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NUCLEAR
Trident base fire ignites fears over nuclear safety
Soldier's new mission is exposing risk of depleted uranium
Iran Warns Its Missiles Can Hit Anywhere in Israel
Israeli nuclear munitions within Iran's missile range: commander
Middle East nuclear disarmament on agenda in January: IAEA chief
Uranium Reactors on Campus Raise Security Concerns
WIPP contractor pursues new projects
MILITARY
21 Killed in Afghanistan Attacks Directed at Provincial Governor
Afghanistan Sends Troops to Calm Fighting
Rwanda Troops Start AU Mission in Darfur
At Least 189 Killed in Raid On Burundi Refugee Camp
U.N. Condemns Massacre of Congo Refugees
Under Intense Security, Iraqis Gather for 3-Day Conference
Talks Fall Apart for Shiite Rebels and Iraq Leaders
Iraqi Troops to Take Lead In Battling Sadr's Forces
To Mahdi Militiaman, Firing on Americans Is Act of 'Patriotism'
Rebel Cleric Wields Power From the Heart of Baghdad
'After three wars we have all had enough'
Palestinians in Israeli Jails Start Hunger Strike
Ukrainian Soldier Killed by Iraq Land Mine
Russian Defense Minister Faults Entry of 3 Baltic States in NATO
Bomb kills many at Indian parade
'Pentagon ready to weaponise space'
Inside the Axis of Deceit
Senate Hearings for CIA Nominee to Begin Sept. 8
Intelligence: Why a Fix Is So Elusive
The Surveillance-Industrial Complex:
Spying in America: How the Pentagon is Overcoming Privacy Laws
Bush to Back Pentagon Plan to Redeploy 70,000 Troops
Venezuela Holds Referendum on President
Divided Venezuela Prepares for Vote
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
US firms sued over Agent Orange
Petak, Russia's Alcatraz, softens hardened inmates
Asylum-seeker now John Ashcroft 's prisoner
POLITICS
For E.U. Critics, a Cautionary Tale
Younger Voters Rapidly Deserting Bush
Bush is Wrong, Kerry is Wrong
ENERGY
Will Russia, the Oil Superpower, Flex Its Muscles?
OTHER
Bush Forces a Shift In Regulatory Thrust
ACTIVISTS
Protesters rally for Sindhis' rights
Protests test Iraq parliament plans
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- accidents and safety
Trident base fire ignites fears over nuclear safety
Major disaster averted after electrical fault in explosives warehouse
By Rob Edwards, Environment Editor
Sunday Herald
15 August 2004
http://www.sundayherald.com/44089
A LEADING nuclear expert has warned that a fire scare at the River Clyde's nuclear submarine base late on Friday could have sparked a catastrophe.
Four fire engines were called to the Royal Naval Armament Depot at Coulport on Loch Long after smoke was detected coming from faulty electrical equipment in the Explosives Handling Jetty at 4.28pm.
The jetty is a huge floating warehouse in which nuclear warheads are detached from the missiles carried by Trident submarines. It is also where conventionally-armed torpedoes are loaded onto hunter-killer and other submarines.
Earlier on Friday a Trident submarine was witnessed sailing up the Clyde towards Coulport, and so is likely to have been present when the incident occurred. In accordance with its policy, the Royal Navy refused to confirm or deny whether any submarine was present.
Leading nuclear consultant John Large, who has advised governments around the world, told the Sunday Herald that a fire in the presence of conventional or nuclear bombs could cause a major disaster.
The circuit breaker may have contained oil and disabled important emergency equipment, he said.
He pointed out that the heat from a 135-second fire on the doomed Russian submarine, Kursk, caused seven torpedoes to self-detonate. The boat sank four years ago in the Barents Sea killing 119 submariners. Large was head of the weapons risk assessment team hired afterwards by the Russian government.
A fire at the Coulport jetty could similarly cause any conventional missiles lying around to explode, he said. "That would be a catastrophe for the jetty."
Worse, a fire could set off the 30-50 kilograms of high explosives that are packed around the plutonium core of nuclear warheads. This would be highly unlikely to trigger a nuclear explosion but it could result in the dispersion of a huge cloud of plutonium particles into the atmosphere.
"This would contaminate a wide area, including Glasgow, if the wind was blowing in the right direction," Large said. "It would have a very significant health impact. "
A spokesman for Coulport disclosed that the cause of the incident had been an overheated circuit breaker . Smoke had triggered an alarm, which brought fire engines from the Ministry of Defence and from Strathclyde Fire Brigade.
"It was an unfortunate incident," said the spokesman, though he stressed it was minor and that emergency procedures had all worked. The fault was rectified and the crisis over after 22 minutes.
"Safety is taken very seriously across the whole base and is given upfront priority," he added. "Given the nature of our business we have to expect the unexpected."
But anti-nuclear campaigners accused the naval base of downplaying Friday's incident. "It's quite possible that we were within minutes of a major catastrophe ," said Phill Jones, of the Scottish Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.
"Most household fires start with just a small electrical fault. A fire close to a Trident submarine while it has one of its missiles raised for the swopping of nuclear warheads does not bear thinking about."
He added: "If the rocket fuel or the high explosive in the warheads had detonated it would have set off a terrible chain reaction scattering radioactive plutonium for miles."
Four Trident submarines carry Britain's 200 nuclear weapons, with at least one always being at sea. HMS Vanguard is currently being refitted at Devonport on the south coast of England.
The navy declined to say anything about the location of the other three: HMS Victorious, HMS Vigilant and HMS Vengeance. It is known, however, that all the boats dock regularly at the Explosives Handling Jetty so that their warheads can be maintained.
Old warheads are removed and transported to Aldermaston and Burghfield in Berkshire for the tritium essential for a thermonuclear explosion to be replaced. Radioactive decay causes tritium to become contaminated and unreliable after a few years in service.
At the jetty, newly refurbished warheads are attached to the Trident missiles. "This incident should remind us all that the sacred cow of Britain's weapons of mass destruction puts all of us, and the environment, at a terrible risk," said Jones.
The anti-nuclear movement is planning an escalating series of protests at Coulport, and at its companion base at nearby Faslane over the next two weeks. This Wednesday, protesters from Trident Ploughshares are due to set up camp at Coulport.
They are promising to disrupt what they see as the Royal Navy's illegal activities at Coulport and Faslane. The campaign, which will include swimming into the docks where the submarines are berthed, will culminate in a "Big Blockade" of Faslane on Monday, August 23. Organisers hope that hundreds will be involved, including MSPs and activists from Scotland, England, Belgium, and Finland and Sweden.
-------- depleted uranium
Soldier's new mission is exposing risk of depleted uranium
Ivy Vogel
August 15, 2004
Glenwood Springs, Colorado, Post Independent
http://www.postindependent.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20040815/VALLEYNEWS/108150002
The children resemble fictitious, freakish figures better suited for a horror movie than ordinary life.
One child's enormously bloated stomach prevents it from doing anything but lying in bed.
Another child lies in its mother's arms. It's impossible to tell if the child's smiling or crying. Its mouth, which is a huge, purple, scarred, messy hole, is so disfigured it doesn't change from its permanent position: wide open.
Perhaps the most disturbing picture is one of a uniformed American soldier holding his young son in his arms. The child's wrists are attached to his elbows and his legs are so bowed it looks like he was born on a horse.
These pictures are just a few examples of what happens when humans are exposed to vast amounts of depleted uranium, said Dennis Kyne, a former U.S. Army sergeant.
Depleted uranium, or DU, is a by-product of uranium, which is the earth's heaviest metal. During the first Gulf war, the U.S. military used DU to coat missiles fired at opposing tanks.
Once DU penetrates a substance, it burns everything around it, disabling enemy weaponry and omitting deadly radioactive particles.
Dennis Kyne, a sergeant and medic during the Gulf war is concerned continued DU use will effect the men and women that will return from Iraq.
Kyne recently recounted his horrific experiences with DU in a speech at the Blue Acacia in Glenwood.
An effective agent of war, DU is extremely deadly and is responsible for the deaths of more than 9,600 veterans of the first Gulf war, Kyne said.
"I know people who came home and their skin literally melted away from their bones," Kyne said. "The military told men they had pneumonia, and two days later they'd tell their wives they died of cancer. How does that happen?"
During the Gulf War, soldiers were exposed to large amounts of depleted uranium particles. Unless cleaned up by professional teams, the particles are radioactive for 4.5 billion years, Kyne said.
In many cases, Kyne's soldiers were exposed to the particles for more than five days. When they came home, they suffered psychological disorders, tumors, unexplained cancers and other physical ailments the government labeled "Gulf War syndrome," Kyne said.
"We started seeing sergeants picking their noses and eating their boogers," Kyne said. "You'd walk into a tent and a guy would be sucking on his big toe."
After the military loosely defined Gulf War syndrome, it did little to find out why soldiers were dying, Kyne said.
Capt. Doug Rokke, who was part of the DU cleanup team, blew the whistle on the use of DU and its fatal effects. The military removed him from his rank and Rokke became a schoolteacher.
"People who know about it get railroaded out," Kyne said.
The military, which is still using DU, doesn't want to acknowledge that it's killing its own people, Kyne said.
Any scientific study on DU that doesn't support the military's agenda is brushed aside and considered invalid, Kyne said.
"The army does whatever they do, and they say whatever they say without any empirical evidence," Kyne said. "The soldiers are the greatest study group in the world."
In a documentary about DU, Dr. Michael Kilpatrick, deputy director of the Department of Defense's Deployment Health Support Directorate, said DU does not cause any of Gulf War Syndrome's symptoms.
"It cannot hurt your body," Kilpatrick said in one clip.
A moment later he said, "It has to be ingested to be harmful."
The Office of the Special Assistant for Gulf War Illnesses works in conjunction with the Defense Technical Information Center. In a report issued by the Office of the Special Assistant for Gulf War Illness, a report said DU is a "heavy metal that's slightly radioactive" and as long "as it remains outside the body, it cannot harm you."
Misconceptions concerning the health risks from DU radiation are over exaggerated, according to the report.
"They made us feel safe," Kyne said. "Feel safe, soldier; come, walk into anything. It can't getcha."
But soldiers were far from safe. Most of the soldiers ingested DU while kicking around sand covered in DU particles, Rokke said.
Soldiers spread the contamination to their families by bringing war souvenirs such as duffle bags into their living rooms. Covered in particles, the souvenirs immediately infect the families, causing death in infants, retardation in younger children and infertility in parents, Kyne said.
According to the Gulf War Resource Center, more than 250,000 of the 700,000 men returning from the war asked for health care for DU symptoms.
Many of the men are turned away or told their symptoms are "nothing," Kyne said.
Kyne has made it his mission to expose what he considers the deceit and betrayal the U.S. Army offered soldiers who risked their lives for the sake of their country.
Many commercial aircraft use DU for balance, Kyne said. DU particles are found all over the United States including California and Colorado, he said.
"I would have been a professional musician by choice, but this is what I have to do," Kyne said. "I'm begging for someone to prove me wrong."
Contact Ivy Vogel: 945-8515, ext. 534
ivogel@postindependent.com
-------- iran
Iran Warns Its Missiles Can Hit Anywhere in Israel
August 15, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-iran-israel-missiles.html
TEHRAN (Reuters) - A senior Iranian military official said Sunday Israel and the United States would not dare attack Iran since it could strike back anywhere in Israel with its latest missiles, news agencies reported.
Iranian officials have made a point of highlighting the Islamic state's military capabilities in recent weeks in response to some media reports that Israeli or U.S. warplanes could try to destroy Iranian nuclear facilities in air strikes.
Iran last week said it carried out a successful test firing of an upgraded version of its Shahab-3 medium-range ballistic missile. Military experts said the unmodified Shahab-3 was already capable of striking Israel or U.S. bases in the Gulf.
``The entire Zionist territory, including its nuclear facilities and atomic arsenal, are currently within range of Iran's advanced missiles,'' the ISNA students news agency quoted Yadollah Javani, head of the Revolutionary Guards political bureau, as saying.
``Therefore, neither the Zionist regime nor America will carry out its threats'' against Iran, he said.
An attack on Iran ``could only be carried out by angry or stupid people. For that reason, officials of the Islamic Republic must always be prepared to counter possible military threats,'' Javani said in a statement, ISNA reported.
ISRAEL READIES MISSILE-KILLER
U.S. and Israeli officials accuse Iran of developing nuclear weapons, a charge Iran denies.
Israel's Arrow missile defense system, designed to counter threats such as the Shahab-3, passed its first live test in July by downing a Scud missile off the coast of California.
Israeli officials say they plan further tests in the near future against threats which more closely resemble the Shahab-3.
``Such statements by Iran only serve to demonstrate the need for Israel to maintain and further develop defensive systems such as the Arrow II,'' a senior Israeli defense source told Reuters Sunday.
``It appears that Iran is rattling its saber for fear of a pre-emptive strike by Israel or the United States -- however grounded in fact such fears are or are not,'' the source said.
Israeli warplanes successfully destroyed the Osirak nuclear reactor in Iraq in 1981.
But many diplomats and defense experts say air strikes against Iran's nuclear plants are unlikely to disable Tehran's nuclear capability, much of which has been built underground, and could prompt a swift military reaction from Iran.
Since its 1979 Islamic revolution Iran has refused to recognize Israel's right to exist and allied itself to the Palestinian cause.
Its political enmity for the Jewish state spilled over to the Olympic Games in Athens this week when an Iranian judo medal favorite withdrew rather than fight an Israeli he was drawn against.
-------- israel
Israeli nuclear munitions within Iran's missile range: commander
TEHRAN (AFP)
Aug 15, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040815100907.y21m2umi.html
A senior commander in Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards Corps said that all Israeli military and nuclear sites are now within the range of the Islamic Republic's missiles, a news agency reported Sunday.
"The entire Zionist territory including its nuclear establishments and atomic munitions are now within the range of Iran's advanced missiles," the students news agency ISNA quoted Yadollah Javani as saying.
Javani said neither the United States nor "the Zionist regime" will carry out their threats against Iran considering the high cost of a possible attack.
Such an attack "could only happen out of anger and stupidity, thus the Islamic regime officials must always maintain their promptness to tackle probable military threats," he added.
Iran on Wednesday tested an upgraded version of its conventional medium-range Shahab-3 missile, two weeks after Israel tested its Arrow II anti-missile system.
Tehran fears Israel could strike its controversial nuclear program, which Washington suspects is being used to covertly develop weapons.
The missile is considered the mainstay of Iran's military technology and portrayed as purely defensive and dissuasive, but specifically as a weapon against Israel.
In the July 28 test of Israel's Arrow II missile, the Jewish state made it clear the improved anti-missile system was aimed squarely at fending off any attack by arch-foe Iran.
The Revolutionary Guards, or Sepah-e Pasdaran, to whom the Shahab-3 was entrusted, exist in parallel to the regular armed forces. They also have their own naval and air forces, and are largely deployed to protect Iran's borders.
Israel refuses to confirm it has a nuclear arsenal but is estimated to possess some 200 warheads.
-------- mideast
Middle East nuclear disarmament on agenda in January: IAEA chief
CAIRO (AFP)
Aug 15, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040815181619.688kwadq.html
Nuclear disarmament in the Middle East will be the subject of talks in Vienna in January, International Atomic Energy Agency director general Mohamed ElBaradei announced here Sunday.
"We have agreed to hold a forum on creation of nuclear-free zones in the world, especially in the Middle East, in January 2005 in Vienna," ElBaradei said after talks with Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Abul Gheit.
"With the participation of Arab states, Israel and other countries in the region, the forum will be an occasion to open talks on the necessary conditions for the creation of a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East," he said.
ElBaradei added: "The IAEA is prepared to send observers to Egypt and Jordan to monitor whether there is any evidence of nuclear radiation emanating from Israel."
The press in the Arab world has for several weeks expressed fears of contamination from the Israeli nuclear power plant in Dimona, in the southern Negev desert.
Egyptian newspapers have even written of the dangers for the region of Israel burying nuclear waste in the Gaza Strip.
The question of radiation from the Dimona plant "should not be linked to the observation by Israel of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) nor inspection by the IAEA of Israel's nuclear activity", ElBaradei added.
It was necessary to distinguish between questions concerning nuclear development for military purposes and the question of safety, he said.
Israel has refused to discuss the question of regional safety arising out of its nuclear programme before reaching a peace agreement with its Arab neighbours. It remains one of the few countries not to have signed the NPT and will not allow inspection of the reactor at Dimona.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
Uranium Reactors on Campus Raise Security Concerns
August 15, 2004
By MATTHEW L. WALD
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/15/national/15NUKE.final.html?pagewanted=all
MADISON, Wis. - The University of Wisconsin's nuclear reactor is an unassuming little model, operated (on Tuesdays and Thursdays only) by students in T-shirts and shorts. In the last few months it has been used to identify the source of pottery shards from an ancient settlement in India, to test whether heart stents work better if they have been irradiated, and to study the water and gas balance that would be present in a future generation of power reactors.
But its fuel is weapons-grade uranium. If it were stolen, experts say, it could give terrorists or criminals a major head start on an atomic bomb.
And Wisconsin is not alone. Five other university research reactors around the country use weapons-grade fuel, even though the federal government has promised for more than two decades to reclaim their uranium and substitute a less enriched variety that is closer to the kind that commercial power plants use.
"We have been on the list for conversion for at least 10 years," said Dr. Michael L. Corradini, the head of the nuclear engineering program here. "We've been waiting for funding from the Department of Energy."
Stealing the fuel here would not be easy. The reactor's radioactive core is near the bottom of a pool of water 27 feet deep, in about two dozen fuel bundles, each weighing 58 pounds. Still, experts say there is no reason to run the risk of theft, since the reactors could run on uranium not suitable for bombs.
The reactors at Wisconsin and the other universities - Oregon State, Washington State, Purdue, Texas A&M and the University of Florida - were first supplied with uranium during the cold war, as a spinoff of the government's Atoms for Peace program. The United States gave the material to research reactors around the world, offering to share nuclear technology if the recipient countries promised not to develop nuclear weapons.
But since 1978, out of concern that the uranium might be turned into bomb fuel, the Department of Energy has spent millions of dollars to develop lower-grade fuel and convert scores of reactors to run on it. As of July 30, according to the Government Accountability Office (formerly the General Accounting Office), 39 of 105 research reactors worldwide had converted or were in the process. But the six campus reactors in this country are not among them.
"It's outrageous that they're still doing this," said Victor Gilinsky, who was an early advocate for switching to low-enriched fuel as a member of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission from 1975 to 1984. There may not be quite enough on hand at Wisconsin to make a bomb, he said in a telephone interview, but "who says that somebody has to get enough in one shot?"
Campus reactors have far less security than places where the government keeps bomb-grade uranium, and they may have foreign students of unknown political sympathies, Mr. Gilinsky said. And he pointed out that the United States is seeking to persuade countries all over the world to stop civilian use of bomb-grade uranium.
"It's a bad example," he said. "How can we go around the world asking people to shift over if we're not shifting over ourselves?"
Asked why the research reactors had not been converted, Anson Franklin, a spokesman for the department's National Nuclear Security Administration, which is in charge of nonproliferation, was blunt. "There hasn't been enough funding," he said. He noted that in May, Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham promised to seek conversion of all the reactors by 2014. But he said he could not give a schedule for the campus reactors.
Mr. Franklin also acknowledged that his department does not know just what the cost would be. The Energy Department told the accountability office that it had converted 11 research reactors at universities for a total of $10 million, but that the remaining ones would cost $5 million to $10 million each. That drew a sharp rejoinder from the State Department, which wants the reactors converted.
"Maybe there's a good reason why the final eight should be 5 to 10 times more expensive to convert than the first 11, but frankly we doubt it," a letter from the department said. The State Department added that the Energy Department "has been reluctant to fund more conversions and has a tendency to overstate the potential costs to deflect pressure to spend money on them."
While the details of conversion have proved to be complicated, the concept is simple. In nature, more than 99 percent of uranium is of a type called U-238, which is very difficult to split in a nuclear reaction and thus not good fuel for reactors or bombs. About 0.7 percent is U-235, which splits easily. Power reactors in this country use uranium fuel in which the proportion of U-235 has been raised to 3 to 5 percent, which is low-enriched fuel. Anything over 20 percent is considered highly enriched. Bombs are generally over 90 percent. Some research reactors run on fuel enriched to over 90 percent; Wisconsin's is 70 percent, and the quantity is probably a little less than is needed for a bomb.
The reactor here is one three-thousandth as large as a typical power reactor, with a core about the size of a college dorm refrigerator. Nuclear experiments performed here, and the production of isotopes for scientific and medical research, which is a common use of research reactors elsewhere, require a high density of neutrons, the subatomic particles that are released when one atom is split, and which go on to split other atoms in a chain reaction.
An easy way to guarantee a lot of neutrons is to use a lot of U-235. But Energy Department engineers have designed fuel that uses a larger quantity of low-enriched uranium, so the total number of U-235 atoms in the core is roughly the same.
John I. Sackett, the associate director of Argonne National Laboratory, who led a team that designed the substitute fuel, said the fuel now in the campus reactors is dangerously radioactive, making it hard to handle. He acknowledged, however, that highly enriched uranium was an easier fuel from which to build a bomb than is plutonium. "It's a less complicated technology," he said.
At reactors, conversion to low-enriched uranium offers no benefits to the researchers or operators, except perhaps to simplify the security rules in force here. University officials will not discuss the details of those rules. The reactor is behind a strong steel door with a steel grate over the windows, and is watched by closed-circuit television, among other precautions.
The reactor operators are paid $10.50 an hour. They recently got a raise to that level, said Dr. Corradini, because someone discovered that campus file clerks were paid more than the reactor operators.
Because the reactor has so much useable uranium and runs so few hours a week, the current fuel load will last about 108 years at current rates of use, according to Robert J. Agasie, the nuclear reactor director. That is probably longer than the reactor itself, but university officials recently won a 20-year extension of its operating license.
"We have re-upped," said John D. Wiley, chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "We made a commitment to nuclear engineering education years ago and we're sticking with it."
Speaking of security at the reactor, Mr. Wiley said, "We're not supposed to talk about it, but I'm confident." Ordering a conversion to low-enriched fuel was an "unfunded mandate" from government, he said, but he added, "As long as they're paying for it, I'll be fine."
-------- new mexico
WIPP contractor pursues new projects
By Victoria Parker-Stevens
Current-Argus Staff Writer
Aug 15, 2004, 02:12 am
http://www.currentargus.com/cgi-bin/artman/exec/view.cgi?archive=432&num=8344
CARLSBAD - As the last container was built for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, workers at a local manufacturer looked to the next big project - and one was there.
The Engineered Products Department built TRUPACT-IIs, the large shipping containers seen on WIPP trucks.
As the end of the contract period loomed, there were worries about the company's future in Carlsbad. After all, a number of WIPP contractors had downsized early this year, including the largest, Washington TRU Solutions, which eliminated 45 positions.
EPD had a smaller voluntary workforce reduction and the cooperation of flexible employees, said Mike McNamara, new general manager of Washington Group International's Government Technical Services Division, of which EPD is the largest part.
EPD's workforce is currently at around 130 people - a level similar to a few years ago. "We needed a new core product," said McNamara, who is spending a lot of time in Carlsbad as acting EPD plant manager.
Enter a $4 million contract to build a different type of nuclear waste container. Awarded a couple of months before the last TRUPACT was completed in June, the contract is for an initial 900 silo containers for Fluor Fernald Inc.
The containers will be used to transport sludge from silos at the Fernald Plant in Ohio. Made of 1/2-inch carbon steel, each container stands more than 6 feet tall and is 76 inches in diameter. The production was split among three companies.
EPD plans to produce 70 containers a week by early next year, with three shifts a day at its facility east of town along U.S. Highway 62-180, McNamara said.
EPD also has a facility in the Carlsbad industrial park, which handles stainless steel work. The facilities together have a manufacturing area of more than 110,000 square feet.
To prepare, EPD employees themselves have undertaken a major construction project, including tasks such as putting in cranes and painting the roof a lighter color to help day-shift workers deal with the heat.
"The workforce sees that it's an investment for the long term," McNamara said, noting several thousand more containers could be ordered.
In June, EPD was also awarded a contract from Columbia Westinghouse to manufacture stainless-steel containers for fuel assemblies, used in commercial nuclear power production.
The initial order was for 35 containers, with the potential for as many as 900, McNamara said.
Also this year, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers green-lighted a new EPD quality assurance program that will allow the manufacture of spent nuclear fuel prototype canisters for the Yucca Mountain project in Nevada.
These projects aren't the only ones at EPD. At any given time, work is being done on more than a dozen products, McNamara said, with contracts estimated at $16 million. While some of EPD's work is commercial, much is under government contract and related to nuclear waste cleanup.
Products include waste boxes, overpack containers, plutonium stabilization packaging and gloveboxes used for working with radioactive materials.
On a smaller scale than the TRUPACTs, EPD has also manufactured a couple of other types of WIPP containers, including for remote-handled waste the federal Energy Department would like to ship to the site.
Private industry can be leery of government contractors because they feel they aren't competitive, but EPD strives to automate as much as possible to lower costs, for example, by using robotics, McNamara said.
He said Carlsbad's remote location is also not impossible to overcome, especially as EPD's products are shipped all over the world.
EPD prides itself on having the best machinists in the Southwest and a high-tech workforce with a lot of longevity, McNamara said.
And, "with a large farm and mining community, there's a real hands-on mindset here," he said.
The company has been in Carlsbad for more than 20 years. Before the mid-1990s, it was a locally owned business called Gregory Enterprises.
EPD is able to assist local businesses - such as those in the oil industry - with machining, welding, engineering and testing, McNamara said.
The company has 18 acres for activities like drop testing and can handle non-destructive examination with things like gamma and X-ray equipment.
"We can do any test here, including helium leak testing," McNamara said. "The equipment for that is very expensive to keep."
He said EPD also checks with area businesses when it purchases materials, and if it can come close on price, EPD will purchase locally.
Since EPD works in the nuclear industry, local businesses can be assured its quality assurance and control departments are of the highest quality, McNamara said.
"High-integrity containers require high-integrity people," he said.
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
21 Killed in Afghanistan Attacks Directed at Provincial Governor
August 15, 2004
By CARLOTTA GALL
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/15/international/middleeast/15HERA.html?pagewanted=all
KABUL, Afghanistan, Aug. 14 - Twenty-one people, including two senior Defense Ministry commanders, were killed in heavy factional fighting overnight in the western province of Herat, in another upset for Afghanistan as it prepares for elections, Afghan officials said Saturday.
In what appeared to be coordinated attacks, forces from three neighboring provinces moved on districts in Herat Province, the fief of the powerful warlord Ismail Khan.
Fighting involving artillery and tanks was continuing on Saturday afternoon south of the city of Herat, around Shindand, said Mohammadullah Afzali, the Foreign Ministry representative in Herat.
Both sides confirmed that 21 people had been killed.
The attacks drew a swift rebuke from President Hamid Karzai, who, after a meeting of his national security council, issued a statement condemning the incursions and calling for those responsible to withdraw from the areas they had seized. The attacks were illegal and a threat to public security, it said.
"Any action that jeopardizes public security and threatens people's lives will not be tolerated and no one will be allowed to get away with committing such crimes," the statement said.
The council clearly took the side of Herat's governor, saying his forces had the right to defend the integrity of the province, said the Defense Ministry spokesman, Gen. Abdul Zaher Azimi.
Mr. Khan has been much criticized in the past by the central government for not respecting central authority, in particular in March, when fighting broke out in the city of Herat after Mr. Khan's son, Mirwais Saddiq, the minister for civil aviation, was killed.
The men who have moved against Mr. Khan are known opponents of the governor who have criticized him in the past for interfering in their areas of control.
South of Herat city, the commander Amanullah Khan seized control of the air base at Shindand and the nearby district center overnight, and his forces were still in control of them on Saturday.
In interviews with local journalists, the commander said there had been a local uprising against Ismail Khan by people opposed to his rule.
In the east, forces under a commander called Abdul Salam overran two villages in the Chesht District, Mr. Afzali said. They retained control of one village but had failed to take the district center, he said.
To the northeast, the commander Zaher Naibzada, whose men killed Mr. Khan's son in March, also recently moved against Mr. Khan's forces, according to local reports.
Mr. Khan sent reinforcements from the garrison in Herat city to Shindand, after two of his senior commanders were killed, along with eight others, and four were wounded.
A battalion of the newly trained Afghan National Army is based in Herat and was on alert but for now remained in their barracks, General Azimi said.
--------
Afghanistan Sends Troops to Calm Fighting
August 15, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Afghan-Factional-Fighting.html
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) -- The government sent U.S.-trained troops to western Afghanistan Sunday to calm a burst of factional violence which killed 22 people and dealt another blow to shaky security ahead of national elections.
A plane carrying 150 troops left Kabul Sunday morning -- the first of 1,500 soldiers to be dispatched on the 370-mile trip to Shindand in Herat province, the Defense Ministry said.
The force was headed for an air base at the center of fighting between troops loyal to Herat Gov. Ismail Khan, one of the country's strongest warlords, and rival commanders.
The anti-Khan forces have voiced support for Karzai, but officials in Kabul denounced their attempts to capture the base and other chunks of territory in the province.
``The militia attacked Herat's legal government,'' Defense Ministry spokesman Mohammed Zahir Azimi said. ``It is an illegal action that benefits Afghanistan's enemies.''
Karzai has sent troops from the new Afghan National Army to trouble spots across the north and west this year, including a battalion already positioned in Herat.
The deployments have had a frosty welcome from regional powerbrokers, including Khan, who have resisted Karzai's attempts to extend the central government's writ.
A warlord attacked an ANA convoy in neighboring Ghor province last month, injuring three soldiers as well as two of the American military trainers who accompany them on missions.
Amanullah, a Pashtun leader who claims to have captured the Shindand base in an offensive begun Friday, said Sunday that his men were exchanging artillery with Khan's troops near Shindand.
He said his opponents had brought tanks and rocket-launchers to the front line, but that there was no close-range fighting or fresh casualties.
Amanullah, who goes by one name, said 21 fighters were killed in the initial battle. Azimi put the total at 22.
Khan, a Tajik, was discriminating against other ethnic groups in the province, Amanullah said. ``So long as Ismail Khan is governor, the fighting will continue.''
Abdul Wahed Tawakali, a spokesman for Khan, also said there was still fighting near Shindand but had no details.
Attacks against Khan's forces by two other dissident commanders in the north and west of the province were repelled, with the rebels pushed into neighboring Ghor province, Tawakali said.
Tawakali said a delegation of officials from Kabul was expected to arrive later Sunday.
But Azimi said no delegation was going and that officials would ``follow the issues from Kabul.''
The United Nations is concerned that the failure to disarm militias who control much of the country leaves the election vulnerable to intimidation.
About 10 million Afghans have registered to vote, according to U.N. figures, despite a string of attacks on voters and election workers blamed on Taliban rebels.
-------- africa
Rwanda Troops Start AU Mission in Darfur
August 15, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-rwanda-sudan.html
EL FASHER, Sudan (Reuters) - Rwandan troops arrived in Darfur Sunday as the first foreign force there, mandated to protect observers monitoring a shaky cease-fire between the Sudanese government and rebels in the remote western region.
Some 155 Rwandan troops were being sent to troubled Darfur at the weekend as part of an African Union (AU) force. Rwandan President Paul Kagame said Saturday his soldiers would also intervene to protect civilians in danger.
Rwanda says the world's slow response to the Darfur crisis echoes its own experience during a 1994 genocide.
The United Nations calls Darfur the worst humanitarian crisis in the world and says 50,000 people have been killed and at least 1 million more displaced since two rebel groups took up arms against the government in February last year.
Greeting the troops, the head of the AU cease-fire commission, Festus Okonkwo, told them to take their mandate as a protection force for the 118 AU monitors currently in Darfur ``as a Bible.'' But he added that on humanitarian grounds they could take action to protect civilians in danger.
``Your assignment here is to protect all AU personnel in the mission,'' Okonkwo told the troops dressed in new, beige camouflage uniforms and green berets at the AU headquarters in El Fasher, capital of Northern Darfur state.
``So at any time remember that is your basic assignment. Any other assignment outside that is on humanitarian grounds. That is not your mandate so ... make sure that every officer here understands the rules of engagement,'' he added.
The comments again brought into question what role the initial 308 Nigerian and Rwandan forces will play in Darfur, a remote area the size of France. Khartoum has rejected a peacekeeping role for any troops other than Sudanese. The AU has said it hopes to increase the number of troops to 2,000.
SANCTIONS THREAT
The Sudanese government has about two weeks to prove to the U.N. Security Council it is serious about improving the security situation in Darfur, or face unspecified sanctions.
Sudanese Foreign Minister Mustafa Ismail told reporters in Khatoum Sunday the government had designated safe areas in Darfur. The areas include the capitals of each of Darfur's three states; Nyala, el-Fasher and Geneina as well as the areas surrounding them.
The towns of Sani, Deleiva and Abu, along with the area of Ajouraha in South Darfur state and the area of Mornei in West Darfur state were also designated safe areas.
``We have identified these areas and implementation will begin tomorrow (Monday),'' said Ismail, adding that the monitors would be asked to head to those areas.
Pronk said the areas had been chosen by the government.
Rights groups and the rebels accuse Khartoum of arming Arab militias known as the Janjaweed -- a term derived from the Arabic for ``devils on horseback'' -- to loot and burn African farming villages as part of a campaign of ethnic cleansing.
Khartoum denies the charge, calling the Janjaweed outlaws.
Okonkwo said Nigeria's soldiers would arrive in Darfur on Aug. 25 to complete the initial deployment of 308 soldiers.
He added aid agencies working in the same areas as the troops would also be afforded protection. The AU has said the soldiers will be based at El Fasher, Geneina, Nyala, Kebkabiya, Tine and in Abeche in neighboring Chad.
About 200,000 Darfuri refugees are encamped in Chad.
Rwandan army spokesman Colonel Patrick Karegeya told Reuters in Kigali the Rwandan troops were well prepared. ``Our troops have lived through the worst and seen it all, so they will not be shocked by anything they encounter in Darfur,'' he said.
A Dutch plane flew Rwandan supplies and several armored personnel carriers and crew to Darfur Saturday. The Dutch government is funding the airlift of troops to Darfur.
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At Least 189 Killed in Raid On Burundi Refugee Camp
By Aloys Niyoyita
Associated Press
Sunday, August 15, 2004; Page A19
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A1425-2004Aug14.html
GATUMBA, Burundi, Aug. 14 -- Attackers armed with machetes and automatic weapons raided a U.N. refugee camp in western Burundi, shooting and hacking to death at least 189 men, women and children, U.N. officials said.
Burundian Hutu rebels claimed responsibility for the attack, saying the camp for Congolese Tutsi refugees fleeing tribal fighting was a hideout for Burundi army soldiers and Congolese militiamen.
But most of the victims appeared to be women and children. Their charred remains lay among the cooking utensils and the smoldering remnants of their homes Saturday.
The attack late Friday echoed the killing during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, Burundi's neighbor, and raised fears of retaliatory violence that could undo peace efforts in Congo.
The camp, 12 miles from the border with Congo, sheltered Tutsi refugees who had fled fighting in Congo's troubled border province of South Kivu, said U.N. officials visiting the camp after the attack.
"People were sleeping when the attack happened," Eliana Nabaa, spokeswoman of the U.N. mission in Congo said. "People were killed as they tried to escape."
Isabelle Abric, spokeswoman for the U.N. mission in Burundi, said 159 people were killed on the spot and 101 others were wounded. At least 30 of the wounded died later in a hospital, she said.
Leaflets distributed before the raid warned refugees to leave the camp or face attacks by a coalition of Burundian, Rwandan and Congolese factions seeking "to fight the Tutsi colonization in the region," survivors said.
Burundian officials and aid workers moved the refugees to a nearby school, where they will be protected by the army, said Louis Niyonzima, a local mayor.
A spokesman for the U.N. refugee agency said the attackers raided an army position close to the refugee camp before attacking the refugees.
"These guys were armed with grenades, machetes and automatic weapons," said Fernando del Mundo, a spokesman for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees in Geneva.
Pasteur Habimana, spokesman for the rebel National Liberation Forces, justified the attack, saying Burundian soldiers were hiding in the camp, located about a half mile from an army position.
The National Liberation Forces is the last main rebel movement fighting the government in Burundi's 10-year civil war, which has killed some 260,000 people. War broke out in 1993, when Hutus took up arms after Tutsi paratroopers assassinated the country's first democratically elected president, Melchior Ndadaye, a Hutu. Burundi's Tutsi minority has effectively run the country for all but a few months since independence in 1962.
An army spokesman, Adolphe Manirakiza, denied rebel claims that Burundian troops had fled into the camp and said there was no attack on the nearby army position.
Burundian President Domitien Ndayizeye described the massacre as "a shame" and asked the Congolese government to assist in investigations. Congo's President Joseph Kabila demanded an international investigation.
Ongoing ethnic strife in the region threatens to undermine peace efforts after Congo's 1998-2003 war, which drew the armies of at least five countries into fighting. The seeds of that conflict lay in the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, in which an estimated 800,000 minority Tutsis and political moderates from the Hutu majority were killed in the 100-day slaughter organized by the Hutu government then in power
U.N. officials are studying whether Friday's attack was carried out with the assistance of Congolese tribal fighters or Rwandan rebels based in eastern Congo, said Nabaa, the U.N. spokeswoman in Congo.
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U.N. Condemns Massacre of Congo Refugees
August 15, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-UN-Burundi-Massacre.html
UNITED NATIONS (AP) -- The U.N. Security Council on Sunday condemned the massacre of at least 150 Congolese refugees at a U.N. camp in neighboring Burundi, and demanded that those responsible be brought to justice ``without delay.''
Reflecting the seriousness of the killings, the council met in emergency session at the request of France to denounce Friday night's attack at the camp in Gatumba.
A statement approved by the 15 council members and read by the council president, Russia's U.N. Ambassador Andrey Denisov, condemned the massacre ``with the utmost firmness.''
A Burundian Hutu rebel group, the National Liberation Forces, claimed responsibility for the attack on the camp, which sheltered Congolese Tutsis known as Banyamulenge who had fled fighting in their troubled country. Officials said Hutu extremists from Congo and Rwanda were also suspected of taking part in the raid.
A spokesman for the rebels said Burundian soldiers and Congolese Tutsi militia were hiding in the refugee camp. But most of those killed appeared to be women and children.
The Security Council statement did not identify the perpetrators or the victims. Instead, the council called on the top U.N. envoy in Burundi, in consultation with the U.N. representative in Congo, ``to establish the facts and report on them to the council as quickly as possible.''
A U.N. statement issued in Burundi on Sunday, expressed ``outrage'' at the massacre, noting that ``most of the victims were women, children and babies ... who were shot dead and burned in their shelters.''
The statement noted that Burundians in the refugee camp were not attacked.
The U.N. Operation in Burundi also reminded the perpetrators, which include the National Liberation Front, who claimed responsibility for the attack, ``that they will answer for their acts against humanity.''
The Security Council statement called on authorities in Burundi and Congo ``to cooperate actively so that the perpetrators and those responsible for these crimes be brought to justice without delay.''
According to witnesses, the nighttime assault on the refugee camp was launched from across the border in Congo, about 1 mile away. One group of assailants opened fire on a nearby Burundian army post to pin down troops while a second group raided the refugee camp, they said.
The Security Council asked the U.N. missions in Burundi and Congo to offer their assistance to authorities in both countries ``with a view to facilitate the investigation and to strengthen the security of vulnerable populations.''
The massacre echoed the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, when majority Hutus slaughtered at least 500,000 minority Tutsis and Hutu moderates.
It also raised fears of retaliatory violence that could undo peace efforts in Congo, where a 10,800-strong U.N. peacekeeping force is trying to help prevent a return to war.
At least five countries were sucked into Congo's 1998-2003 civil war, which claimed some 3 million lives, mostly through strife-induced hunger and disease.
U.N. officials said at least 150 people were killed and 108 wounded in Friday's attack, but survivors said at least 161 were confirmed dead after seven bodies were recovered Sunday near the border with Congo.
Burundi has also been engulfed in a civil war since October 1993, when soldiers from the Tutsi minority assassinated the country's first democratically elected president, a Hutu.
-------- iraq
Under Intense Security, Iraqis Gather for 3-Day Conference
August 15, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iraq-National-Conference.html?hp
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- Under intense security, hundreds of delegates from across Iraq gathered Sunday in Baghdad at a three-day national conference intended to bring a taste of democratic debate to a country suffering from violence, chaos and the legacy of a brutal dictatorship.
``This conference is not the end of the road for us, it is the first step ... to open up horizons of dialogue,'' interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi told the delegates in an opening speech. ``Your blessed gathering here is a challenge to the forces of evil and tyranny that want to destroy this country.''
Delegates had high expectations for this unprecedented gathering of religious, political and civic leaders, which will help elect a 100-member national council to act as a watchdog over the interim government ahead of elections scheduled for January.
``It's a great day in Iraq's history,'' said delegate Mithal al-Alusi, from the Iraqi National Congress party. ``Holding this conference is an important step in creating a kind of supervision of the government, in accordance with the constitutional mandate.''
But the conference was beset by problems even as it got started.
Right after the opening speeches, Nadim al Jadari, an official with the Shiite Political Council ran onto the platform and threatened to quit the conference unless negotiations were restarted to end fighting between Shiite militants and U.S. and Iraqi forces in the holy city of Najaf.
``The Iraqi government bears the responsibility for what is going on in Najaf. It has brought U.S. forces to hit our people in Najaf,'' said Falah Hassan, another official with the group. ``Our demand is to halt the military operations in Najaf and other parts of Iraq. We will withdraw from the conference within 24 hours if our demands are not met.''
A walkout by even a small fraction of the delegates would be a symbolic blow to the government as it tries to project a carefully crafted message of inclusion to Iraqis of different ethnic and religious groups.
Organizers worked quickly to assuage complaints among some of the resistant delegates by forming an additional working committee, tasked with finding a peaceful solution to the tension in Najaf.
At least 30 people were part of the committee, said delegate Saad Qindeel, from the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution of Iraq, the country's largest religious group.
``All kinds, all colors, Shiite and Sunni, they're all involved in this,'' he said.
Other committees formed Sunday were to produce papers on economics and human rights.
The conference had already been delayed for two weeks as provinces struggled to agree on delegates and UN officials worked unsuccessfully to persuade several key groups to participate.
Though the Najaf fighting between firebrand cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's supporters and U.S. and Iraqi forces has angered many of the nation's majority Shiites, some delegates said it did not change their plans to attend.
``We are against the killing of innocent people in Najaf, but we think that it is better to participate in the political process than not to, because we will have better means to express our views,'' said Mohammed Ali, a Shiite cleric.
Several key factions have decided to boycott, despite a public relations campaign that included full page advertisements in local papers and posters plastered on walls throughout the city.
Al-Sadr's group has rejected the meeting as undemocratic and refused to attend.
``The Iraqi national conference will be stillborn,'' Ahmed al-Shaibany, an al-Sadr aide told pan-Arab television network Al-Jazeera on Saturday. ``It will be imposed by force on the Iraqi people as was Ayad Allawi's government.''
The Association of Muslim Scholars, a religious group with links to insurgents, also said it would not attend because of the interim government's reliance on the U.S.-led coalition.
Despite the boycotts, 70 different groups have agreed to participate, conference chair Fuad Masoum said.
``The movements that boycott this conference are free to do that, but that doesn't cause the conference to lose its legitimacy,'' he said Saturday.
The conference presented an obvious target for insurgents waging a nearly 16-month violent uprising here, and security was intense for the gathering being held in the Green Zone enclave, which houses Iraqi government buildings and the U.S. and British embassies.
Helicopters flew overhead. Five-meter-high concrete barriers blocked the entrance to the Green Zone. Bridges leading to the area were barricaded with concrete and Iraqi police checked cars as they slowly moved by. Interior Minister Falah Hassan al-Naqib announced a daytime curfew for the city center during the conference.
Delegates themselves went through metal detectors and were frisked.
Among its responsibilities, the conference will elect 81 members of the 100-member national council, with the remainder coming from former members of the Iraqi Governing Council who were left out of the interim government.
The council will have the power to approve Iraq's 2005 budget and to veto executive orders with a two-thirds vote.
The conference was intended to give Iraq's diverse ethnic and political groups, some of whom may have been left out of the interim government, a voice in the country and to move the nation toward democracy.
``The challenge before you is great,'' U.N. envoy Ashraf Jehangir Qazi told the delegates. ``But these are things you can and will achieve, because all Iraqis share an ancient civilization.''
``Yours is the land that gave birth to the first laws of society, accordingly Iraq is surely able to build a society that adheres to the rule of law and shuns violence,'' he said.
In January, Iraq is to hold elections to choose a transitional government. The newly elected government then will convene a national convention to draft a constitution to be put to the voters in October 2005. Iraqis will then hold another vote in December 2005 for a constitutionally based government.
Associated Press Writer Sameer Yacoub contributed to this story.
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Talks Fall Apart for Shiite Rebels and Iraq Leaders
August 15, 2004
By ALEX BERENSON and JOHN F. BURNS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/15/international/middleeast/15IRAQ.html?pagewanted=all&position=
NAJAF, Iraq, Aug. 14 - Truce talks between Iraq's interim government and Moktada al-Sadr's rebels collapsed Saturday, prompting American commanders to prepare new battle plans for breaking Mr. Sadr's grip on this holy city and the Imam Ali mosque, the Middle East's most sacred Shiite shrine.
Soon after the talks broke down, American marines and soldiers lined up in tanks and armored vehicles at their base in Najaf, with some anxiety but ready to begin an offensive. Instead, it was called off, for the second time in recent days.
"We were sitting here waiting for authorization to go clear the militia," Maj. David Holahan of the Marines told The Associated Press. "We never got that authorization. We'll continue operations as the prime minister sees fit," he said, referring to Iraq's interim leader, Ayad Allawi.
American commanders in Najaf said Dr. Allawi had decided to turn to Iraqi forces, not American, to take the lead against Mr. Sadr at such a sensitive location. That would be a serious test for the American-trained Iraqi military and police forces, which have not performed reliably in the past.
Mowaffak al-Rubaie, the national security adviser to Dr. Allawi, announced the breakdown of the talks, and promised that military operations would resume. He said, "I feel deep sorrow and regret to announce the failure of the efforts we have exerted to end the crisis in Iraq peacefully. Our goal was to spare blood and preserve security."
Dr. Rubaie, 57, a British-trained neurologist who returned from 20 years of exile after the toppling of Saddam Hussein last year, added: "The Iraqi interim government did not leave any stone unturned to lead to a peaceful conclusion. The government is resuming military clearing operations to return the city of Najaf to normal functioning, and to establish law and order in this holy city."
But later on, when the American-led offensive was suspended, a smaller convoy of American soldiers left the base on another mission: to buy food for families of Najaf.
A demand that Mr. Sadr disarm his fighters and withdraw them from Najaf seemed to undo the talks.
Mr. Sadr's aides said they had demanded that both sides, the American forces and Mr. Sadr's militia force, the Mahdi Army, leave the city. They said the cleric also wanted pledges by the government to release scores of Sadr fighters taken prisoner during combat, and to give amnesty to all who had taken part.
The amnesty demand seemed certain to be rejected by American commanders, who curbed a broader national amnesty proposal announced by Dr. Allawi earlier this week, limiting its terms to exclude any rebels who have taken part in actions killing or wounding American troops. The Americans were also wary of any new commitment by the cleric to disarm his troops, saying he had breached an earlier cease-fire and seemed likely to do so again.
Dr. Rubaie said he was leaving Najaf immediately to fly to Baghdad, 120 miles north, where he was expected to join crisis talks on the next step in confronting Mr. Sadr, a populist Shiite cleric who has used the Mahdi Army to stir a widespread insurrection in the Shiite heartland of southern Iraq. Since he initiated uprisings across the south in the spring, Mr. Sadr has entrenched himself as the most identifiable leader of armed resistance to the Americans and as a challenger to lead Iraq's majority Shiite population.
The fighting in Najaf has set off the most serious challenge yet faced by the Allawi government in the seven weeks since it took power with the return of sovereignty to Iraq. In addition to Najaf, American military commanders and members of the 30-nation military alliance here have faced a widening series of attacks in a dozen or more Shiite towns and cities across a 300-mile swath of territory south of Baghdad, including Basra, the second-largest city and linchpin of Iraq's richest oil fields.
On Saturday, an American military spokesman said 50 insurgents were killed when American aircraft dropped 500-pound bombs on rebel hide-outs in a ground-and-air assault on Samarra, north of Baghdad. Hospitals in the city reported 25 people dead and 86 wounded. Mosques in the city broadcast appeals on their loudspeakers blood donations.
Near Falluja, the Sunni rebel stronghold west of Baghdad, American warplanes bombed suspected rebel positions after Marine units were ambushed with rifle fire, rockets and machine guns, the American command said, giving no information about casualties. The bombing raid was one of several carried out in recent days, including some on targets inside Falluja, which American commanders say is a fortress for loyalists of Saddam Hussein and Islamic terrorists led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian-born militant suspected of planning suicide bombings, kidnappings and other attacks.
Commanders of the 3,000 American troops deployed around Najaf, mainly from the 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit and the Army's First Cavalry Division, kept a tight lid on preparations for a resumed offensive after negotiations collapsed, saying future attacks would not necessarily center on Najaf's Old City and the area around the shrine. The short-lived truce allowed both sides to regroup.
As the talks imploded, fresh convoys of Sadr supporters were arriving in Najaf from the cleric's main stronghold in Sadr City, the sprawling Baghdad slum that is home to two million Shiites, and from cities as far south as Basra. An Iraqi freelance reporter working for The New York Times said one convoy of 200 men had arrived in Najaf with food supplies from Falluja.
There was no immediate sign of Mr. Sadr on Saturday. On Friday, he was reported by aides to have suffered shrapnel wounds during a firefight near the shrine in the hours before fighting was halted for the talks. Later, he reappeared in the Imam Ali shrine, demanding the resignation of the Allawi government, calling it "worse than Saddam," and vowing to fight on in Najaf "until victory or martyrdom."
A Sadr aide, Ali Sumeisim, who took part in the talks, told reporters that Dr. Rubaie had backtracked on an outline accord that would have had both sides pull back from the Old City, leaving the shrine under the control of the aging ayatollahs who form Iraq's Shiite clerical hierarchy.
Mr. Sumeisim accused American commanders and Dr. Allawi of using the talks as a smoke screen while plotting a violent showdown intended to wipe out the Mahdi Army. "Today, a vicious plot is being woven to commit a massacre in Iraq," he said. "I call on all honest people in the world, on all Muslims, to raise their voices and expose the truth."
It seemed clear that the decision to end the talks had been taken personally by Dr. Allawi, who has made a mark already as prime minister with his get-tough approach. Dr. Rubaie said Dr. Allawi and other senior ministers had finally concluded that "there is no use to continue."
The fighting that began in Najaf 10 days ago pitched both sides into a game of brinkmanship, with stakes that run to the political future of Iraq. When Mr. Sadr began a series of uprisings in April that spread across southern Iraq, he gave notice of his determination to mount a violent challenge to the American presence here, and to use his defiance as a path to political pre-eminence among Shiite leaders. American officials resolved to do everything possible to curb his growing power, regarding him as dangerously volatile and violent, as well as deeply influenced by the ruling ayatollahs of Iran, who, American intelligence reports say, have funneled weapons and money to the Mahdi Army.
But Mr. Sadr has proved an artful adversary, compensating for superior American firepower with tactics - like turning mosques into fortresses - that have largely preserved him from attack. In what has virtually been hand-to-hand combat, more than 360 of his fighters were killed this week in the vast cemetery next to the Imam Ali shrine, American officers said. The American command has said six American soldiers were killed, along with 20 Iraqi guardsmen.
In Najaf, Mr. Sadr's trump card has been control of the shrine, which American commanders say has been used for firing at Americans soldiers and their allies with mortars, rockets and assault rifles.
In the past, Mr. Sadr has pledged to disarm his fighters and return control of Najaf to police and national guard units under Iraqi government control.
In practice, American and Iraqi officials say, the pledges were never kept, and Mr. Sadr's fighters continued to control whole neighborhoods, build up weapons caches and attack government buildings and police stations, sometimes taking captives.
Alex Berenson reported from Najaf for this article and John F. Burns from Baghdad.
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Iraqi Troops to Take Lead In Battling Sadr's Forces
By Karl Vick and Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, August 15, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A105-2004Aug14?language=printer
NAJAF, Iraq, Aug. 14 -- Prime Minister Ayad Allawi will send Iraqi troops to Najaf to battle a Shiite Muslim militia, Iraqi officials and U.S. commanders said Saturday after peace talks collapsed between the interim government and rebellious cleric Moqtada Sadr.
"The army will be deployed now" to the city, where U.S. forces have been fighting the militia, said Sabah Kadhim, a spokesman for the Interior Ministry. Units of the new Iraqi army would immediately prepare for an offensive aimed at evicting Sadr's Mahdi Army from the shrine of Imam Ali, a sacred site the militia has used as a refuge, he said.
News of the deployment -- the first since sovereignty was restored to Iraq on June 28 -- reached U.S. forces just as scores of tanks, armored troop carriers and Humvees lined up inside the gate of the main U.S. military base in Najaf, apparently preparing for significant combat operations just hours after a two-day truce had been called off. They then turned around and went back into camp.
A U.S. commander spread the word that missions were being scrubbed, conveying a message written on a Post-it note that the prime minister was angry and was "sending Iraqi Army to settle the problem."
The decision to push the U.S. military to the background in Najaf, regarded as the holiest city in the country, underscored the pitfalls Iraqi officials face in using U.S. forces to battle insurgents who still view the country as occupied.
"The occupation has to go out of Iraq," Sadr said on al-Jazeera, the Arabic satellite television network. "Iraq is ours. The wealth is ours. The land is ours. The Iraqis can govern Iraq. There will be no civil war, as the U.S. says."
The matter is extraordinarily sensitive in Najaf. Ali, the son-in-law of the prophet Muhammad, is regarded by Shiites as his rightful successor and is revered by Muslims.
The deployment of the Iraqi army "will help increase the distance" between Iraqi and U.S. forces, Kadhim said. U.S. Army and Marine units in the Najaf area would reinforce Iraqi army operations.
Attempting to flush out Sadr's militia from the shrine will be "quite an undertaking," he said. "There's a lot of weaponry that has been installed in there. There are many tunnels under the ground. It's a very complex structure."
Kadhim said the new army battalions, which are better trained and have more sophisticated equipment than other Iraqi security forces, would augment police and national guard units in the area. "Quite frankly, we don't have adequate police and national guard forces to deal with" the Mahdi Army, he said. "And we don't want the [U.S. forces] to go in" to the shrine.
U.S. commanders on the ground in Najaf applauded the decision to call in Iraqi troops.
"I think the reason Allawi called us off is this would've turned quickly into the occupier versus the defender of the holy shrine, no matter what the truth is," said Maj. David Holahan of the 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit, which took formal control of Najaf five days before the fighting began. "The city would've been damaged, and Sadr would have gained in popularity."
"It's healthy in the fact that they want to take charge," said Army Lt. Col. Myles Miyamasu, commander of the 1st Battalion, 5th Regiment, 1st Cavalry Division, which reinforced a Marine battalion after intense fighting broke out Aug. 5. "It'll be interesting to see what the Iraqi forces can do. And you know we have to just be patient with them."
Khadim declined to say which Iraqi units would be used in Najaf. The Iraqi army has seven trained and deployable battalions, two of which have undergone additional instruction in counterinsurgency warfare.
One battalion of Iraqi commandos is already in the city. The unit, previously known as the 36th Battalion, was trained by U.S. Special Forces and fought alongside U.S. forces in Fallujah in April. Another Iraqi battalion, trained by regular U.S. army troops, refused to fight. The commando unit raided a mosque in Kufa this week, supported by a Marine unit that was kept at a distance.
"Everyone wants to go ahead and finish this," a senior official in the interim government said, speaking on the condition of anonymity. The official said Allawi and his senior ministers are concerned that a protracted standoff would give Sadr more time to harden his defenses and spark instability in other parts of the country.
Earlier Saturday, Iraqi officials reported that 43 people were killed in clashes in Hilla, making the city about 60 miles south of Baghdad the latest in southern Iraq to be roiled by Shiite militiamen this week.
Meanwhile, in the Sunni heartland to the north of the capital, the U.S. Army reported killing 50 people it identified as insurgents after dropping a series of 500 pound bombs in Samarra. An Iraqi police official, Maj. Saadoun Dulaimi, put the death toll at 12, including three policeman, the Associated Press reported.
In Najaf, a city of about 600,000, the sometimes intense clashes since Aug. 5 have left hundreds of militiamen dead, according to U.S. commanders. Six U.S. servicemen and about 20 Iraqi police officers were also reported killed in the fighting before the truce took effect early Friday, one day after the U.S. military mounted an offensive.
The offensive began with the 7th Regiment of the Army's 1st Cavalry Division encircling the old city surrounding the sacred shrine at a radius of about a mile, while Marine and other Army units began a series of raids on Mahdi Army sites. It stopped abruptly early Friday when Mowaffak Rubaie, the national security adviser to the prime minister, accepted Sadr's invitation to discuss a settlement. But Rubaie gave up Saturday evening without having seen the junior cleric, the son of an esteemed grand ayatollah who was assassinated in 1999.
"Three days ago, Moqtada asked me to come to Najaf," Rubaie told reporters summoned to the office of the Najaf provincial governor. "And we achieved some things, including the cease-fire, the medical and food aids that went to the Mahdi Army and other people, and allowing car ambulances inside the city.
"But for three days we couldn't meet up with Moqtada Sadr. We think there are some people who do not want this meeting to happen because they know this meeting would end the crisis."
A Sadr aide told the al-Arabiya satellite television network that the Iraqi government ignored an agreement Sadr had signed and was insincere about peace talks.
"They tricked people by these negotiations because they saw people angry, and they wanted to calm them down," said Ahmed Shaibani, a Sadr spokesman. "We are positioned to defend ourselves, not to attack. We have our followers of Mahdi Army around the shrine of Ali to protect it. We will defend the city."
But other Iraqi officials sought to distance Rubaie's effort from Allawi, who had vowed not to negotiate with Sadr and had demanded that he disband his militia, renounce violence and make his movement exclusively political.
"We are not negotiating," Kadhim, the Interior Ministry spokesman, said. "Unless they are prepared to do what we're asking them to do . . . we will continue until this matter is settled. Iraqis do not want to see this thing repeated every few months."
One U.S. commander indicated that U.S. forces might resume combat later in the week, after a sensitive political conference ended.
The national conference, aimed at selecting members of a new national assembly, will begin a three-day meeting in Baghdad on Sunday despite the violence across central and southern Iraq, Fouad Masoum, the chairman of the conference, said Saturday.
More than 1,300 delegates are scheduled to participate in the meeting, Masoum said. Under a political transition plan designed by the United Nations, the participants will choose 100 people to serve in an interim assembly.
Chandrasekaran reported from Baghdad. Special correspondent Saad Sarhan in Najaf contributed to this report.
--------
To Mahdi Militiaman, Firing on Americans Is Act of 'Patriotism'
By Saad Sarhan and Doug Struck
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, August 15, 2004; Page A22
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A1455-2004Aug14?language=printer
NAJAF, Iraq, Aug. 14 -- Ahmed Eisa sent his wife and two young children out of Najaf "to make sure there is someone to remember me after I die" and took up his post near the shrine of Ali, he said, with an old AK-47 rifle to shoot at U.S. soldiers.
He says he is willing to die -- he insists he wants to die -- with the Mahdi Army, a militia loyal to a young Shiite cleric, because he is convinced that the United States intends to stay in Iraq and oppress Shiite Muslims.
As negotiations to end fighting in Najaf broke down Saturday, U.S. and Iraqi soldiers again prepared for an assault on the followers of the cleric, Moqtada Sadr. And on the other side of the sprawling cemetery that surrounds the shrine, Sadr's followers also prepared for battle.
Eisa, 34, who usually works in a graphics shop designing business cards and stationery, is a gunman for the Mahdi Army. He prefers the title sniper, but in fact, his ancient Kalashnikov is not very accurate, and the bullets often jam in the mechanism.
His job does not require accuracy, though.
"I am supposed to shoot at the American tanks to harass them, to draw their attention, to give my colleague some time to fire at them with an RPG" -- a rocket-propelled grenade, he said.
Eisa performed that duty five times during the recent fighting, darting from his position in the second line of Mahdi Army fighters. The first line hides behind a wall next to the cemetery, and the second line is poised in the warren of century-old brown brick houses that abuts the cemetery.
The Americans are on the other side. In between, among tombs as old as 1,300 years, are the contested killing grounds.
"I know the Americans have better weapons. They have better plans. They have uniforms that cost $3,000, and we have only our clothes," Eisa said. "But I have principles. I have holy land to defend. I have family to protect, so I feel stronger than them. The occupation forces are nothing but mercenaries who fight for money, so I feel stronger."
Eisa's fervor is shared by his fellow fighters in the Mahdi Army, though his background is not. Sadr has grown his militia -- their self-adopted name of army is somewhat grandiose -- from poor and young Shiites drawn to his revolutionary rhetoric. Eisa, however, is a graduate of a computer vocational college, an educated man who could be called middle-class and middle-aged.
A lean man at 5-foot-7 and 150 pounds, his pale face, glasses and uncalloused hands suggest a life spent indoors more than out. A full beard indicates his faith.
Eisa -- whose name means Jesus, considered a prophet in Islam -- explained in a lengthy telephone interview and further conversations in Najaf how he arrived at this point. For Iraq's Shiites, a sense of oppression comes legitimately. Shiites suffered under former president Saddam Hussein, and Eisa said he counts 27 relatives who were executed during that three-decade era.
"We don't even know where they were buried," he said.
After high school, Eisa fulfilled his compulsory military duty in the Republican Guard. He deserted three times, he said, which was not unusual for men living in the harsh conditions of the military. Each time, he returned under an amnesty.
He finished his service in 1993, then attended computer classes at a technological institute. He finished, got married and in 1998 began working in a graphics shop. Eisa said he welcomed the fall of Hussein, but not the U.S. occupation.
"I am old enough now to differentiate between occupation and freedom," he said. "It's not true that the Americans came to get rid of Saddam. It was only a trick to occupy the country."
"We all know that Bush announced twice that this is a crusade. So we know they are targeting a certain group," the Shiites, he said. "We know the strategic importance of Iraq in the region and the wealth of our country. They want to control it. They want to control our oil, our wealth and the world."
"There is something called patriotism," he added. "I like my country, and I saw the U.S. forces did not come to protect us. So I wanted to follow the leader who can demand my rights and defeat the occupation. The U.S. forces are occupiers, so we have to resist them."
Eisa fought in what he calls "the first uprising" against the Americans, fierce street fighting in Najaf between U.S. forces and insurgents in April that left hundreds of Iraqis dead. The Iraqi government that officially took power June 28 is nothing but a puppet of the Americans, he said, and Eisa willingly answered the call to arms nine days ago when fighting broke out again.
He kissed his daughter, 3-year-old Um Albanin, and his 6-month-old son, Mohammed Ali, and sent them with his wife to the safer outskirts of Najaf. He then joined his unit, the 315th Battalion.
The worst fighting was Thursday, he said.
"I smelled the weapons, and the blood of dead people," Eisa said, recounting the pitched battle in the graveyard that resulted in scores of casualties. "I don't know how many were killed. I heard the bullets and even felt the heat of the bullets, but God protects me.
"Sometimes we had wounded people, and we couldn't evacuate them because I didn't want to leave my post. I just wanted to die for my cause. So I stayed in my place, hoping to become a martyr.
"I saw one of my colleagues try to attack a tank with his RPG. The U.S. soldier shot him in the head, about 25 meters from me. His head was destroyed. It was a terrible scene."
As the fighting stopped Saturday while negotiators tried to work out a cease-fire, Eisa mixed in a throng of thousands of supporters who came from inside and outside Najaf to show their support for the Mahdi Army. They milled about outside the shrine. When he found a colleague he had not seen since the battle, the two hugged.
Eisa has an identity card -- "Sadr's Martyr Division," it says -- but like the others in the militia, he doesn't have a uniform. He wears loose fitting black pants, a casual shirt and a green cloth around his wrist to signify closeness to Allah.
As Sadr passed the crowd, Eisa joined in chants, thrusting his fist in the air and stamping his feet. "Long live Sadr! Allawi and the government are blasphemous," he shouted, referring to Prime Minister Ayad Allawi.
The temporary lull in fighting during the negotiations boosted the spirits of the men. "This is a great victory for the Iraqis and the Mahdi Army," Eisa said. "This is evidence that we defeated the occupation forces and we are a legitimate resistance demanding the Iraqi's rights. This is victory."
But if so, it was short-lived. The negotiations faltered late in the day. Eisa and the other militiamen slipped back to their posts at the edge of the cemetery, waiting for night. Waiting for the Americans.
Struck reported from Baghdad.
--------
CONFRONTATION
Rebel Cleric Wields Power From the Heart of Baghdad
August 15, 2004
By SABRINA TAVERNISE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/15/international/middleeast/15SADR.html?pagewanted=all&position=
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Aug. 14 - It was quiet on Friday morning in Sadr City, the immense and destitute Shiite neighborhood here. Young men climbed gleefully on a tank tread they said had been left by American troops during a skirmish the day before. Merchants swept up ash in a market that had burned in the fighting.
For the past 10 days, American tanks and Humvees backed by Iraqi national guardsmen have been at war in Sadr City with fighters loyal to the cleric Moktada al-Sadr. But for the Americans and their allies, the clashes have been forays into enemy territory, advances that are kept to main roads and met by rifle and rocket fire from militiamen who melt away into the alleys.
More than 100 miles away in Iraq's Shiite heartland, Mr. Sadr has been holed up with perhaps 1,000 of his fighters in the Imam Ali mosque, the sect's holiest shrine, confronting some of America's most formidable combat troops.
That confrontation, stilled for negotiations that appeared to falter Saturday, has tightened Mr. Sadr's hold on the imagination of millions of Shiites as the leader of armed resistance to the American military presence in Iraq. And it has enhanced his ambition to emerge from the conflict here as a contender for outright power in a future Islamic republic that might be similar to Iran's.
But Mr. Sadr's challenge since his first uprising against the Americans in the spring has been based on two trump cards: his control of the shrine in Najaf, and his unchallenged primacy in Sadr City, home to 2 million of Baghdad's 5.5 million people. Even if the twists of negotiations or the resumption of the American and Iraqi military operation shake Mr. Sadr's grip on the Imam Ali shrine, his principal power base in Sadr City will remain, poised like an arrow at the capital's heart.
To deprive him of that would require a full-scale American offensive into Sadr City's intensely populated neighborhoods and attacks on the mosques used as armories and strongholds. Neither American military commanders nor Ayad Allawi, leader of Iraq's interim government, seem likely to hazard those steps.
This week, Mr. Sadr's fighters, known as the Mahdi Army, gave a foretaste of the destabilizing potential their control of Sadr City gives.
After American commanders imposed a 16-hour-a-day curfew on Sadr City, Mr. Sadr responded with a curfew order of his own, over all of Baghdad. Streets in the capital emptied after the 1 p.m. deadline the cleric's aides had set for businesses to close and workers to go home.
The Sadr fighters seemed to thumb their noses at the American curfew. Even in daylight, they drive deep into the center of Baghdad in groups of two or three vehicles, firing mortars and rockets at the huge international compound along the Tigris River's west bank where the American Embassy, the American military command and Dr. Allawi are hunkered down.
On one occasion, First Cavalry Division spotters on the roof of the Sheraton Hotel, barely 1,000 yards across the river from the center of the compound, watched powerless as one group of fighters emerged from a green van, fired four rockets across the river, then drove off.
It is becoming routine for Mahdi fighters to stage attacks in other neighborhoods. In the Shaab area of Baghdad last week, militiamen in pickup trucks drove to a police station, surrounded it and began shooting, killing one officer and wounding two, a police officer from the station said. When Mahdi fighters demanded that a market in Shaab close the next day, vendors immediately complied.
Nighttime is particularly hazardous. Mortar fire torments the American post, Forward Operating Base Eagle, at the eastern edge of Sadr City. Soldiers at the base are required to wear body armor and helmets whenever they venture outside. At times last week, more than 40 mortar shells were fired at the base within 24 hours, according to a pool report from an American journalist imbedded at the base.
The violence in Sadr City takes its toll. For the week ending on Friday, an average of nine people a day were killed in the district, according to the Health Ministry.
Many middle-class Iraqis emphasize that the Mahdi militia is a volatile mix of religious fighters, Iraqis showing solidarity with Mr. Sadr, and criminals who were released from jail under an amnesty from Saddam Hussein shortly before the war. One result, American military officials say, is a hydra-headed army that often acts outside Mr. Sadr's control.
"The constitution of this army is a mix of many groups," said Thaier al-Sudani, a Sadr City resident who works as an English translator for Baghdad University. "Many of them are dealing with alcohol. It is hard to find a graduated man among them."
Fighters brush off those accusations, saying the army is better organized and more focused than people think. Uday Hashem, 22, a former car mechanic who is now with the militia, said fighters communicated by mobile telephone.
The militia has divided Sadr City into 79 sections, with each Mahdi commander controlling about four, said Ali Abdul-Hussein, 22, who commands a checkpoint of about 10 men.
Even medical care and food is coordinated. Groups of men and women take turns cooking for the units that keep watch at the checkpoints. When fighters are wounded in an attack outside the district, they sometimes collect their own men and take them to private hospitals with doctors friendly to their cause.
Unraveling the Mahdi Army has proven particularly difficult, in part because of the elaborate web of patronage and tribal systems that crisscrosses the closely knit neighborhood of Sadr City. Police officers are relatives and friends of the fighters, and for the most part do not interfere with their activities.
Police officers in Sadr City "help indirectly," Mr. Abdul-Hussein said. "They don't fight us or try to stop us," and in return, he said, Mr. Sadr "doesn't like them being attacked."
The officers' consideration for fellow Shiites was evident at a demonstration on Friday in which thousands of Shiites gathered in a central square in Baghdad to protest the American siege of Najaf. Two police stations near the area allowed posters of Mr. Sadr to be propped up on roof watchtowers. The afternoon prayer was broadcast from speakers hooked up to a police vehicle.
Sadr City residents and fighters were out in full force at the protest. Pickup trucks packed with Mr. Sadr's supporters streamed out of the district around noon. They chanted slogans demanding that Dr. Allawi leave the government and held posters of Mr. Sadr high.
Abdul Rakhman, 42, a furniture maker, described the fighters as Robin Hoods who helped people pay for cooking gas and directed traffic. "I swear to you, the Mahdi Army is for the people," he said.
But their attacks have cost American occupiers and the new Iraqi authorities dearly, as the violence and unpredictability exhausts Iraqis and slowly erodes their patience.
"We're living without our dignity," said Haidar Abd, 19, who was standing at Al Karkh Hospital with a friend who had been wounded during a clash between Mahdi fighters and American troops. "How long will we have to live like this? We are humiliated."
John F. Burns contributed reporting for this article.
--------
'After three wars we have all had enough'
The uprising against US troops in Najaf is causing further divisions among many Iraqis, who are fed up with fighting
Rory McCarthy
Sunday August 15, 2004
The UK Observer
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,1283413,00.html
In the darkness an hour before dawn the floodlights snapped on, shining into the tiled courtyard of the ancient Imam Ali shrine in the heart of the old city of Najaf. Silently, streams of militia fighters left their weapons and walked into the mosque, led by the call to prayer.
They washed their hands and faces, joked with friends, visited the wounded in the makeshift hospital and knelt to pray. There they chanted intonations to their leader, the rebel cleric Muqtada Sadr whose 10-day uprising has shaken the fragile grip of Iraq's new government.
We left the courtyard where we had slept the night on a carpet under the open sky, and followed them back to the front lines. It was Friday morning, only hours before the militia agreed a truce with the US military and Iraqi forces to begin negotiating an end to the rebellion in the holy city.
As they had every morning for a week, US tanks and Humvee armoured personnel carriers pushed towards the narrow alleys of the sprawling old city, controlled by the militia, in a test of strength. 'Ali be with you,' the fighters said as they passed one other. 'Ya Muqtada, Ya Mohammad, Ya Ali,' they chanted.
'The Americans took a new position and we attacked. They didn't succeed,' said one stocky, bearded man carrying a Kalashnikov rifle. 'They tried to move forward to control a new position and then moved back. It happens every morning, but it is the first time it has happened here.'
For at least an hour the two sides traded heavy machine-gun fire and the militia lobbed mortars towards the American tanks, several hundred metres east of the shrine. The militia cheered when a sniper reported a tank was on fire, although it seemed unlikely. Then the Americans fired back at the sniper's position atop an abandoned three-storey building. Moments later he was carried down, badly injured with his head in his hands. Two friends lifted him into the back of a pickup truck that raced to the hospital in the mosque.
'We hit a tank with our mortar and fired our BKC [a Russian machine gun],' said Jalal Hamood, 22, who had been with the militia for four months and alongside the sniper in the building. 'The tank fired back and made huge holes in the roof and our friend was hurt.' Hamood, dressed in a T-shirt printed with the words 'Oh Hussein, Oh Martyr' was covered in dust. He spent several minutes cleaning the debris out of his machine gun with methylated spirits as the others smoked furiously.
And so the fighting contin ued. Sadr's several hundred militiamen were outnumbered and heavily outgunned, yet yesterday they remained in control of the streets of the old city as the truce took hold. The US military appeared to have pulled back from the cordon it had set up at dawn last Thursday and Sadr celebrated victory even as the negotiations went on.
A procession of thousands of his supporters drove down from his stronghold in the eastern slums of Sadr City in Baghdad yesterday into Najaf and to the Imam Ali shrine. Behind them came trucks of food and medicines, a gift to the Shia from the Sunni resistance stronghold of Falluja, north-west of Baghdad, and an astonishing sign of unity among disparate fighting groups who feel ever more emboldened to take on the Iraqi government.
Yesterday, Sadr's men in other southern cities continued to fight against the US-led multi-national forces, cheered by the appearance of the cleric, one arm bandaged from a shrapnel wound, before crowds of militiamen in the shrine at midnight on Friday.
Throughout the week the golden-domed shrine had been at the centre of the rebellion. It was here that Sadr probably spent his days and here that his young clerics controlled the fight through radios and mobiles. Fighters would check their weapons at the gate and walk in to collect plastic containers of water, or to have their wounds bandaged. Every few hours the mosque's loudspeakers exhort his men to battle.
'You are defending Imam Ali, the prince of the faithful. Hit them and protect your shrine. Hit them and protect your holy city. Be patient and fight. Victory will be yours with the help of God,' they announced at one stage. An hour later, after midday prayers, it continued: 'Fighters return to your positions. The enemy is running away. Go to your places immediately.'
In the end the sanctity of the shrine, one of the holiest sites in the Shia faith, is what gave Sadr his strength. It left the Iraqi government and the US reluctant to press on into the old city, however much the US military commanders wanted to. Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, admitted as much when he said the US was 'squeezing' Najaf to stop the fighting but then added: 'We do not wish to get involved with the mosque. It's a very holy place for all Shia.'
Wresting control from more moderate clerics of the mosque and its vast annual revenue from pilgrims was itself a key victory for Sadr.
The strength of this young cleric, the scion of a revered religious family, was his populist call to arms. For five days, fighters told us again and again they were fighting for their religion but then described at length how they struggled to find work, how they were frustrated that the welcome defeat of Saddam Hussein had brought such little improvement to their lives. We spent one morning with a group of men from the southern city of Amara, who had a position behind abandoned houses and hotels just short of the vast Valley of Peace cemetery to the north of the shrine that had become the key frontline.
On one wall was written in chalk: 'Saddam the criminal.' One fighter, Abbas, injured three times, spoke of the hatred for Saddam.
'He should be handed to the Iraqi people and cut into slices. He destroyed the whole nation,' he said. 'But still we are facing the same economic problems. There are other religious parties but they co-operate with the government and we don't believe in them.'
Their attraction to Sadr was that he had held out against the United States and its Iraqi supporters in the new government.
Another day, a second group of fighters, again from Amara, sat to rest in a basement and complained about the difficulty of finding jobs. Many had been farmers or conscripts in Saddam's army. All had been in Najaf for five months, since Sadr's first uprising last April.
'Most of the people who are fighting are very poor. They don't even have the money to get to Najaf,' said Hassan al-Amari. 'Only those who are with the Iraqi exiles are getting jobs,' said Latif al-Khalisi, a man who escaped four death sentences under Saddam for suspected membership of the Da'awa, then the leading Shia opposition group. 'The people in the West don't think about the poor people who are living here in Iraq.'
The men spoke boldly of their courage, but many were clearly scared by the fight. They spoke to their families by phone, playing down the risks they faced. 'I'm OK,' said one. 'There is no fighting around me. They gave me a rest. You can hear shooting? That is far away. Don't worry.'
Although Sadr had thousands of supporters around him yesterday, his remains a movement of extremists unloved by the majority of the Iraqi population, however frustrated they are with the military occupation of the past year.
As we walked back from the mosque, past the frontlines, Iraqis sat on their doorsteps watching. 'Why do you come here to see the misery in Najaf?' said one woman. 'May God take his revenge on the one who is responsible for this.' Another man ran to us shouting: 'Muqtada and his thugs are outlaws. They are criminals and they are not from Najaf.'
Many of the houses, pilgrims hotels and shops had been destroyed by the fighting. Large roadside bombs, artillery shells with wires leading from them, still lay in place every few hundred metres along the main streets.
In a large grocery shop, a few hundred yards from where the US military set up its cordon last Thursday and Friday, shop owner Raad Abdul Karim said Najaf was in the grip of 'a tragedy'.
'There is no security, no basic rights, there is fighting between the Iraqi people. It is unnatural,' he said. 'Muqtada Sadr's militia has some good people and others who are bad. But we just want to live peacefully. After three wars we have had enough. We just want somebody who can bring peace and security.'
-------- israel / palestine
Palestinians in Israeli Jails Start Hunger Strike
August 15, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-mideast.html
RAMALLAH, West Bank (Reuters) - Thousands of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails began a hunger strike for better conditions on Sunday, but Israel's security minister said he didn't care if they starved to death.
The prisoners, seen by Palestinians as symbols of resistance to Israeli occupation, want wardens to stop strip searches, allow more frequent visits from their families, improve sanitary conditions and install public telephones, supporters said.
More than 7,500 Palestinians, including 4,000 jailed over violence against Israelis, are imprisoned in Israel.
``We declare, in the name of God, our national decision to launch an open hunger strike,'' the Palestinian Prisoners Society said in a statement, accusing Israel of ``robbing us of all our rights, treading on our dignity and treating us like animals.''
The Israel Prisons Authority and Palestinian spokesmen said striking prisoners declared they would live only on fluids until their demands are met. Internal Security Minister Tzahi Hanegbi, however, said Israel would not bow to pressure.
``As far as I'm concerned they can strike for a day, a month, until death. We will ward off this strike and it will be as if it never happened,'' he told reporters.
Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qurie said in a statement any progress toward peace with Israel was contingent on resolving ``this central and sensitive'' issue.
NO CIGARETTES
Ofer Lefler, a Prisons Authority spokesman, said privileges such as cigarettes, sweets and television were taken away from the prisoners after they began the strike, which he described as a ``disturbance.''
He said if a prisoner became too emaciated ``an ethical committee'' would decide whether to begin force feeding.
Israeli officials said they feared closer contact with the outside world through more visits and phone calls would enable prisoners to help militants at large plan attacks on Israelis.
In the latest violence, a Palestinian stabbed an Israeli border policeman, who then shot and killed him outside Jerusalem's walled Old City, a police spokesman said.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility and Israel Radio said it appeared the attacker was mentally ill.
Issa Qaraqe, a prisoners' rights activist in the West Bank city of Bethlehem, said the strike would spread from Israel's main prisons to detention camps in military bases.
Some 200 people in Bethlehem marched in support of the prisoners. A similar demonstration was held by prisoners' children in the Gaza town of Beit Hanoun.
In Lebanon, a support group for the last-remaining Lebanese prisoner in Israel, Samir al-Qantar, began a hunger strike in solidarity and demanded an international investigation into alleged abuses in Israeli jails.
``However hard it is for us, it's even harder for them,'' Qantar's sister Samira said, sitting in a stifling tent pitched for hunger-strikers outside Beirut's U.N. headquarters.
Qantar was sentenced to 542 years in jail for his role in a 1979 raid in northern Israel that killed a four-year-old girl, her father and a policeman.
Last January, Israel swapped about 400 prisoners, most of them Palestinian, for an Israeli civilian and the bodies of three soldiers who were captured in Lebanon in 2000, under a deal with the Lebanese Hizbollah guerrilla group.
-------- landmines
Ukrainian Soldier Killed by Iraq Land Mine
AP,
Sun Aug 15, 2004
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=540&ncid=736&e=7&u=/ap/20040815/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq_ukrainian_soldier_killed
BAGHDAD, Iraq - A Ukrainian soldier was killed Sunday in a land mine explosion southeast of Baghdad, a spokesman for the multinational forces said. The blast occurred in the area of Suwayrah, 25 miles south of Baghdad, in the Ukrainian troops' area of responsibility.
Ukraine has about 1,600 troops in Iraq, the fourth-largest contributor to the coalition and the largest among non-NATO countries. Seven of its troops have died in Iraq and about 20 have been wounded.
-------- nato
Russian Defense Minister Faults Entry of 3 Baltic States in NATO
August 15, 2004
By THOM SHANKER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/15/international/europe/15RUMS.html?pagewanted=all
ST. PETERSBURG, Russia, Aug. 14 - Defense Minister Sergei B. Ivanov of Russia on Saturday criticized NATO's expansion into the three Baltic states, and said that citizens of the Western alliance's original member countries should be worried, too, that their tax dollars were being wasted.
In a weekend visit by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, Mr. Ivanov said he remained "reserved and negative" about the entry into NATO in March of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, three former Soviet republics.
At a meeting of NATO defense ministers in Colorado Springs last October, Mr. Ivanov complained that, if the alliance expanded into the Baltics, it would be able to station combat jets "a three-minute flight away from St. Petersburg."
On Saturday, as the host for Mr. Rumsfeld in that city after the Baltic states had entered NATO, Mr. Ivanov said the alliance risked wasting money and weakening itself by welcoming small states that could not contribute to the collective defense of the members.
"Those Baltic countries are consumers of security, not producers," Mr. Ivanov said. "Of course, it is none of our business to be theorizing about how effectively the NATO countries' tax money is being spent."
Mr. Ivanov said that basing a handful of NATO fighters in the Baltics would not help the effort to prevent terrorism. "We cannot understand how these four planes can intercept Al Qaeda, the Taliban or anything else," he said. "The only thing they can intercept is a mythical Soviet threat."
In defense of the Atlantic alliance, Mr. Rumsfeld said Russia's relationship with NATO was growing and "has been constructive."
He said Russia should understand that NATO, likewise, was no threat to Russian security. Of Moscow's concerns over the Baltic states' entry into the alliance, he said, "This is a relatively new issue."
Mr. Rumsfeld agreed with Mr. Ivanov in noting concerns that Russia did not have bilateral agreements with Latvia, Lithuania or Estonia, as it did with many other neighbors, aimed at avoiding military confrontation.
Mr. Ivanov broadened his criticism of the Baltic states to include their support of the Nazis in World War II. Russia, he said, was concerned "that the Baltic states do have inconsistencies with respect to their human rights record," citing monuments he said had been erected in "the glorification" of Baltic support of the Nazi war effort.
Rather than have the standard day of meetings in the capital, Mr. Rumsfeld accepted Mr. Ivanov's invitation to spend the weekend in St. Petersburg, holding talks and touring palaces and museums in a city that Peter the Great built as Russia's "window on the West."
Mr. Rumsfeld, in his 15th meeting with his Russian counterpart in three and a half years as secretary of defense, praised the bilateral military relationship as one of "cooperation, openness and predictability." He predicted that American ties to Russia would become "broader and deeper over the coming years."
-------- pakistan / india
Bomb kills many at Indian parade
(BBC)
Sunday, 15 August, 2004
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/3566460.stm
A bomb has exploded at an Independence Day march in the north-eastern Indian state of Assam, killing at least 18 people and injuring many others.
Police said many of the victims of the blast on a college parade ground in the town of Dhemaji were schoolchildren or their mothers.
Local people incensed at the failure to protect the parade later attacked police vehicles at the scene.
Police sources blamed the attack on one of Assam's eight separatist groups.
The United Liberation Front of Assam (Ulfa) had called for a boycott of Independence Day events.
The blast occurred at 0930 (0400 GMT) in the town 460km (285 miles) east of the state capital, Guwahati.
"There was total panic with people running all over the place crying for help," Jatindra Nath, a government official who was at the parade ground, told AFP news agency afterwards.
"I could see scores of people profusely bleeding and lying on the ground."
The blast came after two other attacks in the state:
- a small explosion also blamed on the Ulfa was reported in Dhubri on Saturday evening
- separatists were blamed for a grenade blast at a cinema on Saturday which killed four people in Gauribari
Rebels have been fighting for independence since 1979 in a struggle which has claimed more than 10,000 lives.
Security was tight across India for the celebrations.
This woman was one of the many injured In the capital, Delhi, helicopters clattered overhead while nearly 65,000 police and paramilitary troops were deployed.
In a speech to mark the 57th anniversary of independence from British rule, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said India would continue to pursue dialogue with arch-rival Pakistan.
"It is our intention to carry forward with firm resolve and sincerity the composite dialogue process with Pakistan," he said, adding that peace should be built on the twin pillars of mutual trust and confidence.
But Mr Singh, speaking from a bullet-proof enclosure in the 17th-Century Red Fort complex, also warned that "cross-border terrorism" risked marring the process.
-------- space
'Pentagon ready to weaponise space'
A report refers to possible Chinese plans to develop 'parasitic' microsatellites that could destroy US satellites by commands on the ground.
FROM L K SHARMA
Sunday, August 15, 2004
DH NEWS SERVICE WASHINGTON:
http://www.deccanherald.com/deccanherald/aug152004/i7.asp
Speculation has begun on Chinese weapons of satellite destruction even while the Iraqi "weapons of mass destruction" are still in the news.
The Pentagon's latest report on Chinese military power makes a passing reference to the possible Chinese plans to develop "parasitic" microsatellites. These small satellites could attach themselves to the US satellites and then disrupt and destroy them on ground command.
The Pentagon report cites a Hong Kong news report of 2001 which said that China had already ground-tested such a satellite and will soon test it in space. However, unlike the Bush administration's pronouncements regarding the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, the Pentagon's reference to China's space weapon has not been reported on the front page. The Washington Post buried it on page 14 and added information casting doubts on the source of the Pentagon's reference to China's destructive satellites.
The Post is not taking any chances this time. It has been contritely saying that it ought to have questioned the official claims about the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction in the Iraq war.
In an extraordinary move to establish credibility with its readers, the daily has carried reports, comments and letters on its failure to scrutinise the WMD claims. The few reporters who did that found that their stories were buried on inside pages. Those reporting the official WMD claims were featured on the front page. Now that papers like The Washington Post and The New York Times have become wiser, any US administration drawing public attention to the Chinese anti-satellite weapons will have to work twice as hard.
Whatever be the credibility of the Honk Kong report, if the US media is to be believed, the US government is already out to "weaponise: space. While the US has been using space for years to run its ground war, the phase of "weaponisation of space" is coming. Mr Donald H Rumsfeld, the present Secretary of Defence, had warned some years ago: "If the US is to avoid a 'Space Pearl Harbour' it needs to take seriously the possibility of an attack on US space systems."
More funds
This thinking has already led to allocation of more funds to the US military's space projects. In the coming years, the threat of foreign space weapons will get larger and the US military's space programmes will get bigger.
The US is developing the Experimental Satellite System (XSS) consisting of a series of microsatellites smaller than 100 kg. The XSS-10, weighing about 28 kg, was successfully launched last year. It could also be used to stun or disable a large satellite.
Some American think tanks have warned that "when you weaponise space, you invite company". If the US is first, someone else will be the second in space, with its own weapons. Thus space weapons proliferation will become a reality. One study says that once killer satellites start destroying one another above Earth, they will cause space debris that could harm benign civilian satellites, damaging the global economy.
A ballistic missile could disable satellites in low-earth orbit by detonating a nuclear device, blinding the ground troops relying on intelligence from those satellites.
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Inside the Axis of Deceit
Andrew Wilkie, a top Australian intelligence official, didn't think the available WMD intel justified invading Iraq. When the government of Prime Minister John Howard (above) joined the Coalition of the Willing anyway, Wilkie quit in protest. Since then, he's been speaking out.
August 16, 2004
Andrew Wilkie
Interviewed By Jeff Fleischer
http://www.motherjones.com/news/qa/2004/08/08_401.wilkieQA.html
As a senior analyst at Australia's top intelligence agency, the Office of National Assessments, Andrew Wilkie had high-level access to the raw data pouring in before the Iraq war. But while his country's prime minister, John Howard, resolutely supported an invasion, Wilkie saw a significant gap between the evidence the intelligence community collected and the way Howard, George Bush, and Tony Blair argued the case for war.
Just a few days before the U.S., UK and Australia led the "Coalition of the Willing" into Iraq, Wilkie resigned his post at ONA in protest, and took his case against the Howard government public. Since then, he has spoken at numerous protests, testified before government inquiries in Australia and the UK, and won the inaugural Whistleblower of the Year award from the United Nations Association of Australia.
Wilkie has written a new book, "Axis of Deceit," which discusses the intelligence relating to Iraq and how it was politicized in Canberra, London, and Washington. And he is continuing to take the fight to the government, running an underdog race as the Green Party candidate for Howard's parliamentary seat in the upcoming Australian elections. The former intelligence officer spoke with MotherJones.com about his resignation, the war in Iraq, and how the post-war focus on intelligence failures is helping governments avoid responsibility.
MotherJones.com: When did you make the decision to resign from ONA and why?
Andrew Wilkie: It was many, many weeks in the making. I first started to have some concerns about the Iraq war in late 2002, when I wrote the secret report for the Australian government on the possible humanitarian implications of a war. It was a very sobering exercise; it made me start to look at the evidence much more critically. And there were certain waypoints, such as Colin Powell's address to the Security Council on Feb. 5 2003. So much so that by about a fortnight before the war, I had reached the conclusion that a war was not going to be the most sensible or ethical way to resolve the Iraq issue. There are all sorts of things that public servants disagree with, but to my mind, I was looking at government misconduct on an extraordinary scale. So much so that I felt I couldn't support the government any longer and, also, that I had an obligation to speak out publicly.
I never thought I could stop the war. In fact, I don't think anybody could stop the war by early 2003 -- not even George Bush; there was just so much momentum behind it. What I did hope to do was to energize the public discussion about it. I had a very privileged access to secret information, and was basically just backing up what many of the people on the outside were already thinking. I just felt I had an obligation to tell them what I knew and to basically stir up the debate.
MJ: How did John Howard and the government react?
AW: The evening I resigned, they told the media that I hadn't been involved in the Iraq issue -- in other words, that I didn't know what I was talking about. Which was a nonsense, as I'd been involved in the Iraq issue from the start, and I'd written the report in December on the possible consequences of a war. The morning after I resigned, one of the prime minister's staff told the media that I was mentally unstable and shouldn't be listened to. The foreign minister here, Alexander Downer, has been very outspoken about me and called me all sorts of things, and I have been vilified very strongly in our Parliament by government politicians. But, mind you, I've gone strongly in return and spoken very strongly against the Howard government in laying out my case.
MJ: How have you seen public opinion toward the war shift in Australia?
AW: Before the war, there was overwhelming public opposition. Different polls had different results, but certainly in the order of three-quarters of Australians opposed the war. Now as soon as the war started, that did a backflip, and most Australians got behind it. I think part of the explanation was, "our troops are in combat; it's our duty to support them." And then, of course, the war seemed to go well at first. George Bush landed on the aircraft carrier with "Mission Accomplished," the statue was pulled down in the square in Baghdad, and Prime Minister Howard did what I'd call a victory lap around the world and went out to Washington and London. At that point, I think the war was almost a political plus for John Howard, as well as for George Bush and Tony Blair. But steadily, it has turned sour in Australia, and the war has now become a clear political negative for the prime minister, one that he is seeking to neutralize in our forthcoming election.
MJ: In your book, you discuss ONA's pre-war assessments of the United States and its intentions. How did that information shape the case for war?
AW: This is a very important point. There's been so much debate in Australia -- and in the UK -- about what our intelligence agencies were reporting about Iraq. But just as important -- maybe more important -- is what Australian and British intelligence agencies were saying about the United States. It was made very clear to the Australian government that there was a very broad range of drivers for this war -- of which WMD and terrorism were only two, and they were well down the list. What that means is every time John Howard stood up in front of the Australian people -- and every time Tony Blair stood up in front of the British people -- and waxed on about WMD and terrorism, they were doing that in the full knowledge that those weren't the main reasons for the war.
In Australia, there were only two dimensions to the official case for war. One, that Iraq had failed to disarm its weapons of mass destruction, that it had a massive arsenal. And two, that it was collaborating actively with Al Qaeda, and that it was just a matter of time before those weapons were passed to terrorists. That was really the official case for war in Australia. Unlike in the U.S., I might add, where your government did talk about the value of regime change. In Australia, John Howard dismissed regime change. In response to a question by a journalist before the war, he said we wouldn't be able to justify a war on the basis of regime change. So all this talk now about the value of that change and the humanitarian benefits, it has nothing to do with the pre-war case presented in Australia.
MJ: What did Howard hope to gain by Australia's supporting the war?
AW: First and foremost, he has a deep personal conviction about the Australian alliance with the U.S. Howard was in the U.S. on Sept. 11, and I think that's one reason why he feels so much a part of this. But his personal ideology is strongly inclined that way, much more than even his Liberal Party's is. The Iraq war in Australia is very much John Howard's war; it reflects that obsessive relationship with the Bush administration. I think that's what drives him. There are practical benefits -- for example, security guarantees for Australia, free-trade agreements and so on -- but they are really just dividends of this fundamental personal conviction of his.
MJ: How have the Australian intelligence agencies changed their approach to terrorism after Sept. 11?
AW: It goes without saying that 9/11 was a shock, even to the intelligence agencies. They had completely underestimated the threat from Islamic extremists. So it really has shaken them up, and there was certainly an increased focus on terrorism, and transnational threats generally.
Having said that, in Australia there wasn't enough of a focus brought to bear on the terrorism threat. Where I used to work, at the Office of National Assessments, they only took on two terrorism experts after 9/11. It was a bit token, and I think that helps to explain why Australia then got caught out, again, with the Bali bombing. We didn't see that coming either. We hadn't really learned our lesson from 9/11, and I don't think we really learned our lesson from the Bali bombing either. It's only now, because of this Iraq misadventure, that the intelligence agencies are looking more carefully at how they operate.
I should make one more point about the 9/11 thing. Because of the way we were all caught out over 9/11, I think the agencies have been more inclined to think worst-case. And I think that helps to explain the intelligence failure over Iraq. They didn't want and couldn't afford to be caught out again, so the agencies tended to overestimate the threat posed by Iraq.
MJ: How did the governments make the qualified intelligence on Iraq fit their arguments?
AW: Intelligence is inherently ambiguous. That's just the nature of the way it's collected -- there are always uncertainties, and the intelligence agencies know that. The agencies will invariably give very measured and carefully qualified advice to government. That was, in fact, the finding of this recent Philip Flood report in Australia. The official government inquiry has found -- and these are the words used by Flood himself -- that the intelligence agencies gave "cautious and qualified advice."
But that cautious sort of advice was, of course, not the style of what was being said by George Bush or Cheney or Wolfowitz or Rumsfeld or John Howard or Alexander Downer. To them, the advice was always strong and unambiguous; it always had those qualifications removed. And the qualifications were normally just simple words like "could," as in "Iraq could be doing this," qualifications like "uncorroborated evidence suggests" or caveats like "intelligence suggests." Words like "suggests," "could," "can't be ruled out" or "uncorroborated." And those words were almost always dropped from the official government statements. In doing so, all our governments - very deliberately, very mischievously and very dishonestly - turned uncertainty into certainty. And that completely reengineered the threat posed by Iraq.
MJ: What were the main gaps you saw in the intelligence relating to Iraq?
AW: The first main intelligence gap was the unaccounted-for WMD material. There wasn't a lot unaccounted for, but that material became quite central to the official case for war last year. The other intelligence gap was what Iraq got up to after 1998, when UNSCOM pulled out. Now, I think that highlights the inadequacies in our intelligence services, that we didn't have effective human intelligence operations going on, and were relying instead on Iraqi dissidents and whatnot, who all had an agenda. There were too many people who were trying to encourage a U.S. intervention and were prepared to say anything that the U.S. government wanted to hear. In that context, the intelligence database on Iraq just became increasingly contaminated with what I'd call garbage-grade intelligence. So it made it very easy to cheery-pick the database and basically come up with the case for war that the politicians wanted.
MJ: One of the things you worked on at ONA was an assessment of the possible humanitarian costs of an invasion. How has the aftermath compared to the scenarios you considered?
AW: Thankfully, my worst-case scenarios have not eventuated. Mind you, I wasn't looking this far ahead; I was looking at the immediate aftermath. And some of the possible scenarios there were quite scary, in particular the idea of Saddam Hussein himself creating a humanitarian disaster to complicate coalition war-fighting operations or to compel the international community to intervene and say "stop this madness." Given that we all thought he had a very limited chemical and biological capability, it was not impossible that he would use some sort of chem-bio agent on one of his own cities. It wasn't impossible that he'd blow dams and flood areas. There were lots of things he might have done. If I had my time again, I'd probably write the same assessment of the possible humanitarian implications, even though some of those things haven't come to pass. But some did. There's no doubt that the situation in Iraq, for many Iraqis currently, is very dire. It's unfortunate that some parts of the country are now so violent that the media can't get out there and report the situation. It will still be a long time before Iraq is a better place for most Iraqis.
MJ: You've said the post-war focus on intelligence failures in all three countries lets the governments off the hook. How so?
AW: In all three countries, the governments have very deliberately kept the focus on the intelligence agencies and steered the focus away from the bigger issue, which is the government's relationship with the agencies, and the government's misuse of intelligence material. And we're saying this in all three countries. The Flood report's terms of reference were very specifically to look only at the performance of the intelligence agencies. Everyone knows they failed -- the previous Australian inquiry found that out. The most recent British inquiry did the same thing -- looked at the intelligence agencies. The U.S. inquiry did the same thing. I think the governments are being very mischievous in the way they're keeping the focus on the intelligence agencies. Which did fail, there was a limited intelligence failure. But that limited failure in no way excuses the governments for their decision to go to war.
MJ: With the Australian election coming up, how effective has the opposition been at making the war an issue?
AW: We've got a real problem in Australia in this regard. I think the opposition, the Labor Party, has really let us down on this. The Labor Party flip-flopped on its position before the war, and more recently, I don't think Mark Latham [the Labor leader] has been inclined to go hard on this issue; he just doesn't seem to go near the war too much. He's taken a bit of a stand on troops out by Christmas, but I think the Labor Party knows they're a bit vulnerable on this issue, because they didn't take a strong enough stand before the war. Then you've got the Australian media, and they haven't got a good record on this. Australia's good journalists are the best in the world, but too much of the Australian media was lazy over Iraq, sometimes incompetent, and often compliant with Rupert Murdoch's empire. His papers, like the The Australian, were just mouthpieces for the Bush administration and, by implication, the Howard government. So it's not entirely unsurprising that so many Australians have been a bit disengaged, and that's certainly motivated me to keep speaking out.
MJ.com: What should the opposition do, then?
AW: The Labor Party just needs to focus more on it. We're still engaged in an unjustified war. This should bring a government down, and the Labor Party just isn't going hard enough. The Greens have gone very hard on this, which probably helps to explain my attraction to the Greens. And I'm still going hard on it. National security is really the central, main plank in my own campaigning. Rather than being strong on national security, I think John Howard is actually recklessly dangerous on it.
MJ: On the intelligence end, what will the agencies do to prevent similar failures?
AW: I'm very confident that the intelligence agencies are already well advanced in reform. The intelligence agencies are made up of mostly highly competent, highly professional people, and I think the focus on the intelligence failure has been somewhat unfair on the agencies. Intelligence can never be perfect, and will fail from time to time, because that's the nature of the work. That's why intelligence has to treated with great care. It needs to always be kept in balance with things like the advice of political staffers and policy departments, public opinion, polling, the media's views -- and the intelligence has to be kept in perspective.
MJ: One of the recommendations in the Sept. 11 commission's report was the creation a national intelligence czar to oversee the various U.S. agencies. Does that seem like a step in the right direction?
AW: Not knowing all the details, I would agree with the need for better coordination between agencies. But I think it's important that agencies still have a certain amount of independence so they can come up with independent opinions. Depending how it's done, there's a danger that if you have one person in charge, linked too closely to the government, you end up getting one line of compliant reporting. One of the strengths of the U.S. intelligence system before the war was that the INR in the State Department took an independent position on Iraq and was actually much closer to the mark than the CIA. I think that shows the value of having separate lines of reporting from separate agencies and getting those different opinions. So whatever reform occurs, you wouldn't want to get rid of that.
MJ: On the political end, what will it take to ensure the American, British and Australian governments don't make the same mistakes in the future?
AW: That rests upon all three governments being punished at the polls. It's looking more and more like Bush is gone in the U.S. It's hard to imagine the British Labor Party having Blair in charge come the next election. And I think Howard's on the ropes in Australia. It's hard to tell, it's about 50-50 maybe. But if all three governments are punished at the polls, if all three are turned out, that will send a strong signal to the future governments that people won't accept this happening again. If any of those governments survive, that will of course be very worrying, because it will almost legitimize what they did. Hence it's so important that they be punished at the polls. But regardless of the election results, I think the Bush administration is generally shocked at the mess they now find themselves in with Iraq, and I think U.S. foreign security policy will be in the shadow of Iraq for the forseeable future. If only because with so many troops bogged down there, the U.S. doesn't have the resources to be too reckless anywhere else for a while. So I suppose there's some good news in this mess.
MJ: You're standing as the Green Party's candidate for John Howard's seat in Parliament. Why did you decide to run, and to challenge that specific seat?
AW: I wasn't a member of any particular party or politically active when I resigned. But not long after, I decided to become active because I just wanted to keep pressing my case against the government, and didn't believe the government had been held to account. I eventually decided to join the Greens; they're the best match for me personally for a range of reasons. And I'm standing against John Howard personally in his own seat of Bennelong, in part because I want to represent the people in the electorate of Bennelong, but in part also that I judge by going up against the PM personally, it's another way for me to get some more traction for my case against the government.
There's three strong candidates running, though there will probably be a dozen or more candidates in Bennelong. The standout candidates will be John Howard for the Liberal Party, the Labor candidate will poll strongly, and I will also poll strongly. In fact, I think I can get the second-largest number of primary votes; I think I can beat the Labor candidate. So with the primary vote split three ways, nobody will get more than 50 percent, which means it will go to preferences. So someone can win the seat with as little as 30 percent of the primary vote. In that context, a John Howard victory is the likely outcome, but it can't be taken for granted. I have a small, but real, chance of causing a major upset.
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Senate Hearings for CIA Nominee to Begin Sept. 8
August 15, 2004
REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-security-cia-goss.html
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Senate confirmation hearings for President Bush's nominee for CIA director, Republican Rep. Porter Goss, will begin Sept. 8, the chairman of the Senate intelligence committee said on Sunday.
Sen. Pat Roberts, a Kansas Republican, told NBC's ``Meet the Press'' he was ``very confident'' Goss would be confirmed, despite concerns of some lawmakers that he may be too partisan to assume the critical intelligence role.
Sen. Richard Lugar, an Indiana Republican, told ``Fox News Sunday'' he supported Bush's nomination last week of Goss to head the embattled spy agency as timely and necessary.
``There could be many other candidates, but he seems to me to be clearly one at the top list of anybody's consideration,'' Lugar said. He added that any intelligence reforms likely will have to be ``subordinated for the moment to the need to have somebody there.''
Sen. Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat and also a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that will hold the confirmation hearings, said, ``I don't think he is the best person because there is a very big political aspect to that appointment.''
To win his support, Levin told CNN's ``Late Edition'' Goss must convince lawmakers he can provide U.S. intelligence free of political influence.
Democrats charge that Goss as former chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives intelligence committee has taken overtly partisan positions, including criticizing Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry on behalf of the Bush-Cheney campaign.
But Democrats want to avoid being viewed as obstructionists on national security and not one has said he or she would oppose Goss's confirmation. While there are more Republicans on the Senate intelligence panel, and in the U.S. Senate which must ultimately confirm the nomination, Democrats could conduct a filibuster, delaying the process.
Lawmakers return to the U.S. Capitol Sept. 7 and Roberts said the hearings would begin the following day. He previously had said he wanted the process to get under way in August.
Roberts also said the ranking Democrat on the intelligence panel, Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, who opposed the nomination of any politician for the job, had agreed to proceed quickly.
``He may not vote for Porter, but we both have agreed that we're going to expedite the hearing,'' Roberts said.
Rep. Jane Harman, ranking Democrat on the House intelligence committee, said it was best for Democrats not to oppose the nomination but to use the hearings as an opportunity to fully review U.S. intelligence-gathering.
``I think he should be asked some tough questions in the Senate ... about his independence from the White House, about his commitment to civil rights and about, especially, his commitment to implementing the recommendations of the 9/11 commission,'' Harman said.
Newsweek reported on Sunday that the White House may end up appointing Goss as the national intelligence director, overseeing the entire intelligence community, a position proposed by the Sept. 11 commission and recently embraced by Bush.
Roberts downplayed the report, however, telling NBC he had been in touch with the White House, and, ``Well, I just don't think that bucket holds any water.''
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Intelligence: Why a Fix Is So Elusive
August 15, 2004
By DAVID E. SANGER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/15/weekinreview/15sang.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON - The Olympics have opened in Greece, carrying with it fears of a replay of the event that opened the era of televised, large-scale terror: the 1972 Munich attack. Madison Square Garden, the site of the Republican National Convention, is so tempting a target that Midtown Manhattan will be sealed off in ways never seen, even in the first days after Sept. 11.
And in Washington, there is so much talk of the "pre-election threat" that a senior White House official was insisting to reporters on Thursday that Election Day will go forward no matter what Osama bin Laden may be contemplating to influence the outcome.
But if the threat of terror seems imminent this summer, the solutions to American intelligence failings, as painfully documented in the report of the 9/11 Commission, will take years, maybe a generation, to carry out. And that is the crux of the current Washington disconnect: In an age when voters are accustomed to near-instant action - quick tax cuts to spur a lagging economy or the quick toppling of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein - retooling the early warning system is an entirely different matter. Even if the problem weren't so complex, what Washington calls the "intelligence community" is so big, and so turf-conscious that this is a project condemned to move at the speed of landing an astronaut on Mars.
So in the absence of quick solutions, the watchwords in Washington these days are simple: Look busy.
No one wants to appear to be behind the curve in fixing a broken system. So on Tuesday, Mr. Bush nominated a new C.I.A. director, selecting Porter Goss, a one-time spy who has led the House Intelligence Committee, even before anyone has thought through how his job will be redefined by the intelligence overhaul. In fact, some believe that the confirmation of Mr. Goss may be a distraction from the bigger issues.
For his part, Mr. Kerry instantly embraced every recommendation of the 9/11 Commission, even as his advisers offer reservations about which of its ideas will work and which won't. Meanwhile, Congress is holding hearings on intelligence dysfunction, trying to show that big, big reforms are coming. It's just that no consensus has emerged on what powers the proposed new national intelligence director should have, or how the intelligence agencies should work together.
Why is this so hard? The answers have to do with history, with budget power (this is Washington, after all) and with an intelligence community that looks like General Motors in the 1960's - lots of different divisions competing for common resources, factories that manufacture incompatible parts and a disdain for anything invented (or gathered) elsewhere. The difference, noted one senior member of the 9/11 Commission recently, is that "G.M. has changed a lot in the past 40 years."
Actually, much has improved since Sept. 11, and the C.I.A. and F.B.I., by all accounts, are doing a lot better at talking to each other. Yet one senior intelligence official noted last week that it was still virtually impossible to get all the experts on North Korea's nuclear program - the satellite photo analysts, the C.I.A. human-intelligence specialists, the Air Force team that detects tell-tale emissions from nuclear reprocessing, the energy department nuclear experts and the economic experts who look for that long-sought sign that the bankrupt country might implode - to assess their data together.
"There's a reason it took four years to come to the now-obvious conclusion that A. Q. Khan was selling centrifuges and arming Pyongyang and Tehran and Tripoli," said one official who served in several administrations, talking about the head of the Pakistani nuclear program, who put together the largest nuclear export business in history. The Korea experts were separated from the Pakistan experts, who were understandably preoccupied with Mr. bin Laden. No single agency was responsible for putting together the whole picture.
It is a tale that echoes the one detailing the missed opportunities to uncover the 9/11 plot, or the story of why Secretary of State Colin Powell never saw the Defense Intelligence Agency memo doubting the credibility of Curveball, the Iraqi defector who told tall tales about mobile biological weapons labs.
But not all the problems that led Mr. Powell and his colleagues astray on Iraq can be solved by bureaucratic rearrangement. Iraq, said Richard A. Falkenrath, who just left the White House as deputy homeland security adviser, was a problem born of "bad tradecraft." "It was a failure of performance," he said, "not organization."
But for now, Washington is consumed by the what it calls the stovepipe problem - the failure to move intelligence across agencies. It is the inevitable result of a system that produces one specialist-agency after another, creating one to look at satellite photos, another to tap into phone calls and another to run spies and so on. Save for the C.I.A., many are run out of the Defense Department, which is why the defense secretary controls more than 80 percent of the intelligence budget. And that may explain why Donald H. Rumsfeld sounded less than enthusiastic this week about getting rid of stovepipes.
"Every time you bust down a stovepipe, you run the risk of information getting compromised," he said.
You also run the risk of putting a Congressional committee out of business. After all, committees, from Armed Services to Government Operations, preside over the Pentagon's intelligence budget. "This is why," said Mr. Falkenrath, who dealt with this issue when the Homeland Security Department was set up, "you spend a lot of time negotiating over intelligence budgets with people who came out of the department of agriculture."
Mr. Bush fudged the issue when he backed the idea of a national intelligence director; the White House said that this new official would "coordinate" budgets, a word that always raises eyebrows. That is why some of the hardest questions about the reorganization are coming from people whom Mr. Bush cannot easily dismiss, like Robert M. Gates, who served as C.I.A. director under the president's father.
Now the president of Texas A &M, Mr. Gates has assembled a list of the dangers of a bad reorganization, starting with creating a national intelligence director who looks like he has the power to smash the community together, but actually doesn't. Or, as William Perry, the defense secretary under President Clinton and now an adviser to Mr. Kerry, says, "It is entirely possible that rather than solve this problem, we will aggravate it."
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The Surveillance-Industrial Complex:
The Privatization of Surveillance
ACLU,
August 15, 2004
http://www.aclu.org/SafeandFree/SafeandFree.cfm?ID=16224&c=207
The U.S. security establishment is rapidly increasing its ability to monitor average Americans by hiring or compelling private-sector corporations to provide billions of customer records. The explosive growth in surveillance by government and business is creating a "Surveillance Industrial Complex" that threatens all of our privacy.
Read the report: The Surveillance-Industrial Complex http://www.aclu.org/SafeandFree/SafeandFree.cfm?ID=16226&c=282
Take Action: Ask Businesses to take the "No Spy" Pledge http://www.aclu.org/privatize
About the Report:
This report makes the case that, across a broad variety of areas, the same dynamic of the "privatization of surveillance" is underway. Different dimensions of this trend are examined in depth in four separate sections of the report:
- "Recruiting Individuals." Documents how individuals are being recruited to serve as "eyes and ears" for the authorities even after Congress rejected the infamous TIPS (Terrorism Information and Prevention System) program that would have recruited workers like cable repairmen to spy on their customers.
- "Recruiting Companies." Examines how companies are pressured to voluntarily provide consumer information to the government; the many ways security agencies can force companies to turn over sensitive information under federal laws such as the Patriot Act; how the government is forcing companies to participate in watchlist programs and in systems for the automatic scrutiny of individuals' financial transactions.
- "Mass Data Use, Public and Private." Focuses on the government's use of private data on a mass scale, either through data mining programs like the MATRIX state information-sharing program, or the purchase of information from private-sector data aggregators.
- "Pro-Surveillance Lobbying." Looks at the flip side of the issue: how some companies are pushing the government to adopt surveillance technologies and programs based on private-sector data.
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Spying in America: How the Pentagon is Overcoming Privacy Laws to Spy At Home
democracynow.org
June 15th, 2004
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/06/15/1410250
A new provision buried in an intelligence appropriations bill moving through Congress would exempt Pentagon agencies from the Privacy Act, vastly expanding their ability to gather intelligence inside the United States, including recruiting citizens as informants. [Includes transcript] We spend the rest of the hour taking a look at government spy operations here in the United States.
In the 1970s, army intelligence agents were caught spying on antiwar protesters and Congress passed the Privacy Act, which requires officials seeking information to disclose who they are and what they want the information for.
Now, a provision buried in an intelligence appropriations bill moving through Congress would exempt Pentagon agencies from the Privacy Act, vastly expanding their ability to conduct domestic spy operations.
But recent events show how domestic military intelligence gathering can lead to a government assault on free speech.
In February, Army intelligence officers visited the University of Texas law school days after a student-organized conference on Islamic Law and Women's Rights. The agents questioned participants and demanded a non-existent roster of attendees. The Army later apologized for acting outside its jurisdiction, but under the new intelligence provision, such investigations may become more common. The intelligence bill is scheduled to go before the House Intelligence Committee tomorrow.
- Michael Isikoff, investigative correspondent for Newsweek who first reported this story in this week's issue.
- Sahar Aziz, Student at University of Texas Law School and organizer of a conference on Islamic Law and Women's Rights held in February 2004, which was visited by an Army intelligence officer, prompting an apology from the Army for operating outside their jurisdiction.
- Kate Martin, Director of the Center for National Security Studies.
-------- us
Bush to Back Pentagon Plan to Redeploy 70,000 Troops
August 15, 2004
By ELISABETH BUMILLER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/15/politics/15MILI.html?pagewanted=all
WASHINGTON, Aug. 14 - President Bush is to announce on Monday that he supports a Pentagon redeployment plan and will withdraw up to 70,000 troops from Europe and Asia in the most significant rearrangement of the American military since the end of the cold war, an administration official said Saturday.
The redeployment plan itself was first reported by The New York Times in early June.
Mr. Bush will also announce in a speech on Monday to the annual convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Cincinnati that the withdrawal will affect an additional 100,000 military support staff and family members, who will leave the regions as well.
"This will strengthen our ability to address threats abroad, improve our capability to protect America, and ease some of the burden on our uniformed military and their families," said the administration official, who requested anonymity because Mr. Bush had not officially unveiled the plan.
The president's decision, first reported by the Financial Times of London, comes at a time when the Army is stretched thin by large deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan, but administration officials said the new realignment is unrelated to the conflicts in those countries. Instead, the White House cast the repositioning as part of a broader initiative to reshape the military in the 21st century.
Mr. Bush's speech, which he will make two weeks before the start of the Republican National Convention in New York, is also part of an effort to promote his credentials on national security beyond the war on terrorism, which will be a major theme of the Republican gathering.
Pentagon officials, who have been working for more than a year on the troop plan, have said the goal is to create more flexibility to send forces to the Middle East, Central Asia and other sites of potential conflicts.
As Pentagon policy makers envisioned the plan in June, the Army's First Armored Division and First Infantry Division, both based in Germany, would return to the United States. A brigade equipped with light armored vehicles would be deployed in Germany in their place. A typical division can number as many as 20,000 troops, or three brigades, but the First Armored Division and the First Infantry Division have only two brigades each in Germany.
Pentagon officials also said in June that a wing of F-16 fighter jets could be shifted from its base in Germany to the Incirlik Air Base in Turkey, moving the aircraft closer to the Middle East. In addition, Pentagon officials said the Navy's headquarters in Europe would be transferred to Italy from Britain.
Douglas Feith, the under secretary of defense for policy, has briefed German officials. "Everything is going to move everywhere," Mr. Feith said a year ago, as the administration was developing the details of the plan. "There is not going to be a place in the world where it's going to be the same as it used to be."
-------- venezuela
Venezuela Holds Referendum on President
August 15, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Venezuela-Recall.html?hp
CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) -- Voters turned out in huge numbers Sunday to decide whether to keep populist President Hugo Chavez in power or oust him and his social revolution that critics say has sidelined the middle class and fueled tensions between rich and poor.
Activists on both sides set off huge firecrackers and played recorded bugle songs to wake voters hours before dawn. Voters turned out in droves, waiting in line for five hours or more to cast ballots in the historic vote.
It was the first time in Venezuela's history that a referendum on cutting short a president's term in office has been held. The vote will determine whether the country continues with Chavez's social revolution, his centralizing of power in the presidency and close ties with Cuba -- policies that have deeply divided the nation.
``This is the largest turnout I have ever seen,'' exclaimed former President Jimmy Carter, who was helping to monitor the vote. ``There are thousands of people in line, waiting patiently and without any disturbance.''
Lines snaked for many blocks outside polling stations in upscale anti-Chavez neighborhoods and in slums where the president maintains a loyal following because of his social programs on behalf of the poor, including scholarships, medical care and literacy campaigns.
Many Venezuelans adore the 50-year-old former army paratrooper for his efforts to improve the lives of the impoverished majority in the nation of 25 million. But critics say his ``revolutionary'' rhetoric has vilified the middle class and widened the gap between rich and poor. Many fear he is gradually imposing a Cuba-style dictatorship.
``Venezuela is making history,'' declared Information Minister Jesse Chacon. ``This is a triumph for the Venezuelan people.''
Chavez, a vocal critic of Washington's economic and foreign policies, and his opponents accuse each other of trampling over democratic boundaries in a political crisis that climaxed in a failed April 2002 two-day coup that left dozens dead in street protests.
``Today we're going to have a wonderful day,'' beamed Jose Eduardo Lopez, a 58-year-old taxi driver, as he stood in line in a hillside slum overlooking downtown Caracas. ``Chavez will not only get enough votes to win, but will have enough to share. It will be a knockout.''
Across town, thousands lined up to vote in the upscale La Castellana neighborhood, where the sentiment was clearly anti-Chavez.
``I think everyone here is voting against Chavez,'' said Silvia Gomez, 49. ``This country is a disaster.''
Memories of past bloodshed raised fears that violence in the world's fifth-largest oil exporter could erupt again if the results are disputed as many were expecting a close outcome. Some pro-Chavez militants threatened attacks if any fraud was attempted, but the early polling was peaceful.
Nineteen people were killed in an anti-Chavez protest before he was ousted in a two-day April 2002 coup. Dozens more people were killed and hundreds wounded before Chavez was returned to power amid a popular uprising. Political riots last March claimed a dozen more lives.
Officials planned to release preliminary results hours after the polls close Sunday afternoon if one side has a clear lead. The election commission has ruled that only it can release polling figures. Exit polls were banned.
The referendum, with 14 million eligible voters, follows months of painstaking negotiations mediated by the Organization of American States and the nonprofit Carter Center, the gathering of millions of signatures and rulings by the National Elections Council and the Supreme Court.
Chavez pledged to respect the results ``no matter what they are.''
Chavez, who led a failed military coup in 1992, was elected president on an anti-corruption, anti-poverty platform in 1998. After changes to the constitution, he was re-elected to a six-year term in 2000.
For the recall to succeed, more Venezuelans must vote against Chavez than the nearly 3.8 million who voted for him four years ago. Then new presidential elections must be held within 30 days, during which time Vice President Jose Vicente Rangel would head a transitional government.
The constitution is unclear on whether Chavez could run as a candidate if a new election is held, as he has said he would do. The opposition coalition has yet to name a potential candidate.
Edginess over possible disruptions in Venezuela's oil industry, which normally provides almost 15 percent of U.S. imports, contributed this week to record high oil prices, which have reached more than $46 a barrel.
--------
Divided Venezuela Prepares for Vote
Chavez Referendum Expected to Be Close; Turmoil Is Feared
By Mary Beth Sheridan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, August 15, 2004; Page A19
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A1407-2004Aug14?language=printer
CARACAS, Venezuela, Aug. 14 -- This bitterly divided nation votes Sunday on whether to recall President Hugo Chavez, with both sides warning of possible fraud and the government saying that Chavez's defeat could produce turmoil in the oil industry, a key supplier of the U.S. market.
International observers said they expect the referendum to be generally clean and the result to be respected. But the volley of accusations and threats of unrest reflect the country's deep polarization over Chavez, a former paratrooper who has upset the middle class and U.S. government with his leftist, populist rule.
The referendum will decide whether the president leaves office two years before the end of his six-year term. Pollsters have said the vote could be close.
Chavez, 50, has pledged to step down if he loses and compete in a new presidential election that would follow in a month. But he also has declared it "impossible" for him to be defeated in the referendum. On Friday, one of his top aides suggested that Chavez's removal could plunge the country's oil industry into turmoil, at a moment when world petroleum prices are surging to record levels.
"There is no way our people, and this includes the oil workers, would accept a defeat" of Chavez, said Rafael Ramirez, minister of energy and mines. The referendum is intended to resolve years of clashes between Chavez and a broad range of opponents who accuse him of authoritarian rule. The conflict has at times exploded into violence, with the opposition staging a coup attempt in 2002 and later a three-month general strike. But Chavez has remained popular with many of this South American country's poor, whom he has rewarded with social programs and a sense of greater political power.
The vote is of keen interest to the United States, which counts Venezuela as its fourth largest source of petroleum, after Canada, Saudi Arabia and Mexico. The Bush administration has been irritated by Chavez's fervent verbal attacks and his embrace of Cuba's Fidel Castro and leftist movements.
Venezuela is one of the oldest democracies in Latin America; its last dictatorship ended in 1958. But the country is now so bitterly divided that many people here fear Sunday's referendum could be followed by a violent outburst, particularly if the losers cry foul.
Sunday, voting day, "is very important. But the 16th is even more important," said Elias Santana, a grass-roots activist working with the opposition.
Chavez's opponents, who include politicians, business executives and most of the country's news organizations, have accused the government of numerous irregularities leading up to the vote. They allege, for example, that authorities have switched thousands of registered voters to polling places far from their homes. And they are wary of new election technology making its debut, including touch-screen voting machines and equipment to capture fingerprints.
The national election commission, which oversees the vote, "can't be trusted," charged Enrique Mendoza, the leading figure in the Democratic Coordinator, the opposition coalition. He noted that Chavez supporters hold a majority on the five-member panel.
"If we lose in transparent elections, we'll recognize that. But we won't accept tricks," Mendoza said at a news conference Friday.
Chavez, who led an unsuccessful coup in 1992 before being elected president in 1998, has promised a fair vote. He has criticized his opponents for failing to respect his numerous electoral victories, including the landslide win that brought him to office, the approval of a new constitution in 1999, and his reelection to the presidency in 2000 under the new constitution.
International observers said they have detected no systematic fraud leading up to the vote and have confidence in the new voting machines. While Chavez's government was initially reluctant to allow international observers to freely monitor the balloting, it has backed down and quietly agreed to many of their requests, diplomats said. A team from the Organization of American States (OAS) and another led by former president Jimmy Carter will be present.
"The agreements between the government and the opposition have brought a more credible electoral system," Cesar Gaviria, secretary general of the OAS, told journalists on Friday night. Because of such credibility, he said, widespread violence was unlikely.
The opposition is suspicious of Sunday's vote in part because of the government's repeated challenges of the referendum process. The opposition gathered millions of signatures to hold the recall, but the Chavez administration alleged fraud and harassed some of the people who signed the petitions, according to diplomats and government critics.
But faced with international pressure and the specter of street violence, Chavez ultimately agreed to the referendum. As the vote approached, his popularity rose as he used soaring oil income to launch education, health and food programs in this nation of 25 million.
Chavez has also played on fears of instability if he loses the recall. Millions of people in this poor country are passionately dedicated to the charismatic president. He is believed to have strong support in the military and in the state-run oil company, which he purged of opponents after they spearheaded a general strike aimed at forcing his resignation.
Still, for all the doomsday scenarios, diplomats and Chavez aides said his supporters would likely fall in line behind him if the president loses and accepts the results.
"We have a leader. His name is Hugo Chavez," said one of his top campaign aides, Samuel Moscada. If Chavez is recalled, he said, "it's not a catastrophe. In 30 days there will be another election."
If Chavez wins on Sunday by a slim margin, however, "it would be very tense," Moscada said. "This would be almost as bad as if he lost."
Many polls gave Chavez a small lead going into the referendum. However, with about 10 percent of likely voters saying they were undecided, the result was difficult to predict, pollsters said.
The opposition coalition has mobilized hundreds of thousands of people, ranging from right-wing businessmen to homemakers to former leftist guerrillas. Analysts said the opposition has suffered from a lack of leadership and a clear program but has considerable experience in mobilizing voters.
Chavez has also rallied hundreds of thousands of followers to promote his cause. He has campaigned with the slogan "No to the Past," referring to former politicians associated with the upper class who were reviled for their poor economic results and alleged corruption.
"A year ago, we thought the only way Chavez could win was through cheating," said Luis Vicente Leon, director of the Datanalisis polling firm, noting that the president's popularity had dipped at that time because of a prolonged recession. But now the economy has started to grow, and Chavez has run an effective campaign, putting him on an equal footing with his opponents, analysts said.
His message has convinced Marta Vielma, 41, who sells beauty creams from her home in a working-class area of Caracas.
"The only president who has done things for the people is Hugo Chavez," she said. "All those people who ruled before just destroyed the country."
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- courts
US firms sued over Agent Orange
15 August 2004
By Our Foreign Staff
UK Independent
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=551537
A lawsuit filed by three Vietnamese citizens against the makers of the defoliant Agent Orange has been expanded after nearly 100 more people - who say the chemical has made them ill - joined the case.
Two women and a man filed the suit on 30 January in New York, seeking damages from more than 20 companies that produced the chemical, which US forces sprayed on Vietnam nearly 30 years ago.
It was the first legal redress ever sought by Vietnamese victims.
The additional names have been forwarded to US lawyers representing the Vietnamese claimants.
Agent Orange, named after the colour of its containers, was made by a number of companies including Dow Chemical and Monsanto, which were named in the suit. The chemical destroyed the jungles that Communist forces used for shelter and growing food. American veterans of the Vietnam War exposed to the herbicide have complained for years about a variety of health problems and have also sued the makers.
In 1984, Dow and Monsanto agreed to pay $180m to US veterans.
Among the chemical components of Agent Orange was dioxin, a compound that remains in the soil and is shown to cause cancer, birth defects and organ dysfunction.
The after-effects of Agent Orange remain a sticking point in the US-Vietnam relationship. Both sides are conducting research on the defoliant, but Washington has consistently declined to discuss compensation.
-------- prisons / prisoners
Petak, Russia's Alcatraz, softens hardened inmates
August 15, 2004
By Julius Strauss
LONDON DAILY TELEGRAPH
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20040814-093842-9140r.htm
PETAK ISLAND PRISON, Russia - During the dying days of the Soviet Union, Vyacheslav was a 29-year-old prosecutor in Russia's Smolensk region who, by his own admission, had almost God-like powers over the locals.
One day, overcome with boredom, he stabbed to death two women he barely knew, because he wanted to know how it felt to kill.
"I took a knife, killed a bookkeeper and a cashier and stole their money. I didn't need the money, but I needed to feel again. I was bored with my life. You've read Dostoyevsky? Maybe you understand," he said, now a 46-year-old balding man with a squint and wire-rimmed glasses.
Vyacheslav was sentenced to death. But on the day he was to be shot by a firing squad, a prison official came to the execution cell and told him his life would be spared - Russia had decided to instate a moratorium on all executions.
"I expected the executioner and instead Jesus Christ came. Since then I have prayed to God every day. I thank Him for the sun, the sky, life and our bread," Vyacheslav said.
He is one of 170 men being held in Russia's notorious prison No. OE-256/5. Known to prisoners and warders alike as Petak, it is specially adapted to hold the country's most dangerous prisoners.
In a country where brutality and hopelessness are common currency, Petak is as bad as it gets. There is not the communal fighting, the rapes and drunkenness that is common in some Russian prisons, but the regime is so unbending and inhuman that it eventually crushes even the toughest inmates.
Like its more famous American cousin, Alcatraz, Petak is surrounded by water. Security is so tight that no one has escaped in living memory. The prisoners live in a state of relentless and unending despair.
If Russia had not signed the moratorium on implementing the death penalty, most of them would be dead now. Instead, they will each serve a minimum of 25 years. In the present political climate - President Vladimir Putin has made law and order a central plank of his policy - few expect to emerge alive.
Each prisoner is kept in a small two-man cell for 221/2 hours every day. For 11/2 hours they stand, or pace like predatory animals, in a small cage outside.
Only the most determined stay in good physical condition. The day the Daily Telegraph visited, Valery and Oleg, cell-mates for five years, were toning their muscles by clenching a piece of rag in their fists and pulling against each other.
Valery, 39, from Tyumen, an oil town in Siberia, has a zipper tattooed down his throat and smaller tattoos on his eyelids. He has spent 24 years in prison for robbery, theft and, more recently, multiple murder.
"Three people were trying to put pressure on me," said Valery, who acted as a hired gun for businessmen in the early 1990s. "So I killed them. I was caught within a week. They sent me here. This is the worst. There are no toilets, no proper washing facilities and you spend your whole life in a cell. When I came here I told my wife to get a divorce. She cried a little and we've never seen each other since."
Oleg, 42, was convicted of murder and committing serious injury in a notoriously brutal case in Yakutsk in 1989. His brother, who was given a five-year sentence for his role in the same crime, came to see him once, but he has not had a visitor since 1996.
The letters and the food parcels, which the prisoners use to trade with and buy cigarettes, dried up at the same time.
"This place destroys these people. The first nine months or so they spend adapting. After three or four years their personalities begin to deteriorate," said Svetlana Kiselyova, 29, the prison psychologist.
"There is no way anyone can spend 25 years in a place like this without being psychologically destroyed. The homosexuals are the ones that come off best - at least they are not starved of physical and emotional contact," she said.
There are only two ways in and out of Petak: by foot, along two rickety wooden bridges, or by prison boat. Armed guards stand at watch towers on each corner of the building. German shepherds are kept in a special pound.
In stark contrast to the grim brutality inside, the White Lake surrounding Petak is one of Russia's most beautiful. Gulls fly, the water is rich with fish and the trees and bushes are reflected in the shimmering water.
"There are prisons in Russia where the prisoners are in control, where even the governor has to consult with the head criminal before he can do anything, but not here. Here we're the bosses," said Vasily Smirnoff, the head guard.
"Of course sometimes I worry about sending my guys into a room with only a notebook and CS gas against some of the toughest guys on earth. But nobody's ever escaped. If they dig, they hit water. If they try to swim, the guards will shoot them," he said.
For the first 10 years of a man's sentence, he is allowed two visits a year, of two hours each. After that he can have two long visits and two short visits. But by the time a decade has passed most men have lost contact with their families, who often live many days' travel away. Parcels are allowed twice a year.
Half of the prisoners have tuberculosis. At least two prisoners are clinically insane. When men die, their bodies are taken to a small graveyard nearby and buried in the presence of one or two of the guards. No prisoners can attend.
Misbehaving prisoners are sent to punishment cells to be locked in a small, dark room with only a metal bucket and a fold-down bed for 15 days. No books are allowed. In the daytime, the bed is stowed and they must stand, or sit on a tiny wooden perch a few inches wide.
Vladimir, 45, killed two men and two women in St. Petersburg in 1994.
"I was drunk," he said.
Soon after he was sent to Petak, he started painting with oil paints friends sent him. Today his cell is a gallery of rural Russian landscapes he paints from memory.
"I don't want to leave here," he said. "I've made this room my home. One day it will be my mausoleum. Who knows, perhaps after my death I will be famous and people will come and visit this cell. They'll say of me, 'He might have been a murderer but at least he was a fine painter.' "
--------
Asylum-seeker now John Ashcroft 's prisoner
NEW YORK TIMES
BOB HERBERT
Aug. 15, 2004
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1092521408631&call_pageid=968332188854&col=968350060724
MIAMI-David Joseph is a little guy, about 5-foot-5, maybe 115 pounds.
He's 20 years old, looks younger, and has the sluggish demeanour and sad expression of one who is deeply depressed.
He has nightmares and headaches.
He spends his days dressed in the blue fatigues of detainees at the federal Krome Detention Center, washing dishes at mealtimes, staring listlessly at television images broadcast in a language he doesn't understand, and praying.
"I thought I would come here for a few days and be released," he told me in a soft voice, his words translated by an interpreter. "But I watch the other people come and go, and I am stuck here."
Joseph is a refugee from Haiti who is seeking asylum in the United States. He is not a terrorist, and no one has even suggested that he is a threat to anyone. And yet he's been in federal custody for nearly two years.
An immigration judge and the Board of Immigration Appeals have ruled that he should be freed on bond, pending a final ruling on his asylum request. But U.S. Attorney-General John Ashcroft won't let him go.
Playing his ever-present, all-encompassing terrorism card, Ashcroft personally intervened in Joseph's case, summarily blocking his release.
According to the attorney-general, releasing this young Haitian would tend to encourage mass migration from Haiti and might exacerbate the potential danger to national security of nefarious aliens from Pakistan and elsewhere who might be inclined to use Haiti as a staging area for migration to the United States.
Ashcroft has been out in the Washington sun too long. Terrorism is not an issue here. Joseph is a nervous, nail-biting young man who has an uncle in Brooklyn who's a U.S. citizen and would be only too happy to take in his nephew. Keeping Joseph imprisoned for years is inhumane.
What's really at work here is the Bush administration's unwillingness to budge even an inch from its unfair and frequently cruel treatment of Haitians seeking refuge in the United States.
Joseph and a younger brother, Daniel, were among more than 200 Haitians aboard a boat that landed at Key Biscayne, Fla., in October 2002.
The boys' immediate family had been viciously attacked in the political turmoil that wracked their homeland, and David Joseph still does not know whether the mother and father he left behind are alive. (Daniel, a teenager, is reportedly in foster care in New York.)
The United States may be a beacon of liberty, but when someone like David Joseph sails toward that beacon he can find himself perversely embraced in the barbed wire of a place like Krome.
"He was fleeing persecution," said Selena Mendy Singleton, a vice-president of TransAfrica Forum, a research and policy group that is among several organizations supporting Joseph's request for asylum.
"He is not a threat to the community. He is not a terrorist. And he meets the criteria to be released on bond. David needs to be let out."
Ashcroft was pointedly questioned about the Joseph case by Republican Senator Arlen Specter during an appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee in June.
"On April 17 of last year," said Specter, "an issue came before you where there was a young Haitian refugee where there had not been any showing of a problem with respect to terrorism.
"And you overruled both the immigration judge and the Board of Immigration Appeals.
"And then the inspector general of the Department of Justice criticized the department for the failure to distinguish between immigration detainees who are connected to terrorism and those who don't have any reason for detention."
Specter urged Ashcroft to consider a policy in which the Justice Department would address cases like Joseph's on a less sweeping, "more individual" basis, which would enable officials to determine whether there was any real reason for concern about terrorism.
Ashcroft was unmoved. He told Specter: "Sometimes, individual treatment is important. Sometimes it's important to make a statement about groups of people that come."
So David Joseph, a threat to no one, sits and waits and prays at Krome.
-------- POLITICS
-------- propaganda wars
For E.U. Critics, a Cautionary Tale
Police Raid on Reporter's Home Seen as Retaliation for Story
By Glenn Frankel
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, August 15, 2004; Page A19
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A1424-2004Aug14?language=printer
BRUSSELS -- The bell rang three times early on a cold Friday morning before a sleepy Hans-Martin Tillack, an investigative reporter for the German newsweekly Stern, answered the door in his T-shirt and boxers. Six Belgian policemen politely filed in, he recalled, handed him a search warrant and went to work.
For the next 10 hours, they combed through his apartment and his separate office, seizing his computer hard drives, his bank records, his Filofax organizer, four cell phones, 18 boxes of files and a copy of "Spaceship Brussels," his exposé of fraud and waste inside the European Union. When Tillack complained, he recalled, one of the officers shrugged. In Burma, the policeman told him, "journalists get treated much worse."
The police were looking for evidence that Tillack had bribed an E.U. official to obtain a confidential memo from the union's anti-fraud unit, known by its French acronym OLAF. But what they were really doing that March morning, he and other critics allege, was retaliating against a reporter whose stories had embarrassed the E.U. by focusing public attention on corruption and secrecy.
"They think it's more important to find out the leakers than to protect freedom of the press," said Tillack, who says the bribery allegation is false and absurd.
The anti-fraud unit contends that it was pursuing only a bribery allegation made by a former official. Once the unit determined that the allegation was credible, officials said, it had no choice but to turn the matter over to police. "There was some evidence that money had been paid, and this meant the matter had a different importance and gravity from a criminal law point of view," said Joerg Wojahn, a spokesman for the unit.
Critics contend that Tillack's case is an indictment of the anonymous, unelected bureaucracy that rules Europe from Brussels. It's a cozy network, they claim, presided over by directors general who frequently operate like feudal lords.
In their view, these mandarins issue an endless stream of rules and regulations that are often opaque and unintelligible to all but the savviest insiders, while the elected parliament that is supposed to oversee them is weak and ineffective by comparison. Loyalty is prized, critics argue, and accountability is minimal.
People such as Tillack, who make too many waves, can find themselves on the receiving end of the commission's wrath. In 1999, Paul van Buitenen, a commission accountant from the Netherlands, was suspended on half-pay for going outside official channels after he took allegations of fraud to members of the European Parliament. Marta Andreasen was demoted from her post as the commission's chief auditor after publicly challenging its accounts two years ago. And Dorte Schmidt-Brown, a Danish official, stepped down from her post with Eurostat, the commission's powerful statistics agency, alleging that she had been harassed by an outside consulting company after she questioned its contracts with the commission.
In each case, commission officials have said the people involved failed to follow procedures for whistle-blowers and therefore were subject to internal discipline.
The European Parliament itself has come under fire for a reimbursement system that provides deputies with chauffeured cars, free health care, staff jobs for family members and travel allowances that can pay up to 10 times the actual airfare.
"Europe as a whole is not a democracy, but a bureaucracy," said van Buitenen, who no longer works for the commission and was recently elected to the European Parliament on a reform platform. "The instruments of democratic control are simply not developed enough to be effective."
No wonder, say the critics, that many Europeans feel alienated from the institutions that oversee their lives and work. Voter turnout fell below 30 percent in some areas during parliamentary elections in June, and a large contingent of E.U. skeptics -- including a handful of lawmakers who have pledged to abolish the union altogether -- won seats.
Bribery Allegations
Hans-Martin Tillack, 42, came to Brussels in 1998, at a time of crisis for the European Commission -- the group of 20 commissioners, appointed by their home countries, that oversees the E.U.'s 24,000 civil servants and $100 billion annual budget. The commission is the executive arm of the E.U., carrying out policies and laws decided on by the European Parliament and representatives of E.U. member governments.
Van Buitenen's allegations of wrongdoing had recently become public, disclosing a pattern of cronyism epitomized by commissioner Edith Cresson of France, who had appointed her dentist to a high-paying E.U. post.
Cresson and the other members of the commission were forced to resign en masse in 1999 -- an unprecedented step in its 45-year history -- and a new group was installed, pledging zero tolerance for corrupt practices. Neil Kinnock, the former head of Britain's Labor Party, was appointed vice president for administrative reform, with a mandate to set up new codes and procedures to prevent a repetition of the scandal. One of his creations was OLAF, the European Anti-Fraud Office, which was given extraordinary powers to investigate corruption.
From the start, however, critics saw problems with the changes. Andreasen complained publicly about irregularities in the E.U.'s new accounting system, and she was suspended for a time. Van Buitenen raised new concerns. Both have since resigned.
Many of the concerns centered on Eurostat, the European Union's statistics agency. Because it monitors compliance with the union's complex financial regulations and its data determine which regions qualify for special aid programs, Eurostat wields enormous power. But van Buitenen raised questions about the agency's financial relationships with private-sector firms and where some of its revenue had gone.
Tillack wrote brash and bold pieces, based on leaked documents and complaints from unhappy bureaucrats. "He was one of the few to continue to write critical stories," van Buitenen said. "He was very well informed."
His toughest piece appeared in February 2002, when he published details of a 46-page confidential OLAF memo assessing van Buitenen's latest allegations against Eurostat. Tillack refuses to say where he got the memo. One month later, OLAF issued a statement announcing that it was investigating a claim that Tillack had bribed an E.U. official to obtain the report.
Later, it emerged that the source of the allegation was Joachim Gross, a former Stern journalist and press spokesman for the European budget commissioner, Michaele Schreyer, whose office oversees OLAF. According to an account in the German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung, which OLAF officials confirmed, Gross had mentioned to the agency's spokesman that he had heard Tillack might have paid 8,000 euros (currently about $9,800) or German marks (about $5,000) for the document. Gross told investigators he had gotten his information from a Stern staff member.
When contacted, Gross refused to comment on the investigation. The Stern colleague did not return phone calls seeking comment, but according to the newspaper, he has said he has not spoken to Gross for years.
Still, OLAF decided to turn its file over to police in Brussels and Hamburg, where Stern is based. The German authorities decided the information was too skimpy to warrant investigation. But police in Belgium, which has no shield law protecting journalists or their sources, decided to act.
OLAF official Wojahn denies that his agency is out to get Tillack. "We're not interested in Mr. Tillack as such," he said. "We're interested in the person who gave the confidential documents to him."
Police Action Criticized
The police raid caused an immediate furor. Officers prevented Tillack from making calls at his home or at his office at the International Press Center, to which they escorted him, but he was able to raise the alarm with a handful of his journalistic neighbors at the center. Soon the narrow doorway of his office was bristling with television cameras and microphones. The International Federation of Journalists protested the raid. Tillack later filed suit in a European court in Luxembourg, demanding the return of his files and $350,000 in damages. The case is pending.
The raid was also criticized by Raymond Kendall, chairman of the supervisory committee that oversees OLAF. He told a hearing at Britain's House of Lords in May that the agency's case against Tillack "was purely on the basis of hearsay evidence from an informant, one informant, who happened to be in one of the public relations offices of the commission. . . . Any normal person would have to say that somewhere along the line OLAF [was] probably trying to get back at" Tillack.
European magazines are not shy about paying for scoops, especially those involving the private lives of celebrities. But Tillack says Stern would never have paid for E.U. documents; the stories simply aren't sexy enough.
Kinnock said he has no direct responsibility for OLAF but says he and his fellow commissioners have helped clean up the E.U.'s act. "Reform is a process, not an event," he said in an interview. "You always want things to go faster and farther. But those who want to believe that we've got some kind of KGB here bent upon suppressing and, when that fails, penalizing whistle-blowers, are living on Mars."
Tillack is not convinced. "I'm not so sure anymore that Burma is worse than Brussels," he said.
-------- us politics
Younger Voters Rapidly Deserting Bush
Sunday, August 15, 2004
Washington Post Staff Writers
By Richard Morin and Christopher Muste
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A1509-2004Aug14.html
Mounting concerns over the war and the sluggish economy have sent President Bush's popularity plummeting among young adults in the past four months, complicating his bid for reelection and challenging Republicans to increase their efforts to win over new or lightly committed young voters.
Four years ago, network exit polls found that Bush and Democrat Al Gore split the vote of 18-to-29-year-olds, with Gore claiming 48 percent and Bush getting 46 percent -- the best showing by a Republican presidential candidate in more than a decade.
But that was then. In the latest Post-ABC News poll, taken immediately after the Democratic National Convention, Kerry led Bush 2 to 1 among registered voters younger than 30. Among older voters, the race was virtually tied. About 1 in 6 voters in 2000 was between 18 and 29 years old.
Tyler McLaughlin, 27, of Georgetown, Tex., did not vote four years ago but supported Bush during the first years of his presidency. "But after two years of war, I became anti-Bush," said McLaughlin, a project scheduler for a computer firm. "This seemed like a guy . . . who made a decision and won't go back on it."
Bush's problems with younger voters began long before the Democratic convention, Post-ABC polls suggest. The last time Bush and Kerry were tied among the under-30 crowd was in April. In the five surveys since then, Bush has trailed Kerry by an average of 18 percentage points.
Virtually every other major poll conducted in the past month confirms Kerry's popularity with voters under the age of 30. A poll by the Pew Center for the People & the Press released Thursday reported Kerry still ahead by 18 points among this group.
Taken together, those surveys suggest that if the election were held today, Bush would do about as well among younger voters as GOP presidential candidate Robert J. Dole in 1996. Dole lost to President Bill Clinton by 53 percent to 34 percent among 18-to-29-year-olds. Bush's father split the young vote in 1988 and lost to Clinton by nine points in 1992. The Reagan era marked the recent high-water mark for the GOP with younger voters, who gave the Gipper his biggest victory margin of any age group in 1984.
The latest Post-ABC News survey found that Kerry consistently topped Bush by double-digit margins as the candidate young adults trusted to deal with every major issue, including the economy, Iraq, education and health care. The Democrat also was viewed by substantial margins as best able to handle taxes and the campaign against terrorism, issues where Bush still had an advantage among all voters.
The issues motivating younger voters are not much different from those on the minds of all Americans. The war in Iraq and the economy lead their list of top voting concerns in recent Post-ABC News surveys -- not surprising, because it is mostly young people who are fighting in Iraq and hustling to keep or find jobs in this uncertain economy. Education ranks somewhat higher as a voting issue among younger voters, not unexpected either, since many of them are just out of school or are still in college.
One surprise: The campaign against terrorism is less of a voting issue for younger voters than for the rest of the country. In the most recent Post-ABC poll, 9 percent of all 18-to-29-year-olds rated it as their top voting concern, compared with 20 percent of all voters.
"The war -- definitely," Becky Hibma, 24, a homemaker in Dorr, Mich., said when asked her top voting issue. Hibma says she is concerned about terrorism. But for her, Iraq is the more immediate and tangible problem. "It could have been handled very differently. We jumped in too quickly. . . . A little more thinking would have been great."
Still, she says she is torn between the two candidates. She's "more Bush" at the moment, largely because of the president's leadership after Sept. 11, 2001. "But there are days when I totally agree with everything Kerry says."
----
Bush is Wrong, Kerry is Wrong
Sunday, August 15, 2004
by the Capital Times / Madison, Wisconsin
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0816-09.htm
Never mind that Iraq had no significant weapons of mass destruction, and no capacity to develop any such weapons in the foreseeable future.
Never mind that there was no serious collaboration between Iraq and Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network.
Never mind that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein has been replaced by a thuggish "strongman" who has ordered violent attacks on Iraqis that do not share his politics, who has shut down news media that question his authority, and who talks about delaying elections until he deems them appropriate.
Never mind that Iraq has become a staging ground for terrorist groups that never operated there before the United States invaded the country on George W. Bush's order.
Never mind that a clear majority of Americans say the invasion of Iraq was a mistake, and worry that it has made America more vulnerable.
Never mind that more than 900 American lives and tens of thousands of Iraqi lives have been lost, and that more will be lost in what has become a quagmire.
Never mind any of the facts.President Bush, who seems to think that the whole war on terror is some kind of Wild West costume show, declared last week that he would do it all over again.
The president grudgingly acknowledges that most of the pre-war claims he and his aides made about a supposed "need" to attack Iraq were wrong. Yet, he says without a hint of irony, "Knowing what I know today, I would have made the same decision."
Bush's don't-bother-me-with-the-facts approach should close the case against his re-election to the presidency. Any leader who gets things as horribly wrong as Bush did ought to be viewed skeptically when he asks to have his tenure extended. But when that leader says he does not care that he screwed up so miserably, or that thousands of Americans and Iraqis have died as a result, it is time to move beyond skepticism. Common sense argues that the man must be replaced.
Unfortunately, Democratic candidate John Kerry was almost as foolish in his response to the president's know-nothing rant.
When Bush challenged his challenger to say whether he would still vote to give the president the authority to invade Iraq, Kerry responded, "Yes, I would have voted for the authority. I believe it was the right authority for the president to have."
The only difference, Kerry said, was that he would have used that authority "more effectively" than Bush.
Kerry pointedly refuses to say that it was wrong to go to war, or even to admit that he was mistaken to vote to give Bush the authority to do so. That's too bad. The Democratic nominee does himself few favors by suggesting he would be a kinder, gentler George W. Bush.
Kerry should pay attention to a point made by U.S. Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis. Feingold says that Democrats make a mistake by assuming that so-called "swing" voters are centrists who support the war. A lot of undecided voters, Feingold suggests, are Americans who believe this war is a terrible mistake and who want a leader who recognizes that fact and will bring it to an end.
In fact, the majority of Americans say the war was a mistake. It is too bad that neither of the major party presidential candidates shares the common sense of the electorate.
-------- ENERGY
-------- energy
Will Russia, the Oil Superpower, Flex Its Muscles?
August 15, 2004
By ERIN E. ARVEDLUND
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/15/business/yourmoney/15russia.html?pagewanted=all&position=
RUSSIA is again emerging as a superpower - but the reason has less to do with nuclear weapons than with oil.
The country has its swagger back, as its economy expands for the fourth consecutive year and the world price of oil hovering at just over $45 a barrel. Now the second-largest oil producer behind Saudi Arabia, Russia has positioned itself as an important alternative supplier to the increasingly unstable Middle East.
But Russia's oil supply is looking none too stable these days. The Kremlin's protracted battle with its largest producer and exporter of crude oil, Yukos, has raised doubts among some skittish traders about the reliability of Russian supplies and helped drive up prices in unusually tight global oil markets.
The Yukos affair began last October, when the government arrested Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, the company's founder. Officially, he was detained on tax and fraud charges, though there has been speculation that the arrest may have been retribution for his support of political parties opposed to President Vladimir V. Putin.
Not long after that, Yukos was hit with a $3.4 billion tax bill for 2000, and some analysts said tax bills through 2003 could total $10 billion. At the same time, the government has barred the company from selling assets to raise cash and has frozen its bank accounts. Yukos's share price has tumbled - and concern about the reliability of Russian oil supplies has soared - amid the appearance that the Kremlin is driving the company into bankruptcy proceedings.
People in the industry are split on whether Yukos will survive in its current form, but they are almost unanimous in dismissing concerns about Russia's commitment to remain an oil-exporting superpower. They, and the government, point out that even amid the back-and-forth over Yukos, Russia's oil production has not dropped by a single barrel.
Indeed, Russia's output has risen strongly over the past year. And Viktor Khristenko, the industry and energy minister, took pains to publicly reassure Mr. Putin and the world on Wednesday that the Yukos situation would not disrupt exports.
"Production is growing steadily," Mr. Khristenko told the president, in remarks that led national news broadcasts. For the first seven months of this year, Russia produced about 2 billion barrels of oil, and the year's total should be almost 3.3 billion barrels, he said. In 2003, Russia produced 3.073 billion barrels.
Oil markets are likely to remain jittery for a while, because of sabotage in Iraq, a referendum today on President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela and the Aug. 31 deadline for Yukos to pay its 2000 tax bill. But the Kremlin is unlikely to let Russian exports drop significantly as a result of its fight with Mr. Khodorkovsky, industry executives and analysts said.
For one thing, Russia can produce more oil than it has the pipelines to export, so any dip in Yukos's production could be made up elsewhere. For another, high prices are letting Russia reap windfall profits from oil sales. Lastly, the Kremlin is unlikely to risk the international opprobrium that turning off Yukos's taps would generate.
"Russia's international standing would be destroyed," said Christopher Weafer, chief strategist at Alfa Bank here. "The Kremlin wouldn't jeopardize its position in the global economy by what would be nothing short of an act of global economic terrorism."
In some ways, the Kremlin itself may have been surprised by the effect of its Yukos prosecution on the global oil market. "Russia has become a decisive force in the world oil market in a way it hasn't been since the beginning of the 1960's, when its exports stimulated the birth of OPEC," said Daniel Yergin, chairman of Cambridge Energy Research Associates, based in Cambridge, Mass.
Mr. Yergin added, however, that the Kremlin's tussle with Yukos "at another time wouldn't have had the same effect." This, he explained, is in part because "the world oil market is even tighter than in the 1973 oil crisis."
What the Kremlin certainly did know before prosecuting Yukos was just how important the company is to Russia's status as a petro-state. Yukos produced 591 million barrels of crude oil last year, nearly 20 percent of Russia's production. Yukos has 14.7 billion barrels of oil reserves, almost as much as the OPEC members Algeria and Indonesia combined.
That helps explain why the Yukos affair has had such a powerful global effect. "If it weren't for Yukos, we wouldn't have crossed the $45 mark," said Fadel Gheit, oil analyst at Oppenheimer & Company.
INDUSTRY leaders in Russia say they encourage outsiders to take a longer view of the country's ability to prevent the price of crude from spiking. "Russia today has a very important role in the stability of world oil markets," said Viktor Vekselberg, one of the founders of the big Russian oil company TNK.
Mr. Vekselberg noted that his company operated a 50-50 joint venture, called TNK- BP, with the big British oil company BP. While that is the only large investment to date by a foreign company in Russian energy, others could follow, he said. "The fact that BP and several other international oil majors are coming here speaks to the fact that they see Russia as a stable supplier and participant in the world oil market," Mr. Vekselberg said.
Notwithstanding such sanguine forecasts for Russia's oil industry in general, investors now expect the government to auction off Yukos's main subsidiary to pay the tax bill. Its main subsidiary - Yuganskneftegas in western Siberia, which produces 60 percent of Yukos's oil output and holds more than 70 percent of its reserves - may end up in the hands of a rival, possibly one more friendly to the Kremlin. It is unclear what would happen to minority investors in that event.
On Thursday, the Ministry of Justice appointed the investment bank Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein to determine the value of Yuganskneftegas. Analysts have estimated that it could fetch from $10 billion to $20 billion.
The financial screws on Yukos are definitely tightening. Just this week, it said its banks had the right under loan covenants to start seizing oil export revenue because it had defaulted in July on a $1 billion loan from Société Générale, Citigroup and others and more recently on a $1.6 billion loan organized by Group Menatep, Mr. Khodorkovsky's investment company and Yukos's controlling shareholder.
Even if Yukos ends up being run by someone other than its current management, however, Russia's status as a mighty global oil producer is secure, experts said.
Over the next decade, production from Russia and the Caspian will increase as much as that in the Middle East, said Mr. Yergin. "Russia is big time," he said. "A superpower when it comes to oil and gas."
The question is: Who will the superpower allow to own those oil assets? The Kremlin clearly wants a larger role in oil and gas, which it views as a strategic sector of the economy. But government control could mean that Russia's production would not grow as swiftly as it might under private ownership, with oligarchs and other wealthy businessmen trying to maximize profits.
"Russia has huge potential," said Mr. Gheit, the analyst. "It is underdeveloped and underexploited, and foreign oil companies with money burning in their pockets are salivating to get in. But no one will go to Russia if they can just take companies away like Yukos."
-------- OTHER
-------- health
Bush Forces a Shift In Regulatory Thrust
OSHA Made More Business-Friendly
By Amy Goldstein and Sarah Cohen
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, August 15, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A1315-2004Aug14?language=printer
First of three articles
Tuberculosis had sneaked up again, reappearing with alarming frequency across the United States. The government began writing rules to protect 5 million people whose jobs put them in special danger. Hospitals and homeless shelters, prisons and drug treatment centers -- all would be required to test their employees for TB, hand out breathing masks and quarantine those with the disease. These steps, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration predicted, could prevent 25,000 infections a year and 135 deaths.
By the time President Bush moved into the White House, the tuberculosis rules, first envisioned in 1993, were nearly complete. But the new administration did nothing on the issue for the next three years.
Then, on the last day of 2003, in an action so obscure it was not mentioned in any major newspaper in the country, the administration canceled the rules. Voluntary measures, federal officials said, were effective enough to make regulation unnecessary.
The demise of the decade-old plan of defense against tuberculosis reflects the way OSHA has altered its regulatory mission to embrace a more business-friendly posture. In the past 3 1/2 years, OSHA, the branch of the Labor Department in charge of workers' well-being, has eliminated nearly five times as many pending standards as it has completed. It has not started any major new health or safety rules, setting Bush apart from the previous three presidents, including Ronald Reagan .
The changes within OSHA since George W. Bush took office illustrate the way that this administration has used the regulatory process to redirect the course of government.
To examine this process, The Washington Post explored the Bush administration's approach to regulation from three perspectives. This article about OSHA traces the impact on one regulatory agency. Tomorrow's story will look at a lobbyist's 32-line, last-minute addition to a bill that created a tool for attacking the science used to support new regulations. Tuesday's article will document a one-word change in a regulation that allowed coal companies to accelerate efforts to strip away the tops of thousands of Appalachian mountains.
The Post also analyzed a database from the Office of Management and Budget containing the 38,000 regulatory actions considered by agencies over the past two decades.
The analysis, combined with the more detailed look at specific regulatory decisions, shows how an administration can employ this subtle aspect of presidential power to implement far-reaching policy changes. Most of the decisions are made without the public attention that accompanies congressional debate. Under Bush, these decisions have spanned logging in national forests, patients' rights in government health insurance programs, tests for tainted packaged meats, Indian land transactions and grants to religious charities.
All presidents have written or eliminated regulations to further their agendas. What is distinctive about Bush is that he quickly imposed a culture intended to put his anti-regulatory stamp on government.
Unlike his two predecessors, Bush has canceled more of the unfinished regulatory work he inherited than he has completed, according to The Post's analysis. He has also begun fewer new rules than either President Bill Clinton or President George H.W. Bush during the same period of their presidencies. Since the younger Bush took office, federal agencies have begun roughly one-quarter fewer rules than Clinton and 13 percent fewer than Bush's father during comparable periods.
President Bush's closest advisers and sharpest critics agree that the shift in regulatory climate since he took office in January 2001 has been profound. But they disagree over whether that shift represents a harmful turn away from federal protections to benefit business or a useful streamlining of costly government rules.
Sally Katzen, who oversaw all federal regulation for five years under Clinton as deputy budget director for information and regulatory affairs, said new regulations were, in those days, embraced as a means to improve the quality of water, of air -- in short, of people's lives. "Bush, or at least the people around him, are skeptical, if not hostile to that notion," she said.
John D. Graham, who holds the same job in the Bush White House, said regulations are "a form of unfunded mandate that the federal government imposes on the private sector or on state or local governments." A president, he said, should not be judged solely by the number of regulations he starts or cancels.
This White House, Graham said, has initiated regulations when the benefits clearly outweigh the costs -- for example, a decision last year that eventually will require labeling of trans fatty acids in food. "We've just been much more selective about expensive new regulatory requirements than previous administrations have been," he said.
Rules Placed in Jeopardy
At OSHA, the administration's regulatory philosophy has translated into a smaller staff to develop new standards, less reliance on the views of organized labor and an enlarged role for businesses.
As Bush set out in 2001 to recast the government along more conservative lines, workplace standards seemed an unlikely focus. During his transition period, the new president did not assign anyone to assess OSHA; the transition "team" for the entire Labor Department consisted of one longtime congressional aide.
A relatively small part of the department for three decades, OSHA has the large mission of sifting through research on potential hazards to workers and deciding when the government should step in. It writes federal standards, conducts inspections to determine whether employers follow them and metes out punishment when they do not.
Bush offered the job of running OSHA to a career-long industrial hygienist from St. Louis who was a virtual stranger to Washington.
John L. Henshaw had worked for two decades at Monsanto Co., a giant manufacturer of agricultural chemicals. Most recently, he had been the director of environment, safety and health at Astaris LLC, another chemical company.
Even though he had come from industry, Henshaw was viewed by the administration's critics as a more palatable choice than they had expected. "He's a competent, well-regarded safety and health professional," Peg Seminario, the longtime occupational safety and health director of the AFL-CIO, the umbrella labor organization, said at the time. "Well qualified for this important responsibility," Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), then chairman of the labor panel, said when Henshaw was approved unanimously by the committee on Aug. 3, 2001, and immediately confirmed without debate.
During his first days in Washington, Henshaw made it clear that he would carry out a directive from Labor Secretary Elaine L. Chao instructing the entire department to comb through the regulatory work Clinton's aides had left unfinished and find items to eliminate. Chao explained the order in a letter in 2001 to John J. Sweeney, the AFL-CIO president. The list of incomplete work left over from the Clinton days, she wrote, "had swollen to unmanageable size, containing many items that had been moribund for years, making it an inaccurate and effectively useless document."
Chao's order was in keeping with the new White House philosophy.
The day Bush was sworn in, his chief of staff, Andrew H. Card Jr., issued a memo that, in an unprecedented move, put a two-month freeze on final rules across the government that had not yet gone into effect. The new administration wanted time to decide whether to change or reverse them.
A few months later, Graham, the White House's top regulatory official, was alerting agencies that they would face closer scrutiny from the OMB when they proposed new rules. The day after he was confirmed by the Senate, he sent the first of 14 letters to agencies saying they had failed to prove the need for regulations they had proposed. That was more than had been sent during Clinton's eight years.
The most dramatic symbol of the new regulatory climate arose from a joint action by Bush and Congress.
Two months after he took office, a Republican Congress, making first use of a recent power to review regulations, repealed the biggest worker-safety standard of the Clinton years. The standard was a set of rules that created broad safeguards against ergonomic injuries. Without Bush's signature, the repeal could not have taken effect.
The death of the ergonomics standard, Democrats and Republicans now agree, exposed a weakness of Clinton's regulatory strategy at OSHA in his last few years -- putting so much emphasis on that standard that others were left unfinished.
The agency had concentrated nearly all its energy and political capital on the effort to protect workers against musculo-skeletal injuries, such as repetitive-stress injuries and carpal tunnel syndrome. The rules would have required employers to redesign workplaces if they were hazardous and compensate people who became disabled. The Clinton administration believed the standard, covering more than 6 million work sites at an estimated cost of $4.5 billion for employers, was the biggest step the government could take to protect the greatest number of employees.
As a result, OSHA left other major proposals, including the tuberculosis rules, unfinished -- and thus easier to cancel. Those dangling rules, combined with the sudden end of the ergonomics standard, emboldened Bush's corporate allies to fight new rules from OSHA -- and the expense they could entail.
"In the past, the business community worked to develop regulations that were acceptable," said Patrick R. Tyson, an Atlanta lawyer representing corporations in occupational safety matters who held senior positions at OSHA in the 1970s and '80s. "But now the game has changed, and the business community feels like they can kill any regulation they want."
Building Alliances Minus Unions
The new administration began by trying to cut staff and money at OSHA. In his first year in office, Bush wanted to eliminate nearly 100 of the agency's 2,400 jobs. His budget also would have reduced funding for the standards-setting part of the agency by $1.2 million, or 8 percent. Lawmakers restored the money and the positions.
The next year, the administration succeeded in eliminating 10 jobs out of 95 in the standards area, when Henshaw merged divisions dealing with health and safety. The merger, Henshaw said, eliminated duplicative jobs in middle management. But it angered some current and former OSHA employees, who said it cost the agency some of its expertise.
"I finally couldn't take it anymore," said Peter Infante, who retired after 24 years at OSHA as the senior epidemiologist who helped to develop health standards. He had planned to stay long enough to finish years of work on rules to protect workers from beryllium, a metal that can cause cancer if inhaled in minute amounts. Instead, he left in May 2002, saying that the only U.S. company that mines and processes beryllium ore had gained too much influence inside the agency.
Henshaw said in an interview that the bottom line for OSHA is not how many rules it produces but how many people get hurt, sick or killed at work under its watch. He said trends are improving. Henshaw said he is proud that the agency has increased federal inspections of workplaces.
The overall number of inspections has increased under Bush, but the typical inspection takes less time, and fewer are in response to accidents or complaints. OSHA officials say they are more trusting now of industries with good safety records, while putting greater emphasis on those -- such as construction -- where workers are most prone to injury. Union leaders said that inflates an appearance of vigilance, because OSHA counts each subcontractor at a construction site as a separate inspection.
With its current staff, Henshaw said, OSHA can visit about 2 percent of the nation's workplaces each year. Given those limits, he said, it has made sense to strengthen the agency's relationships with businesses, encouraging voluntary compliance.
To do so, OSHA has created a new kind of voluntary program, intended to foster "trusting, cooperative relationships" between the government and groups of industries and professional societies, according to an agency fact sheet. These new alliances, as they are known, depart from a central tradition throughout the agency's history: They are allowed to exclude labor unions. Of the 57 national alliances OSHA has formed, with groups ranging from air conditioning contractors to shipyard owners, just one -- intended to promote safe work habits in road construction zones -- includes a union representative.
Agency officials say that more than 500 other, older voluntary projects run by OSHA still involve unions. As for the new alliances, one OSHA administrator, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that some employers might be too uncomfortable to participate if unions were there.
In November 2002, OSHA announced an alliance with 13 airlines and the National Safety Council to find better ways to prevent workers who handle baggage from being injured. The OSHA alliance excluded airline unions, which had asked to take part.
"It is simply illogical and insulting," Sonny Hall, president of the AFL-CIO's transportation trades department, said at the time, "when the powers that be in this administration's OSHA sat down to form a private-sector group to reduce injuries to airline workers that they chose to exclude, of all people, airline workers." Fewer and Narrower Rules
At the same time, Henshaw was carrying out Chao's orders. Echoing his superiors at the Labor Department and in the White House, Henshaw said the Clinton administration had left too much unfinished regulatory work at the agency. OSHA, Henshaw repeatedly said, needed to convert its agenda from a "wish list" to a "to-do list."
The data analyzed by The Post show that Clinton left behind 44 incomplete rules at OSHA, just four more than when Bush's father had moved out of the White House eight years earlier. "I don't recall things being added just because somebody asked for them," said Katzen, who had been the top official for regulations in the Clinton White House.
Henshaw's housecleaning produced dramatic effects. By the end of Bush's first year in office, OSHA had eliminated 18 of the 44 rules. By the end of 2003, six more, including the tuberculosis protections, were gone.
"Every one of the items on there had some merit. Nobody is disputing that," Henshaw said of the proposals he removed. "But there is only so much you can do."
Many of the cases involved complex arguments pitting the interests of workers against those of their employers.
In August 2001, the same month Henshaw was confirmed, the agency stopped efforts to regulate chemicals used in making semiconductors and suspected of causing miscarriages in workers. The agency's written explanation at the time consisted of one sentence: "OSHA is withdrawing this entry from the agenda at this time due to resource constraints and other priorities."
A month after the semiconductor decision, OSHA eliminated a proposal, dating to the Reagan administration, that would have updated lists of the amounts of industrial chemicals to which workers could be exposed. The new administration said it made more sense to regulate each substance one at a time, a slower process.
That December, the agency killed a proposal on indoor air quality intended to prevent restaurant and other workers from exposure to tobacco smoke or other pollutants. State and local standards, OSHA said, had solved the problem.
Some of the canceled rules will make it more difficult for Bush's critics to pursue regulations in the future. After Congress and Bush killed the ergonomics rules, OSHA eliminated a proposal to compel employers to break out ergonomic injuries when they report on worker injuries in general.
Henshaw said at the time that such records would not help to reduce such injuries. Seminario of the AFL-CIO said that, without such records, advocates of ergonomic protections have less ability to document that federal safeguards are needed.
With his focus largely on coaching employers to follow existing rules, Henshaw said, "writing another standard is not going to help with that." Still, he said, the agency has continued to write new rules when they are needed.
At OSHA, The Post's analysis found, the rules the agency has proposed are narrower than most of those it has eliminated. Thirteen of the 24 proposals it has canceled since Bush took office fall into a category the government classifies as "economically significant," meaning they would cost or save the economy at least $100 million. None of the 16 standards OSHA has proposed during that time falls in that group.
Graham said it does not make sense for OSHA to overreach. From his days as a Harvard professor, Graham said, he knew of research suggesting that neither the health nor safety standards created over OSHA's history had a clear track record of being effective. Besides, he said, OSHA's procedures have always made it uncommonly sluggish in churning out big rules.
Graham said OSHA has set into motion an ethic of "smart regulation" that the White House has tried to instill across the government: creating new rules only after rigorous scientific and economic analysis proves they are warranted. Under Henshaw, he said, OSHA has shown "an intensely practical, down-to-earth approach to worker health and safety, not inclined toward grandiose, unrealistic ventures."
The 3M Gambit
In several instances where Bush's OSHA has moved a rule forward, it has done so in a way that has benefited a specific business interest.
One case concerns the updating of a 25-year-old standard intended to ensure that workers do not inhale hazardous substances. The update said that employers -- from factory owners to firehouses -- must assess hazards, select appropriate safety masks, train workers to use them and periodically check to see whether they fit.
After the Clinton administration finished the standard in 1998, however, a critical question lingered: What safety rating should the agency assign to the different types of masks? Those ratings, which would tell how effective a given mask was at removing contaminants from the air, would cover everything in the category -- elaborate respirators as well as inexpensive paper masks sold at any hardware store.
The stakes were huge for workers and the companies that make the masks: Some type of respiratory protection is used in more than 600,000 workplaces, one in every 10 nationwide, a recent federal survey found. And no corporation had a larger stake in the decision than 3M Co., which pioneered disposable dust masks in the early 1970s and is their largest manufacturer.
3M and other companies said the disposable version deserved the same rating as the more sophisticated respirators, a decision that would increase sales of the disposable masks and provide a buffer against a growing volume of lawsuits over their effectiveness.
Last winter, OSHA held a hearing on this question. An expert witness hired by the government testified that the disposable masks were as effective as the more elaborate ones, as long as they were checked periodically to ensure they fit properly.
The witness, Warren R. Myers, mentioned in explaining his qualifications that he was an associate dean at West Virginia University's college of engineering and mineral resources and that he had worked for a dozen years testing respirators at a branch of the federal Centers for Control and Prevention. He did not mention that he had worked previously as a consultant to 3M.
Another witness took a different view. Richard W. Metzler, who works for the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health in Pittsburgh, testified that researchers have not evaluated most of the disposable mask models sold today. "There has been a lack of science," Metzler, who directs NIOSH's National Personal Protective Technology Laboratory, said in an interview.
Opposition to 3M's position also came from an industrial scientist named James S. Johnson at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. He is the chairman of an American National Standards Institutes (ANSI) committee. His views were particularly important. By law, OSHA is supposed to coordinate its standards with ANSI committees. Johnson testified that the committee had concluded that the dust masks deserved a lower rating -- half that of the more elaborate respirators.
Faced with such mixed testimony, 3M took action.
This February, Tyson, the Atlanta lawyer and former OSHA official, filed a motion on behalf of the company with the Labor Department's administrative law judge. The motion asked the agency to disregard the ANSI committee's conclusions on the grounds that they were in draft form and "currently under appeal."
The reason they were under appeal: 3M and two of the company's allies had challenged ANSI's conclusions just a month earlier.
The company "was screaming bloody murder," said Mark Nicas of the University of California at Berkeley, who had been given three contracts by OSHA during the 1990s to advise the government on respiratory issues. "It just doesn't want to upset the market share."
In April, the administrative law judge rejected Tyson's motion, saying that OSHA was free to make its own judgments about the conflicting testimony. Still, when OSHA publicly proposed its rating scale in June, it called for all masks, including disposable ones, to get the same ranking, just as 3M wanted.
The 3M gambit had apparently worked: The OSHA official who spoke on the condition of anonymity said the agency could not take Johnson's testimony or the ANSI committee's conclusions into account because it is allowed to consider only final recommendations.
The agency did not want to wait for the outcome of the ANSI appeal -- even though 3M was using it to hold up the process -- because, the official said, that dispute may take "forever."
"We can't be hamstrung that way," the official said.
Does Provide Mean Pay For?
As OSHA has recalibrated worker protections, one word can make a big difference. This summer, OSHA has thrown open the question of what "provide" means.
That question is heir to a dispute that began in 1994, when the agency issued rules on safety equipment in dangerous jobs. The rules say an employer must determine what kind of equipment a worker needs -- hard hats, protective gloves and clothing, safety goggles -- and provide it to the employee.
The regulation, however, does not specify who pays for the equipment -- or whether the employer can, as industry has argued, deduct the cost from the worker's wages. A year later, OSHA said that "provide" means "pay for." Industry groups appealed that definition. Eventually, OSHA's review commission decided employers could not be made to pay without a new rule.
In 1998, a federal study found that workers in low-paying jobs more often were being charged for their safety equipment. The practice was most prevalent in the construction trades, where just slightly more than half of employers were picking up the full expense of hard hats and welding goggles.
The following year, OSHA proposed a rule to make clear that "provide" meant "pay for."
That rule was one of many that were not quite final when Bush took office. Last year, after two years of OSHA inaction, a coalition of nine unions petitioned Chao demanding that the rule be issued within two months.
That did not happen. Instead, Henshaw announced in July that OSHA wanted to rethink part of the issue -- particularly for equipment that employees can take from job to job -- and asked for new outside comments. And that was how a rule headed for approval under Clinton became open to further delay and uncertainty.
Agency officials speaking on the condition of anonymity said that, in the end, the government might keep the proposed rule -- or it might decide that employers do not need to pay for certain kinds of safety equipment. Or for any at all.
Critics Conquer TB Standard
Asking for more outside opinions was the same step OSHA officials had taken before they canceled the tuberculosis protections the day before New Year's.
The evidence on the TB standard is mixed.
Government record-keeping is so sketchy it is impossible to tell how many workers are being infected with TB on the job. The two main unions that have lobbied for the protections since the beginning, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees and the American Federation of Teachers, were unable to provide a single example of someone who could talk on the record about having caught TB.
Given the murkiness, the outside opinions that prevailed came from the American Hospital Association and other groups that had long resented the idea of OSHA enforcing safety practices. Opponents said government no longer needs the requirement for tuberculosis tests, patient quarantines and the other protections in the standard.
The disease had waned in most states in the decade since OSHA began developing the TB standard, the critics argued. Besides, they said, the Centers for Disease Control already provided voluntary guidelines for protecting workers.
There was some support for this position in an evaluation of the proposed standard by a respected advisory group, the Institute of Medicine, which had been ordered to conduct the study at the behest of congressional Republicans while Clinton was in office.
But when the study came out the month Bush took office, it concluded that the standard still was worthwhile, even if it might not need to cover as many workers.
In the end, OSHA cited the study in its rationale for eliminating the TB standard.
Unions and public health officials were furious. TB rates continue to increase in many states, they said. Even where the rates have gone down, they said, workers in health clinics or hospitals still run into the disease.
Nicas has conducted research on whether hospitals around San Francisco adhere to the CDC guidelines. Even though the hospitals were doing a better job, he found, all had lapses sometimes. A federal regulation, he said, still is needed.
"The health care industry [does not] like being regulated by OSHA," Nicas said. "But then, that puts them in league with every other industry."
Immediately after winning its long battle to eliminate the TB standard, the nation's hospitals and their allies began a new campaign. They sought to block a rule requiring yearly checks to make sure that the breathing masks of their workers fit correctly.
-------- ACTIVISTS
Protesters rally for Sindhis' rights
August 15, 2004
By Denise Barnes
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/metro/20040814-104747-4154r.htm
A small group of demonstrators gathered yesterday near the Embassy of Pakistan in Northwest to voice their opposition to the policies of Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf.
About 20 protesters at the "Vigil for Democracy and Justice in Pakistan" huddled on the corner of International Drive and Van Ness Street carrying placards reading, "Musharraf, Give Up Your Weapons of Mass Destruction," "Down with Musharraf. Down with the Pakistani Army," and "Down with Corrupt Pakistani Generals."
The hour-long vigil was sponsored by the World Sindhi Institute (WSI), an organization based in Northwest that is committed to its struggle for human rights for Sindhis in southeastern Pakistan through nonviolent advocacy and activism.
"We cannot continue to ignore current conditions in Pakistan. The Pakistani people are being discriminated against and tortured under the current banner of democracy, and world leaders are turning a blind eye," said Munawar Laghari, WSI executive director.
"With the world distracted by events in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pakistani government has had free rein to commit numerous human rights violations. There was a sharp increase in sectarian violence in the second half of the year, particularly in the provinces of Sindh and Balochistan," he said.
The threat of rain did not stop John Salzberg, 67, from coming out to support the organization's efforts to publicize the reputed atrocities taking place in the Pakistani provinces of Sindh and Balochistan.
"I feel that the U.S. policy in supporting dictatorial governments like the one in Pakistan is promoting terrorism," Mr. Salzberg said.
"Many in the Muslim world see the United States in this light, whether [it's] Pakistan, Saudi Arabia or Kuwait. You can see inconsistencies in U.S. policies, and one of the worst purveyors of mass destruction is Pakistan. Pakistan gave weapons to Libya, [North] Korea and Iran," he said referring to Abdul Qadeer Khan, the founder of Pakistan's nuclear program who was pardoned by Gen. Musharraf for selling weapons secrets to Iran, Libya and North Korea.
Lisa Washington, 29, joined in the chorus of protesters who chanted at the top of their lungs: "Pakistani Military Go Home" and "Democracy In - Dictatorship Out," during the vigil. Ms. Washington said she believes in the issues WSI is bringing to the forefront.
"General Musharraf is allowing dams to be built on the Thal Canal - a major canal - that carries water to provinces in Pakistan. It would be like cutting off parts of the Mississippi River," said Ms. Washington, who lives in Northeast.
"The people of Sindh don't [have access] to water so they can't grow their crops. It's an easy way to commit genocide," she said.
Khalid Hashmani, a member of the Sindh Association of North America, moved through the crowd stopping to talk with protesters and energized the group by shouting slogans through a bullhorn.
"This is a day that is supposed to be a celebration of human rights, equal rights and achievement in Pakistan," said Mr. Hashmani, referring to the date 57 years ago when Pakistan formally came into existence.
"Unfortunately, today in Pakistan, cruel and discriminatory policies adopted by the present dictatorial government [are in place] against the people of Sindh and Balochistan," Mr. Hashmani said.
----
Protests test Iraq parliament plans
August 15, 2004
By Beth Potter
United Press International
http://washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20040814-104108-1307r.htm
Baghdad, Iraq, Aug. 14 (UPI) -- Amid failed efforts to quell the fighting between U.S. forces and fighters loyal to Shiite firebrand cleric Moqtada Sadr in the holy city of Najaf, protests continued around Iraq for the second day. Meanwhile, preparations for a national conference to name an interim parliament reached a fever pitch Saturday.
Organizers have invited more than 1,500 representatives of political parties, civil society groups, prominent individuals, members of tribes, academics and others to the conference, scheduled to start Sunday. Several political groups have said they will boycott the meeting, including the Islamic Party and the Muslim Scholars Association, both made up Sunni Muslims, the same religious group as former president Saddam Hussein. Radical Shiite Muslim cleric Moqtada Sadr, whose Mehdi Army has been fighting U.S. troops for the last week, was invited, but previously said he would not attend. The conference was originally scheduled for Aug. 1.
"Parties might boycott, but that doesn't make the conference lose its legitimacy," conference organizer Fuad Masoum told journalists late Saturday.
An "overwhelming majority" of those invited are expected to attend, Masoum said, although he admitted that none of those who said they would boycott have been convinced to rejoin the political meeting.
United Nations advisers suggested a little more than two weeks ago that the conference be put off to get a more diverse group of participants, said Ibrahim Nawar, an adviser to the United Nations mission overseeing the conference.
Plans announced following the naming of an interim government in June call for 100 people to be named to the interim parliament, including 25 women.
"The reason was to have more diversity and more representation from society -- more women, more independent personalities, labor groups," Nawar said.
Delegates are expected to elect 81 parliament members from among themselves at the end of the conference, which could last three days, Nawar said. Another 19 members will come from the former Governing Council named by U.S. advisers to help govern Iraq from November to the end of June.
"We don't expect everything to go smoothly overnight, but it's the best way we can do this process," Nawar said. Hamid al-Sharifi, who will attend the conference as the delegate of the Institute for Religious Freedom in Iraq, agreed.
"It is far from being perfect, given the current situation," al-Sharifi said, referring to the fighting between Sadr's Mehdi Army and U.S. troops in the southern city of Najaf and in the Sadr City suburb of Baghdad. "We don't expect Iraqis to accept it, because it is not an election.
Sadr's Mehdi Army agreed to stop fighting while the conference is going on, after more than a week of clashes with U.S. troops. More than 10,000 Sadr supporters held Friday prayers in the street in front of the convention center, where the conference is to be held. The convention center is guarded by high cement walls, numerous checkpoints, U.S. forces and guards in the heavily fortified "green zone" where thousands of Americans live.
"It is a democratic process, but it is something in-between naming people and having an election," al-Sharifi said. "From a dictatorship we had before, you can't make magic -- but it's progress."
Now that it's been more than a year since U.S.-led troops invaded Iraq, most people feel disappointed that there haven't been actual elections yet, said Bashim al-Hashimi, 55, a journalist working for a newspaper run by a political party in Iraq. He declined to say which political party he represented.
"People don't know what's going on. The process doesn't seem to be based on any logical reason," al-Hashimi said. "This won't meet the needs of the Iraqi people."
Al Sharif Ali Bin al-Hussein, head of the constitutional monarchy party and the nephew of King Faisal II, who ruled until 1951, was more dark in his predictions.
"What this conference should have been about is to expand the base of international institutions," al-Hussein said. "Our view has been no military solution to the current situation. I think it will get worse, not better."
Problems like the fighting between Sadr and U.S. troops will not get resolved before there is are "clean, honest, elections," al-Hussein said.
"I worry that the United Nations will declare the security situation is such that it will not allow them to supervise an election. I fear the conference will be a substitute for the elections," al-Hussein said.
The conference was organized by former Governing Council members as part of a United Nations-administered process to name the new interim government now in power. Delegates have come from around the country, Nawar said. He declined to speculate on how many people might actually be in town for the conference -- delegates have made their own accommodation arrangements.
On the first day, delegates are scheduled to hear from interim prime minister Iyad Allawi, interim president Sheikh Ghazi al-Yawar and new U.N. envoy to Iraq, special representative Ashraf Jenhagir Qazi. Delegates are then to divide into groups to discuss politics, reconstruction, security law and order, and human rights and transitional justice.
World officials, including U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell and United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan, have insisted Iraq hold national elections in January as called for under a transitional law approved in November.
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