that led to war
August 8, 2004
Toronto Sun
By Eric Margolis
http://www.canoe.ca/NewsStand/Columnists/Toronto/Eric_Margolis/2004/08/08/573355.html
WELCOME TO the "Italian Job."
In his 2003 State of the Union address, U.S. President George Bush cited British intelligence claims that Iraq had secretly imported uranium ore from Niger to make nuclear weapons. Bush's claims were based on crude forgeries, previously rejected by the CIA.
Now, new information from European intelligence sources is detailing how the forgeries made their way from the Niger embassy in Rome to the White House. An FBI investigation of this outrageous scandal is said to be at a critical phase.
In a classic example of what intelligence professionals term "disinformation," a shady Italian intermediary, "Giacomo," was told a lady at the Niger embassy had "a gift" for him.
"Giacomo" has told The London Sunday Times he was given a sheaf of documents purporting to show Iraq had sought yellowcake uranium ore from Niger, a mineral used for nuclear fuel and weapons. "Giacomo" then reportedly passed them on to American agents. He says the Niger documents were given to him through SISMI, Italy's foreign intelligence service.
SISMI has long been notorious for far-right leanings.
Senior SISMI officers were implicated with celebrated swindler Roberto Calvi, the notorious P2 masonic lodge, and other extreme rightist groups. SISMI works hand in glove with U.S., British and other intelligence agencies.
In the 1960s and '70s, it was revealed that SISMI carried out numerous operations for the CIA, including bugging the Vatican, the Italian president's palace, and foreign embassies.
Some of its officers have been accused in the past of perjury, blackmail and political interference.
Italy's civilian intelligence service, SISDE, associated with Italy's political centre-left, has long been a bitter rival of SISMI.
In any event, although the CIA rejected the Niger file, it was taken up by U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney who was urgently seeking reasons to invade Iraq.
Cheney passed the now-discredited data to Bush, who used it in his January, 2003 address to the nation. Six months later, CIA director George Tenet admitted that the claim should never have been included in the State of the Union address.
A 2002 investigation by former U.S. Ambassador to Niger, Joseph Wilson, also concluded the documents were forgeries, but he was ignored by the White House. Wilson is now being smeared by Republicans. Amazingly, Bush, Cheney, the neo-conservatives, and the media, all of whom kept beating the war drums over the alleged Iraqi nuclear threat, never seemed to have understood that yellowcake uranium ore is no more lethal than plain dirt.
To make nuclear weapons, the ore must be laboriously enriched by gaseous separation or centrifuge. Both processes require enormous plants and huge amounts of electric power -- easily observable by satellite. Iraq had no nuclear industrial infrastructure to enrich uranium, as everyone knew. What would it do with raw ore?
Iraq had no means to deliver nuclear warheads. The only way Iraq could get a nuclear warhead to the U.S. was by FedEx.
Who was behind the Italian Job? Who knows? Likely right-wing elements within Italy's government who are ideological soulmates of Bush. In any event, this appears to be SISMI's contribution to the cascade of lies that led to war.
In Great Britain, which also pushed the discredited Niger/uranium story, claiming it had independent confirmation from another source, MI6 provided other disinformation.
Britain's respected Scotsman newspaper has just cited a report by investigative journalist Tom Mangold that Tony Blair's intelligence chief, John Scarlett, sent a secret message to British arms inspectors in Iraq, pressuring them to confirm 10 charges made by the British government -- which have now been disproved -- about Saddam's nefarious weapons of mass destruction.
These claims were the centerpiece of a key government report on the Iraqi threat justifying war. All, as it turned out, were bogus. Instead of being sacked, Scarlett was recently promoted to head MI6 by Blair.
Completing the farce, we now learn an astounding 15,000 tons of highly enriched uranium the U.S. sent around the world since the '50s for various research projects remain unaccounted for. It takes 10 kilos to build a basic nuclear weapon.
-------- un
Kurds Are Seizing Property of U.N. In Iraq,
Agency's Permanent Base Delayed
By Colum Lynch
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, August 8, 2004; Page A17
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A48712-2004Aug7.html
UNITED NATIONS, Aug. 7 -- Kurdish authorities in the northern Iraqi city of Irbil are seizing millions of dollars worth of trucks, computers and communications equipment from the United Nations, delaying U.N. plans to establish a permanent office in northern Iraq to manage its political and humanitarian operations there, according to senior U.N. officials.
Kurdish officials said any equipment that was purchased with Iraqi oil revenue under Saddam Hussein's government belongs to the Iraqi people, according to U.N. officials. The United Nations had initially agreed to transfer the equipment to the local authorities in Irbil, only to reverse position and demand it be returned, the Kurdish officials said.
The former Iraqi president was required to use his country's oil wealth to underwrite a massive U.N. humanitarian aid program in Iraq between December 1996 and May 2003. Iraq spent more than $36 billion on goods through the U.N. oil-for-food program and funded the activities of 900 international staffers and about 2,500 local Iraqi employees throughout the country.
The United Nations abruptly pulled out of Iraq last year, after two terrorist attacks against the United Nations' Baghdad headquarters. It left behind millions of dollars' worth of vehicles, computers and other equipment in its offices in Baghdad, Basra and Irbil. U.N. officials in Jordan, and Kuwait continue to manage the organization's assets and relief operations from outside Iraq through a network of Iraqi employees.
The seizures began on June 21, after the Kurdistan regional government's prime minister, Nechirvan Barzani, a nephew of prominent Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani, ordered the requisition of vehicles and other equipment belonging to six U.N. agencies, including the U.N. Development Program and the World Health Organization, a senior U.N. official said.
"They seized 40 vehicles, 400 to 500 communications items, everything from walkie-talkies to satellite units," said Fred Eckhard, the chief spokesman for U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan. Eckhard said Kurdish authorities also took "200 computers, printers, copiers, air conditioners and other office equipment. In addition, they went to the U.N. storehouse, broke the padlocks, replaced them with their own locks and said these are now their assets."
U.N. officials said the Kurdish action comes several months after a separate Kurdish faction headed by Jalal Talabani, the leader of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, claimed the United Nations' property in Sulaymaniyah. At the time, the United Nations was in the process of transferring some of the assets to the local Iraqis, according to a senior U.N. official. "The secretary general instructed us, 'Don't keep anything you won't need for the reasonable scope of activities,' " the official said. "We were ready to transfer them, and they came in and took over everything."
Annan's top humanitarian relief official for Iraq, Ross Mountain of New Zealand, protested the latest action in Irbil in a letter to the local administrator, noting that "under international law" the United Nations was the rightful owner of the property, according to a report released Friday by Annan.
"They contend that since these had been purchased with funds from the oil-for-food deal program and donor contributions, they were not U.N. property," Annan wrote. "The local authorities have now expanded the scope of the seizures, taking over all U.N. assets regardless of their source of funding."
Mohammed Ishan, a minister for human rights in the Kurdistan Regional Government, said the allegations that the local government forcibly seized the equipment are "not true."
He said the United Nations and the U.S.-led occupation authorities transferred the equipment in June to local authorities, who then distributed it to the various ministries that carried out humanitarian programs with the United Nations. He said U.N. officials in Jordan then "changed their minds."
Ishan said Kurdish authorities protected the U.N. headquarters and its possessions in Irbil throughout the war, preventing looting that occurred elsewhere in Iraq. He said the United Nations "thanked us for protecting their property and authorized us to keep them."
The property squabble comes as the United Nations is preparing to establish its first permanent bases of operations in Baghdad, Basra and Irbil since last year's attacks, which killed 22 U.N. officials and associates, including top envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello of Brazil.
Although the United Nations has postponed plans to set up an office in Irbil, it is pressing ahead with plans to send a small team, headed by Vieira de Mello's successor, Ashraf Jehangir Qazi of Pakistan, to Baghdad before mid-August. The new mission will be limited to essential U.N. staff required to pave the way for a national conference on Iraq's future and to prepare for January elections.
But U.N. officials said an effort to assemble an international force to defend a larger U.N. presence has stalled, forcing them to maintain a limited presence and to rely on the United States and its military allies for security.
"Staff security remains the overriding constraint for all United Nations activities," Annan wrote. "For the foreseeable future, the United Nations will remain a high-value, high-impact target for attack in Iraq."
-------- us
Hearing Recesses in England Case
Associated Press
Sunday, August 8, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A48711-2004Aug7.html
FORT BRAGG, N.C., Aug. 7 -- The pretrial hearing for a soldier photographed with naked Iraqi prisoners recessed Saturday without a ruling on whether Vice President Cheney and other high-ranking administration officials must testify -- and without the photos being accepted into evidence.
Military judge Col. Denise Arn recessed the Article 32 hearing for Pfc. Lynndie R. England until she reviews defense requests to call dozens of witnesses, including Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and top Army generals.
"It is my intent to complete this investigation as soon as possible," Arn told attorneys. Defense attorney Richard Hernandez said the case could resume the week of Aug. 30.
The hearing is to determine whether England, 21, a reservist with the Maryland-based 372nd Military Police Company, should face a court-martial on 13 counts of abusing detainees and six counts stemming from possession of sexually explicit photos.
-------- war crimes
Rwandan Accused in Genocide Wins Suit for U.N. Pay
August 8, 2004
By JANE PERLEZ
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/08/international/africa/08rwanda.html?pagewanted=all
fter the killing frenzy in Rwanda a decade ago, a war crimes investigator charged that a United Nations employee delegated to ensure the safety of his colleagues took part in the atrocity. The employee was never prosecuted and continued to hold jobs in the United Nations for years.
Now he has won the right to compensation for pay lost after he was finally dismissed in 2001, a decision that has incensed some United Nations investigators and officials, who say it represents a betrayal of the United Nations' most basic principles.
The failure to prosecute the former employee, Callixte Mbarushimana, they assert, coupled now with the decision to compensate him, calls into question the United Nations' willingness to confront serious wrongdoing within its ranks.
Tony Greig, a criminal defense lawyer now based in New Zealand, said in an interview that as a United Nations war crimes investigator, he had collected evidence against Mr. Mbarushimana for an indictment that was never pursued.
The accusations, drawing on the accounts of 24 witnesses, asserted that Mr. Mbarushimana, a Rwandan Hutu who was assigned to help keep United Nations workers alive during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, instead directed or took part in the killing of 32 people, including United Nations colleagues, and personally shot two people.
Mr. Greig says he was told by United Nations officials that because Mr. Mbarushimana was not considered one of the planners of the killings, the indictment, prepared by the tribunal's lawyers, was set aside.
Mr. Mbarushimana's lawyer, François Roux, said the tribunal had decided that the accusations were "not sufficiently well founded.'' On the matter of pay, Mr. Roux said, "It's only right that after all he has been through, my client should at least be indemnified."
Mr. Mbarushimana, who now lives in France, said in a telephone interview that he could not comment.
The judgment by a United Nations personnel board to award the back pay has incensed Mr. Greig and other officials already deeply angered that Mr. Mbarushimana not only has not been prosecuted, but went on to work for the United Nations in Angola and Kosovo.
"Callixte may have been a relatively small fish in the genocide, but what's important is principle, and the standing of the United Nations,'' said Charles Petrie, who was a senior official with the United Nations Development Program in Rwanda and is now the organization's senior representative in Myanmar. "If he wins his back pay, it would convey the impression that the United Nations is corrupt."
But Mr. Petrie says more than money is at stake. For the sake of its own reputation, the United Nations should squarely confront the case and either declare Mr. Mbarushimana not guilty or prosecute him.
"If we accept the principle that he should not get the money, why are we not reviewing the indictment?" he said. He and others consider the decision to compensate Mr. Mbarushimana now as an indirect exoneration.
Fred Eckhard, the spokesman for Secretary General Kofi Annan, said that under pressure from the Security Council, the chief prosecutor, Carla Del Ponte, decided to pursue only the planners of the genocide, and that Mr. Mbarushimana was left to the local courts. Efforts by the Rwandan government to extradite him were unsuccessful.
Mr. Eckhard said that the United Nations had refused to pay the six months' salary awarded to him by the United Nations Appeals Board and that the matter would soon be examined by the organization's Administrative Tribunal.
Particularly galling to United Nations staff members like Mr. Petrie is the accusation that Mr. Mbarushimana sought out United Nations colleagues as his primary targets. Investigators said he was able to do so, in part, because soon after the killings started, the New York headquarters decided not to intervene and evacuated international staff members.In the vacuum, Mr. Mbarushimana was assigned to deliver money and food supplies to the Rwandan staff members left behind. Instead, dressed in an army uniform and carrying a gun, he handed keys to United Nations vehicles to Rwandan soldiers and allowed other United Nations matériel to be used by them, according to the indictment prepared by the tribunal's lawyers.
About 800,000 Rwandans, mostly of the Tutsi minority, were wiped out in killings orchestrated by the extremist Hutu government from April to June 1994.
When an American United Nations worker, Gregory Alex, returned to Kigali, the capital, in late April 1994 to help set up a small emergency system of food deliveries, Mr. Mbarushimana came to his office and said, "We will eliminate them all,'' Mr. Alex recalled in a telephone interview from Pennsylvania.
He said he believed that the remark was a reference to a list of United Nations Tutsi staff members that Mr. Mbarushimana, a Hutu, had on a piece of paper in his hand.
Among the accusations against Mr. Mbarushimana was the killing of Florence Ngirumpatse, who had been the director of personnel at the United Nations Development Program's office in Kigali. Twelve other people, mostly Tutsi children, ages 8 to 18, whom Ms. Ngirumpatse was trying to protect from the slaughter, were killed in her house with her, the indictment said.
Mr. Greig said Ms. Del Ponte, the prosecutor, visited Kigali on Sept. 11, 2001, and asked about the Mbarushimana case. "I told her the elements of the case,'' he said. "She was delighted.''
A former London police detective who immigrated to New Zealand and now works as a criminal defense lawyer, Mr. Greig said he was confident of the quality of the evidence. "I know what evidence is,'' he said. "I know how to collect it.''
But the indictment against Mr. Mbarushimana was dismissed a year after it was drawn up. Soon afterward, Mr. Mbarushimana filed a complaint with the United Nations for wrongful dismissal from his post in Kosovo. His United Nations contract in Kosovo was canceled in 2001 when an article appeared in The Sunday Times in London about his case. He was arrested at the time, held for one month and then released.
Mr. Mbarushimana's complaint to the Appeals Board was for back pay from what he considered unfair termination of his contract.
In a note to the administrator of the United Nations Development Program, Mark Malloch Brown, at the time of the 10th anniversary of the Rwanda killings in April, Mr. Petrie said he tried to bring the case to the attention of his boss, one of the most senior officials in the United Nations hierarchy.
Mr. Petrie wrote that he found "the murder of our colleagues of such gravity that it is difficult to accept that an individual against whom such allegations have been made should be indirectly exonerated through an administrative procedure.''
Mr. Petrie said he did not get a response from Mr. Malloch Brown, who said he had discussed Mr. Petrie's note with "his superiors in New York and thought they had gotten back to him verbally."
But Mr. Petrie said he never heard from a more senior official in New York, or from Mr. Malloch Brown. Mr. Petrie said he believed that Mr. Mbarushimana had benefited from a "don't tell me, I don't want to know" form of bureaucratic inertia.
"No one questions the horror of the story, but people say the system is not going to do anything about it," he said.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- death penalty
Iraq Reinstates Capital Punishment
August 8, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iraq-Capital-Punishment.html
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- Iraq reinstated capital punishment for people guilty of murder, endangering national security and distributing drugs, the government announced Sunday, saying the death penalty was necessary to help put down the country's persistent insurgency.
The announcement came a day after the government offered an amnesty to Iraqis who committed minor crimes since the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime last year. The two laws were part of a carrot-and-stick approach by the government to try to put down the 15-month-old campaign of violence.
Capital punishment was suspended during the U.S. occupation. Under Saddam's regime, some 114 offenses could garner the death penalty. The new law was more restrictive than that had been.
``This is not an open door to execute anyone and everyone, or people whom the government dislikes. This is not Saddam's law,'' Minister of State Adnan al-Janabi said.
Many Iraqis also wanted the death penalty reinstated so it could be applied to Saddam, who faces trial on war crimes charges. It was not immediately clear how the new law would effect Saddam.
In announcing the law, Janabi and Human Rights Minister Bakhtiar Amin said they regretted the need to bring back the death penalty, but it was needed to fight the militants destabilizing the country with car bombings, kidnappings, sabotage and other violence.
``The tough task in front of us in this country is maintaining security and stability, combatting terror and organized crime,'' Amin said. ``I assure you that none of us in the government are comfortable with reinstating capital punishment.''
When security returns to the country, the law will be revoked, they said. The law did not specify how the executions were to be carried out, or if they were to be done in public or private.
--------
Iraq Reimposes Death Penalty for Certain Crimes
August 8, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-iraq-penalty.html
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraq's interim government reinstated the death penalty Sunday for a range of crimes including murder, kidnapping and drug offences, officials said.
Capital punishment was suspended after the toppling of Saddam Hussein in April last year. Officials, speaking at a news conference, said the death penalty would go into effect once it had been published in a government gazette.
``This has to do with the security situation in Iraq,'' Minister of State Adnan al-Janabi said, speaking a day after the government announced an amnesty for insurgents who have committed minor crimes.
The death penalty, used liberally during Saddam's brutal rule, might apply to the captured ex-dictator himself, who stands accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity. The officials at the news conference refused to be drawn on whether the death penalty would apply to him.
The European Union had urged the interim government not to reinstate capital punishment. But Iraqi officials had said it was needed to halt a raging insurgency and crime wave.
--------
Iraq Death-Penalty Decision Condemned
8 Aug 2004
PA News
By John Deane, Chief Political Correspondent
http://news.scotsman.com/latest.cfm?id=3315589
Human rights campaigners today condemned a decision by Iraq's interim government to reinstate capital punishment.
The UK branch of Amnesty International described the move as a "sad day" for Iraqis, insisting that the death penalty is "inhumane".
The penalty will apply to those found guilty of murder, endangering national security and distributing drugs.
Capital punishment, widely used under the regime of Saddam Hussein, had been suspended during the US-led occupation.
Announcing the move, minister of state Adnan al-Janabi and human rights minister Bakhtiar Amin said they regretted the need to bring back the death penalty, but argued that it was needed to fight the militants destabilising the country with car bombings, kidnappings, sabotage and other violence.
They said the law would be revoked when security returned to the country. It was not clear how the new death penalty law might effect Saddam Hussein, who is currently awaiting trial on war crimes charges.
Amnesty International UK spokesman Steve Ballinger said: "It is a sad day for the families of those thousands executed under Saddam Hussein when their government reverts to the inhumane penalties that were so widely used in the past.
"The death penalty is cruel, inhumane and has had no marked effect on crime rates in the countries where it is used.
"Amnesty International opposes the death penalty in all forms and in all countries."
Earlier, the Foreign Office reiterated Britain's long-standing opposition to the use of the death penalty.
"If the Iraqi government has reintroduced the death penalty we will lobby them to abolish it as we would do with other states that have the death penalty," a spokesman said.
Foreign Secretary Jack Straw has previously said that while Britain in principle opposes the use of the death penalty, it was a matter for the sovereign Iraqi authorities to determine whether it might be applied to Saddam and his colleagues.
-------- homeland security
Homeland Security badge unites agencies
August 08, 2004
By Jerry Seper
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20040807-113835-4455r.htm
The Department of Homeland Security last week announced the successful unification of U.S. Customs and Border Protection's work force by presenting officers, agriculture specialists and Border Patrol agents with the first DHS law enforcement badges.
Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge called the badge presentations in Newark, New Jersey, San Diego and Detroit a major milestone in the agency's "One Face at the Border" initiative - the placement of a single border agency at and between the nation's ports of entry.
"The Customs and Border Protection [CBP] badges you see today are the badges of honor in the war on terrorism," Mr. Ridge said. "In the weeks to follow, each of our 30,000 CBP officers, CBP agriculture specialists, and CBP Border Patrol agents will be issued a new badge under which they will carry out their mission as one unified force protecting America's borders."
While cross-training and other aspects of integration have been under way for some time, Mr. Ridge said all former Customs and Immigration inspectors have now been converted to the CBP officer position. The former agriculture inspectors were converted to CBP agriculture specialists a few months ago, and granted pay parity with CBP officers.
"It is an honor for me to administer a new oath to our front-line officers and agents under the Department of Homeland Security," said CBP Commissioner Robert C. Bonner. "This new oath and the badges we pin on today are symbolic of the dedication of U.S. Customs and Border Protection employees to protect our borders against the terrorist threat.
"At CBP, as 'One Face at the Border,' we are building on strong traditions, but we are also forging a new tradition, a tradition of total professionalism and excellence." Mr. Bonner said.
CBP includes more than 41,000 employees to manage, control and protect the nation's borders at and between the ports of entry.
"U.S. Customs and Border Protection has accomplished a lot to secure our borders, but there is much more we are doing," Mr. Bonner said. "We understand that as America's front line, the security of a nation rests on our shoulders. We have learned the lessons of September 11 and are working day and night to make America safer and more secure."
The conversion of immigration and customs inspectors to the CBP officer position was made possible with the recent implementation of the Customs Officer Pay Reform Act (COPRA), which took effect on July 25. It provides a single overtime system for front-line officers at the ports of entry and ensures efficient and equitable work assignments and compensation.
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What, Us Worry? The New State of Disbelief
August 8, 2004
By TODD S. PURDUM
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/08/weekinreview/08Purd.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON - The capital was a strange blend of spy movie and slapstick last week. Public news conferences raised alarm, private background briefings raised doubts and every answer seemed to raise more questions. Barricades went up, confidence went down and political recriminations suffused the scene as high officials and average citizens struggled to come to grip with a maddenly elusive threat.
Perhaps no moment since Sept. 11 has better captured a new reality: When the Terrorist Era meets the Information Age, a Time of Confusion results. The latest ill-explained upswing of the government's yellow-orange yo-yo of terror warnings showed just how much uncertainty and suspicion have become constants in the political and civic culture here - and how much worse things may yet get before they get better.
"Just 10 years ago, you could basically shut off any question on anything by saying, 'That's an intelligence matter and we never discuss it,' '' said Michael D. McCurry, a White House press secretary under Bill Clinton. "Now that just doesn't cut it anymore, and part of the reason is that people are so skeptical of intelligence as a consequence of the intelligence failures pre-9/11 and pre-Iraq war."
Washington has come a long way since the dawn of the cold war, when so-called Wise Men ruled the foreign policy establishment and inspired a broad public trust later shredded by Vietnam. The world is more complicated. The threats are more shadowy, information moves at lightning speed, demand for public disclosure is pressing and confidence in institutions is frayed.
It is clear that nearly three years after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, new rules and institutional responses are still being improvised.
"We're learning, put it that way," said William H. Webster, the former director of the F.B.I. and C.I.A., who is co-chairman of the Department of Homeland Security's advisory council.
In the post-Sept. 11 age, the notion that what you don't know can't hurt you seems as quaint as the crossbow and catapult. But when it comes to how the government should discuss and disseminate information about threats that the experts themselves are struggling to understand, it is also clear that what citizens do know can hurt them - especially when the information they are given leaves them unsure about what to do.
On Sunday, the Bush administration won praise for a warning much more precise than those in the past - limited to financial service institutions in New York, New Jersey and Washington - then drew skepticism when law enforcement officials let it be known later that much of the information that led to the alert may have been newly discovered in Pakistan, but was three or four years old. By week's end, word came that a senior Qaeda operative in Britain was under arrest. He is believed to have directed the surveillance that prompted fears of a fresh attack and the implications for any continuing threat remained unclear.
"For me, this week was the first real crystallization of the challenge we are really having adapting to the post-9/11 world," said Stephen Flynn, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of "America the Vulnerable: How Our Government Is Failing to Protect Us From Terrorism." "One immediate thing it made clear is that an approach that's driven by our responding to threats based on the intelligence we receive is a very frail one indeed, because we just simply don't have access to the kind of intelligence we need and want, and we probably won't for 10 to 15 years."
Instead of ratcheting up responses to threats that are often vague, Mr. Flynn said, the nation should look at potential terrorist targets the way engineers look at a building's ability to withstand disaster, "and think about rational safeguards" like better screening systems in airports or new ventilation systems to defuse biological or chemical attacks. "In the beginning, we're going to live in this messy in-between state," he said.
No one suggests the answers will be easy, but other societies from Northern Ireland to Israel have learned to adapt, albeit to threats more specific and less severe.
"The Israelis every day are confronted with suicide bombers, but they don't issue generalized threats," said the historian Ronald Steel, who teaches international relations at the University of Southern California. "This simply becomes a fact of life. The method chosen to deal with this here seems inappropriate. The warnings don't say what you're supposed to do or where you're supposed to look. It's, 'Be afraid, but go about your business.' If you go about your business, presumably you're not afraid. You condition mice by keeping them in a constant state of terror. Whether that's deliberate here or not, I don't know. It hasn't worked because there hasn't been any event that seems to justify it."
President Bush has not hesitated to use powerful imagery from the Sept. 11 attacks in his campaign advertising, but his aides professed shock that the elevated warning would be seen as in any way tied to election-year politics. They insisted they were simply sharing information that was strikingly specific, and that the public demands as much, especially in the aftermath of the 9/11 commission's report, which found that both the Clinton and Bush administrations missed years of tantalizing clues that might have averted disaster.
Once upon a time, there was less skepticism. At the height of the Cuban missile crisis, when John F. Kennedy sent the former diplomat Dean Acheson to brief President Charles de Gaulle of France, Acheson offered to show surveillance photos to buttress his case. The usually demanding de Gaulle demurred: The word of the president of the Untied States was good enough for him. It is hard to imagine even Mr. Bush's most stalwart allies being so accommodating today.
For 50 years, the principal threat to national security was nuclear annihilation at the hands of a government - the Soviet Union - presumed to be led by rational actors. Yes, there was fear of subversives at home, but they were seen as proxies for foreign powers, not independent actors willing to die in suicide attacks. Even an earlier generation of terrorists on American shores had clearer political motives, and more peaceful means.
"Back in the more benign days of airplane hijackings to Cuba, when all that meant was somebody got a free ride to Havana and you got flown back to Miami courtesy of Eastern Airlines, we wrestled with the question of how much and who to inform when we had a threat," Mr. Webster recalled. "If it was a broad-scale thing about bombs on airplanes without specificity, the general consensus was it did no real value to tell the public something as indefinite as that."
Now, of course, the threat is in the nation's bloodstream, hijackers are far more creative and confidential warnings from Washington to local law enforcement quickly become public. No one can say how long the danger will last, or when the all clear can be sounded.
"I think the hardest problem is going to be how do we back off these incremental increases,'' Mr. Webster said. "Who's going to say, 'Well, it's been four years and nothing happened?' Once you've decided that you have a sufficient basis to go to an elevated level of security, it's very hard to go back. You know these people can take a lot of time on their planning and execution. When do you say, 'We don't think this is as likely to happen.' "
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THE 9/11 REPORT
New Alert Shows That Intelligence Weaknesses Remain
August 8, 2004
By ERIC LICHTBLAU and ERIC LIPTON
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/08/politics/08terror.html?pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, Aug. 7 - In what amounted to an unexpected test run of the nation's overhauled security system, the unfolding terrorist threats of recent days revealed both marked improvements and lingering vulnerabilities in the federal government's ability to identify and mobilize against a possible attack.
A tense week of global arrests, closed-off roadways and public jitters demonstrated the government's capacity to move much more quickly and mass far more resources in response to a perceived threat than it did three years ago before the Sept. 11 attacks, government officials and outside experts agreed.
But the week underscored the United States' increased reliance on terrorist information from Pakistan and other allies, its continued difficulties in using covert sources to infiltrate Al Qaeda and, perhaps most critically, the credibility problems the government faces in deciding what to tell a somewhat jaded public.
In general, the administration's handling of the most recent threats against financial centers "was really a great example of how the system can work, and what I really liked was the heightened sense of urgency we saw," Thomas H. Kean, chairman of the Sept. 11 commission, said in an interview.
Indeed, after American intelligence officials began receiving word about 10 days ago of alarming terrorist intelligence out of Pakistan, Central Intelligence Agency workers and analysts were called back from vacation to scrub new information about possible plots against financial centers in New York, Newark and Washington. The White House maintained a virtual open phone line to senior officials across the federal government, as well as mayors and police leaders in the targeted areas. And the Department of Homeland Security issued the most explicit public warning in its short history.
That led city leaders in Manhattan, Newark and Washington to undertake extraordinary security measures around possible targets - an overreaction in the eyes of some commuters but necessary in the view of others.
The climate contrasted sharply with that seen in the weeks before the Sept. 11 attacks.
In the summer of 2001, as warnings of a possible terrorist attack grew louder, key information about Al Qaeda was bottled up within the American government because of miscommunication and turf wars. The White House held few high-level strategy meetings on the threat. Tantalizing leads went unconnected.
But if the week's drama showed a much more agile federal response to fast-breaking events, it also pointed up the government's continuing limitations in infiltrating Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups, some terrorism experts said.
The United States is getting more on-the-ground support and intelligence from allies like Pakistan since the Sept. 11 attacks, but it is making much less progress in infiltrating Al Qaeda with its own spies and informers.
The result last week was that it took intelligence that originated in Pakistan to point officials to detailed Qaeda reconnaissance missions on the streets of Manhattan, Newark and Washington about where security guards were posted, when elevators ran and what coffee shops could be used for cover.
The Sept. 11 commission's investigation showed that "we knew much more about activity abroad than we did about activity in the United States," said Jamie S. Gorelick, a commission member. "And we got much more information abroad from our liaison relationships than we did from our own sources."
Governor Kean said the new information from Pakistan about the Qaeda reconnaissance missions highlighted the need for the United States to find better ways of placing more spies and informers inside Al Qaeda and develop quicker information about terrorist plots.
"It was disturbing that we didn't have any information during the time when they were actually casing these places out," he said. "But until we rebuild the C.I.A.'s covert program - and that could take five years - we just don't have a lot of human intelligence operatives. And until that happens, we have to rely on countries like Pakistan for a lot of our intelligence."
While intelligence officials are training record numbers of new case officers, they acknowledge that it will take years to build their network of clandestine officers to where it needs to be to overcome global threats. The number of case officers posted overseas is now thought to be only about 1,100, or roughly the number of F.B.I. agents in New York City.
Terrorism experts said the Bush administration may have also hurt its own cause and inspired public skepticism last week in how it alerted the public to the possible attacks. Administration officials did not acknowledge until Monday, a day after declaring a "high risk" of attacks against financial sectors in Manhattan, Newark and Washington, that much of the new intelligence was based on reconnaissance missions by Qaeda operatives three or four years ago.
"It is hard to understand why they felt something was going to happen in an imminent way," said Tony Bullock, spokesman for Mayor Anthony Williams in Washington, where officials set up roadblocks and inspected vehicles around targeted buildings. "We had hundreds of people in Washington and from around the country saying, 'Should we leave the city?' "
The conflicting views of what took place this week - a vigorous response to a looming danger, or a knee-jerk overreaction driven by political calculations as much as practical ones - may be impossible to reconcile, given that much of the intelligence that has been disclosed is murky, and that presumably there is more that remains hidden from public view.
Last week's events reflected the difficult balance between giving the public sufficient notice about a threat but not so much information that intelligence sources may be compromised, officials said. So while government officials hinted last week that an additional strand of intelligence corroborated their concerns about another attack, they would not discuss that fresh intelligence in any detail.
"These public warnings are all very new stuff, and it's going to take a little while to get it right," said John Gannon, a former C.I.A. official who is now staff director for the House homeland security committee.
Governor Kean said the administration's failure to acknowledge from the outset that it was dealing with largely dated material "was a mistake, and it's tough to undo the damage in public confidence. What looked bad is the public thinking we just found this out yesterday, then you find out it was four years old and people say, 'Well, it couldn't be that important.' ''
Administration officials defended their response, saying they were still analyzing the new information from Pakistan through last weekend and that they did not fully realize until after the threat level was raised that most, if not all, of the surveillance of the financial buildings happened before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks - and that no matter its vintage, the information was still specific and alarming.
Still, the changing public message also raised questions about how quickly intelligence officials are able to analyze information, determine its significance and help determine what and whether to tell local law enforcement officials, private businesses and the general public.
Counterterrorism officials say they have already taken strong steps to bolster their intelligence and analysis capabilities, including the hiring and training of more agents, analysts and linguists, as well as the opening of a joint terrorism center run out of the C.I.A.
The new center, known as the Terrorist Threat Integration Center, brings together some 100 analysts from the C.I.A., F.B.I. the Department of Homeland Security, the Secret Service and other agencies, and it was at the center of last weekend's effort to assess the significance of the new intelligence from Pakistan. Some C.I.A. staff members were pulled back from vacation to work 20-hour days, while senior officials sat in a windowless conference room taking part in hours-long video teleconferences, said John O. Brennan, the C.I.A. official who runs the center.
"The government worked more as a team than I have ever seen it before," Mr. Brennan said in an interview. "When you have those principals as well as the experts there, it makes a difference. They were discussing the casing reports, explaining what was in casing reports, identifying new nuggets and any new buildings identified."
Several Sept. 11 commission members said that for all the improvements already made, the week's events reinforced the commission's belief that wholesale restructuring is still needed, including the creation of a national intelligence director.
President Bush last week endorsed a scaled-back version of the position, but under Mr. Bush's plan, the intelligence director would not sit in the White House and would not have direct control over the intelligence community's $40 billion budget.
Another recommendation of the Sept. 11 commission - backed by President Bush - would expand the terrorism center to allow even faster analysis of threat information.
"We need clear, clean, short lines of command and control," Philip Mudd, another senior C.I.A. official, said at a congressional hearing last week. "Opportunities to roll up a terrorist or prevent an attack demand immediate action. This is a war of speed."
The most encouraging sign to emerge from last week's threat response, officials at the federal, state and local levels agreed, was the quick coordination and sharing of information up and down the Washington-New York corridor.
Even as the new intelligence from Pakistan was being analyzed, federal officials were on the phone with top local officials in New York and Washington, followed by direct conversations on secure phones between Mr. Ridge and the mayors of both cities.
Before the weekend was over, Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly of New York was hooked into a conference call that included Donald H. Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, and top officials at the C.I.A. and F.B.I., among others.
"If you are included in a conference call with people of that nature, there is not much to complain about," said Ed Skyler, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's press secretary. "It really shows a recognition on the federal government's part that the localities are the ones that ultimately are going to have the troops on the ground domestically - the police department and others - and keeping them in the loop is necessary if you are going to be successful in preventing an attack."
Not only were the city officials told about the threat, details about the surveillance reports gathered as part of what might have been a terrorist plot were shared to help the local officials decide what security measures to take.
For cities where officials in the past had complained about being left out of the loop, this was a much appreciated departure - a sure sign, top officials in these cities said, that the response to threats has improved since September 11, 2001.
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New Technology Filling Defense Arsenal
Bomb Jammers and Vehicle Scanners Help, but an Educated Public Also Is Vital
By Spencer S. Hsu and Sari Horwitz
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, August 8, 2004; Page A15
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A48597-2004Aug7.html
In a government building in Herndon, the U.S. Transportation Security Administration is building a computer system intended to anchor the next generation of information sharing and analysis to thwart the truck bomb threat.
Meanwhile, scientists at America's national laboratories and defense research centers are developing scanning and detection equipment and such countermeasures as vehicle-disabling devices and bomb jammers, which can block or delay someone using a cell phone or other remote gadget from detonating an explosive.
The effort, analysts say, is to leverage America's strengths -- its technology, wealth, organizational power and educated citizenry -- to blunt terrorists' advantages.
The Transportation Security Operations Center is creating a cyberspace system that will collect and analyze tips from 400,000 truck drivers, toll collectors, construction workers and rest area crews.
In cooperation with the private sector, the system builds on the trucking industry's six-year-old national call-in line and tracking center. The Highway Watch program will feed a clearinghouse of government information on the transportation industry, becoming "the center of the matrix," in the words of Chet Lunner, assistant TSA administrator for maritime and land security.
Combined with law enforcement, media and other information sources, TSA leaders hope, in effect, to sweep straw from throughout the nation into a giant haystack and search for the sharp points.
"This information never existed in one spot before," Lunner said. "For the first time, we are getting a nationwide, systemwide look at the situation . . . in close to real time."
New technology is also coming on line, much of it classified. Tens of millions of dollars have been spent at such places as the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, which combines Department of Energy, Homeland Security and other funding to leverage techniques used to track and detect nuclear weapons, said Nancy Jo Nicholas, nuclear nonproliferation manager for Los Alamos.
Military, business, diplomatic and political leaders are purchasing bomb jammers. Such devices cost from hundreds to millions of dollars, and newer models are small enough to fit into a briefcase or backpack.
Pakistani intelligence said one helped thwart a December assassination attempt against President Pervez Musharraf. Others are being supplied to some U.S. military convoys in Iraq.
In January, the Army's chief of staff acknowledged the use of jammers to the House Armed Services Committee, but he would not discuss the bomb defense technology in detail for security reasons.
Elsewhere, U.S. border agents are employing gamma rays to scan a moving vehicle in 10 seconds. The Mobile Vehicle and Cargo Inspection System was used at the recent summit of the world's eight largest industrialized nations in Sea Island, Ga.
Agencies are pressing ahead with "geo-fencing," a method that can combine satellite, cellular or other wireless signals to track vehicles entering restricted areas.
Authorities also are looking to develop vehicle-disabling devices, embedding roadways with cables or other pop-up devices to stop or slow an approaching vehicle.
"Among industries, there is a lot of reluctance to implement new technology and regulations that are forced upon them," said David McCallen, program leader for nuclear material storage science at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California who has led research of devices to stop trucks. "There is no incentive for the market, so it takes determination on the part of government to do them."
Still, technology has its limits. On Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist hijackers switched off the radar beacons of their airliners, disappearing from controllers' screens.
In Washington, for example, the Department of Transportation has completed a two-year, $500,000 study of the truck bomb threat to the nation's capital. Its recommendations, which it acknowledges may not be practical in cases "short of war," include implementing truck restriction zones, banning gasoline tanker and through shipments of hazardous materials, and creating a centralized truck inspection facility, in addition to expanding technology.
But regardless of the government's efforts, authorities say that an educated and alert citizenry must be vigilant and must understand that some risks can only be minimized, not eliminated. If the public is educated about the nature of the threat, terrorism will lose some of its bite in the post-9/11 world.
"Money is not the defining factor. . . . Technology is not the answer," Lunner said. "It begins with better awareness of intelligence, better coordination [and cooperation with industry and operators]. It's not one silver bullet."
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Officials: Capitol Among New U.S. Terror Targets
August 8, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-security-usa-targets.html
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States has received information about additional possible terror targets in the country, including the U.S. Capitol in Washington, a counterterror official said on Sunday.
Homeland security adviser Frances Townsend said on CBS' ``Face the Nation'' the targets were in addition to the five cited last week when the terror threat alert was raised to the second-highest level for financial buildings in Washington, New York and Newark, New Jersey.
Asked if there had been a threat against Washington or lawmakers, Townsend said, ``Yes, in the past and as part of this continuing threat stream, and so we shared that with them.''
U.S. Sen. Joseph Biden, a Delaware Democrat, said he had been briefed by the FBI regarding the situation in Washington, where security has been increased in the past week, most notably with checkpoints around the Capitol, occupied by Congress.
The U.S. government raised the threat level based on evidence gathered from computer expert Mohammad Naeem Noor Khan, whose secret arrest in July has helped authorities track down al Qaeda militants in Britain and the United States.
Information gathered from Khan revealed interest in attacking the World Bank and International Monetary Fund in Washington, and the New York Stock Exchange and Citigroup in New York and the Prudential Financial building in New Jersey.
Biden said ``there were several things'' that, combined with the captured information, gave officials reason to believe some old ``plans still might be viable or still may be being considered'' for Washington.
``There is reason to be concerned. I don't think there is reason to be alarmed,'' he said.
U.S. CONCERNED ABOUT ELECTION ATTACK
On ``Fox News Sunday,'' Townsend said, ``There were others (targets). We obviously didn't want to go out with everything that we knew and indicate to the terrorists exactly what we knew.... We worked directly with those other entities that have been targeted to take additional security precautions.''
Townsend and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, also appearing on the Sunday talk shows, said U.S. officials continue to be concerned about an attack intended to disrupt the Nov. 2 presidential election.
``We had reporting from multiple strains where there might be -- and we still believe there probably are -- ongoing plots in the pre-election period,'' Rice said on CNN's ``Late Edition.''
Rice was also defensive about the disclosure of Khan's name, which has sparked criticism Washington may have jeopardized the effort to find al Qaeda operatives.
``We did not, of course, publicly disclose his name,'' Rice said, adding that it had been given ``on background.'' She did not say when or by whom the name was first revealed, and said she did not know whether Khan had been cooperating with Pakistani intelligence.
Townsend said officials were trying to determine whether the recent spate of arrests went to the heart of al Qaeda's operation.
``We have disrupted it. The question is, have we disrupted all of it or a part of it? And we're working through an investigation to uncover that,'' she said.
Asked if she felt the situation was similar to the summer before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Townsend said, ``I think it feels sort of more serious, more urgent than it did even then.''
Time Magazine disclosed details of some of the surveillance in Newark, including the suggestion a black limousine could easily approach the building and be loaded with explosives.
The July 24 raid in Pakistan uncovered ``three laptop computers and 51 data-rich discs ... 500 photographs of potential targets inside the U.S., minutely detailed analyzes of the vulnerabilities to a terrorist attack of several of them and communications among some of the most wanted terrorists in the world,'' Time said.
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Impervious Shield Elusive Against Drive-By Terrorists
Aug 8, 2004
Washington Post
By Spencer S. Hsu and Sari Horwitz,
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=1802&ncid=1802&e=3&u=/washpost/20040808/ts_washpost/a48677_2004aug7
Government bomb technicians have packed Chevrolet sedans, Dodge vans and Ryder trucks with 10 tons of explosives and have blown them up in the desolate New Mexico desert hoping to analyze the flight of debris over the sand.
Federal agents in Front Royal, Va., have trained more than 400 Labrador retrievers to sniff out the chemical compounds used in 19,000 separate explosives formulas.
Law enforcement officers have left thousands of calling cards across the country -- from a farmer's co-op store in McPherson, Kan., to a chemical company in West Haven, Conn. -- asking sales managers to report unusual interest in fertilizer or other components of homemade bombs.
The United States has spent more than $1 billion on these and other efforts to stop a single threat: the explosion of a car or truck bomb at a government installation or other structure. But 11 years after Muslim extremists used an explosives-laden van to attack the World Trade Center and nearly three years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, even senior federal agents acknowledge that the country has virtually no defense against a terrorist barreling down the street with a truck bomb.
"If a person doesn't care about dying, they can pull right up to a building, push a button and the building would go," said Michael E. Bouchard, assistant director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. "That's why we have checkpoints and try to keep large vehicles away from buildings."
The government has been racing to devise ways to systematically detect and warn against plotters creating truck bombs. But those efforts are embryonic at best, government officials say, even as al Qaeda and other Islamic extremists have used the truck bomb time and again overseas and the threat to use it here is growing.
The frustrating struggle to thwart terrorists' low-tech, low-cost weapon of choice provides a case study of America's challenge in waging the fight in the post 9/11 world -- a fight in which the enemy is hiding and the traditional role of soldiers and weapons takes a back seat to intelligence and prevention.
It is a war in which the United States, with all its technological and economic advantages, has been unable to develop protection against a self-taught bomber assembling large amounts of explosives in secret, acquiring a vehicle and fading into the landscape before detonating a payload.
Since the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the government has hardened federal buildings and military facilities at home and abroad; passed laws restricting the sale of explosives and shipments of hazardous materials; inspected thousands of people who deal with explosives; and researched explosive-detection and vehicle-disabling technology. But the only foolproof defense was on display last week, when heavily armed police sealed off buildings, roads and bridges in Washington, New York and Newark after the government issued an elevated terror alert focusing on five financial institutions.
The threat of truck bombs underscores the ways terrorists can turn America's economic strength and freedoms against itself, academic experts say.
"The challenge is to provide a level of security that does not impede normal life and commerce, which would achieve the terrorists' aims without even launching an attack," said Bruce Hoffman, author of "Inside Terrorism" and head of the Washington office of the Rand Corp., a nonprofit think tank.
In a society based largely on the free movement of information, bombmakers acquire their expertise from chemistry texts, the Internet or each other. Taking advantage of a giant economy that depends on efficiency, they can buy or steal bomb components and obtain vehicles without fear of regulation while security measures are resisted by many farmers, truckers, city planners and citizens. They exploit free movement of people through states and cities, requiring society to undertake extraordinary surveillance and spend large amounts of time and effort to find them.
"What do you do when you have whole cities built up with no regard to this threat?" asked Daniel Benjamin, former counterterrorism director at the National Security Council. "Are we going to turn Lower Manhattan into a pedestrian zone?"
Counterterrorism experts say the threat is especially striking because al Qaeda and other Muslim extremists have demonstrated mastery of the weapon. Since the first World Trade Center attack was plotted by Ramzi Yousef with 1,200 pounds of chemical explosives tied to Casio watch timers in a rented Ford van, al Qaeda cells perpetrated simultaneous truck bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, blew up three housing compounds in Saudi Arabia in May 2003, attacked resorts in Bali and Jakarta and carried out multiple bombings in post-war Iraq.
In Britain, authorities recovered a half-ton of ammonium nitrate in March, and in April, Jordanian officials disrupted a plan that involved tons of commercial fertilizer and two heavy trucks.
"The truck bomb is a pervasive threat. Al Qaeda is adept at it and comfortable with it, and for all those reasons it is difficult to protect against it," Hoffman said. "The lesson of September 11 was there's not a moment to lose, but we're constantly behind the curve. . . . We improve security, and it slows them down slightly, but it doesn't stop them." A Strategy Shattered
On April 19, 1995, disillusioned Persian Gulf War veteran Timothy J. McVeigh and Army washout Terry L. Nichols blew the face off the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City with a 5,000-pound mixture of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil, killing 168 people.
The bomb was instructive in its power and ease of assembly. Equivalent to 4,100 pounds of dynamite, the blast damaged 312 buildings, cracked glass as far as two miles away and inflicted 80 percent of its injuries on people outside the building, up to a half-mile away. ATF officials had never studied the effects of a vehicle bomb larger than about 1,200 pounds, an ATF explosives expert said.
The components came largely from a Kansas co-op. Nichols bought two tons of fertilizer in 50-pound sacks starting seven months before the attack. McVeigh also was careful to avoid detection, renting a Ryder truck from a Junction City, Kan., body shop one state away from his target.
Today, it remains difficult to detect similar activity. Nearly 5 million tons of ammonium nitrate fertilizer are sold each year in the United States. None of it is regulated, although its explosive properties are used in mining and construction and by armies around the world. Government controls are resisted by farm and chemical lobbies, who say they would burden law-abiding citizens and not thwart terrorists. U.S. law permits farmers to mix it with fuel oil for personal demolition uses.
Controlling vehicles is similarly problematic. There are 23.8 million trucks used for business purposes in the United States and 70 million more in personal use, according to the American Trucking Associations.
Unlike commercial aviation, motor vehicles are not registered by a single federal agency; they're not based at a fixed number of airports or operated by a small number of companies controlling access to them. There are 600,000 trucking companies, which have 2.6 million tractors, 3.1 million big-rig drivers and 5 million trailers, the association said.
Regulation is complicated not only by sheer numbers, but also by fragmentation of the industry and of state and federal regulators, analysts said. For example, unlike many countries in Europe, which have national motor vehicle databases, each U.S. state maintains its own records.
Also, 92 percent of trucking companies are mom and pop operations with 20 or fewer trucks, said Tom Nightingale, spokesman for Schneider National Inc., the nation's biggest truck carrier. Schneider holds just 4 percent of the market.
There is also the problem of rentals. The FBI (news - web sites) and Department of Homeland Security issued their latest threat bulletin Thursday, warning car, truck and limousine rental companies to report suspicious people. "There is no standard type of vehicle associated with" delivering a car or truck bomb, the alert says.
The bulletin listed suspicious behavior and urged companies to file detailed reports. It took special note of limousines, which it said have larger storage capacity and may get special treatment to approach buildings.
And with 1 million cars and trucks stolen in the United States each year, counterterrorism agents say they would investigate only if other evidence linked it to terrorism.
With such challenges, law enforcement authorities say they have few warning signals to stop bombers from building their weapons and approaching their targets.
As one ATF explosives expert said, "The only true defense is to shut the road down so no one can come down there. Sedans, sport-utility vehicles, a Ryder truck, a large flatbed vehicle or a truck -- there's no sure-fire way to look at that vehicle and say, 'That's a large vehicle bomb.' " The expert spoke on condition of anonymity because of agency security rules.
Added Bouchard: "Distance is our friend."
For the U.S. government, blast walls, barricades and setbacks at sensitive buildings have become the last line of defense. The Pentagon (news - web sites), White House and Capitol increasingly resemble fortresses. Defensive measures costing hundreds of millions of dollars are proposed or underway at more than 20 facilities, and the government has adopted a 100-foot setback as a guideline for high-security new construction in the United States and overseas.
The problem is that hardening some locations might redirect terrorists to "softer" ones, including hotels, malls or stadiums, analysts said.
"You cannot secure all of the potential targets for the U.S. government or government employees in Washington, or New York City for that matter," said Ronald K. Noble, who was U.S. Treasury undersecretary when the Secret Service shut Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House in 1995 and is now secretary general of Interpol.
Michael Mason, assistant FBI director for the Washington field office, likened the sense of vulnerability to boxing in the dark against a terrorist with "night vision goggles. They know when they're going to attack, how they're going to attack and where they're going to strike," he said. "You reach out and think you have an elbow. You think you have a shoulder, but it takes time to put it all together to effectively strike back." Competing Priorities
For four years in the 1990s at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, government technicians wired vehicles with explosives and tracked the blasts' effects with high-speed cameras. In Florida and overseas, scientists conducted similar tests -- adding buildings to the destructive mix.
Dubbed "Dipole Might" and funded by the National Security Council, the tests mapped the flight of debris as small as a matchbook, crater patterns and even the street sign-bending effects of blasts. Those experiments have become the basis of U.S. truck bomb forensics, allowing investigators to identify the type and quantity of explosive from studying the effects of the blast.
But in 2000, the money ran out, and so did the tests, the ATF said. Agents say they need more. Based on the experience in Iraq and around the globe, the diversity of explosives has grown.
The desert tests reflect both the promise and the limits of the struggle to manage the threat. Some outside observers say other government efforts have not been creative or energetic enough.
"The administration has focused primarily on two areas. . . . One is aviation security, and the other is bioterrorism," said Benjamin, a former Clinton administration official and co-author of "The Age of Sacred Terror." "Truck bombs have been very far down the list."
In March, the Transportation Security Administration awarded a $19 million grant to American Trucking Associations to expand Highway Watch, a computerized instant-reporting network through which professional drivers and highway workers can report accidents, thefts, hazards and suspicious incidents nationwide.
Cited by TSA officials as a major initiative, it, too, was funded at half the $43 million the industry requested back in 2002.
"We are the point men. We are the Distant Early Warning line for the trucking security problem," said Jeff Beatty, security consultant to ATA, comparing the system to the nation's northernmost radar defense line during the Cold War to detect a Soviet nuclear attack.
Regulatory initiatives have been delayed or watered down because of concerns by industry groups that say a cure may be worse than the illness. In June, Homeland Security announced it had completed background checks of 2.7 million commercial driver's license holders authorized to haul hazardous materials, but it culled only 29 with potential terrorist connections.
Another fingerprint-based background-check program, which has been opposed by truckers, has been delayed nine months. The program, now scheduled to begin Jan. 1, would require states to collect fingerprints from hazmat drivers to undergo FBI checks as well, part of a USA Patriot Act requirement.
"People ask, 'What's the big deal?' But a one-hour delay [for the nation's truck drivers] costs the entire truck industry $500 million," Nightingale said.
Similar sensitivity limits the controls of bomb components. Last month, the fertilizer industry urged ammonium nitrate sellers to voluntarily track sales and require buyers to show identification. But it resists any government regulation, and only Nevada and South Carolina have laws requiring tracking.
The move followed a history of voluntary initiatives. In 1996, the Fertilizer Institute and ATF unveiled a "Be Aware for America" campaign after the Oklahoma City bombing, distributing 30,000 brochures and asking industry members to report suspicious activities.
In 2001, they launched another education campaign, "Be Secure for America," encouraging manufacturers, distributors and retailers to prevent theft. In April, after the arrest of alleged terrorists in England, ATF met again with industry officials and rolled out "America's Security Begins with You." This time, the mission was to raise awareness and ask for voluntary reporting of thefts or unexplained losses.
Kathy Mathers, spokeswoman for the Fertilizer Institute, said most fertilizer is sold in rural outposts. "These retail outlets and employees know their customers. A customer they don't know . . . will raise suspicions," she said.
On another front, the government last year began requiring all people receiving explosives to obtain a permit from the ATF -- "a major change," said Audrey Stucko, chief of the ATF's firearms and explosives services division.
The Safe Explosives Act requires users and sellers of explosives to submit photographs and fingerprints and undergo criminal background checks. About 12,300 licenses and permits have been issued by the agency.
At the end of the day, the nation's security experts say they expect terrorists will get their hands on the weapon and that keeping bombers away from buildings is their best hope.
The FBI's Mason, whose office is handling about 800 terrorism cases, warns that the public is "being fed a false bill of goods" if it is led to believe that every terrorist will be stopped. He described security measures as a "net that stretches from coast to coast" and government efforts as an attempt to "shrink the mesh."
"Despite all the reforms and changes being made at the FBI and other agencies, the best we can hope to do is shrink the size of the mesh, allowing fewer things to pass through," Mason said.
-------- patriot act
Sensing the Eyes of Big Brother, and Pushing Back
August 8, 2004
By TIMOTHY EGAN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/08/national/08patriot.html?pagewanted=all
TUMWATER, Wash. - After saluting the flag and purring over a potluck invitation from the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the City Council of this town of 13,000 got down to the business of the night: a public hearing on whether to oppose the USA Patriot Act.
Liberals quoted Newt Gingrich, the Republican former House speaker, who says that the federal law passed just after the Sept. 11 attacks needs to be reined in to protect basic civic birthrights.
Conservatives praised the campaign against the act by the American Civil Liberties Union, which says the law gives government unchecked power to rifle through an individual's financial and computer records and bookstore purchases.
And one Tumwater resident asked why all the fuss in a sleepy little town over a federal antiterror law.
In the end, the concerns over the Patriot Act - real or phantom - were enough to compel the Tumwater City Council on July 20 to join more than 330 communities and 4 states that have condemned or expressed worry about the act. The resolution called on city employees in this town near Olympia not to follow provisions of the law that violate the Constitution - though leaving it vague how they would interpret this.
In the last two months, a small window has opened into just how the government may be using the most contentious parts of the law, and it has revealed enough information to stoke fresh fears in civic forums, in Congress, the capitals of four states - Alaska, Hawaii, Maine and Vermont - and among librarians.
The law, passed overwhelmingly in Congress just 45 days after the terrorist attacks, is a grab bag of enhanced police and prosecution powers. In the presidential campaign, it serves as bumper-sticker fodder for opponents, and a centerpiece of President Bush's effort to show he has responded aggressively to domestic terror.
In fact, most of the fine points in the 342-page law have generated minimal debate. But at least two parts have caused a furor across party lines.
One provision empowers the authorities to search people's homes without notifying them at the time. That provision may have been used by federal agents to rummage through possessions of Brandon Mayfield, the lawyer from the Portland, Ore., area suspected and later cleared of a connection to the bombings in Madrid earlier this year, said his lawyer, Steven T. Wax.
Another clause, granting the government authority to go through personal library, business, medical and other personal records, may have been used in another case, though federal documents make it unclear just what the purpose was.
Librarians are so riled about that provision of the Patriot Act - Section 215 - that they plan a nationwide survey to see whether reading and Internet habits have changed because of it. And in Congress, a vote to knock out that section fell one vote short of passage on July 8.
Last September, Attorney General John Ashcroft, in trying to quell what he called "baseless hysteria," declassified some data and said the government had not once used the law to go into libraries.
"No one's reading habits have been reviewed," Mr. Ashcroft said, adding, "charges of abuse of power are ghosts, unsupported by fact or example." His assurance did little to curb opposition, and town-hall-style resolutions against the law have only picked up steam.
Part of the problem may be because of the official secrecy that is welded to so much of the law, making it difficult to assess its use or effectiveness.
Librarians point to an internal F.B.I. memorandum, dated Oct. 15, 2003, and released in June as part of a lawsuit brought by the A.C.L.U. It indicates the government may have used the power of the law that allows it to request personal records from a third party. The memorandum was written a month after Mr. Ashcroft made his statement.
"It was concrete enough to tell us they wanted to do a search, but unclear if it was a library," said Emily Sheketoff, executive director of the Washington office of the American Library Association, which wants the law changed to protect the privacy of library users.
Justice Department officials say the memorandum revealed only intent, not action.
"The document showed that the F.B.I. sought permission," said Mark Corallo, a Justice Department spokesman. "That's all it is. It doesn't say whether it was granted."
Under the antiterrorism law, the government does not have to say if it is looking into someone's records, and people who have been asked to turn over such records are required to keep the request secret. The government needs these powers, federal authorities say, to help fight new types of crimes and threats.
Another F.B.I. memorandum seems, to critics, to expand the reach of what the government can obtain in secret searches. The memorandum, offering internal guidelines for federal agents, interprets a part of the law that allows the government to seize "tangible things" in an "ongoing investigation" to include an apartment key from a landlord.
"Now we have it from the government's own mouth that they are going to rely on a sterile phrase like 'tangible things' to get the keys to people's apartments," said Jameel Jaffer, a lawyer for the civil liberties union.
"You might be able to get the key," Mr. Corallo said. "But they could not use it to enter a house or apartment."
To opponents of the law, these few glimpses inside the Justice Department's internal processes provide more than enough reason to fear.
"A veil of secrecy has shrouded the Patriot Act for two and a half years," said David L. Sobel, general counsel for the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a nonprofit group that does research on privacy issues. "The fragments of information that we have managed to pry out of the Justice Department raise serious questions and provide few answers."
Here in the Pacific Northwest, the law has figured in two widely publicized cases, both of which raise questions that echo the concerns of critics.
One case, the Mayfield investigation, may yet shed some light on how the government is using the provision of the law that allows federal agents to search a home without telling the residents until later.
The standard for most search warrants has long been "knock and announce." But the antiterrorism law expanded the search power for terror investigations, giving the government the right to conduct "sneak and peek" searches, as they have been called.
Mr. Mayfield, an American citizen, immigration lawyer and convert to Islam, was suspected of a connection to the Madrid bombings after the government claimed to have matched his fingerprints to a set linked to the bombings. Agents searched his home with a regular court warrant.
But they may have conducted an earlier secret search, said Mr. Wax, his lawyer, who is the federal public defender for the Portland district.
"We believe the Patriot Act was used against Mr. Mayfield," Mr. Wax said.
Two months ago, the Justice Department apologized to Mr. Mayfield, after Spanish authorities said the fingerprints were actually those of an Algerian national. Mr. Ashcroft said it was an "unfortunate incident" and one that the Justice Department "deeply regretted."
Mr. Mayfield is still trying to find out whether some of his possessions were taken in a secret search done under the powers of the law, Mr. Wax said. Mr. Mayfield, he said, is also upset about a part of the law that allows federal agents to share information about a suspect with intelligence agencies, saying his privacy has been violated.
"It's chilling," Mr. Wax said. "Here you have a case of an innocent man. Information about him, his wife and children were obtained and disseminated among the intelligence community."
Asked about Mr. Mayfield's case, Mr. Corallo, the Justice Department spokesman, said Mr. Mayfield's privacy could have been protected if the investigation of him had never been made public.
"We were infuriated that this was leaked at such an early stage," he said.
In another case, a Saudi graduate student, Sami Omar al-Hussayen, was charged with supporting terrorist groups by maintaining a number of Islamic Web sites. His trial tested a part of the law that made it a crime to provide "expert advice or assistance" to terrorist groups. Mr. Hussayen said he did not support the groups, but merely acted as Web master.
After a lengthy trial in which the government presented evidence from more than 20,000 e-mail messages and 9,000 phone calls, a jury in Boise, Idaho, acquitted Mr. Hussayen in June.
One juror, John Steger, said in an interview that the jury believed Mr. Hussayen's activities were matters of free speech, protected by the First Amendment.
"He never spoke a word supporting terrorists,'' Mr. Steger said. "He just did what a university or a television station does - he posted the stuff."
In an effort to shore up support for the law, the Justice Department released a 29-page report in July, detailing how the it had been used to thwart terror plots and to prosecute other crimes like kidnapping and child pornography.
But the report steered clear of the provisions that have caused the most concern to civil liberties groups, and did not chronicle any ways in which the new powers to obtain people's records or get search warrants without notification had been used. Justice Department officials said the secrecy provisions of the law prevented them from giving any details on their use.
Whether federal agents are monitoring reading habits or not, the newfound power to do so has already had an effect on how people use their libraries, Ms. Sheketoff, the library association official, said, citing evidence from fellow librarians. Many libraries have posted notices saying that because of the law, they cannot protect the privacy of patrons' reading habits.
"If you live in Detroit, and have olive skin, are you going to go into the library and check out a book on the Koran?" Ms. Sheketoff asked.
This fall, the American Library Association will try to determine how the law has affected library operations. To get around the part of the law that prohibits those who have been asked about such records from disclosing the search, the library association is trying to devise a questionnaire that protects anonymity and does not break the law.
"If we find that they are not using this provision, well, then why do they need it in the first place?" Ms. Sheketoff said. "We know that if there is a law on the books that can be abused, it will be abused."
Mr. Corallo compared the new powers to a police officer's gun. "Ninety-nine percent of police officers never fire their weapon," he said. "But you sure as hell want them to have it when they need it."
Here in Tumwater, there was enough concern over anecdotal tidbits about the law to pass the resolution against it. The vote was 5 to 2.
"These are fundamental rights," said Councilman Wayne Williams, who drafted the resolution. "And these rights begin at home. Maybe this resolution, coming from a small town, helps to remind people that big laws like the Patriot Act affect people at the lowest level."
--------
Concerns with Patriot Act mount
330 communities, four states worry federal law gives too much power
Aug. 08, 2004
By TIMOTHY EGAN
New York Times
http://www.thestate.com/mld/thestate/news/nation/9347941.htm
TUMWATER, Wash. - After saluting the flag and purring about a potluck invitation from the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the City Council of this town of 13,000 got down to the business of the night: a public hearing on whether to oppose the USA Patriot Act.
Liberals quoted Newt Gingrich, the Republican former House speaker, who says the federal law passed just after the Sept. 11 attacks needs to be reined in to protect basic civic birthrights.
Conservatives praised the campaign against the act by the American Civil Liberties Union, which says the law gives government unchecked power to rifle through an individual's financial and computer records and bookstore purchases.
In the end, the concerns about the Patriot Act - real or phantom - were enough to compel the Tumwater City Council on July 20 to join more than 330 communities and four states that have condemned or expressed worry about the act. The resolution called on city employees in this town near Olympia not to follow provisions of the law that violate the Constitution - though leaving it vague how they would interpret this.
In the past two months, a small window has opened into just how the government might be using the most contentious parts of the law, and it has revealed enough information to stoke fresh fears in civic forums, in Congress and among librarians.
The law, passed overwhelmingly in Congress just 45 days after the terrorist attacks, is a grab bag of enhanced police and prosecution powers. In the presidential campaign, it serves as bumper-sticker fodder for opponents and a centerpiece of President Bush's effort to show he has responded aggressively to domestic terror.
In fact, most of the fine points in the 342-page law have generated minimal debate. But at least two parts have caused a furor across party lines.
One provision empowers authorities to search people's homes without notifying them at the time. That provision might have been used by federal agents to rummage through possessions of Brandon Mayfield, the lawyer from the Portland, Ore., area suspected and later cleared of a connection to the bombings in Madrid earlier this year, said his lawyer, Steven T. Wax.
Another clause, granting the government authority to go through personal library, business, medical and other personal records, might have been used in another case, though federal documents make it unclear just what the purpose was.
Librarians are so riled about that provision of the Patriot Act - Section 215 - that they plan a nationwide survey to see whether reading and Internet habits have changed because of it. And in Congress, a vote to knock out that section fell one vote short of passage July 8.
Last September, Attorney General John Ashcroft, in trying to quell what he called "baseless hysteria," declassified some data and said the government had not once used the law to go into libraries.
But librarians point to an internal FBI memorandum, dated Oct. 15, 2003, and released in June as part of a lawsuit brought by the ACLU. It indicates the government might have used the power of the law that allows it to request personal records from a third party. The memorandum was written a month after Ashcroft made his statement.
Justice Department officials say the memorandum revealed only intent, not action.
"The document showed that the FBI sought permission," said Mark Corallo, a Justice Department spokesman. "That's all it is. It doesn't say whether it was granted."
Under the anti-terrorism law, the government does not have to say whether it is looking into someone's records, and people who have been asked to turn over such records are required to keep the request secret. The government needs these powers, federal authorities say, to help fight new types of crimes and threats.
Another FBI memorandum seems, to critics, to expand the reach of what the government can obtain in secret searches. The memorandum, offering internal guidelines for federal agents, interprets a part of the law that allows the government to seize "tangible things" in an "ongoing investigation" to include an apartment key from a landlord.
"You might be able to get the key," Corallo said. "But they could not use it to enter a house or apartment."
-------- prisons / prisoners
Terror Suspect's Arrest Opens New Inquiries
By Dana Priest and Susan Schmidt
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, August 8, 2004; Page A10
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A48936-2004Aug7.html
New York City investigators are attempting to retrace the steps of an al Qaeda suspect who was arrested in England last week and is believed to have been sent by Khalid Sheik Mohammed, alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, to case financial targets in New York in early 2001, according to several law enforcement officials.
As the ripples from a recent spate of arrests and computer discoveries became apparent yesterday, law enforcement officials and documents disclosed that Eisa Hindi is believed to have been dispatched to New York with two other al Qaeda members whose mission was to take photographs and document security around symbolic financial buildings.
By retracing their steps and interviewing people identified in the surveillance photos, such as security guards on the job at the time, investigators hope to discover someone who may have been in contact with Hindi and might know more about his contacts in the United States, one law enforcement official said.
Several counterterrorism officials said yesterday that Hindi is not believed to have been in the United States since early 2001. They also disputed news reports that Hindi had come to Washington to surveil buildings.
Counterterrorism officials said Hindi was an alias for Issa al-Britani, who is a subject of the recently completed report on the 2001 terrorist attacks. Under interrogation, Khalid Sheik Mohammed described al-Britani as a trusted al Qaeda operative whom he sent to conduct surveillance of possible economic and Jewish targets in New York. Mohammed told interrogators that the casing mission was ordered by Osama bin Laden.
Mohammed, who has been in CIA custody in a secret location since his capture in Pakistan last year, also told interrogators he sent al-Britani in late 1999 or early 2000 to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to meet with Riduan Isamuddin, the top al Qaeda figure in Southeast Asia who is better known as Hambali. Hambali is also being held by the CIA.
The 9/11 commission report said al-Britani offered Hambali addresses of individuals in California and South Africa who al-Britani said could help Hambali.
Meanwhile, a New Jersey man is under investigation for having helped a British computer specialist, also arrested in London this week, allegedly solicit funds for a terrorist group by creating and operating an exact replica of the British man's Web site.
Mazen Mokhtar, an Egyptian-born imam and political activist, operated a Web site identified in an affidavit unsealed Friday by the U.S. attorney's office in Connecticut. The Web site solicited funds for the Taliban and Chechen mujaheddin, according to the affidavit. It is an exact replica of Web sites operated by Babar Ahmad, who was arrested in England on a U.S. extradition warrant this week.
The affidavit said the New Jersey home of the mirror Web site operator, identified on a Web site as Mokhtar, was searched in the recent past and that copies of Azzam Publications sites, operated by Ahmad, were found on Mokhtar's computer's hard drive and files.
Officials at the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement office, which is leading the investigation, declined yesterday to comment on Mokhtar or the New Jersey investigation.
Ahmad possessed three-year-old classified routes of a U.S. naval battle group and is believed to be part of a branch of al Qaeda linked to Khalid Sheik Mohammed that authorities on three continents have been working to capture in recent weeks. He allegedly operated two U.S.-based Web sites, one in Connecticut and one in Nevada.
Ahmad, a British subject of Pakistani descent, faces four charges of involvement with terrorism. His attorney, appearing in a British court Friday, denied Ahmad was involved in terrorism.
According to the affidavit, Ahmad "worked in concert" with the New Jersey-based operator of www.minna.com, who is identified on the site as Mokhtar. Mokhtar is described in news reports as a U.S. citizen in his mid-thirties and an outspoken advocate of Palestinian causes. There was no answer at a phone listed at Mokhtar's home Friday or Saturday.
News accounts of rallies where Mokhtar has spoken have also described him as an imam, or spiritual leader, at the Masjid al-Huda mosque in New Brunswick, N.J. He was scheduled to speak later this month in Pennsylvania at a summer camp run by Young Muslims, at a seminar titled "A Few Good Men."
Ahmad is also the cousin of Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan, who was arrested last month in Pakistan. Khan's computers carried detailed surveillance of five financial buildings in New York, Newark and Washington and prompted the Department of Homeland Security to elevate the threat alert level to orange.
Staff writer Sari Horowitz and staff researcher Madonna Lebling contributed to this report.
-------- terrorism
Impervious Shield Elusive Against Drive-By Terrorists
Sunday, August 8, 2004; Page A01
Washington Post Staff Writers
By Spencer S. Hsu and Sari Horwitz
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A48677-2004Aug7?language=printer
Government bomb technicians have packed Chevrolet sedans, Dodge vans and Ryder trucks with 10 tons of explosives and have blown them up in the desolate New Mexico desert hoping to analyze the flight of debris over the sand.
Federal agents in Front Royal, Va., have trained more than 400 Labrador retrievers to sniff out the chemical compounds used in 19,000 separate explosives formulas.
Law enforcement officers have left thousands of calling cards across the country -- from a farmer's co-op store in McPherson, Kan., to a chemical company in West Haven, Conn. -- asking sales managers to report unusual interest in fertilizer or other components of homemade bombs.
The United States has spent more than $1 billion on these and other efforts to stop a single threat: the explosion of a car or truck bomb at a government installation or other structure. But 11 years after Muslim extremists used an explosives-laden van to attack the World Trade Center and nearly three years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, even senior federal agents acknowledge that the country has virtually no defense against a terrorist barreling down the street with a truck bomb.
"If a person doesn't care about dying, they can pull right up to a building, push a button and the building would go," said Michael E. Bouchard, assistant director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. "That's why we have checkpoints and try to keep large vehicles away from buildings."
The government has been racing to devise ways to systematically detect and warn against plotters creating truck bombs. But those efforts are embryonic at best, government officials say, even as al Qaeda and other Islamic extremists have used the truck bomb time and again overseas and the threat to use it here is growing.
The frustrating struggle to thwart terrorists' low-tech, low-cost weapon of choice provides a case study of America's challenge in waging the fight in the post 9/11 world -- a fight in which the enemy is hiding and the traditional role of soldiers and weapons takes a back seat to intelligence and prevention.
It is a war in which the United States, with all its technological and economic advantages, has been unable to develop protection against a self-taught bomber assembling large amounts of explosives in secret, acquiring a vehicle and fading into the landscape before detonating a payload.
Since the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the government has hardened federal buildings and military facilities at home and abroad; passed laws restricting the sale of explosives and shipments of hazardous materials; inspected thousands of people who deal with explosives; and researched explosive-detection and vehicle-disabling technology. But the only foolproof defense was on display last week, when heavily armed police sealed off buildings, roads and bridges in Washington, New York and Newark after the government issued an elevated terror alert focusing on five financial institutions.
The threat of truck bombs underscores the ways terrorists can turn America's economic strength and freedoms against itself, academic experts say.
"The challenge is to provide a level of security that does not impede normal life and commerce, which would achieve the terrorists' aims without even launching an attack," said Bruce Hoffman, author of "Inside Terrorism" and head of the Washington office of the Rand Corp., a nonprofit think tank.
In a society based largely on the free movement of information, bombmakers acquire their expertise from chemistry texts, the Internet or each other. Taking advantage of a giant economy that depends on efficiency, they can buy or steal bomb components and obtain vehicles without fear of regulation while security measures are resisted by many farmers, truckers, city planners and citizens. They exploit free movement of people through states and cities, requiring society to undertake extraordinary surveillance and spend large amounts of time and effort to find them.
"What do you do when you have whole cities built up with no regard to this threat?" asked Daniel Benjamin, former counterterrorism director at the National Security Council. "Are we going to turn Lower Manhattan into a pedestrian zone?"
Counterterrorism experts say the threat is especially striking because al Qaeda and other Muslim extremists have demonstrated mastery of the weapon. Since the first World Trade Center attack was plotted by Ramzi Yousef with 1,200 pounds of chemical explosives tied to Casio watch timers in a rented Ford van, al Qaeda cells perpetrated simultaneous truck bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, blew up three housing compounds in Saudi Arabia in May 2003, attacked resorts in Bali and Jakarta and carried out multiple bombings in post-war Iraq.
In Britain, authorities recovered a half-ton of ammonium nitrate in March, and in April, Jordanian officials disrupted a plan that involved tons of commercial fertilizer and two heavy trucks.
"The truck bomb is a pervasive threat. Al Qaeda is adept at it and comfortable with it, and for all those reasons it is difficult to protect against it," Hoffman said. "The lesson of September 11 was there's not a moment to lose, but we're constantly behind the curve. . . . We improve security, and it slows them down slightly, but it doesn't stop them."
A Strategy Shattered
On April 19, 1995, disillusioned Persian Gulf War veteran Timothy J. McVeigh and Army washout Terry L. Nichols blew the face off the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City with a 5,000-pound mixture of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil, killing 168 people.
The bomb was instructive in its power and ease of assembly. Equivalent to 4,100 pounds of dynamite, the blast damaged 312 buildings, cracked glass as far as two miles away and inflicted 80 percent of its injuries on people outside the building, up to a half-mile away. ATF officials had never studied the effects of a vehicle bomb larger than about 1,200 pounds, an ATF explosives expert said.
The components came largely from a Kansas co-op. Nichols bought two tons of fertilizer in 50-pound sacks starting seven months before the attack. McVeigh also was careful to avoid detection, renting a Ryder truck from a Junction City, Kan., body shop one state away from his target.
Today, it remains difficult to detect similar activity. Nearly 5 million tons of ammonium nitrate fertilizer are sold each year in the United States. None of it is regulated, although its explosive properties are used in mining and construction and by armies around the world. Government controls are resisted by farm and chemical lobbies, who say they would burden law-abiding citizens and not thwart terrorists. U.S. law permits farmers to mix it with fuel oil for personal demolition uses.
Controlling vehicles is similarly problematic. There are 23.8 million trucks used for business purposes in the United States and 70 million more in personal use, according to the American Trucking Associations.
Unlike commercial aviation, motor vehicles are not registered by a single federal agency; they're not based at a fixed number of airports or operated by a small number of companies controlling access to them. There are 600,000 trucking companies, which have 2.6 million tractors, 3.1 million big-rig drivers and 5 million trailers, the association said.
Regulation is complicated not only by sheer numbers, but also by fragmentation of the industry and of state and federal regulators, analysts said. For example, unlike many countries in Europe, which have national motor vehicle databases, each U.S. state maintains its own records.
Also, 92 percent of trucking companies are mom and pop operations with 20 or fewer trucks, said Tom Nightingale, spokesman for Schneider National Inc., the nation's biggest truck carrier. Schneider holds just 4 percent of the market.
There is also the problem of rentals. The FBI and Department of Homeland Security issued their latest threat bulletin Thursday, warning car, truck and limousine rental companies to report suspicious people. "There is no standard type of vehicle associated with" delivering a car or truck bomb, the alert says.
The bulletin listed suspicious behavior and urged companies to file detailed reports. It took special note of limousines, which it said have larger storage capacity and may get special treatment to approach buildings.
And with 1 million cars and trucks stolen in the United States each year, counterterrorism agents say they would investigate only if other evidence linked it to terrorism.
With such challenges, law enforcement authorities say they have few warning signals to stop bombers from building their weapons and approaching their targets.
As one ATF explosives expert said, "The only true defense is to shut the road down so no one can come down there. Sedans, sport-utility vehicles, a Ryder truck, a large flatbed vehicle or a truck -- there's no sure-fire way to look at that vehicle and say, 'That's a large vehicle bomb.' " The expert spoke on condition of anonymity because of agency security rules.
Added Bouchard: "Distance is our friend."
For the U.S. government, blast walls, barricades and setbacks at sensitive buildings have become the last line of defense. The Pentagon, White House and Capitol increasingly resemble fortresses. Defensive measures costing hundreds of millions of dollars are proposed or underway at more than 20 facilities, and the government has adopted a 100-foot setback as a guideline for high-security new construction in the United States and overseas.
The problem is that hardening some locations might redirect terrorists to "softer" ones, including hotels, malls or stadiums, analysts said.
"You cannot secure all of the potential targets for the U.S. government or government employees in Washington, or New York City for that matter," said Ronald K. Noble, who was U.S. Treasury undersecretary when the Secret Service shut Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House in 1995 and is now secretary general of Interpol.
Michael Mason, assistant FBI director for the Washington field office, likened the sense of vulnerability to boxing in the dark against a terrorist with "night vision goggles. They know when they're going to attack, how they're going to attack and where they're going to strike," he said. "You reach out and think you have an elbow. You think you have a shoulder, but it takes time to put it all together to effectively strike back."
Competing Priorities
For four years in the 1990s at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, government technicians wired vehicles with explosives and tracked the blasts' effects with high-speed cameras. In Florida and overseas, scientists conducted similar tests -- adding buildings to the destructive mix.
Dubbed "Dipole Might" and funded by the National Security Council, the tests mapped the flight of debris as small as a matchbook, crater patterns and even the street sign-bending effects of blasts. Those experiments have become the basis of U.S. truck bomb forensics, allowing investigators to identify the type and quantity of explosive from studying the effects of the blast.
But in 2000, the money ran out, and so did the tests, the ATF said. Agents say they need more. Based on the experience in Iraq and around the globe, the diversity of explosives has grown.
The desert tests reflect both the promise and the limits of the struggle to manage the threat. Some outside observers say other government efforts have not been creative or energetic enough.
"The administration has focused primarily on two areas. . . . One is aviation security, and the other is bioterrorism," said Benjamin, a former Clinton administration official and co-author of "The Age of Sacred Terror." "Truck bombs have been very far down the list."
In March, the Transportation Security Administration awarded a $19 million grant to American Trucking Associations to expand Highway Watch, a computerized instant-reporting network through which professional drivers and highway workers can report accidents, thefts, hazards and suspicious incidents nationwide.
Cited by TSA officials as a major initiative, it, too, was funded at half the $43 million the industry requested back in 2002.
"We are the point men. We are the Distant Early Warning line for the trucking security problem," said Jeff Beatty, security consultant to ATA, comparing the system to the nation's northernmost radar defense line during the Cold War to detect a Soviet nuclear attack.
Regulatory initiatives have been delayed or watered down because of concerns by industry groups that say a cure may be worse than the illness. In June, Homeland Security announced it had completed background checks of 2.7 million commercial driver's license holders authorized to haul hazardous materials, but it culled only 29 with potential terrorist connections.
Another fingerprint-based background-check program, which has been opposed by truckers, has been delayed nine months. The program, now scheduled to begin Jan. 1, would require states to collect fingerprints from hazmat drivers to undergo FBI checks as well, part of a USA Patriot Act requirement.
"People ask, 'What's the big deal?' But a one-hour delay [for the nation's truck drivers] costs the entire truck industry $500 million," Nightingale said.
Similar sensitivity limits the controls of bomb components. Last month, the fertilizer industry urged ammonium nitrate sellers to voluntarily track sales and require buyers to show identification. But it resists any government regulation, and only Nevada and South Carolina have laws requiring tracking.
The move followed a history of voluntary initiatives. In 1996, the Fertilizer Institute and ATF unveiled a "Be Aware for America" campaign after the Oklahoma City bombing, distributing 30,000 brochures and asking industry members to report suspicious activities. In 2001, they launched another education campaign, "Be Secure for America," encouraging manufacturers, distributors and retailers to prevent theft. In April, after the arrest of alleged terrorists in England, ATF met again with industry officials and rolled out "America's Security Begins with You." This time, the mission was to raise awareness and ask for voluntary reporting of thefts or unexplained losses.
Kathy Mathers, spokeswoman for the Fertilizer Institute, said most fertilizer is sold in rural outposts. "These retail outlets and employees know their customers. A customer they don't know . . . will raise suspicions," she said.
On another front, the government last year began requiring all people receiving explosives to obtain a permit from the ATF -- "a major change," said Audrey Stucko, chief of the ATF's firearms and explosives services division.
The Safe Explosives Act requires users and sellers of explosives to submit photographs and fingerprints and undergo criminal background checks. About 12,300 licenses and permits have been issued by the agency.
At the end of the day, the nation's security experts say they expect terrorists will get their hands on the weapon and that keeping bombers away from buildings is their best hope.
The FBI's Mason, whose office is handling about 800 terrorism cases, warns that the public is "being fed a false bill of goods" if it is led to believe that every terrorist will be stopped. He described security measures as a "net that stretches from coast to coast" and government efforts as an attempt to "shrink the mesh."
"Despite all the reforms and changes being made at the FBI and other agencies, the best we can hope to do is shrink the size of the mesh, allowing fewer things to pass through," Mason said.
Staff researchers Madonna Lebling and Don Pohlman contributed to this report.
--------
THE INVESTIGATION
U.S. Says Man Had Ties to Plot to Disrupt Vote
August 8, 2004
By DAVID JOHNSTON
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/08/politics/08plot.html?pagewanted=all&position=
This article was reported by David Johnston, Thom Shanker and David E. Sanger, and written by Mr. Johnston.
WASHINGTON, Aug. 7 - A Pakistani man whose arrest provided information about the reconnaissance of financial institutions in New York, Newark and Washington was also communicating with Qaeda operatives who the authorities say are plotting to carry out an attack intended to disrupt the fall elections, a senior intelligence official said Saturday.
Senior intelligence and counterterrorism officials said it was not clear whether the people behind the surveillance of the financial institutions and the people involved in the election threat were part of the same group, or belonged to overlapping or separate ones.
The arrest last month of the Pakistani, Mohammed Naeem Noor Khan, had already prompted a search in the United States, Britain and other countries to locate the people behind the surveillance, which took place three or four years ago. Now the authorities say Mr. Khan's arrest is also helping them unravel a threat to carry out an attack this year inside the United States.
It is not clear whether Mr. Khan represents the second channel of intelligence that officials have alluded to in recent days that, they say, convinced them that the reconnaissance of financial institutions was related to current threats.
But he is emerging as a central figure in an expanding web of connections that, the authorities say, indicates that they may have penetrated an operational Qaeda group whose intentions were previously unknown.
Bush administration officials have talked about a potential threat to the election since the spring. Early last month, the homeland security secretary, Tom Ridge, spoke of a plot to disrupt the democratic process.
On Saturday, American authorities said they were close to identifying the main figures who conducted reconnaissance of the financial centers. Armed with multiple leads stemming from arrests in Britain and Pakistan, and aided by a wealth of information from forensic studies of computers seized in Pakistan, the authorities have begun a large-scale investigation.
Still frustrating investigators is the uncertainty about whether the surveillance in 2000 and 2001 was part of an ongoing plot. So far, the officials said, no clear evidence has been obtained that indicates whether the plot was ever abandoned.
Increasingly, however, the authorities suspect that the Qaeda figures believed to have been involved in the surveillance were active members of the terrorist network. They say the clandestine manner in which they operated suggested that they wanted to carry out attacks inside the United States.
Investigators are counting on people already in custody, or others whom they hope to apprehend, to help solve the mystery of whether the plot is still active.
Among those in custody is a suspect named Babar Ahmed, who was arrested in Britain this week at the request of the United States. Whatever his role in the surveillance, the authorities now say that Mr. Ahmed obtained detailed information about the movements of the Navy aircraft carrier Constellation, including information about the formations used by the carrier and its escort vessels in maneuvers like its passage through the Strait of Hormuz in the Middle East in 2001.
As part of the inquiry, Navy officials examined the record of a sailor aboard the Benfold, a destroyer that was part of the Constellation battle group. Officials said they had found an e-mail message from the sailor - who has since left the service - that was sympathetic to Al Qaeda.
The officials said that a turning point in the surveillance case came with the arrest in Britain, earlier this week, of Abu Issa al-Hindi. The authorities say they believe Mr. Hindi was dispatched to the United States by senior Qaeda leaders to carry out the reconnaissance operation.
For reasons still not entirely clear, Mr. Hindi was under surveillance by the British authorities - believed to be acting on information supplied by the United States - even before he is said to have been identified as an operative in the surveillance of American financial institutions.
One senior counterterrorism official said the outpouring of leads had mushroomed into a sprawling investigation in which agencies in the United States and overseas were struggling to coordinate and share the enormous volume of information.
The inquiry has caused strains between the United States and Britain. There were signs that some British authorities might not have agreed with the White House decision to make public information about the surveillance operations. The news agency Reuters quoted the British home secretary, David Blunkett, as saying that there was "a difference between alerting the public to a specific threat and alarming people unnecessarily by passing on information indiscriminately."
Officials at MI5, the British domestic intelligence agency, have warned that the intense news media coverage in the United States of recent arrests in Britain could interfere with legal efforts to extradite suspects to the United States.
So far, American authorities have sought the extradition of only one person, Mr. Ahmed, who was arrested on charges unrelated to the surveillance operation. He is being sought on charges that he used a computer Web site to raise money for fighters in Chechnya and Afghanistan.
Mr. Ahmed is a cousin of Mr. Khan, a Qaeda communications expert whose arrest last month in Pakistan produced the trove of information that led American officials to elevate the terror alert level.
A report by Reuters in Pakistan said Mr. Khan had been secretly funneling information about Al Qaeda to Pakistani authorities and that his arrest and subsequent identification in news accounts may have cost the United States a valuable source.
American officials contacted on Saturday would not confirm whether Mr. Khan was a mole or double agent. They said his arrest had led to intelligence gains of enormous value in uncovering the surveillance operation in the United States.
Intelligence officials have also recently come into possession of information about how much Al Qaeda knew about Navy operations.
According to a statement from United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement, British law enforcement authorities, executing search warrants for several locations connected to Mr. Ahmed, "seized, among other things, a document that set forth plans for a U.S. naval battle group operating in the Strait of Hormuz in April 2001. The information contained in the document, which was classified at the time, has been confirmed as legitimate by the U.S. Navy."
The documents, according to the government statement, "included the battle group's planned movements on April 29, 2001, and a drawing of the group's formation. In addition, the document specifically noted that the battle group was tasked both with enforcing sanctions against Iraq, and with conducting operations against Afghanistan and Al Qaeda."
Most important, the statement said, "the document specifically described the battle group's vulnerability to a terrorist attack, and provides specific examples on how the ships might be attacked (e.g., 'they have nothing to stop a small craft with RPG etc, except their Seals' stinger missiles')."
The initials R.P.G. refer to rocket-propelled grenade, and Seals are naval Special Operations Forces.
For unrelated reasons, the Constellation was retired from service in August 2003. In addition, after the attack on the Cole, in October 2000, the Navy began "force protection'' measures for ships sailing into regions where attacks were deemed likely. Those measures remain classified.
American officials said the e-mail correspondence from the sailor from the Benfold occurred in July 2001. Navy officials said on Saturday that investigators had not found any evidence that the sailor was the source of Mr. Ahmed's information on the Constellation group.
The content of the e-mail correspondence "was sympathetic to the jihad movement," according to the immigration and customs statement. "The enlistee expressed anti-American sentiment and offered praise for the Mujahedeen, the attack of the U.S.S. Cole" and for those "who have brought honor" to the movement "in the lands of Jihad Afghanistan, Bosnia, Chechnya, etc."
David Johnston and Thom Shanker reported from Washington for this article and David E. Sanger from Kennebunkport, Me.
-------- POLITICS
-------- investigations
Terror suspect tells of 'abuse'
Initial results of the hearings could be known by this week
BBC
8 August, 2004
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3545644.stm
The 35-year-old told a panel of three judges he was deprived of light and water for two months.
The panel is investigating every prisoner at the camp to determine whether they are Taleban or al-Qaeda combatants from the US-led Afghan war.
The case is the 12th to be heard, but six detainees refused to take part.
The tribunals follow a US Supreme Court ruling that the prisoners have the right to challenge their detentions.
Human rights groups have criticised the hearings because the detainees do not have access to lawyers.
'Well treated'
US military officials said the prisoner had originally told interrogators he had been trained with militants in Afghanistan.
But he apparently changed his story on Saturday, saying that he had falsely confessed after being abused.
He did not say who his captors were, but US officials said he was held by the anti-Taleban Northern Alliance forces before being turned over to US troops during the 2001 war.
He had been well treated in Guantanamo and no longer feared retribution, he was quoted as saying.
"He said he felt safe in coming forward with his current version of the truth," an official said.
At a second hearing on Saturday, a Saudi man confessed to being a front line fighter in Afghanistan, a US military spokesman said.
Earlier in the week an Iranian, three Yemenis, a Saudi and a Moroccan refused to appear at their hearings.
'Inadequate' process
On Thursday, the BBC's Nick Childs was one of a small group of reporters allowed to witness the appearance of two Afghan men at their hearings in a windowless, cramped room at Guantanamo.
This is the first time any of the 600 or so detainees, who have been held without trial or access to lawyers for more than two years, have been allowed any form of hearing.
Initial results could be given by this week, US officials say.
Human rights groups say the process is inadequate because the detainees are not allowed lawyers, and the three military officers sitting on each panel can not be considered to be impartial.
But the man overseeing the process, Gordon England, has defended the system, saying it derives from the Geneva Convention.
-------- propaganda wars
Iraq Orders Al Jazeera to Close Office in Baghdad for a Month
August 8, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/08/international/middleeast/08jazeera.html
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Aug. 7 (Reuters) _ - Iraq's interim government on Saturday ordered Al Jazeera satellite television network to close its Baghdad office for a month, and the channel criticized Iraq's order.
Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, confirming the decision at a news conference, said a commission had been monitoring Al Jazeera, which has headquarters in Qatar, for the past four weeks to see whether it was inciting violence and hatred, and that the decision had been made "to protect the people of Iraq."
"It's regrettable, and we believe it's not justifiable," said a Jazeera spokesman, Jihad Ballout. "This latest decision runs contrary to all the promises made by Iraqi authorities concerning freedom of expression and freedom of the press."
The Iraqi interior minister, Falah al-Naqib, said this week that Arabic satellite channels were encouraging kidnappings by showing images of hostages threatened with executions.
Another government official at the news conference said the station had "encouraged criminals and gangsters" in Iraq.
Mr. Ballout denied the charge.
"We are not a political organization that is for or against anybody,'' he said. "We display what happens on the ground as objectively as possible and in a balanced way."
Mr. Ballout said the network would continue to cover events in Iraq. "I'm not going to say it will be easy, but again a creative journalist will try to get a comprehensive and balanced story out there," he said.
This week, the station reported a videotaped statement from a militant group linked to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian militant believed to have ties to Al Qaeda, saying it had released two Turkish drivers because their company agreed to stop working in Iraq.
Scores of hostages from two dozen countries have been seized in the last four months. Most have been freed but at least 10 have been killed, and at least 20 are still being held in Iraq.
Last month, Al Jazeera, accused by the United States of graphic and anti-American coverage, unveiled a code of ethics it said would ensure balanced reporting.
Al Jazeera won over millions of Arab viewers before and during the war on Afghanistan in 2001 for broadcasting exclusive images of Osama bin Laden, the Qaeda leader, after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
--------
Iraqi Leader Orders Temporary Closing of Al Jazeera's Bureau in Baghdad
August 8, 2004
By SABRINA TAVERNISE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/08/international/middleeast/08jazeera.html
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Aug. 7 - Prime Minister Ayad Allawi on Saturday ordered the temporary closing of the television network Al Jazeera's Baghdad bureau, the Arab world's primary source of news from Iraq, saying its extensive coverage of kidnappings has encouraged militants.
He said at a news conference that the network's office here would be shut for a month and that it would be allowed to reopen if the network addressed the government's concerns.
Al Jazeera broadcasts to millions of Arab viewers from headquarters in Doha, Qatar. The Bush administration has long criticized its coverage as biased against the United States. The network has a large bureau here and is frequently cited by news organizations because it provides coverage from areas deemed too dangerous for Western reporters. It has broadcast videotapes provided by militant groups of hostages like Nicholas E. Berg, the American beheaded in Iraq in May.
Mr. Allawi has tried to bring order to the chaos of kidnappings, vigilantism and rebel militias that has befallen Iraq. "We will not allow Al Jazeera or anyone else to disturb the security in the country," Interior Minister Falah al-Naqib said.
Mr. Allawi cited a videotape broadcast Saturday by the network that appeared to show an American being beheaded as an example of the coverage he opposed. But the tape turned out to be a hoax. "I am worried about these people," he said. "I am not worried about whether Al Jazeera will like it or not."
The network, on its Web site, called the closing unjustified and said the decision "is contrary to pledges made by the Iraqi government to start a new era of free speech and openness."
Mr. Allawi brushed off criticism that the closing boded badly for freedom of the news media in Iraq, saying that the network's coverage of kidnappings encouraged terrorists and that immediate concerns of security for Iraqis were much more important. He also said that he had asked an independent panel to evaluate the network's coverage of Iraq and that it had concluded the coverage advocated violence.
Some Iraqi journalists agreed with him. The network, "doesn't always give the truth," said Kareem al-Yousif, one of the owners of Radio Dijla, a new radio station in Baghdad. "It doesn't give the Iraqi people their right. It's not on their side."
It was not the first time the Baghdad bureau was closed. Saddam Hussein shut it in 2002 and Iraq's Governing Council, since dissolved, closed it in January for what it called inflammatory coverage.
Saturday night, the network ran live scenes from the Baghdad bureau of Iraqi police officers, who said they were simply trying to carry out orders, with lawyers for Al Jazeera. A reporter for Al Jazeera talked as the scene played out behind him.
-------- us politics
Kerry Defends Position on Iraq
Democrat Says He Would Reduce U.S. Troops Within 6 Months
By Jim VandeHei and Mary Fitzgerald
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, August 8, 2004; Page A04
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A48708-2004Aug7.html
LA JUNTA, Colo., Aug. 7 -- On his whistle-stop swing through the West, Sen. John F. Kerry has been pulled into two issues he rarely touches on in his campaign speeches to the party faithful: his support of the Iraq war and his opposition to same-sex marriage.
Kerry, who is trying to focus on less divisive issues, such as health care, during his train trip through battleground states, was pushed into the spotlight on Iraq and same-sex marriage by President Bush, local reporters -- and a fellow Democratic senator from the swing state of Wisconsin.
Sen. Russell Feingold (D-Wis.) told the Capital Times in Madison on Thursday that Kerry and his running mate Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.) were "wrong" to vote for the congressional resolution authorizing the war and later against the $87 billion to fund it. His comments mark one of the few times a Democratic senator has spoken critically of the party's ticket in the general-election campaign.
They should have voted "no against an unwise war and yes to support the troops," as he did, Feingold told the newspaper.
Stephanie Cutter, Kerry's communications director, said Kerry "voted to hold [former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein] accountable and continues to believe that it was the right thing to do. After witnessing the way in which the president went to war, Senator Kerry voted against the $87 billion because it was wrong to give a blank check to the president for a failed policy."
Bush is stepping up pressure on Kerry to declare whether it was right to oust Hussein, despite the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Steve Schmidt, a Bush campaign spokesman, said the president would not only have still ousted Hussein, but not adjusted the strategy or timing of the military strike. "Unequivocal answer: [Bush] would have removed Saddam when we did," Schmidt wrote via e-mail.
Knowing then what he knows today about the lack of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Kerry still would have voted to authorize the war and "in all probability" would have launched a military attack to oust Hussein by now if he were president, Kerry national security adviser Jamie Rubin said in an interview Saturday. As recently as Friday, the Massachusetts senator had said he only "might" have still gone to war.
Kerry and Rubin also are detailing a new Iraq policy to "significantly" reduce the number of U.S. troops in Iraq during the first six months of a Kerry administration. In an NPR interview Friday, Kerry said: "I believe that within a year from now, we could significantly reduce American forces in Iraq, and that's my plan." His comments took several aides by surprise. Until the interview, Kerry's stated policy was to significantly reduce troops by the end of his first term.
Rubin said Kerry could accomplish the new goal "because of the new credibility we would bring to the White House, because leaders would see cooperation with the United States as a plus rather than a minus. . . . We will be in a better position to get help in terms of troops and money."
There are 138,000 U.S. troops in Iraq, but Kerry is not setting any firm targets for the proposed reduction. The reduction would be possible by encouraging other nations to participate more in Iraq and by training more Iraqi forces to take over for American troops, Rubin said.
Campaigning in Missouri this week, Kerry did not include a reference to the state's vote to ban same-sex marriage in his speeches. But he told the Kansas City Star he would have voted for the ban, which is similar to one he supported in Massachusetts, and he reiterated his opposition to same-sex marriage in a local television interview. "We always argued the states will be capable of taking care of this by themselves," Kerry told the NBC affiliate in Kansas City.
Here in southwestern Colorado on Saturday, it was retail politics for Kerry. Under a sweltering afternoon sun, he outlined for a crowd his plan on health care reform, an issue many onlookers said was crucial in deciding how they would vote.
"Under our [health care] plan, we cut the waste, the greed, the fraud and the abuse," he told the crowd. "In our America, we are going to stop being the only industrial country on the face of the whole planet that doesn't yet understand that health care is not a privilege for the wealthy, the elected and the connected. It is a right for all Americans."
Theresa Carrillo, 55, a social worker from nearby Pueblo, said Kerry's pledges on health care struck a chord.
"Our country has been going downhill under Bush," she said. "It's time for a change, a fairer approach to issues like health care."
Kerry also drew rousing cheers when he condemned the fallout from the war on Iraq.
"Too many of our young kids in uniform are at greater risk today than they needed to be. Too many of our young people today and American taxpayers are bearing the burden of Iraq almost alone because this president rushed to war without a plan to win the peace," he said.
--------
Congress Split on Pace of Intelligence Reforms
Feeling Pressure From 9/11 Commission, Lawmakers Urge Speed and Caution
By Helen Dewar and Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, August 8, 2004; Page A08
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A48710-2004Aug7?language=printer
Members of Congress are sharply divided over how fast to proceed in drafting legislation to restructure the nation's intelligence services -- torn between political demands for speed and caution arising from the complexity of their task.
They also appear split over some of the major recommendations that the national commission charged with investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, made in its 567-page report last month, triggering the extraordinary mid-summer legislative effort. Those proposals -- especially ones that seek a far-reaching realignment of intelligence responsibilities -- could prompt a serious turf war among powerful Washington departments and agencies as well as congressional committees charged with overseeing them.
Over the last 30 years there have been eight unsuccessful efforts to reorganize intelligence operations -- including two recent ones from a presidential commission chaired by retired Lt. Gen. Brent Scowcroft, who is also chairman of President Bush's own Foreign Intelligence Board, and the joint House-Senate panel that investigated the Sept. 11 attacks.
Skeptics caution against unintended consequences that could impede rather than strengthen intelligence efforts. But the commission has been fierce in its lobbying for approval of all its recommendations, and its stature, reinforced by broad acclaim for its work and the support of Sept. 11 victims' families, has generated election-year pressure on Capitol Hill.
House and Senate leaders remain committed to producing legislation by the end of September, although they have been less clear about whether they will push for final passage before the Nov. 2 elections or later, perhaps in a post-election "lame duck" session.
Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), chairman of the Governmental Affairs Committee, which is charged with drafting the Senate version of the bill, has warned against both delay and excessive haste but said in an interview last week that she believes legislation can be passed before the elections. Armed Services Committee Chairman John W. Warner (R-Va.) said in a separate interview that he believes a bill could be drafted in time for final action before Congress adjourns in October. Democratic presidential nominee John F. Kerry and Democrats in both chambers are also pushing for speedy action.
But influential lawmakers from both parties, backed by current and former government officials, are warning against haste inspired by presidential election politics and by lawmakers' fears of being blamed for inaction, especially if terrorists strike before the elections.
"We must not allow false urgency dictated by the political calendar to overtake the need for serious reform" and "rush haphazardly through what may be the most complicated and significant government reorganization since World War II," Senate intelligence committee member Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) said in an op-ed column in The Washington Post last Tuesday.
Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) sounded a similar warning the next day to the Governmental Affairs Committee, saying, "We have to make sure we are driven more by 9/11 than by 11/2."
In the House, the dispute was framed in dramatic fashion last week when Rep. Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.), chairman of the House intelligence committee, urged caution, while Rep. Jane Harman (Calif.), the panel's ranking Democrat, accused the committee of moving too slowly.
House and Senate committees began holding hearings just days after the Sept. 11 commission issued its report, which called for prompt action on restructuring both intelligence operations within the executive branch and what it called "dysfunctional" oversight by Congress.
The report called for creation of a new post of national intelligence director within the president's office, with budgetary and hiring-and-firing authority over 15 agencies responsible for U.S. intelligence operations, including the CIA as well as several agencies in the Defense Department. The report also urged establishment of a national counterterrorism center, also in the president's office, to oversee anti-terrorist intelligence.
For Congress, it proposed a major strengthening of intelligence committees, with new powers to determine policy and funding, along with consolidation of homeland security responsibilities in permanent committees. These proposals would replace the hodgepodge of committees and subcommittees now responsible for these areas, which often results in delay and deadlock. But they could also trespass on the carefully guarded turf of powerful committees, such as Armed Services and Appropriations.
Bush endorsed these proposals, with significant reservations. He opposes putting the new director in the president's office and said the director should play a coordinating -- but not controlling -- role in apportioning funding for intelligence agencies.
Meanwhile, several bills have already been introduced reflecting varying approaches to the reorganization, including separate drafts from Goss and Harman that would invest the job with budgetary authority but differ on who would head the intelligence community.
Although it is too early to tell what Congress will do on these issues, lawmakers say there appears to be considerable support for giving the director broad budgetary authority but, unlike the commission's recommendation, removing the position from the executive office of the president.
But there are also important unresolved questions, such as how the director could assume such a broad array of new responsibilities, what the director's relationship to the defense secretary would be and who would brief the president on intelligence matters. "There are a lot of questions, serious questions," said Sen. Carl M. Levin (Mich.), ranking Democrat on the Armed Services Committee.
Despite their rush to address executive-branch reorganization, neither house has taken any concrete steps to deal with the proposals for Congress. In the Senate, Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) and Minority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.) said they will create a bipartisan task force to deal with the issue but have yet to appoint it. House GOP leaders may not move on congressional reorganization until after the elections, according to Stuart Roy, spokesman for Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.).
Some argue that congressional changes cannot be made intelligently until executive-branch reforms are nailed down, whereas others say the issues must go together to assure effective oversight. Still others point to the turf issues. "It's extraordinarily difficult to reorganize the executive branch, but that is going to be a piece of cake compared to reorganizing Congress," Collins said.
As the election approaches, many lawmakers are worried that the whole debate could get subsumed by politics. While the Senate has been working on a bipartisan basis, House GOP leaders acted unilaterally in laying out the timetable for action, and Democrats responded by scheduling a special party caucus for Tuesday to consider the proposals.
The political implications deepened earlier this month when Kerry, after endorsing the commission's recommendations in their entirety, urged Bush to call Congress back into session to consider them this month. Bush rejected the proposal but urged action in September.
House Republican leaders are considering breaking the proposals into several packages, starting with a highly symbolic installment to be passed by Sept. 11 and leaving the most controversial proposals for later. One step they could take quickly would be to establish the proposed counterterrorism center by merging the CIA's Terrorist Threat Integration Center and Counterterrorist Center. Those units, along with a portion of the FBI's Counterterrorism Center, are already working together.
But others, including key senators and government officials, oppose a piecemeal approach. "If we're going to do this, we should do this in one piece for the well-being of the people that do the work," J. Cofer Black, the State Department's counterterrorism coordinator, told the House intelligence committee last week.
-------- OTHER
-------- homeless
Homeless, Advocates Worry About Convention
August 8, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-GOP-Convention-Homeless.html
NEW YORK (AP)-- J.W. Ballantine, a 77-year-old homeless man, already sleeps most nights in Penn Station and eats many of his meals in neighborhood soup kitchens. But Ballantine's life is about to get much harder now that the Republican National Convention is coming to Madison Square Garden, directly on top of the train station where he usually sleeps.
Ballantine, and hundreds of other homeless people like him, will be moved out from Aug. 30 to Sept. 2 so the convention can take place. ``They think homeless people are eyesores,'' Ballantine said. ``They want to hide them so tourists don't see them.''
Security is already high in New York City, and homeless people worry that even tougher convention security will force them to the city's fringes -- far from the outreach workers trying to help them.
``When you lose people and they become fearful, you're not going to see them again,'' said Arnold S. Cohen, president and CEO of Partnership for the Homeless.
It's hard to say precisely how many homeless people sleep in midtown Manhattan, but a food pantry on West 31st Street serves 500 people a week. The Holy Apostles Soup Kitchen on West 28th Street serves roughly 1,200 people every day.
But beginning the week of the convention, police will close down much of the area around the convention site, allowing pedestrians only if they can prove they have business in the area.
``There is going to be extraordinary security around the Republican Convention, as there was around the Democratic Convention,'' national security adviser Condoleezza Rice said Sunday.
The Bread of Life Program, a food pantry on West 31st Street, has already announced that it will close during the convention. The center serves about 500 people every Wednesday, but it will not open on Sept. 1, the Wednesday of the convention. The pantry instead will provide its clients with extra food the week before.
Holy Apostles Soup Kitchen, the largest in the city, will remain open, and Rev. Elizabeth Maxwell of Holy Apostles Church said she will issue identification cards to volunteers and homeless people.
Maxwell echoes the homeless people's concern that the city will attempt to ``make the city pretty for the visitors and sweep the homeless people away.''
``These are people, they're not a problem,'' she said.
Convention organizers said they have met with city and police officials to discuss the homeless population.
``Everyone understands the concerns that advocates have and that's that all the people in the community be treated with dignity and respect,'' convention spokesman Paul Elliott said.
-------- imf / world bank / wto (economics)
IMF considers more loans to Turkey
August 08, 2004
United Press International
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20040806-044444-5379r.htm
Washington, DC, Aug. 6 (UPI) -- The International Monetary Fund said Friday it is considering offering another loan to Turkey.
"The Turkish authorities have informed us that they have decided to request a successor to the current (IMF) arrangement, which is delivering good results and expires in early February 2005," said the IMF's managing director Rodrigo de Rato.
"Over the coming weeks, the authorities plan to work on formulating the policies required to sustain their existing strategy of disinflation and debt reduction, aimed at robust and sustained growth. Once information on these policies has been provided to the Fund, the request for a successor arrangement will be considered under the applicable procedures," de Rato added.
The current $16 billion loan was offered in February 2002 as the country faced a financial crisis, but Turkey's economy had improved considerably since last year.
-------- ACTIVISTS
Iraq is the new Vietnam as pop protest returns to the airwaves
Rock's conscience awakens for the first time in 30 years and Bush is the alarm clock
08 August 2004
UK Sunday Herald
By Torcuil Crichton
http://www.sundayherald.com/43981
For the first time since the Vietnam war the protest song is back. But this time it's personal. Whereas protest songs of the Vietnam era were broadly anti-war in their message, the new batch of political tunes rising up the American Billboard chart are focused directly on Iraq and aimed at getting George Bush out of office.
"For better or worse, Bush has stirred up a lot of vitriol in the music community," said David Browne, the head music critic for Entertainment Weekly.
"There's always been protest songs against presidents, but they have never been near to the level of venom you're seeing now."
It's not just street rappers and garage punk bands who are having a go at unseating Bush. In the battle for American votes this year the traditional rock 'n' roll guitar chord is riding to the rescue of Democrat candidate John Kerry.
A host of mainstream stars, from the veteran rocker Bruce Springsteen to New York rapper Jadakiss, are helping pop find a political voice once again. The reason why? This time, they say, it's too important not to take part.
American musicians, moved by the war in Iraq, are starting to write, perform and tour against the re-election of President Bush in November's election, hoping to swing a few crucial votes.
Bruce Springsteen, the boss of blue-collar America, is at the helm of the Vote for Change tour, which begins in October and takes in the crucial swing states that could tip either way. He has kept out of partisan politics during his 25-year career but feels that this election is the most critical of his lifetime. "This wasn't one that a concerned citizen felt comfortable sitting out," he said when announcing a 28-city tour to rock the vote.
Ahead of the October tour, anti-war protest music has already broken through to mainstream America despite the reluctance of radio stations to promote hard-hitting material, and a diverse range of musicians are slipping into an anti-war mood.
Why?, a single from Jadakiss, the rapper from Yonkers, New York, reached number 23 in the Billboard chart last week. The success of the single in the incredibly patriotic United States is all the more amazing given that its lyrics include the line: "Why did Bush knock down the towers?"
Jadakiss explained to the Washington Post that the reference to knocking down the twin towers is a metaphor highlighting the Bush administration's intelligence failures before 9/11.
"Everybody ain't gonna like it, but as long as they hear it, my job is done," said Jadakiss, whose real name is Jason Phillips. "I want them to hear it and think about it."
Reaching out to the voters with music with a direct message is 1990s dance music guru Moby. He has teamed up with hip-hop group Public Enemy to produce an uncompromising single, Make Love F@@# War, which was written for Unity, the official album of the Athens Olympic Games.
Following the lead of the rapper P Diddy, whose Citizen Change project aims to broaden voter registration among young people, Springsteen has set up Vote for Change, which will enter the electoral fray at the height of the battle, strumming up support for the Democrats.
An impressive list of artists has been put together for the Vote for Change tour, which will go directly for votes in the 10 crucial swing states and finish in Florida, the most important electoral battle front of them all. Rock giants REM, Pearl Jam, Bonnie Raitt, James Taylor, the Dave Matth ews Band and the Dixie Chicks are lined up for the tour.
The Dixie Chicks have put their politics on stage before, of course, and paid a commercial price for it. In 2003, on the eve of the Iraq war, their lead singer Natalie Mains said she was ashamed that George Bush came from her home state of Texas. The remarks, which gave the new-country group terrific exposure in Europe, proved explosive and commercially disastrous in the United States.
Springsteen has laid out his approach in a string of television interviews and an article in the opinion pages of The New York Times last week. "Like many others in the aftermath of 9/11, I felt the country's unity," he wrote. "I supported the decision to enter Afghanistan and I hoped that the seriousness of the times would bring forth strength, humility and wisdom in our leaders.
"Instead we dived headlong into an unnecessary war in Iraq, offering up the lives of our young men and women under circumstances that are now discredited."
Springsteen says the tour will not be a head-on attack of the President and that the tone will be questioning, more in sorrow than in anger.
Not every musical note in America is struck against Bush. There are patriotic songs supporting the war in Iraq, such as Toby Keith's country hit Courtesy Of The Red White And Blue (The Angry American), but they are rarities in a tidal wave of anti-Bush lyrics.
Not surprisingly, punk is leading the charge against the White House. Fat Mike, frontman for the veteran punk rock group NOFX, created the current Billboard-charting compilation entitled Rock Against Bush, a collection of sneering punk songs from bands like Sum 41, OffSpring, and the Ataris. Twenty-six bands off ered songs for the compilation and many more joined the tour that followed.
Established artists like Patti Smith and Rickie Lee Jones have always been at the forefront of political lyricism. Now others are getting in on the act. John Mellencamp and Steve Earle have penned anti-Bush songs, and Earle's next album, The Revolution Starts ... Now, is almost exclusively about the Iraq war.
Whether a single musical note will make a difference to the election is in some doubt. As well as it being a case of singing to the converted, it's clear that voters are not greatly influenced by celebrity endorsements in politics. In raising the profile of the election itself, and the war, in a nation where almost half the population don't vote and the mainstream media is cowed by government, the tour will serve a direct purpose.
It will, of course, be attacked by the Republicans as another liberal circus showing how out of touch John Kerry is with mainstream America. With Bruce Springsteen onside, a performer whose songs and persona embody earthy, home town America, making that charge stick won't be that easy.
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Lab rally to mark atomic bombings
'Books not Bombs' supporters blast new weapons research, call for increased school funding
Sunday, August 08, 2004
Oakland Tribune
By Ian Hoffman, STAFF WRITER,
http://www.oaklandtribune.com/Stories/0,1413,82~1865~2322111,00.html#
Protesters will assemble in a dance ring and drape Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's fences with quilts and cards today in the yearly marking of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The "Books Not Bombs" rally opens noon at Jackson Elementary School with live music, then speeches denouncing the closure of local schools as Washington funds the study of new and modified H-bombs at Livermore.
At 3 p.m., protesters will march to the corner of the lab at East Avenue and South Vasco Road, some grappling with a huge, inflatable missile and bomb.
Tara Dorabji of the watchdog group Tri-Valley CAREs says people will form a giant dance circle, hold hands and walk around a drummer.
"It's so people will have their chance to bring their voice and thoughts and hopes to bring Lawrence Livermore lab to something sustainable for future generations," she said.
Roughly a dozen major protests nationwide are expected for the 59th anniversary of the two bombings, which together killed more than 105,000. Livermore's is expected to be among the largest, and more sizable than the traditional Easter weekend protest, which last spring encountered a mountain lion sleeping by the lab's main gate.
On Monday, in memorial of the Nagasaki bombing and the recent death of veteran anti-nuclear activist Father Bill O'Donnell, a smaller group will march on the lab from William Payne Park and cross some security line at the lab to trigger their own arrests.
Lab security officers and Livermore police aren't certain where the Monday protesters will be and plan to post a warning to motorists to ensure protesters' safety.
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ACLU SUIT: Police deny spying claims
August 8, 2004
By IAN C. STOREY
Traverse City, MI, Record-Eagle
http://www.record-eagle.com/2004/aug/08aclu.htm
TRAVERSE CITY - A top ranking official with the Traverse City Police Department denies having ever sent officers to surveil antiwar demonstrators.
Capt. R. Patrick Hinds said any assignment, even from the chief, would go through the detective bureau, which Hinds heads.
"We are not in the business of surveilling or keeping records on people who demonstrate or picket as long as they are operating within their rights," said Hinds. "I didn't authorize or order any assignments for antiwar surveillance."
But the ACLU of Northwest Michigan wants a better answer. It filed a Freedom of Information Act request in March to find out if police had conducted surveillance on the National Alliance, a white supremacist group, and anti-war demonstrations in Traverse City from 2001 until this year.
After four months of what the ACLU called "evasive" responses from Hinds that the organization's request wasn't specific enough, chapter president Steve Morse filed a lawsuit last week asking the circuit court to compel the department to provide information.
"We provided the police with detailed information sufficient for the department to determine whether the requested information exists and, if it does, to release it as required by the FOIA," said Morse. "So far, their response has simply been inadequate. We're hopeful that this lawsuit will change that."
Local peace activist Tom Shea said many who go to out-of-state rallies encounter surveillance by police and come back with stories.
"(Activists) are aware that it can happen, but I haven't heard anything about it happening here," he said. "However, that doesn't mean that it isn't happening."
Hinds said it is the duty of police to protect peaceful demonstrators.
"We don't keep track of lawful activity, and that is what makes the request difficult," said Hinds.
Although Shea hasn't heard of police watching local demonstrations, he still believes it is important to find out what is going on.
"I would be interested to find out, and given the reports from other places, it is important for us to know what our local officials are doing, or not doing," he said.
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