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NUCLEAR
Firm cleans up with dirty work
French state company denies nuclear shipment is US military plutonium
KEPCO shouldn't shut reactors unnecessarily
UN: Arab states, Israel to attend forum on nuclear-free zone
Professor studies island's nuclear legacy
Idaho National Laboratory may pick up plutonium project
MILITARY
In Kabul, Private Jail Leads to Trial
Afghans Hail Chance for a Choice
Afghan Forces Retake Air Base
Tora Bora army strikes back at the Janjaweed
Rwanda Sends Troops to Protect Truce Monitors in Sudan
Crisis in Sudan
Remembered: war-dead records go online
CONTRACTS AWARDED
Local Contract BearingPoint Wins ID Project at TSA
US mooting Aegis destroyer sales to Taiwan following sub deal
100 desert Iraq conference
Protest at Iraq Forum Reshapes Najaf Crisis
U.S. Troops Stay Active in Najaf
Iraqi Assembly Sends Delegation to Najaf in Bid to End Fighting
Iraqi Conference on Election Plan Sinks Into Chaos
Arafat Survives Latest Challenge to His Political Power
Palestinians Fast in Israeli Prisons
Clashes resume in Georgian separatist region: Russian defense ministry
Ex-Chiefs of C.I.A. Back Key Point of 9/11 Report
U.N. Demands Justice After Massacre of 150 Refugees in Burundi
'Secret Pentagon' hidden under mountain
Bush Announces Plan to Realign Thousands of Troops
Wounded Shelby soldier battles nightmares, injuries from Iraq
Last U.S. Defector Said Living in N. Korea
Turnout Massive In Venezuela's Vote on Chavez
Chávez Is Declared the Winner in Venezuela Referendum
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Detention of British Travelers Brings New Policy
F.B.I. Goes Knocking for Political Troublemakers
Israel turns up heat on prisoners
POLITICS
Audit of Child Care Finds Excess at IRS
ENERGY
UK Government Urges World Bank Towards Renewable Energy
OTHER
Technology Already Exists To Stabilize Global Warming
Polluted Sites Could Face Shortage of Cleanup Money
Marijuana Ingredient Useful in Treating Brain Tumors
ACTIVISTS
Pro-Palestinian U.S. activist ordered expelled from Israel
Iraqi 'human shields' flock to Najaf
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- depleted uranium
Firm cleans up with dirty work
After a boost from a government program, Stafford environmental consultants are going beyond radioactive remediation
Aug. 16, 2004,
By PURVA PATEL
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/business/2740137
In the midst of the war in Iraq last year, the U.S. Army called on a local company to collect equipment tainted with depleted uranium.
When weapons made with depleted uranium strike solid objects, like the side of an armored tank, they penetrate and can break into fragments or erupt into a vapor that settles as radioactive dust.
Stafford-based MKM Engineers managed the collection site that gathered and hauled off damaged tanks and equipment contaminated with depleted uranium during the war.
Such government contracts have helped the environmental consulting and remediation firm go from depending on owner and President Khodi Irani's credit cards in 1991 to $42 million in revenue last year.
The company expects to top $48 million in revenue in fiscal year 2004 and has its eyes on being a $100 million company by 2008.
"We find ourselves excited by projects that have something unique and special about them," Irani, 43, said.
Special indeed. MKM began with a focus on environmental engineering but ventured into multimillion-dollar jobs at sites contaminated with radiological waste or unexploded weapons, such as ammunition plants.
"When we go in, there could be explosives anywhere," Irani said of the plants. "At the end of the day, there's grass growing on this land."
One contract called for the demolition and decontamination of about 100 buildings at the Cornhusker Army Ammunition Plant in Nebraska. Another had workers sifting through sands at the Udairi range in Kuwait to remove depleted uranium.
Business from Uncle Sam
Most jobs spring from government-ordered environmental restorations.
The U.S. Army has awarded the company contracts ranging in value from thousands to millions of dollars, said Bob Matthys, a former military contracting officer.
"As a small business, they were a phone call way," he said. "I had access to them 24/7. You don't always get that with the bigger businesses. That's the relationship we built up."
MKM also won contracts from the Department of Defense, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency.
The company's growth is also partly because of its designation as a small disadvantaged business by the Small Business Administration. The label allows the company to participate for nine years in the 8(a) business development program and bid on contracts set aside for smaller companies. It's also helped the company tag along on larger contracts as a subcontractor.
Now in the last year of the program, Irani's banking on his track record to keep landing large jobs.
"We've worked hard on getting jobs on our own merit," he said. "We do good work, and I like to think we're one of a few companies that has successfully leveraged the program for our benefit."
With more sites getting restored and funding generally declining, jobs are getting scarcer. And competition has stiffened, said Gurinder Rana, who is the company's executive vice president as well as Irani's former employer. That's why the company is now looking ahead to designing and building on the land it restores.
'Expertise is needed'
MKM is also eyeing more jobs through the Department of Homeland Security, such as installing remote camera systems for patrolling the borders and handling seized explosives.
Two years ago, the company helped identify and haul off 4.3 million pounds of illegal explosives seized by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms in Columbus, Kan.
He'd rather not talk about it, but the 2001 terrorist attacks had some positive effects on the business, Rana said.
"It has opened up some opportunities for us because our kind of expertise is needed," he said. "But we've constantly got to look ahead and see where the industry is headed so we don't get caught left behind."
Plus, the company's director of federal programs, Paul Ihrke, added: "We're doing something to make the country cleaner and safer. There's great satisfaction in seeing the results of that."
purva.patel@chron.com
-------- europe
French state company denies nuclear shipment is US military plutonium
Aug 16, 2004
CHERBOURG, France (AFP)
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040816135658.5ivvoktz.html
France's state-owned Areva nuclear energy company denied Monday that a truckload of plutonium it was sending to a subsidiary in Belgium was US military grade, as the environmental group Greenpeace claimed.
"It's not plutonium from the US disarmament plan," an Areva executive, Thierry Langlois, told AFP. He described the plutonium as civilian grade.
In a statement earlier Monday, Greenpeace said the truck, which left an Areva factory in La Hague in western France for Dessel in Belgium, was carrying plutonium left over from American Cold War stocks that are being reduced.
The group said it would escort the truck and warn residents along the roads of the radioactive cargo.
Langlois criticised the Greenpeace statement, adding "these civilian transportations have been going on for more than 15 years" and all safety requirements were being met.
-------- japan
KEPCO shouldn't shut reactors unnecessarily
Aug. 16, 2004
From The Yomiuri Shimbun,
http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/newse/20040816wo81.htm
Without a doubt, the leak of high-temperature steam at the No. 3 reactor of Mihama Nuclear Power Plant in Mihamacho, Fukui Prefecture, represents a fatal disaster that has been caused by Kansai Electric Power Co.'s inexcusable error.
However, questions should be raised about the post-disaster decision by KEPCO, the operator of the ill-fated facility, to suspend operations at all its other nuclear power stations and temporarily freeze its plutonium-thermal project. No defects have been found at the condensation pipes installed at these plants that specialists say could sustain a rupture in a manner comparable with the Mihamacho accident.
KEPCO must be blamed for its failure to prevent the recent disaster. However, it is illogical for the utility to decide that the accident at one of its power stations justifies shutting down all its other plants.
The pipe that suffered a rupture at the Mihamacho plant had never been inspected since the facility's No. 3 reactor was put into service in 1976. KEPCO never bothered to examine the pipe despite a report about an accident similar to the steam leak at a U.S. nuclear power plant in 1986.
It is all the more disturbing to note that KEPCO left the pipe in question unchecked despite a report issued late last year by an inspection company that said the pipe was not included in the list of equipment subject to inspection. KEPCO did not bother to implement corrective measures until a periodic inspection scheduled for this month.
All this led to a rupture at the pipe, the inside of which had long been worn away by water running through it. This caused a leak of extremely high-temperature steam, killing four workers at the plant.
Open investigation needed
KEPCO must uncover the truth behind its repeated mistakes, while also taking tough action against the company officials and employees responsible for the tragedy. The utility also should know better than to lie about the results of its investigation into the incident if it wants to regain the trust of local residents.
The Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency has instructed all electric power firms and steel manufacturers to report their latest findings about inspections on steam pipes installed at their power plants, nuclear, thermal, or otherwise. The utilities have every reason to determine whether they have left any important equipment at their facilities unchecked. This is crucial to prevent another steam-leak incident.
However, power stations must be kept running if it has been established that they have been properly checked in the past.
KEPCO intends to halt operations at all eight of its nuclear power plants for the purpose of inspecting the thickness of their pipes. The facilities subject to such inspection include ones where the condensation pipes already have been replaced with stainless steel ones.
The utility's decision means that the list of nuclear power stations to be suspended for close inspection includes ones with condensation pipes incapable of rupturing.
The decision came after KEPCO decided to meet a request from Fukui Gov. Issei Nishikawa to suspend operations at the facilities. The governor made the request based on the concerns of residents in the prefecture over the safety of the facilities.
Threat to electricity supply
However, the suspension of operations at KEPCO's nuclear power stations could arouse concerns about the stable supply of electricity in the Kansai region as the area is currently experiencing an extended heat wave. It also should be noted that KEPCO's plan to increase its thermal power generation could further raise crude oil prices.
Nishikawa also has said a plan to start a plutonium-thermal project at KEPCO's Takahama Nuclear Power Plant in the prefecture in 2007 could be postponed. A freeze on the project could arouse undue suspicion among other nations about the plutonium to be left unused in the project. Such material can be used to produce atomic bombs.
All in all, KEPCO's decision to halt operations at all its nuclear power stations could produce extremely adverse side-effects. It is necessary to determine what must be corrected and what can be accepted. The governor should urge residents in his prefecture to remain calm and open-minded toward whether to continue operations at the latter facilities.
-------- mideast
UN: Arab states, Israel to attend forum on nuclear-free zone
Associated Press,
Mon., August 16, 2004
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/465028.html
The UN nuclear agency will next year host a conference, including Israel and Arab states, to discuss steps to make the Middle East into a zone free of nuclear weapons, the head of the UN watchdog said Sunday.
As Israel is the only Middle Eastern country believed to have nuclear weapons, the talks would effectively boil down to what the Israeli government would require to abandon the nuclear option. Israel has never confirmed nor denied having the nuclear bomb.
Speaking after talks with Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, said the conference would be held in January and representatives of regional states and the UN Security Council would attend.
"The agency will hold a forum, in which Israel, Arab countries and Middle Eastern countries, will participate," ElBaradei told reporters. "This would be the first opportunity to start a dialogue about the conditions and steps that should be needed to establish a nuclear free zone in the Middle East."
ElBaradei said that during his visit to Israel last month, the Israeli government repeatedly raised concerns about Iran's own nuclear program.
Iran is in the finishing stages of building its first nuclear reactor, but the United States and Israel strongly suspect it is using a civilian nuclear program as a cover for a covert project to make nuclear bombs. Iran denies the charge, saying its program is entirely for generating electricity.
The UN nuclear agency is probing Iran's nuclear program and is due to report next month on aspects of its nuclear activities that have caused suspicion.
"We're currently achieving progress toward solving the Iranian issue. We didn't finish all issues. I hope to do so in the coming months." ElBaradei said.
Recalling his talks with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon last month, ElBaradei said: "I emphasized to Sharon that that the only acceptable option, in my view, is the choice of peace - security that is based on the cooperation of the region's countries."
ElBaradei said it is significant that Israel is now willing to discuss its alleged nuclear arsenal before a comprehensive peace exists.
"The development that we've witnessed in the Israeli stance is slight, but it's a development in the right direction," he said.
Israel says its policy of neither confirming nor denying nuclear arms is the best way to keep its enemies from attacking it while denying them the excuse for making such weapons.
By keeping silent on its nuclear capacities, Israel has also avoided the international controls that Iran faces. Iran has signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.
Evidence that Israel has nuclear arms is overwhelming, much of it based on details and pictures leaked in 1986 by a former Israeli nuclear technician, Mordechai Vanunu.
-------- pacific
Professor studies island's nuclear legacy
By Jennifer Bails
PITTSBURGH TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Monday, August 16, 2004
http://pittsburghlive.com/x/tribune-review/trib/pittsburgh/s_208362.html
In the icy rough waters where the Pacific Ocean meets the Bering Sea, the island of Amchitka still bears the radioactive waste burden of the Cold War.
In 1971, the now-defunct Atomic Energy Commission conducted the largest underground nuclear explosion in the nation's history on the remote Aleutian outpost to test a warhead for missile defense.
The nearly 5-megaton bomb named Cannikin (pronounced CAN-ick-in and meaning "airtight container") was detonated a mile beneath the earth, lifting Amchitka one foot in the air and drowning its rugged cliffs in waves two stories high.
Felt throughout Alaska as a massive earthquake, the thermonuclear blast was almost 400 times more powerful than the weapon that destroyed Hiroshima. More than 30 years later, it's still unclear whether radioactive particles released underground by Cannikin and two smaller nuclear test blasts on the island are leaking from the bomb-created glass-lined cavity where they are supposed to be contained.
This nuclear legacy could pose a threat to marine life in the waters around the island and to the health of people across the world who consume fish caught there.
Two-month expedition
To assess this risk, Conrad "Dan" Volz, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health, spent about two months this summer as project director of a $3.1 million scientific expedition to Amchitka (an Aleut word pronounced am-CHIT-kah) paid for by the U.S. Department of Energy.
The DOE is moving to designate the island as a national wildlife refuge under the stewardship of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Before this transfer can take place, the federal government is seeking to find out whether radioactive material from the three nuclear tests is seeping from the bomb craters into Amchitka's marine ecosystem.
"There may not be a leak on Amchitka now, but it will leak someday," said Volz, 51, of West Deer. "We need to get a complete picture of what's going on so the government can develop a plan for the island's future."
The environmental and economic stakes are high.
Amchitka is home to a diverse web of marine life that includes kelp beds, king crab, bald eagles, puffins, halibut, cod, sea otters, sea lions and killer whales.
Also, the waters off the island are popular with both commercial and native fishermen.
Statewide, fish and shellfish brought in more than $1.1 billion in revenue in 2003, along with $50 million in taxes for Alaska, according to the state's Division of Commercial Fisheries. In addition, more than 100,000 subsistence fishermen in Alaska depend on what they catch to survive, Volz said.
Therefore, cancer-causing radioactive particles detected in the heavily fished waters around Amchitka could have consequences not only for marine life, but for the health of the Alaskan fisheries industry, native Aleutians and seafood consumers worldwide.
The Amchitka research study is being conducted by CRESP, the Consortium for Risk Evaluation with Stakeholder Participation. Launched in 1995, CRESP is an independent partnership among university researchers, including Volz, working to help the federal government make decisions about cleaning up the nation's nuclear weapons sites. Dr. Bernard Goldstein, the dean of Pitt's Graduate School of Public Health, serves on CRESP's management board.
Volz came to the university about six years ago to pursue his doctorate in public health after selling his Harmar-based environmental services company. CRESP tapped him to lead the Amchitka field expedition because of his project management and outdoors experience.
"What Dr. Volz accomplished on Amchitka epitomizes environmental public health practice under very challenging conditions," Goldstein said.
'Adventure of a lifetime' Volz is an accomplished mountaineer and river raft guide who has trekked across Glacier National Park in Montana, hiked the beaches of Normandy and traversed the Paintbrush Divide in the Grand Tetons.
But he calls his journey to Amchitka "the adventure of a lifetime."
The seismically active island with weekly earthquakes is a few miles from the international dateline and much closer to Russia than to mainland Alaska. Summer days are long and cold, and violent snowstorms aren't uncommon in the middle of July.
"You are really at the end of the earth on Amchitka," Volz said.
In the early 1960s, the government chose the 40-mile-long island for underground nuclear tests that were too large for Nevada. No one lives on Amchitka, although native Aleuts on Adak Island 155 miles away fish in the surrounding waters and view the region as their historic home.
Volz accompanied two teams of about a dozen scientists to the island this summer aboard a 160-foot trawler called the Ocean Expedition that doubled as a research laboratory and seafaring hotel.
The first team was in charge of oceanographic bottom mapping and land geophysics.
They used sonar to survey the ocean bottom near the blast cavities for fractures that might have been caused by the movement of the island chain, seismic activity or the bomb tests. These fractures could make it easier for radionuclides, such as cancer-causing plutonium, uranium and cesium, to escape into the ocean, Volz said.
In addition, the team used electronic underwater probes to look for indications that freshwater might be entering the ocean bottom. This could provide evidence that radionuclide-containing groundwater is flowing from the bomb cavities.
They also measured the depth of freshwater over the blast cavities to better predict the position of potential seepages.
The second group of scientists used these physical data to select the locations where radionuclides would be most likely to enter the sea.
They worked day and night at these sites for about six weeks to collect thousands of tissue samples from a dazzling menagerie of algae, small invertebrates such as sea urchins, fish and seabirds.
To do so, they braved storms on the open ocean with swells taller than 40 feet and winds fiercer than 80 mph. They rappelled down steep cliffs to a bald eagle's nest. They went scuba diving in freezing cold waters. They trekked through fields of waist-high tundra grass to search for ducks. They caught 150-pound halibut off the rear of their boat.
"Life's a little too mundane now that I'm back in Pittsburgh," Volz said. "I keep thinking I'd much rather be at the back end of a trawler with the waves breaking over my head."
The next steps
In the next few months, the samples of marine life collected at Amchitka will be analyzed for radioactive contamination by researchers at the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory and the Vanderbilt University Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering in Nashville.
These results will be compared to data gathered from an uncontaminated reference island nearby.
Of particular concern are birds and mammals -- including humans -- at the top of the food chain, which ingest all of the contaminants accumulated in the tissues of their food.
That's why commercial fishermen in Alaska and native Aleutians are anxiously awaiting results of the Amchitka study, which will not be published until spring, Volz said.
"I sincerely hope that we find no difference between the animals on Amchitka and those at our reference site," Volz said. "That would take us into really having to define a problem that might exist."
There is no way to plug a deep underwater radiation leak. If higher than normal levels of radionuclides are detected in the waters around Amchitka, the best solution would be a long-term monitoring program, Volz said.
If contamination is found, restrictions might have to be placed on fishing in certain areas, he said. Scientists also would have to determine the real risk posed to human health by eating fish caught near the island and issue warnings accordingly so people could make informed dietary decisions, Volz said.
In Pennsylvania, for example, state agencies caution against eating more than one serving a week of fish caught in state waterways because of concern about mercury and PCBs.
Lessons learned in the Aleutian Islands could be put to use at other so-called nuclear legacy sites, including those in Southwestern Pennsylvania, Volz said.
"We want to do the things we're doing at such faraway sites locally," he said. "There are a number of Superfund sites in the region that need to be (cleaned up), and the Graduate School of Public Health together with CRESP has the institutional capability to make this happen."
Jennifer Bails can be reached at jbails@tribweb.com or (412) 320-7991.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- idaho
Idaho National Laboratory may pick up plutonium project
Associated Press
Mon, Aug. 16, 2004
http://www.thestate.com/mld/thestate/news/local/9415931.htm
http://www.wkrn.com/Global/story.asp?S=2181027
IDAHO FALLS, Idaho - There are two finalists for a federal facility to produce the fuel for batteries to enable satellites and probes to flourish in space, an official said Monday.
The program to produce the radioactive fuel will either be housed at eastern Idaho's Argonne National Laboratory-West or at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.
The final decision depends on an environmental review by the Department of Energy, which will determine the future production of plutonium-238.
"That has to occur before we know whether more plutonium will be produced," spokesman Tim Jackson said Monday.
Plutonium-238 is made by processing neptunium-237, another radioactive element.
As it decays, plutonium generates heat which is used to make electricity inside radioisotopic thermal generators. This process has supplied power to probes NASA's Galileo and Cassini.
Although the Energy Department has already decided to move neptunium-237 from its Savannah River Site in South Carolina to Argonne-West, it is unclear when those shipments will begin, Jackson said.
Bill Magwood, director of nuclear energy research, decided to move the material to Argonne-West as part of the consolidation of nuclear energy research at the future Idaho National Laboratory.
The decision, announced Friday in the Federal Register, indicates the Idaho facility already meets stricter security requirements and has the storage space available for the neptunium, while the Oak Ridge site does not meet security standards.
Moving the entire plutonium project to Idaho is expected to carry a price tag of about $200 million.
At a hearing last month on the INL, Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., criticized spending the money on moving the program to Idaho. He said it would have been better spent on other projects.
Argonne-West is currently building a new radioisotopic thermal generators for a Pluto probe, scheduled to be launched in 2006.
The Idaho National Laboratory will be created in February by the merger of Argonne-West and the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory.
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
In Kabul, Private Jail Leads to Trial
Americans Accused In Kidnapping of At Least 8 Afghans
By Keith B. Richburg
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, August 16, 2004; Page A12
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A3653-2004Aug15?language=printer
KABUL, Afghanistan -- Mohammed Sadiq, a religious scholar and Supreme Court judge, thought the bearded men who had come to his Kabul home one morning in late June could only be U.S. soldiers. They carried sidearms and wore military-style clothing affixed with American flags, he recounted. Dark sunglasses covered their eyes. They spoke English as they barked orders to him and to their Afghan interpreters.
What came next for Sadiq were 12 days and 11 nights of torture.
He was kept naked and blindfolded in a small hut, forced to urinate and defecate where he sat, he said. His captors doused him with cold water and played deafeningly loud music next to him. Around him, he said, he could hear the screams of other people being tortured.
When he was freed on the 12th day of his ordeal, following a shootout that he heard but could not see, Sadiq said, he was told by an Afghan intelligence officer that he had not been arrested, but kidnapped. And his captors were not U.S. soldiers, but American civilians running a private war against suspected terrorists and al Qaeda members, and using a makeshift jail in a rented house to try to extract confessions.
Three Americans and four of their Afghan helpers are scheduled to go on trial Monday, including the alleged ringleader of the group, Jonathan Keith Idema, 48, of Fayetteville, N.C., a former Special Forces soldier who spent time in federal prison in the 1990s on fraud charges. He emerged in northern Afghanistan in 2001 as a self-described security consultant, supposedly assisting the Northern Alliance, the U.S.-supported Afghan group that was fighting the fundamentalist Taliban.
Idema -- who in Afghanistan used the first name "Jack" -- and his associates stand accused of entering the country illegally on false passports, causing insecurity in the country and kidnapping at least eight Afghans, including Sadiq. Kidnapping in Afghanistan carries the death penalty.
The two other Americans on trial are Brent Bennett and Edward Caraballo. Caraballo has said through his attorneys that he is not part of the group but was there as a freelance journalist to make a film about their anti-terrorist activities.
When the three were first brought to court in late July, Idema told reporters that his activities were sanctioned at the highest levels of the U.S. government, and that he had been in regular contact with the office of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. "We were working for the U.S. counter-terrorist group and working with the Pentagon and some other federal agencies," he said. "The American authorities absolutely condoned what we did."
The U.S. government, the American military in Afghanistan and the U.S. Embassy in Kabul have denied any connection to Idema and the others.
The only evidence Idema has offered publicly so far is that he once turned over an Afghan prisoner to U.S. military authorities at the Bagram air base north of Kabul. U.S. officials acknowledge receiving a prisoner from Idema. But a U.S. official said that authorities would accept any prisoner suspected of terrorist links and that the man brought by Idema was eventually found to be innocent and freed.
Idema is a colorful personality who became well known to foreign journalists in 2001 during fighting around the village of Jabal Saraj, north of Kabul. In January 2002, the CBS News program "60 Minutes" aired a videotape, provided by Idema, that was said to show an al Qaeda training camp.
In 1997, he sued the producer Steven Spielberg, claiming that the Special Forces character played by George Clooney in the movie "The Peacemaker" was modeled on him. Idema lost the suit.
Some Afghans involved in the case, including Sadiq, contend that Idema is a modern-day bounty hunter -- the U.S. government has offered as much as $50 million for Osama bin Laden and for other senior al Qaeda leaders. Others call Idema, Caraballo and Bennett misplaced adventurers -- zealots waging their own war against al Qaeda. Sadiq, the former prisoner, noted that his captors never asked him any questions and said simply: "They are criminals."
What is certain is that Idema was able to function relatively openly for so long because there are so many mysterious armed Westerners in Afghanistan and few people dare question them. Some of these men wear Afghan-style clothing and sport big beards and dark wrap-around sunglasses. Some drive sport-utility vehicles with darkened windows.
They may be operatives of Western intelligence agencies or private consultants hired to organize security. If the prosecutors pursuing Idema's group are right, some are entirely freelance, relying on swagger and military bearing to command authority.
Idema was even able get NATO forces operating here to assist his group in searching for bombs.
"The security forces are looking for other such groups," Abdulboset Bakhtiary, the judge presiding over Idema's case, said in an interview. "Their operating on Afghan territory threatens the sovereignty of Afghanistan."
Bakhtiary said he believes that the Americans are guilty, although he has yet to hear the evidence they plan to present in their defense. "I haven't seen anything to show that they are innocent," he said in the interview. "Everything we have seen here shows they are guilty. They came here illegally and they had a private jail."
The presiding judge said he gave no credence to Idema's claims that his actions were sanctioned by the U.S. government. "During questioning, they didn't claim they were working for the Americans," he said. "They just mentioned private connections with some authorities."
Bakhtiary dismissed the claims that Caraballo was just chronicling the group's activities for a film. "He was helping them all the time, so we count him as an accomplice," Bakhtiary said. "If he was a journalist, he had to know what his responsibility was. If they arrested people and tortured them, he had to report this. His silence shows his complicity."
Caraballo's Afghan-appointed lawyer, Najiba Rahmanzada Taj, seemed doubtful of her client's motives as well. "Edward says, 'I'm not connected to them, my job was just to take pictures,' " she said in an interview at her home. "I still don't know if he was working as a journalist or as a colleague of theirs." She said all three men entered Afghanistan on false Indian passports, traveling from India.
Rahmanzada Taj said she visited the three men in the Kabul prison, where they are being held along with Taliban and al Qaeda suspects, and found them all worried about their fate. She said they were wearing Afghan clothes and had bare feet. Caraballo asked for slippers.
-------
Afghans Hail Chance for a Choice
As Enthusiasm Builds Around Election, Political Intrigue May Cause Dangerous Split
By Pamela Constable
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, August 16, 2004; Page A12
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A3736-2004Aug15.html
BAZARAK, Afghanistan -- Like virtually every adult in this Panjshir Valley village, Rahmal Beg registered to vote weeks ago. Indeed, popular enthusiasm is so high for the Oct. 9 presidential election -- the first in Afghan history -- that thousands of people in the valley have reportedly registered twice.
"Everyone wants to vote," the 75-year-old farmer said proudly. "The radio, the mullahs and the district officials have all promoted the election. This is our chance to choose a leader who is patriotic and Islamic. Our valley was the center of resistance against the Russians and the Taliban. Now we want to become the center of democracy."
Given the hectic and frequently dangerous conditions for voter registration during the past six months, Afghan and U.N. officials view double registration as a minor flaw in an unexpectedly successful process. By Sunday, when the registration period ended, more than 9.9 million people -- slightly more than the estimated number of eligible voters -- had signed up nationwide.
But beneath the formal momentum of public participation and choice, Afghan and foreign analysts say, murkier pressures are at work. These include deal-making among candidates, drug money influence and old ethnic rivalries that could undermine the election's legitimacy as a historic test of political freedom in Afghanistan.
Until recently, international concern has focused on the problem of terrorist violence from Islamic extremist groups, including the revived Taliban militia, which has vowed to stymie the election and has recently attacked rural aid workers, voter registration aides, police stations and U.S. military patrols and outposts, especially in the desolate southeast.
Terrorism, however, is only one threat to a fair and free vote. Behind-the-scenes maneuvering, observers said, could dangerously split the election along the same ethnic lines that led to civil war in the 1990s -- or reduce it to a formality that ushers in a new coalition government between President Hamid Karzai and the same group of controversial militia leaders with whom he has shared power for the past 32 months.
"In a country like ours, an election can be a double-edged knife that can hurt or kill democracy," said Homayoun Shah Assefy, 64, a lawyer and political scientist who recently returned to Kabul, the capital, from long exile in France and is running for president. Assefy said Karzai, the front-runner, might well win at the polls -- only to enter office hamstrung by pre-election backroom deals that leave him tainted and paralyzed as a leader.
Only three weeks ago, Karzai seemed assured of gaining the majority of votes needed to win a first-round election. Installed by the United Nations in late 2001 and backed by the Bush administration, he had no serious rivals among 23 candidates. The scion of a noble ethnic Pashtun clan, he was popular with the public and enjoyed the advantages of incumbency such as the use of state media.
The president, sometimes criticized as a weak leader, also appeared to be taking an increasingly hard line with Afghanistan's regional strongmen, known as warlords, who have resisted international demands to disarm their forces, and who brawl among themselves and pose a perennial threat to central power.
But on July 26, this tough stance appeared to backfire. Karzai announced he was dropping Marshal Mohammed Fahim, the defense minister and Panjshiri militia leader, from his ticket as first vice president. Stung, Fahim and other Panjshiris in Karzai's shaky coalition cabinet bolted and put forth a rival candidate, Education Minister Yonus Qanooni.
Qanooni is a professional respected in Afghanistan and a former aide to Ahmed Shah Massoud, the ethnic Tajik guerrilla fighter who was assassinated in 2001. Qanooni might not be able to beat Karzai, experts said, but he could easily force the elections into a second round, from which a much weaker winner would emerge.
Last week, the plot thickened when the national election commission announced the final list of 18 presidential candidates. The list included two other ethnic minority militia leaders -- Mohammed Mohaqeq and Gen. Abdurrashid Dostum -- despite rules barring any candidate who had remained in command of private troops or abused human rights.
Some election experts here welcomed the field of candidates as a positive step for Afghanistan's democracy in the rough. They argued that it was preferable to have warlords competing for office than shooting at each other, and they noted that all major candidates had pointedly selected running mates from different ethnic groups than their own.
But other Afghan and foreign observers expressed concern that minor candidates, including a female physician and a poet, would become bartering chips in a race dominated by gladiatorial rivals, and that these strongmen might either end up in a bloody ethnic slugfest or buy up shares of power in a future Karzai administration.
"Qanooni offers a tangible alternative to leadership, and it's healthy to have so many candidates," said Grant Kippen, with the U.S.-based National Democratic Institute here. "But it's the credibility of the process that matters most. In the end, people will ask whether the process has contributed to removing people who rule by the gun, or whether it has instead allowed them to participate and become legitimate."
The voters have made it clear they are looking for a fresh political start.
In the Panjshir Valley, a beautiful but war-ravaged region north of Kabul badly in need of paved roads, electricity and water, Qanooni -- the native son and heir apparent to the revered guerrilla fighter Massoud -- seems the obvious choice to bring home those benefits.
Yet in village after riverside village, residents said they were exhausted from years of ethnic fighting and planned to vote for whichever candidate seemed to offer the best chance for economic stability and national unity.
"I fought in the holy war against the Russians like everyone else, and I would vote for a man who had Massoud's qualities," said Shah Agha, 28, a shopkeeper in the village of Rokha. "But I really don't care if the winner comes from the Panjshir or not, as long as he wins fairly. We have never had elections before, and the only thing that matters to me is that they are fair and impartial."
In Kandahar province, six Taliban rebels were killed and 11 captured in an air and ground assault by U.S. and Afghan government forces Sunday, the Reuters news service reported, citing a government spokesman. Earlier in the day, a Taliban spokesman said rebels had killed six Afghan army troops in a pre-dawn raid on a military post in the province.
--------
Afghan Forces Retake Air Base
August 16, 2004
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/16/international/asia/16afghan.html?pagewanted=all
KABUL, Afghanistan, Aug. 15 - Forces of the newly trained Afghan National Army took control of an air base in the western province of Herat, where 21 people were killed Friday night after a local commander attacked the base, the president's office announced Sunday. Two more battalions of the new multiethnic army were dispatched to the province on Sunday, forcing back the forces of the governor, Ismail Khan.
In southern Afghanistan, fighting against suspected Taliban members continued in two areas. Seven government soldiers were killed as they slept in their checkpoint west of Kandahar on Saturday night. Eight suspected Taliban fighters were killed and 11 detained by Afghan government forces in a clash near the Pakistani border, local officials said.
--------
Tora Bora army strikes back at the Janjaweed
16 August 2004
UK Independent
By Kim Sengupta in Hijer, Darfur
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/africa/story.jsp?story=551868
The Tora Bora soldiers were exultant. They had fought off a Janjaweed and government force, and the next operation, they insisted, would be even more spectacular.
Commander Ibrahim was apologetic for the lack of suku suku, the local beer made out of sorghum, but there was no shortage of rice or goat meat to celebrate the victory.
"The battle was over there, and it was a big battle," said the commander, waving his arm across the fields and wadis.
"We fought the military and the Janjaweed. They were many times our size, but they did not have our bravery and skills with weapons. They are good at killing women and children, but they cannot fight men like us."
His men around him laughed and cheered and waved their tin plates and complimented each other. One tried to pick up his Kalashnikov for a spot of ceremonial shooting but dropped it through his greasy fingers, making those around him flinch.
The "battle" appeared to have really been little more than a skirmish. The Tora Bora had suffered few casualties; one man had a wounded leg where a bullet had passed through without hitting any bones, and another had dislocated his shoulder swinging a heavy machine-gun too enthusiastically. It is doubtful that the enemy had fared any worse.
The fighters, about 70 of them, were resting at a sprawling abandoned village north-east of Nyala, the capital of south Darfur. They were a mixture of tribes - the Masalit, Fur, Zaghawa, Birgit and Daju - from the hills of Jabal Mara and Toor. They had adopted their name - from the Afghan mountain where the Taliban and its al-Qa'ida allies fought one of their last battles - to symbolise their own martial prowess.
Not all the fighters were purely black. Some had Arab blood, an example of the complex relationship between the two communities despite the savage internecine conflict.
The Janjaweed, blamed for the worst of the brutalities, is a government-backed Arab militia. But some of its fights have been against other Arab tribes which refused to join attacks on African civilians or rebels.
"My mother is Terjem, an Arab, and my father is from the Daju, which is African," said Ahmed Adem Abdurrahman, 26. "But I hate the Janjaweed. They are thieves and murderers. Other Arabs should be ashamed of them. When I am shooting my rifle at them, I feel proud. They attacked the Mahaliyah [another Arab tribe], but they were fought off."
The Tora Bora fighters take care to look tough. They have Rambo headbands and wraparound sunglasses, bandoliers of cartridges slung across naked chests. They carry an assortment of light weaponry - semi-automatic rifles, rocket-propelled grenade launchers, an old flame thrower which appeared not to work, and a machine-gun. Most of the weapons, they said, had been captured from government troops and their militia allies.
Suleiman Ali Wahid had brought his own weapons. A policeman for 12 years, he deserted after the Sudanese army and the Janjaweed sacked the village of Yassin in June despite repeated protests by him and others in the area's police force that no rebels were present.
"The soldiers were in Land Cruisers and the Janjaweed came on camels and horses. We kept on saying that this was a mistake, there were no [rebels] there. We would have known; we were the police. But they would not listen. They burned the village and killed around 20 people," Mr Wahid said. "Three of us decided to leave the following day. I took four rifles and some ammunition and headed north where my people were. I ended up with the Tora Bora."
The government insists that groups such as the Tora Bora are criminals and terrorists who have been responsible for countless murders and widespread looting.
Commander Ibrahim, 42, a farmer who took up arms after his wife and two children were killed in a government attack in north Darfur, denies this. "We do not kill civilians, that is the job of Khartoum," he said.
But in Arab refugee camps near Nyala can be heard accounts of the Tora Bora executing men they claimed were Janjaweed and driving Arabs from their villages.
Noura Mohammed and Ayasha Abdullah Abu were kidnapped near the village of Mirair by, they say, the Tora Bora. They were released, unharmed, three days later, and Commander Ibrahim even gave them some money to get home. But two male relations with them, Yaheer Abdullah and Mousa Hamid Mohammed, are still missing. "We can only hope they are still alive," said Ms Abu.
-------- africa
Rwanda Sends Troops to Protect Truce Monitors in Sudan
By Josphat Kasire
Associated Press
Monday, August 16, 2004; Page A18
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A3647-2004Aug15.html
El FASHER, Sudan, Aug. 15 -- Dozens of Rwandan soldiers flew into Sudan's troubled Darfur region Sunday, the first foreign armed forces deployed in the area since Arab militiamen began a rampage against black African farmers, killing tens of thousands.
The 141 Rwandan troops, as part of an African Union force, were airlifted to the huge, desert province of western Sudan on a mandate to protect unarmed military observers monitoring a four-month cease-fire that humanitarian groups say has largely been ignored by the Arab militiamen, called the Janjaweed.
Rwandan President Paul Kagame has said his troops would also use force to protect endangered civilians.
As many as 50,000 people have been killed in the fighting, 1.5 million have been forced from their homes and 2.2 million are in urgent need of aid, according to the U.N. and U.S. officials, who have called Darfur the worst humanitarian crisis in the world.
The U.N. Security Council passed a resolution on July 30 that gave Sudan 30 days to act to disarm the militiamen. The government has been accused of backing the Arab militiamen in its effort to put down rebel groups.
The Rwandan troops are part of a 300-member African force Sudan was pressed to allow into Darfur.
The troops were trucked to a camp immediately after landing in El Fasher, capital of the Northern Darfur state. They will be deployed to five other areas, including a region in neighboring Chad where thousands of people have sought refuge.
Nigerian troops are expected to enter Darfur on Aug. 25, the African Union said in a statement.
"All my troops are on board; we hope our mission in Darfur will be of great benefit to our African brothers there," Maj. Emmanuel Rugazora, commander of the Rwandan army contingent sent to Darfur, said while boarding a transport plane.
An advance team of a dozen Rwandan troops was airlifted to Darfur on Saturday aboard a cargo aircraft carrying armored personnel carriers, arms, ammunition and other military supplies for the troops. Rwanda has been pushing African leaders to give the troops a formal mandate to use force to stop attacks on civilians.
--------
Crisis in Sudan:
Thorny Issues Underlying Carnage in Darfur Complicate World's Response
August 16, 2004
By SOMINI SENGUPTA
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/16/international/africa/16sudan.html?pagewanted=all&position=
DJAMENA, Chad, Aug. 15 - There is no disagreement about the consequences of the war under way in Sudan, Africa's largest country: tens of thousands killed, cholera outbreaks, severe malnutrition, more than a million people forced to flee their homes, many into neighboring countries like Chad.
Yet there is deep disagreement among world leaders over how to respond. The stalemate comes from issues underlying the conflict in Darfur, a region in western Sudan: questions of racial identity, competition for natural resources and the imperatives of a powerful sovereign state.
Unfortunately for the victims of the war, the international response is also complicated by issues that reach beyond this conflict. First, in pitting Arab herders against black African farmers, the civil war in western Sudan underscores a larger struggle for power, land and water that cuts across borders in this arid part of Africa. Second, efforts to address the Darfur crisis have become entangled in the larger grievances of the Arab world - not least, the United States-dominated war in Iraq.
The result? The Arab Islamist government of Sudan, joined by its allies in the Arab League, has angrily accused Western countries of ganging up against an Arab-led government to exploit its oil and gold reserves. The Bush administration has dismissed that contention, and the United States Congress has accused the Arab militias, backed by Sudan and known as the Janjaweed, of genocide against Darfur's black Africans. Nearly 150,000 black Africans have fled to seek refuge on the barren eastern frontiers of Chad.
The United Nations, meanwhile, has threatened unspecified penalties if Sudan cannot prove by Aug. 31 that it can restore stability. Sudan and its allies have resolutely opposed outside intervention, like the deployment of foreign peacekeeping forces. And Europe and the United States have left it to the fledgling African Union, which represents the continent's governments, to handle matters on the ground.
The Darfur crisis has presented a stark challenge to African leaders: How is Africa to live with its diversity, specifically its Arab and black African mix, and how are the continent's leaders, in fashioning a response in Darfur, to balance the claims of a sovereign state and an emergency facing ordinary Africans? Fortunately, for African leaders, this conflict has no religious divide: both sides are Muslims.
The African Union has dispatched monitors to Darfur to oversee the cease-fire declared in April and has invited the Sudanese government and the two Darfur rebel groups to peace talks, starting Aug. 23, in Abuja, the capital of Nigeria. It is also sending a few hundred peacekeepers to Darfur, but only to protect its monitors, not Sudanese civilians.
On Sunday, about 150 Rwandan troops were en route. Nigerians are scheduled to arrive in 10 days.
"The Sudan government sees the A.U. as their best option," said one Western diplomat here. "Wider international intervention is a bigger problem for Sudan than the A.U."
Clearly, the biggest potential threat for Sudan is the United Nations Security Council's deadline and the prospect of penalties.
With little more than two weeks left, the United Nations secretary general's special representative for Darfur, Jan Pronk, described conditions as bleak and dangerous.
"There is no improvement in terms of safety, there is more fighting, the humanitarian situation is as bad as it was," Mr. Pronk said Friday in a telephone interview from his office in Khartoum, Sudan's capital.
Since February 2003, the war in Darfur, sparked by a rebel insurgency demanding political and economic rights for the people of western Sudan, has killed 50,000 civilians and displaced more than a million Sudanese, the United Nations estimates.
Mr. Pronk said he met with Sudanese authorities on Thursday and laid out a timetable: Instruct local authorities in Darfur to disarm the Janjaweed in the next 10 days and demonstrate "a substantial improvement in security" in the 10 days after that.
"Local authorities should be forced to do what the national government has decided," Mr. Pronk added. "It cannot be done in Khartoum only. It has to be done in Darfur. No attacks by the army. Exercise restraint. Even if the army is attacked by rebels, no retaliation."
Also on Friday, the government ordered tribal leaders in Darfur's three provinces to start disarming the Janjaweed, The Associated Press reported.
Mr. Pronk credited President Omar el-Bashir of Sudan with having ordered the military to refrain from air raids and other attacks, but blamed the government-allied militias for violating the April cease-fire.
"There are Janjaweed militia under the influence of the government," he said. "We do not know how many. However, they are under influence of government, and they are continuing attacks."
Sudan has rejected foreign military intervention, saying it alone is responsible for security within its borders. Nigeria, the West African nation leading the peace talks, has already voiced frustration. "What has to be made clear is that if Sudan will not yield to gentle and African pressure it will have to succumb to extra-African pressure that might not be so gentle," Remi Oyo, the spokeswoman for President Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria, was quoted as saying in an Agence France-Presse report.
It is unclear whether the African Union will decide to send peacekeepers to protect civilians in Darfur - or whether Sudan, one of the union's member states, will allow it to do so.
Meanwhile, the most powerful Arab voice in the African Union, neighboring Libya, summoned both sides to informal talks late last week. One of those attending, Adam Shogar, of the Sudan Liberation Army, a Darfur rebel group, said in an interview here in Chad's capital that Libyan officials expressed to him their discomfort with the prospect of Western intervention in the region.
"They don't want the Americans and the others to come in," Mr. Shogar said. "I told them, 'Not America alone, if the devil himself comes in to protect us, we accept him.' ''
The Sudan Liberation Army and the other rebel group, the Justice and Equality Movement, have agreed to take part in the Abuja talks. But already, some have voiced cynicism about their prospects.
"We don't have full trust that the African Union has the capability of solving this problem because the Sudanese government is not going to listen to them," Ahmed Tugod Lissan, coordinator of Justice and Equality Movement, said in an interview here. "The Sudan government is building up for a war."
Depending on the role of the African Union on the ground and in negotiations, the crisis in Darfur will undoubtedly test its mettle as little else has. It will force the union to face the racial divide that has long bedeviled the continent in complicated ways, from a long tradition of slavery in Mauritania to recurrent clashes over land and water between Arab nomads against black African farmers here in Chad and in nearby Niger and Mali. Not least, the African Union itself must contend with Arab and African leaders within its ranks.
That delicate balance is being closely watched by those who are counting on the African Union to take charge of solving the Darfur crisis. After all, with widespread discontent in the Arab world over Iraq, neither Americans nor Europeans are keen to put troops on the ground in another Arab-led country."If the African Union splits over this issue, then its capacity to deal with this will diminish," said a senior European Union official in a recent telephone interview from Brussels. The Darfur crisis will also test how the African Union will balance the rights of a sovereign African nation with the rights of ordinary Africans.
-------- britain
Remembered: war-dead records go online
By Cahal Milmo
UK Independent
16 August 2004
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/this_britain/story.jsp?story=551875
A single line of smudgy black type reads "OWEN, Wilfred, lieutenant, Fifth Battalion Manchester Regiment". It is just one of more than 700,000 reminders of the carnage of the Great War kept in the dusty ledgers of a London archive.
But now the entry of the poet Wilfred Owen in the official index of war dead, along with those of his comrades fallen in both world wars, has leapt from the corridors of the General Register Office (GRO) to cyberspace.
From today, amateur historians and genealogists will be able to search a website for scanned images of the original death records of more than a million British soldiers killed in conflicts from the Boer War to the Korean War.
The records, provided by the GRO, which is responsible for registering births, deaths and marriages in Britain and abroad, are part of a database which includes several million documents gathered by officials while overseas.
Colin Miller, managing director of the website, www.1837online.com, said: "These are unique records of what happened to Britons abroad, from war to registrations at a foreign embassy or births while on board a ship.
"Until now people have had to get on a train to look at them but now they can be traced at home. It is poignant to think that so many thousands of men who died in two world wars can be traced at the click of a button."
According to one survey, one in eight Britons, some 7 million people, are actively tracing their family trees, spawning a succession of websites and discussion groups for genealogists. An attempt last year by the National Archives to place the 1901 census online collapsed under the weight of demand - three million hits in three hours. The service has since resumed but the thirst for online research has also attracted private "pay-per-view" companies, raising questions about their use of public records for profit.
Some websites, such as the American-based Rootsweb, offer their information for free. The Mormon church, which counts prayer for named ancestors as a tenet of its faith, has entered much of the data in the 12,000 parish registers in England and Wales for free.
Under current legislation companies can also buy a licence to use the records as a business but have to invest to scan and enter the data for their own use. Mr Miller, whose company is charging its 250,000 registered users a minimum of 10p for every page from the records viewed, insisted that the service was not over-priced.
He said: "We are not into ripping people off. Putting these records online is a time-consuming and expensive process.
"The growth in interest in genealogy goes across all age groups - we have many customers in their 20s. People want to know who they are, what their background is and the internet allows people to achieve that in a time frame that was simply impossible before now."
The website, which includes entries for other First World War poets such as Rupert Brooke and the man responsible for recruiting many British volunteers, Lord Kitchener, provides the name, rank, unit and reference number to obtain the death certificate of each soldier.
It also features a number of unusual archives such as the register of births at sea, under which it was customary for the child's second name to be that of the ship, and births in aircraft. One entry, for an Osman Fayyad born in 1954, reads: "Born over Syria, 30 miles east of home."
WILFRID OWEN: POET KILLED WEEK BEFORE PEACE
By Cahal Milmo
When Wilfred Owen's mother received the telegram informing her of her son's death, the bells were ringing to celebrate Armistice Day on 11 November 1918.
The 25-year-old poet had been killed by German machine gun fire a week earlier as he led his men in an assault across the Sambre-Oise canal in northern France.
His death, a month after he was awarded the Military Cross for bravery, cut short a career which produced two of the most powerful poetic condemnations of warfare, "Dulce et Decorum Est" and "Anthem for Doomed Youth".
But the son of a railway worker, who held the rank of lieutenant in the 2nd Manchester Regiment, had a low assessment of the value of his creative talents. A month before his death, he wrote: "I came out in order to help these boys - directly by leading them as well as an officer can; indirectly, by watching their sufferings that I may speak of them as well as a pleader can. I have done the first."
The young officer was injured in March 1917 and was sent home suffering from shell shock. It was at the Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh that he met fellow poet, Siegfried Sassoon, who became Owen's mentor. Sassoon, who encouraged him into a more direct style, returned to France only to suffer a further injury. Owen himself then returned to the front line, seeing it as his "poetic duty" to replace his friend.
-------- business
CONTRACTS AWARDED
Washington Post
Washington Technology
Monday, August 16, 2004; Page E04
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A3930-2004Aug15?language=printer
Anteon International Corp. of Fairfax, Booz Allen Hamilton Inc. of McLean, Maxim System Inc. and Science Applications International Corp., both of San Diego, won places on a four-year, $320 million contract from the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command to provide program management services. The four companies will compete with each other for work under the contract.
Battelle Memorial Institute of Columbus, Ohio, Booz Allen Hamilton Inc. of McLean, Johnson Controls Security Systems LLC of Milwaukee, Lockheed Martin Corp. of Bethesda, Science Applications International Corp. of San Diego, STG Inc. of Reston, Northrop Grumman IT TASC Inc. of Chantilly, URS Group Inc. of San Francisco and Unisys Corp. of Blue Bell, Pa., won positons on a five-year, $124 million Transportation Department contract to provide vulnerability assessments, security planning and security system design, installation and testing. The companies will compete with each for work under the contract.
DigitalNet Holdings Inc. of Herndon won a four-year, $11.5 million contract from the Justice Department's antitrust division to provide network and desktop support services.
Northrop Grumman IT of Herndon won a five-year, $16.9 million contract to develop a database that will be used to centralize and integrate data for six pathogens that pose significant public health threats and could be used as bio-terrorism agents.
Northrop Grumman Corp. of Los Angeles won a five-year, $71.2 million order from the Army to provide acquisition and software support for command and control program readiness.
Northrop Grumman Newport News Shipbuilding of Newport News, Va., won a $36.7 million contract from the Naval Sea Systems Command for the interim dry-docking of USS Hyman G. Rickover.
Advanced Technologies & Laboratories of Germantown and Westat Inc. of Rockville won a $3.5 million contract from the Health and Human Services Department for research and development services.
Honeywell Technology Solutions Inc. of Columbia won a $1.5 million contract from the Army for operation and maintenance of the Detrick Earth Station in support of the Direct Communications Link.
Creative Associates International Inc. of Washington won a $10 million contract from the General Services Administration for management, organizational and business improvement services.
1120 Vermont Avenue Associates LLP of Washington won a $3.4 million contract from the General Services Administration for lease or rental of office space.
Skyhawk Logistics Inc. of Silver Spring won a $20 million contract from the General Services Administration for logistics worldwide.
Techno-Sciences Inc. of Lanham won a $1.2 million contract from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration for Dass Developmental Local User Terminal Processor System.
John J. Kirlin Inc. of Rockville won a $50 million contract from the General Services Administration for facility maintenance and management solicitation.
Horizons Youth Services of Harrisonburg, Va., won a $17 million contract from the Labor Department for operation of the Muhlenberg Job Corps Center.
Wrightwood Properties Inc. of Arlington won a $1.25 million contract from the General Services Administration for management, organizational and business improvement services.
Stateside Associates of Arlington won a $1.25 million contract from the General Services Administration for management, organizational and business improvement services.
EF Kearney Ltd. of Alexandria won a $15 million contract from the General Services Administration for management, organizational and business improvement services.
1350 Piccard Limited Partnership of McLean won a $11.6 million contract from the General Services Administration for lease of office space.
L.E. Peabody & Associates Inc. of Alexandria won a $2.5 million contract from the General Services Administration for management, organizational and business improvement services.
Raven Services Corp. of Manassas won a $3.5 million contract from the General Services Administration for facility maintenance and management solicitation.
Computer Sciences Corp. of Falls Church won a $4.3 million contract from the Air Force Material Command.
Resource Consultants Inc. of Vienna won a $17 million contract from the Navy for Navigation Sensor System Interface and NAVSSI Lite.
Pitney Bowes of Annadale won a $1.5 million contract from the Coast Guard to buy of mailing systems, installation, scales, meter rental, training and maintenance of mailing equipment.
Staff writer Judith Mbuya contributed to this report.
--------
Local Contract BearingPoint Wins ID Project at TSA
By Patience Wait
The Washington Post
Monday, August 16, 2004; Page E04
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A3931-2004Aug15.html
BearingPoint Inc. of McLean won a $12 million contract from the Transportation Security Administration to begin the third phase in the agency's program to create a standard identification card for U.S. transportation employees.
During the seven-month project, BearingPoint will help the agency test a prototype of the biometric ID card, called the Transportation Worker Identification Credential. The prototype program will run at more than 40 sites involving 150,000 employees from maritime, rail, aviation and ground transportation.
The agency will collect the information necessary to issue the identification cards, perform background checks and study the day-to-day use of the smart cards by the workers as the agency prepares for a national rollout of the program.
BearingPoint will be responsible for the technical infrastructure for the cards, said Gordon Hannah, the company's program manager for the project. Among its tasks, BearingPoint will set up a Web site for workers to apply for cards. Employees will be required to appear in person to submit the necessary documents for authenticating identification, such as passports and driver's licenses. In some locations, workers may be fingerprinted as well.
While the government must approve workers for the credentials, BearingPoint will manage the process for issuing the cards. The company also will help the TSA write a report assessing the project and making recommendations for how to proceed in the next phase.
"It's a very complex system, and we want to make it as efficient as possible," Hannah said.
Eventually, the agency expects to issue the cards to as many as 12 million workers to improve security at airports, ports and other transportation facilities.
A prototype biometric card is to be tested in three regions: Camden, N.J., Islip, N.Y., Philadelphia and Wilmington, Del.; the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, Calif.; and the 14 major port facilities in Florida.
TSA spokesman Darrin Kayser said the three regions volunteered to participate. The agency has selected a card incorporating an integrated circuit chip as the standard to be evaluated during the pilot program, though other technologies, such as optical memory strips, magnetic stripes, 2-D bar codes, linear bar codes and digital photographs, will be supported to facilitate the use of legacy systems now in place, Kayser said.
As part of the testing program, the TSA will be doing background checks on transportation workers in California and the Delaware River Valley who volunteer to participate. "Florida has a state law that requires certain aspects of this [program], and they will be doing background checks beyond what we're doing," Kayser said. "They'll be doing fingerprints."
BearingPoint was one of four prime contractors chosen by the TSA for the first or planning phase of the card program; the other three were Northrop Grumman Corp. of Los Angeles; Maximus Inc. of Reston, and EDS Corp. of Plano, Tex. The second phase, evaluating alternative technologies, was awarded to Maximus, with EDS as a teammate.
For more details on this and other technology contracts, go to www.washingtontechnology.com. Patience Wait is a staff writer with Washington Technology.
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US mooting Aegis destroyer sales to Taiwan following sub deal: report
TAIPEI (AFP)
Aug 16, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040816082524.u30o2hp9.html
The United States is expected to announce sales of four destroyers armed with advanced Aegis systems to Taiwan if a controversial arms package which includes the purchase of eight submarines is approved by Taipei's parliament, a report said Monday.
The proposed sale of four Aegis destroyers for 120 billion Taiwan dollars (3.5 billion US) is likely to draw protests from Beijing as it would boost Taiwan's naval defense capabilities against rival China.
China has told the United States it should stop selling advanced arms to Taiwan and cut military links with the island if it wants to improve bilateral relations.
The Taipei-based China Times said Taiwan had told the US it wants to buy the four destroyers and that Washington could "announce the sales next year".
It said that once the destroyer deal clears the parliamentary floor the Taiwanese navy would be able to acquire the first Aegis system in 2011.
The defense ministry declined to comment on the reports.
Taiwan's military is seeking parliament's approval of the planned 610 billion Taiwan dollar arms purchase from the United States which includes eight diesel-powered submarines, anti-missile Patriot systems and 12 submarine-hunting P-3C aircraft.
Following complaints from lawmakers that the arms package was too expensive, Defense Minister Lee Jye last week agreed to cut costs by about 93 billion Taiwan dollars.
Parliament speaker Wang Jin-pyng had already asked Washington to lower the price of the package while on a trip to the United States in June.
Beijing has ratcheted its rhetoric against Taipei since the March re-election of pro-independence President Chen Shui-bian, strengthening its vow to take Taiwan by force should the island declare formal independence.
Chen has argued the island needs to upgrade its weapons capability to deter the military threat from China.
The two sides split in 1949 at the end of civil war.
-------- iraq
100 desert Iraq conference
16aug04
Australia Daily Sun
By Sam Dagher in Baghdad
http://www.heraldsun.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5478,10453960%5E421,00.html
A NATIONAL conference, hailed as Iraq's first experiment in democracy for decades, got off to a rocky start today when more than 100 delegates walked out to protest against fighting in the holy city of Najaf.
Dozens of people leapt out of their seats as soon as UN special envoy to Iraq Ashraf Jehangir Qazi finished his opening speech. "As long as there are air strikes and shelling we can't have a conference," some shouted.
Yahya Mussawi, from a Shiite Muslim political grouping that helped defuse a spring uprising by militia leader Moqtada al-Sadr, jumped on the stage before he was forced down by chief organiser Fuad Maasum.
"Part of democracy is that you listen to the Iraqi people. It is time that you heard us and we ask that military operations stop in Najaf immediately and dialogue takes place," Mr Mussawi shouted.
"Listen to us, prime minister, listen to us," said the protesters, as Mr Maasum announced a 30-minute break in the proceedings.
The protesters threatened to withdraw from the conference unless US-led military operations against Sadr's fighters in Najaf were not halted.
Gunfire resumed almost simultaneously in Najaf, a day after the government said its offensive against Sadr's Mehdi Army would continue in the wake of failed peace talks.
Delegates also demanded that a national council, which the conference delegates are due to appoint, be allowed to impeach members of the interim government if they decided they are not serving the interests of Iraqis.
They also demanded that groups excluded from the event, among them Sadr's camp, be included.
During the break, mortar bombs exploded in the Green Zone, shaking the building as organisers of the conference screamed at participants to get away from the windows of the convention centre.
An AFP correspondent inside the building heard at least five or six explosions and described the atmosphere as very tense.
Three columns of smoke could be seen rising into the air from within the heavily fortified area, which houses the seat of the interim government and the US embassy.
Speaking to CNN, UN adviser Jamal Benomar said the conference's delayed start, after being originally due to take place late last month, had enabled the event to be more complete.
"I can say that there is a very diverse group of people here," he said.
Asked about the mortar explosions he said only: "We're getting used to this living here in Baghdad."
The conference is scheduled to first hold working sessions to discuss the transition process, human rights, reconstruction and the issue of justice for those who suffered under Saddam Hussein's former dictatorship.
On the last day, delegates will select 81 members of the national council to advise the government as it paves the way for national elections scheduled for January 2005.
The other 19 seats have already been allocated to members of the defunct interim Governing Council that served between Saddam's fall and the creation of the caretaker government in early June.
"We are laying the first building blocks for our country's march towards democracy and ridding ourselves of the 35-year legacy of the previous regime," Mr Maasum said as the conference opened.
Clashes also broke out between US soldiers and insurgents on Baghdad's Haifa Street, one of the areas included in a government curfew until 4pm (10pm AEST) for the conference, a US soldier at the scene told AFP.
"A few rounds of mortars were fired on Haifa Street, but we have no information about casualties," he said on condition of anonymity.
"The firing is sporadic but quite regular," he said, adding that US forces also found an explosive device outside the health ministry.
An AFP correspondent saw at least half a dozen Humvees and around 20 US soldiers in the area, with the street deserted and blocked off.
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Protest at Iraq Forum Reshapes Najaf Crisis
Angry Delegates Put 'Democracy in Action'
By Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, August 16, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A2540-2004Aug15.html
BAGHDAD, Aug. 15 -- More than 1,100 Iraqis convened Sunday for the start of a conference aimed at selecting a national assembly, a milestone in the country's transition to democracy, but the high-security meeting was roiled by a dispute over the use of military force to confront militiamen loyal to a rebellious Shiite Muslim cleric.
In a remarkable scene of political activism that would have been unimaginable under Baath Party rule, dozens of Shiite delegates jumped to their feet in a loud protest of the interim government's decision to mount military operations to evict followers of the cleric, Moqtada Sadr, from a Shiite shrine in the holy city of Najaf. Chanting "Yes to Najaf!" and raising their fists, the Shiite dissenters demanded that the participants call on the interim prime minister and Sadr's followers to refrain from violence and for a special committee of delegates to negotiate a solution to the crisis.
The outburst triggered a succession of events that quickly reshaped government policy toward Najaf and instilled the first measure of checks-and-balances in Iraq's nascent political system. The Shiite protesters, along with several non-Shiite participants, caucused and drafted a letter to interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi and his cabinet that called for a dialogue with Sadr and "an immediate cease-fire and cessation of all military activities in Najaf and other Iraqi cities."
A four-person delegation from the conference then met with Allawi. When the meeting was over, the government announced that its plans to use force to expel Sadr from the Imam Ali shrine were on hold. In a reversal from its position a day earlier, Allawi's cabinet issued a statement pledging to refrain from military action against Sadr's militiamen and to keep an "open door" to a negotiated settlement.
"This is democracy in action," said Ibrahim Nawar, a U.N. adviser who helped organize the conference. "For now, at least, they have succeeded in changing the government's approach toward the situation in Najaf."
Although senior officials said units from the Iraqi army would still be deployed to Najaf to prepare for an assault on the shrine should Sadr not withdraw, they acknowledged their strategy had shifted. "We're going to give time for a peaceful solution," said Wael Abdul-Latif, the minister of state for provincial affairs.
Shortly after the Shiite protest, a half-dozen mortar rounds landed near the heavily fortified conference center, killing two people and wounding 17 others at a nearby transportation depot, where three buses were reduced to charred hulks. The meeting was not interrupted, but the attack pierced an extraordinary security umbrella that involved curfews in nearby neighborhoods and numerous vehicle checkpoints.
The Shiite protest over Najaf provided a window into the chaotic fervor with which Iraqis are embracing democracy. Through their demands of Allawi, the delegates started to create a balance of power in the political system, even before winnowing themselves into a 100-member national assembly. But the protest also revealed the degree of Sadr's influence and the extent to which Iraqi society remains riven by differences that could impede its democratic transition.
Speaker after speaker rose to condemn the use of force against Sadr and his militiamen. "What is happening in Najaf is much more important than this conference and demands our immediate attention," one man intoned. Another likened the tactics used by U.S. and Iraqi security forces to those employed by the military under Saddam Hussein's government to crush Shiite dissent. A woman rose to criticize Sadr, saying "it is not American cannons" that are responsible for the bloodshed there, but was shouted down.
Members of the interim government have maintained that few Iraqis endorse Sadr's lawlessness and that many back Allawi's tough tactics to restore order in this strife-torn country. But the delegates, who are supposed to represent Iraq's 25 million people, took a more nuanced approach to the standoff in Najaf, where scores of fighters from Sadr's Mahdi Army militia have been holed up in the Imam Ali shrine. Despite strong support for aggressive action to combat criminals and insurgents, many of the conference participants -- not just Shiites, but rival Sunnis as well -- rejected the idea of using force to liberate the shrine and apprehend Sadr, who is a descendant of the prophet Muhammad.
"We want the immediate stoppage of bloodshed in Najaf," said Hussein Mohammed Hadi Sadr, a Shiite cleric who is a distant relative of Moqtada Sadr and served as the conference's chief emissary to the prime minister. "It is a holy place. We should not fight there. The language of dialogue should be the overruling language."
Others were more blunt. "How can we have a conference if we have a war in Najaf?" growled Nadim Jabbari, the leader of a small Shiite party in Baghdad. "We must solve that problem first."
Solving that problem delayed other business at the conference. The delegates are supposed to select a 100-member interim national assembly by Tuesday. By the end of the day Sunday, they had not even agreed on the rules by which members would be elected. The organizers want delegates to vote on slates of 81 candidates -- 19 members of the former U.S.-appointed Governing Council have been guaranteed seats -- but some participants, particularly those who are political independents, say they believe that method favors political parties and instead want assembly members to be elected individually.
The assembly, which will have the authority to veto decisions issued by Allawi's cabinet, will be replaced after national elections are held. Those elections are scheduled for January.
The conference had been postponed for two weeks to attract more participants. It was supposed to be limited to 1,000 members, but political advisers from the United Nations asked organizers to invite 300 additional people, many of them from religious and ethnic groups that were deemed underrepresented. More than 1,100 of the 1,300 attended on Sunday, said Fouad Masoum, the conference chairman.
"Your blessed gathering here is a challenge to the forces of evil and tyranny that want to destroy this country," Allawi told participants in an opening address. He called the gathering a "first step that will open up horizons of dialogue" and serve as "an example for democracy and freedom" in the Middle East.
But it was Allawi's vow last week that he would not negotiate with Sadr that resonated even more profoundly at the conference. Abdul-Latif, the minister of state for provincial affairs, said that the government had repeatedly asked Sadr to withdraw his militia from the shrine. Abdul-Latif also noted that Allawi's national security adviser recently traveled to Najaf to negotiate, but Sadr would not meet with him.
Abdul-Latif said the government would give Sadr "reasonable time" but not an indefinite period. If the militiamen do not vacate soon, he said, "we will pursue them."
Conference organizers said a group of delegates would travel to Najaf, perhaps as early as Monday, to try to persuade Sadr and his militia to withdraw from the shrine and lay down their weapons.
In his opening address, President Ghazi Yawar urged the delegates to "achieve national consensus and agreement."
Ashraf Jehangir Qazi, a former Pakistani ambassador to Washington who is serving as U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan's special representative in Iraq, told delegates that the gathering was "a critical milestone on the path toward a goal shared by all Iraqis -- the goal of seeing their beloved country become a stable, pluralistic and inclusive democracy." He insisted that strife could not be addressed "through security measures alone. They require political consensus-building, rehabilitation measures and the promotion of the rule of law."
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U.S. Troops Stay Active in Najaf
Fight Iraq Delays Plan To Use Force Against Militia
By Karl Vick
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, August 16, 2004; Page A14
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A3690-2004Aug15.html
NAJAF, Iraq Aug. 15 -- Combat resumed in Najaf on Sunday, as U.S. forces edged into the narrow streets surrounding the shrine of Imam Ali and militiamen fired mortars and rocket-propelled grenades from around the holy site that serves as their firebase.
The renewed clashes signaled that U.S. forces intend to remain active in the fight, a day after Iraq's interim government announced it was dispatching the Iraqi army to lead the battle against forces loyal to Moqtada Sadr, a rebellious Shiite Muslim cleric. But the government said Sunday that its plans to use force to expel Sadr from the shrine were on hold.
A Marine commander said the U.S. forces were trying to keep pressure on the militia, called the Mahdi Army, while awaiting the arrival of the newly trained Iraqi troops.
"The Iraqi government has asked us to squeeze in," said Maj. David Holahan of the 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit.
Two soldiers were killed in fighting in the city's vast graveyard, bringing to eight the number of U.S. military deaths in the area since Aug. 5. U.S. commanders said they inflicted substantial casualties on the militiamen.
After dark, U.S. military spotters called in a series of deafening artillery barrages on the cemetery, targeting a concentration of militiamen more than a mile from the shrine, said Marine Capt. Coby Moran. At the same time, troops from the Army's 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry Regiment conducted raids in Najaf's old city, a neighborhood south of the sacred site.
During daylight, mortar fire, rocket-propelled grenades, tank rounds, machine-gun fire and the crack of sniper rifles echoed intermittently across the sun-baked downtown, largely deserted by residents ordered to evacuate the crowded neighborhoods near the gold-domed shrine.
Iraqi police swept into the hotel housing international and Iraqi journalists and threatened to arrest anyone who did not leave the city. A reporter for an Iranian satellite channel was reportedly taken into custody while broadcasting live from a rooftop.
The order added to concerns about restrictions on the news media in the new Iraq. Earlier this month, the interim government closed the Baghdad office of the al-Jazeera satellite television station, saying the Qatar-based network was encouraging the insurgency.
Details of the Iraqi deployment remained uncertain. Defense Minister Hazim Shalan visited a Marine base in Najaf, but afterward senior officers said they remained uncertain how many Iraqi troops would arrive, or when.
The U.S. commander said forces supported the decision to use Iraqis in the crisis, given the unpopularity of U.S. forces 16 months after the invasion that toppled the government of president Saddam Hussein and the extraordinary sensitivities surrounding the shrine.
But officers also said they were concerned that the delay would mean more casualties, and they expressed frustration with the closely circumscribed rules of engagement involving combat near the sacred site. At one point in the afternoon, troops in the cemetery north of the shrine dodged more than 15 mortar shells fired from 150 yards outside the shrine, but could not return fire.
"We're taught: You receive fire, you go forward, destroy it," said Maj. Bob Pizzitola, executive officer of the 1st Battalion, 5th Cavalry Regiment. "But we understand the bigger picture. If we were to do that, we'd have a bigger fight on our hands throughout Iraq.
"We understand we can't do it, but it's frustrating, like being the designated driver."
A decorative perimeter wall surrounding the mosque was damaged by an explosion Sunday, prompting coverage on Arabic-language satellite channels and ardent vows from volunteers to protect the site. The source of the explosion could not be learned precisely, but around 2:30 p.m., a U.S. tank had fired a 120mm round in the general direction, targeting a house from which militiamen had fired five rocket-propelled grenades within five minutes. Pizzitola said it was "possible, but unlikely" that the round reached the wall after piercing the house.
That exchange signaled the beginning of a steady uptick in combat throughout the day and into the night. Capt. Brian Ennesser, the 1st Battalion's intelligence officer, said Sadr's besieged forces used a cease-fire over the weekend as an opportunity to evacuate wounded fighters, bring in food and ammunition, and plant booby traps along routes used by U.S. forces.
The lull also might have provided an opening for additional fighters to reach the city. Ten minibuses of young men, many flying flags reading Sadr City Fedayeen, traveled from Baghdad to Najaf over the weekend, according to an aide to Ayatollah Kazim Haeri. Sadr City is a large Shiite slum in Baghdad named for Sadr's father, a grand ayatollah who was assassinated in 1999.
Haeri, a senior cleric based in the Iranian holy city of Qom, issued a fatwa, or religious edict, forbidding the Iraqi police and National Guard to fight against Iraqis, according to the satellite news channel al-Arabiya. Sadr looks to Haeri for guidance.
Elsewhere, officials announced the deaths of three other soldiers in the U.S.-led coalition. A U.S. soldier was killed early Sunday when a roadside bomb exploded in northern Baghdad, according to a military spokesman. A Ukrainian captain was killed when a mine exploded as soldiers were drawing water, according to the Defense Ministry in Kiev, which did not give a location for the fatality. Ukraine has about 1,600 troops in Iraq.
A Dutch soldier was killed and five others were seriously wounded when their military vehicle was ambushed in southern town of Rumaythah, where some of the 1,300 Dutch troops in Iraq are based.
Correspondent Doug Struck in Baghdad and special correspondent Saad Sarhan in Najaf contributed to this report.
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Iraqi Assembly Sends Delegation to Najaf in Bid to End Fighting
August 16, 2004
By ALEX BERENSON
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/16/international/16CND-NAJA.html?hp
NAJAF, Iraq, Aug. 16 - Iraqis meeting to pick an interim national assembly agreed today to send a delegation here in an attempt to convince a rebel Shiite cleric, Moktada al-Sadr, to end the fighting with American forces. An aide to the cleric was quoted by news services as welcoming the suggestion.
Dozens of explosions echoed here early today as American marines fired artillery shells into the cemetery from their base three miles to the north, pressing on through the night in renewed fighting with rebels loyal to the cleric.
Barely a day after truce talks collapsed, two American soldiers were killed here on Sunday, part of a force of Army and Marine units that had pushed into the outer edge of Najaf's Old City and battled Mr. Sadr's fighters in the cemetery just north of the shrine of Imam Ali, a mosque revered by Shiite Muslims.
The American military said today that a third soldier attached to the First Marine Expeditionary Force, deployed in Al Anbar Province, was also killed on Sunday.
In recent weeks rebels loyal to Mr. Sadr, the rebellious Shiite cleric, and insurgents have renewed their challenge to the American-led foreign troops and Iraqi forces in fighting in Shiite areas of Iraq and in Anbar province, mostly in the towns of Ramadi and Falluja.
The fighting here worsened though the interim Iraqi government, which ended the talks with Mr. Sadr's rebels on Saturday, said its army would take over the battle against him. The interim government has asked American forces to continue to hold Mr. Sadr's forces at bay until the Iraqi Army arrived, Army and Marine officers said.
"It's been a series of skirmishes, limited objective attacks," said Capt. Coby Moran, the operations officer for the First Battalion, Fourth Marine Regiment. After a shaky two-month truce, heavy fighting between American forces and Mr. Sadr's rebels began again in Najaf on Aug. 5. Eight marines and soldiers have died since, with an unknown number of guerrillas.
But Mr. Sadr's control over the Old City and the Imam Ali shrine has not been challenged since the fight began. Mr. Sadr, 31, whose father was revered by many poor Shiites, has emerged as the leading opponent of the interim government and the presence of American troops in Iraq. Many Iraqis dislike him, but others view him as a national hero for defying the United States.
Iraqis who are meeting for a second day in Baghdad to pick an assembly favored a proposal to send a delegation to Najaf in an attempt to convince Mr. Sadr to withdraw from the shrine and end the conflict, news agencies quoted a senior delegate , Hussein al-Sadr, as saying.
"The door is very open to all Iraqis, regardless of their religion, ethnic background, to join the free political process," Hussein al-Sadr was quoted as saying by The Associated Press. Ahmed al-Shaibany, an aide to the cleric, welcomed the initiative, saying, "We are ready to accept any mediation for a peaceful solution," according to the A.P.
Conditions in the Old City were chaotic on Sunday, with street fighting between Mr. Sadr's rebels and American troops who have established a cordon around them. Many streets were deserted, said Iraqi employees of The New York Times who visited the city.
An explosion damaged the outer wall of the Imam Ali shrine on Sunday, a spokesman for Mr. Sadr said. It was unclear whether American weapons were responsible.
Electricity was cut, and police officers ordered all journalists out of Najaf, saying that their safety could not be assured. Reporters embedded with American forces were excluded. On the Marine base at the northern edge of Najaf, the mood was somber after the deaths of two soldiers fighting in the cemetery in the afternoon. To protect the shrine, American forces in the cemetery are fighting under strict rules about when and how they may use their heavier weapons. Many soldiers say they understand the need for the rules but should be able to respond more forcefully to attacks.
"We're taught, you receive fire, go forward, destroy it," said Maj. Bob Pizzitola, executive officer of the Army's First Battalion, Fifth Cavalry. "It's frustrating, like being the designated driver."
Iraqi employees ofThe New York Times contributed reporting for this article but their names are being withheld for their safety.
Christine Hauser contributed reporting from New York for this article.
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Iraqi Conference on Election Plan Sinks Into Chaos
August 16, 2004
By JOHN F. BURNS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/16/international/middleeast/16baghdad.html?pagewanted=all&position=
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Aug. 15 - A conference of more than 1,100 Iraqis chosen to take the country a crucial step further toward constitutional democracy convened in Baghdad on Sunday under siege-like conditions, only to be thrown into disorder by delegates staging angry protests against the American-led military operation in the Shiite holy city of Najaf.
After an opening speech by Iraq's interim prime minister, Ayad Allawi, delegates leapt out of their seats demanding the conference be suspended. One Shiite delegate stormed the stage before being forced back, shouting, "We demand that military operations in Najaf stop immediately!"
Shortly afterward, two mortar shells fired at the area where the meeting was being held landed in a bus and truck terminal nearby, killing 2 people and wounding at least 17.
The three-day conference, called to elect a 100-member commission that is to organize elections in January and hold veto powers over decrees passed by the Allawi government, was not halted. But reporters who had been told to wear flak jackets and helmets when entering the convention center complex past American tanks were frantically waved back from the center's plate glass windows as the mortar shells exploded, shaking the complex and rattling the windows.
In many ways, the scene seemed like a metaphor for America's problems in Iraq, with the rebel attacks that have spread to virtually every Sunni and Shiite town across this country of 25 million threatening to overwhelm plans for three rounds of national elections next year, ending with a fully elected government in January 2006.
Just as American troops in Najaf have failed so far to quell an uprising by a rebel Shiite cleric, Moktada al-Sadr, so on Sunday's showing here, American political plans for Iraq remain hostage to the violence that has made much of the country enemy territory for the Americans.
The fighting in Najaf, which resumed Sunday after the Allawi government walked out of truce talks, is part of a wider insurrection across southern Iraq by militiamen loyal to Mr. Sadr, who has cast himself as a tribune of the Shiite underclass and as the leader of a national resistance movement against American troops.
The signs in Najaf were of preparations for yet another attempt to force Mr. Sadr and a force of perhaps 1,000 men from his Mahdi Army militia to relinquish control of the Imam Ali Mosque, Shiism's holiest shrine, and by defeating them there, to begin rolling back the challenge he poses to plans to stabilize the country.
After a day of sporadic gunfire and explosions that shook Najaf's Old City, with the mosque at its center, reporters said they had seen American tanks blocking almost every street leading to the shrine, some as little as 1,000 yards away.
American commanders spoke of tightening the cordon they threw around the Old City last week, but of leaving any attempt to move into the immediate vicinity of the shrine to the Iraqi forces that Prime Minister Allawi said Saturday would now carry the brunt of the Najaf fighting.
By using Iraqi troops, Dr. Allawi and the American officials who are his partners in Baghdad hope to avoid the eruption of fury among Iraq's majority Shiites - and across the wider Shiite world, particularly in Iran - if American troops were seen to have damaged or desecrated the mosque, which is revered as the burial place of Imam Ali, Shiism's founding saint.
In a further sign that a new push against Mr. Sadr might be imminent, the Allawi government ordered the expulsion of all reporters working in Najaf, Iraqis as well as Westerners, and even warned Najaf residents working as freelancers for Western news outlets to cease work.
"I received orders from the interior minister, who demands that all local, Arab and foreign journalists leave the hotel and the city within two hours," Gen. Ghaleb al-Jazairi, Najaf's police chief, told newsmen at the hotel on the edge of the Old City that has become a news media headquarters. He gave as his reason the government's inability to protect the journalists if major new battles erupted.
Taken together, the events in Baghdad and Najaf appeared to catch Iraq at a new tipping point. Many Iraqis believe that events in the days ahead are likely to signal as clearly as anything in recent months whether the wider American enterprise in Iraq can emerge from a seemingly endless sequence of reverses and achieve at least a part of what President Bush and other advocates of the war have said they are seeking here. That is the midwifing of a new, peaceful, democratic Iraq - or, contrarily, a further descent into bloodshed and chaos, at a continuing heavy cost in Iraqi and American lives.
From modest beginnings 16 months ago, when American troops toppled Saddam Hussein, Mr. Sadr has used every confrontation with United States forces to build his political following, and his militia, to the point that he now boasts of being able to thwart attempts to build a Western-style democracy, and to fundamentally disrupt the $18 billion American reconstruction program.
For months, American officials have said Mr. Sadr's challenge must be overcome if he is not to imperil all they have worked for here. The sense now, in the heavily guarded compound beside the Tigris River where the American Embassy works side by side with United States military commanders and top officials of the Allawi government, is that the moment may have arrived.
Deliberately killing or capturing Mr. Sadr, as American commanders vowed during an earlier Sadr insurrection in April, has now been ruled out, American officials say, since the cleric, if harmed in circumstances for which the Americans could be blamed, could become more of a rallying point among his following.
With Mr. Sadr believed to be entrenched with his militia in the Najaf shrine, or somewhere in areas of the Old City controlled by the militia, the need not to harm him personally has added extra complexity to American military planning. But a greater problem is the political one.
American officials have been hoping for months that moderate Shiite leaders would coalesce in a condemnation of Mr. Sadr's resort to arms. But this time, as in April, there has been mostly silence from those leaders, even from those who privately excoriate the cleric as a rabble-rousing upstart who has defiled a 1,000-year tradition by making an armory of the Imam Ali shrine.
With the conference in Baghdad, Dr. Allawi and the Americans saw an opportunity to demonstrate that, the violence across the country notwithstanding, it was possible to proceed with the timetable for democracy laid down earlier this year, when Iraq was still formally an occupied country. As well, in the context of the uprising in Najaf and the Sadr militia's attacks elsewhere, they wanted to show that a large number of politically active Iraqis - Shiites a majority among them - would defy threats of violence from Mr. Sadr's fighters and other insurgent groups and attend the gathering.
By that measure, Iraqi and American officials said, they counted the conference a success, just for the fact that it had convened.
For weeks, at caucuses across the country, thousands of Iraqis competed for election to the conference, and for the say it would give them in shaping the country's political future. A two-week postponement of the gathering, ordered in hope of broadening participation, did not yield any breakthroughs, particularly in persuading influential Sunni Muslim groups like the Muslim Clerics Association, or Mr. Sadr, to abandon their boycott of the process.
Still, the turnout exceeded the goal of at least 1,000 delegates, including some from Najaf and the other cities now roiled by Mr. Sadr's uprisings.
Yet the conference's opening day was dominated not by discussion of the coming elections or of the many other issues that confront Iraq, including the ruined economy, but by delegates' demands for an end to American and Iraqi military operations against Mr. Sadr. In speech after speech on Sunday, delegates called on Dr. Allawi to stop the fighting.
In an attempt to regain control, conference organizers established a committee to draft a resolution on Najaf, and it was carried to Dr. Allawi by a small group of delegates.
A larger group of about 100 threatened to walk out over the issue, but eventually relented. "Nobody withdrew, and that was all there was to it," said Fouad Masoum, the conference's principal organizer.
Dr. Allawi, a 59-year-old physician who came to the prime minister's post with a reputation for toughness, made a brief opening address to the gathering that suggested that he had little intention of backing down over Najaf, which he visited a week ago, vowing "no negotiations or truce" with Mr. Sadr.
"Your blessed gathering here is a challenge for the forces of evil and tyranny that want to destroy this country and this assembly," he told delegates. With that, he quickly withdrew to his offices 500 yards away, avoiding the clamorous protests that ensued on the conference floor.
His compromise was to meet with the conference delegation, led by Hussein al-Sadr, a Shiite cleric and distant relative of Moktada al-Sadr who, like Dr. Allawi, spent years in exile in London, escaping the repression of Mr. Hussein.
On the conference floor, Hussein al-Sadr had taken an ambiguous position, as have many Shiite religious leaders, saying that military operations in Najaf should end, but that somehow "the government should enforce its control over all of Iraq."
That appeared to cut little ice with Dr. Allawi, a Shiite, who scheduled a news conference in the convention center at the end of the day's discussions, then abruptly canceled it.
In his place, he sent a junior minister, Wael Abdul Latif, who reiterated the government's demand that the Sadr militiamen disarm and quit Najaf, or face a showdown with Iraqi troops. He said Dr. Allawi had not yet given the order for the operation to begin, but implied that it might not be long in coming if Mr. Sadr failed to send word that he was ready to negotiate seriously on the government's terms.
"We call on everyone who is in the shrine to vacate it," he said. "There is an open door, but it will not remain open for very long."
Sabrina Tavernise contributed reporting for this article.
-------- israel / palestine
Arafat Survives Latest Challenge to His Political Power
August 16, 2004
By STEVEN ERLANGER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/16/international/middleeast/16gaza.html?pagewanted=all&position=
GAZA, Aug. 15 - With Palestinian politics in an extraordinary ferment, Yasir Arafat has survived the latest challenge to his authority from a younger generation of frustrated politicians, outmaneuvering an American favorite, Muhammad Dahlan, 42, a former security chief.
Mr. Arafat, the Palestinian president, isolated in his headquarters on the West Bank, has been confronted with scathing criticism of the competence of his administration from Palestinians themselves, including personal criticism of an unprecedented kind and degree.
The ferment grows out of Israel's intention to withdraw unilaterally from the Gaza Strip in a year. The potential power vacuum has emboldened Mr. Dahlan and other Gaza-based Palestinians, including major figures in the Palestinian legislature, to a form of power struggle with Mr. Arafat, whom they regard as a paramount figurehead but uninterested in democracy or in efficient administration.
At the same time, Hamas, no friend to Mr. Arafat, is weighing its own opportunities in Gaza.
Mr. Dahlan, a member of Mr. Arafat's Fatah movement who has had past disputes with him, has accused Mr. Arafat of corruption, incompetence, selfishness and inattention as the Palestinian intifada fades, and Palestinian hopes wither.
But the challenge has not gone especially well, certainly not here in teeming Gaza, where Israeli troops have just concluded another long incursion, destroying factories, some 20 houses and hundreds of acres of orchards in Beit Hanun. The troops were responding to Palestinian militants firing short-range Qassam rockets at Israel, but the incursion has allowed Mr. Arafat and his allies to dismiss Mr. Dahlan's critique as selfish, ill-timed, even unpatriotic.
Mr. Dahlan himself is regarded by many Palestinians here as corrupt, which he denies. Some have suggested that he serves the interests of Israel, the United States and Egypt, rather than caring about people under occupation.
The population reveres Mr. Arafat, 75 and kept isolated by the Israelis in Ramallah, as the founder and symbol of an embryonic Palestinian nation. After a period of uncertainty and orchestrated indiscipline in Gaza that began last month, including the seizing of the police chief and some French aid workers, and the off-again resignation of the Palestinian prime minister, Ahmed Qurei, Mr. Dahlan effectively sued for peace, asking for a face-saving meeting with Mr. Arafat.
But Mr. Arafat, an experienced and talented politician, after having initially agreed to the meeting, is now delaying, Palestinian officials say. He suggested that Mr. Dahlan simply be handed a cabinet portfolio.
"Arafat has outmaneuvered Dahlan and he knows it," said Khaled Yazji, a Dahlan friend. "But if he accepts a post from Arafat he will lose completely, because everyone will think his criticism was to gain a job."
But Mr. Dahlan may yet take a new portfolio in Mr. Qurei's office if he can also bring along allies like his successor in Gaza, Rashid Abu Shak.
The Palestinian Legislative Council itself has been trying to capture the moment. A committee of five legislators, including Mr. Arafat's former spokesman, Marwan Kanafani, and Nabil Amr, who was shot by unknown gunmen during the chaos, have produced a bluntly worded report that blames the Palestinian leadership, and Mr. Arafat by implication, for failing to make decisions.
"The main reason for the failure of the Palestinian security forces and their lack of action in restoring law and order is the total lack of a clear political decision and no definition of their roles, either for the long term or the short," the report says. It calls for Mr. Arafat and Mr. Qurei to define in law the roles of the various and overlapping Palestinian security forces and to streamline them.
The report also urges Mr. Arafat to order the end to "all the dangerous activity taking place in the Gaza Strip by some of the commanders and men of the armed security forces," including a halt to the firing of Qassam rockets from Gaza into Israel, which caused the Israeli incursion. It is unclear whether Mr. Arafat could control the militants of Hamas, who are popular in Gaza and are committed to Israel's destruction. But it has also been a long time since he has tried.
In an interview, Mr. Kanafani said the report also called for the resignation of the government and fresh elections - the first and last were in 1996, with a scheduled 1999 vote put off because, the Palestinians said, of the occupation. The challenge from Mr. Dahlan "is not really a move for reform but a very simple conflict between two security forces," Mr. Kanafani said. "Reform must be through elections and laws, and not through guns and accusations. But democracy is not giving the people the right to vote one time only."
Ziad Abu Amr, 44, another reform legislator, warned that Mr. Arafat needed to be wary of the temptation to sit tight and ignore the cries for reform. "Part of these internal struggles were exploratory," Mr. Amr said. "But they result from the stagnation of the last 10 years - no rule of law, no transparency, no change, no reform, no elections, no peace. The disorder is a symptom of the malaise in the entire Palestinian system."
Salah Abdel Shafi, 42, an economist who runs a community mental health program, thinks Mr. Arafat has been weakened, with corruption, criminality, administrative disorder and the conduct of the intifada now firmly on the table. "What's happened in the last few weeks has been important, even very important," he said. "Arafat is no longer the sacred cow in the Palestinian community. He has been criticized personally, and not just his ministers."
It was shocking enough when Terje Larsen, the longtime United Nations special envoy, criticized Mr. Arafat by name last month in a report to the Security Council, or when King Abdullah of Jordan suggested that Mr. Arafat "needs to have a long look in the mirror to be able to see whether his position is helping the Palestinian cause or not." It was quite another when such open, intense criticism came from inside Mr. Arafat's Fatah movement.
Still, Mr. Arafat must not be underestimated, and few Palestinians want to pull him down. "You can't bypass an historical figure like Arafat," Mr. Shafi said. "The minute you touch the holy Arafat you're burned. But his margin of maneuver is narrowing. Dahlan knows there is no coup d'état. It's a process. The emergence of a new leadership will be gradual."
Hamas calls for unity against Israel and professes support for Mr. Arafat as a unifying figure.
Chaos among Palestinians "weakens pressure on the international community to press for peace, it gives a chance for Israeli aggression to continue and diverts attention from resistance to the internal conflict," said a Hamas spokesman, Sami Abu Zuhry.
Hamas thinks that "external hands" are behind the Dahlan challenge, which "serves the Israeli agenda" of divide and rule, he said. "Hamas supports Arafat in confronting such external pressure."
Pressed, he said: "It's not like we're with Arafat. We are with the reform, but the reform must have a Palestinian, not a personal vision, and all Palestinian factions must participate, including Hamas."
But Hamas is trying to take advantage of the changing situation in Gaza. It suggests a "unified popular leadership," including Hamas, before any new elections. That is not likely to fool Mr. Arafat. Nor does he want to let Israel isolate Gaza further from the West Bank, which would further weaken the Palestinian Authority; already, Palestinian security in each territory is controlled by separate organizations.
Egypt, as a quiet American partner, does not want Hamas running the Gaza Strip, and it is trying to find a Palestinian consensus on what will happen if the Israelis do pull out of Gaza. Cairo wants to help Mr. Arafat control Gaza and Hamas without being seen as dictating to the Palestinians, an Egyptian diplomat here said, which means reforming the rival security forces.
"We know in the end that Arafat is the only one who has the credibility to sign any agreement" between the Palestinians and Israel, he said. "If you want to put him outside the game, you end up with nothing."
Mr. Arafat has mismanaged the intifada and the peace effort, said a Palestinian who asked to be described only as "close to the security services." Not long ago, he said, the Palestinians were negotiating for a state. "Now we're negotiating about checkpoints."
In the last 15 years, while Fatah has had the same leaders, he said, the Soviet Union has collapsed, there have been two Iraq wars, the Balkan wars and Sept. 11.
"And we have the same people," he said. "Actually we are a people without leadership. Just now, our problem isn't Israel. The date of the Israeli withdrawal is coming closer, and we're losing time."
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Palestinians Fast in Israeli Prisons
August 16, 2004
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/16/international/middleeast/16prisoner.html?pagewanted=all
JERUSALEM, Aug. 15 - Thousands of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, both civilian and military, began a hunger strike on Sunday, taking only fluids, to press for better conditions, a halt to strip searches, more access to telephones and more frequent family visits. There are more than 7,500 Palestinians in detention, about half of those for violence against Israelis.
A prison service spokesman said that more than half of the 3,800 Palestinians in civilian jails were on a hunger strike. The Israeli minister for internal security, Tzahi Hanegbi, said: "As far as I'm concerned they can strike for a day, a month, until death. We will ward off this strike."
Other officials said that prisoners would be given infusions if necessary, and that privileges like cigarettes, sweets and television were taken away from the strikers.
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Clashes resume in Georgian separatist region: Russian defense ministry
TBILISI (AFP)
Aug 16, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040816195609.hapwwq0p.html
Clashes resumed late Monday in Georgia's breakaway region of South Ossetia, leaving a three-day-old ceasefire in tatters after two Georgian servicemen were killed and other casualties were reported, the Russian defense ministry said.
Military observers with the joint Georgian-Russian-Ossetian peacekeeping force in South Ossetia "observed the first shots at 09:20 pm" (1720 GMT), the ITAR-TASS news agency quoted spokesman Colonel Nikolai Baranov as saying.
"Fighting is now taking place between the South Ossetian and Georgian sides two to three kilometers north east of Tskhinvali," South Ossetia's capital, Baranov added.
A spokesman for Georgia's interior ministry said earlier Monday two Georgian soldiers had died after coming under mortar and automatic weapons fire from irregular forces from the pro-Russian South Ossetian territory.
The spokesman, Guram Donadze, also claimed that 15 Ossetian fighters were killed in return fire from Georgian forces, but a South Ossetian spokeswoman denied any fatalities.
"Fortunately, no one was killed," in the overnight fighting, South Ossetia spokeswoman Irina Gagloyeva was quoted by the RIA Novosti news agency as saying. However three civilians had been hurt.
RIA Novosti and other Russian news agencies confirmed the deaths on the Georgian side and said that Georgian forces had also fired shells into a district of South Ossetia's main city, Tskhinvali, as well as three other nearby villages.
A spokesman for the joint Georgian-Russian-Ossetian peacekeeping force in South Ossetia was quoted by ITAR-TASS as saying that the firing "came from both sides and involved machine guns, mortars and grenade launchers."
The violence came three days after a ceasefire signed by the conflicting parties as well as Russia and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) went into effect in a renewed drive to defuse the crisis in the region.
The United States on Monday urged all sides in the South Ossetian conflict to show restraint and restore the ceasefire.
The State Department said US diplomats in Washington and Tbilisi were continuing to meet with Russian and Georgian officials in an effort to cool tensions over the breakaway region.
"We want all sides in this to exercise restraint and to implement the (ceasefire) agreement as it's been given," said Tom Casey, a department spokesman. "There are continuing violations of the ceasefire that (are) being reported and that need to stop," he added.
Tensions have soared and clashes have repeatedly broken out in the area over the past two months as Georgia has stepped up pressure to bring separatist regions back under its control -- turning its attention to Ossetia after winning back renegade Adjara in June.
Inhabited mainly by ethnic Ossetians, South Ossetia has enjoyed de facto independence after an armed conflict with Tbilisi following the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Leaders in South Ossetia have demanded either their own state or else separation from Georgia and direct governance from Moscow.
Prime Minister Zurab Zhvania said Georgia was calling on the international community to step in and help break the deadlock.
Georgia wanted the OSCE executive to hold an urgent meeting in the coming days on the situation in South Ossetia and President Mikhail Saakashvili would talk with other leaders about organizing an international conference on the conflict, he said.
"We are looking for a peaceful resolution," Zhvania said, adding that he was prepared to sit down for talks with South Ossetian separatist leader Eduard Kokoity.
Kokoity offered no indication he was ready for such a meeting.
"Unfortunately, today in Georgia the war party holds the upper hand," Russia's RIA Novosti agency quoted him as saying. "The war party is pushing the Ossetian and Georgian people toward tragedy."
Georgian and Ossetian forces had already traded gunfire and shelling during the night both Saturday and Sunday, when Tbilisi reported seven Georgian soldiers had been wounded in the clashes.
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Ex-Chiefs of C.I.A. Back Key Point of 9/11 Report
August 16, 2004
By BRIAN KNOWLTON
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/16/politics/16CND-PANE.html?hp
WASHINGTON, Aug. 16 - Three former C.I.A. directors expressed support today for many of the recommendations of the national commission on the 9/11 terror attacks, in particular the call for creation of a national director with broad powers over all intelligence agencies.
The endorsements came at a hearing of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, which heard from William Webster, who headed the F.B.I. under Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan before moving to the Central Intelligence Agency at Mr. Reagan's behest; R. James Woolsey, C.I.A. director under President Bill Clinton; and Admiral Stansfield Turner, who led the C.I.A. under Mr. Carter.
President Bush, his Democratic rival, Senator John Kerry, and the bipartisan commission on the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, have all supported the concept of a national intelligence director, one of 41 recommendations made by the panel.
Several Congressional committees are now examining ways to implement the legislation that will be required to make associated changes. Several members of the Governmental Affairs panel supported far-reaching intelligence reform.
Senator John D. Rockefeller, Democrat of West Virginia, suggested that the current arrangement was unworkable - the director of central intelligence, who also heads the C.I.A., has nominal responsibility for all American intelligence agencies but only limited powers over them and their budgets.
"It's more akin to a custody settlement between divorced parents than an effective management plan for a 15-agency, multibillion-dollar entity," he said. "We're going to have to break some china around here. Otherwise, we will fail."
Judge Webster was also critical of the current structure. He said that over three decades, an "almost Byzantine system of intelligence control" had evolved; the director of central intelligence, he said, was like a "den chief" trying to shepherd 15 diverse agencies in the same direction.
"It's remarkable what has been accomplished by consensus-building, friendly cajoling and a patriotic effort among so many agencies to make it work," Mr. Webster said. "But this is not enough to deal in a timely way with the complexities of the world in which we find ourselves." Whether the director of central intelligence is merely given enhanced powers, or whether the position of a true director of national intelligence is created, Mr. Webster said, "the designated leader must be clearly and unambiguously empowered to act" on important issues.
Mr. Woolsey supported the idea of creating a separate national intelligence director and of establishing a National Commission on Terrorism that would report to that person.
The current position of director of central intelligence, he said, is "a very weak position" when viewed in terms of the entire intelligence community.
"It is not impossible for one person to do this job under the current circumstances," Mr. Woolsey said, but that would require a close working relationship with the president, support of Congress, and close working ties to eight key intelligence committee leaders. And that in turn would require an almost crippling investment of time.
"In my case," he said, "I didn't have a bad relationship with the president I served -- I just didn't have much of one at all."
Admiral Turner, on the other hand, said that at the instruction of President Jimmy Carter he had carried out his duties, as director of central intelligence from 1977 to 1981, much as the commission was now describing a new position of national intelligence director.
"As a result," he said, "I delegated 80 percent of the responsibility for the C.I.A. to the deputy director of central intelligence." This, Admiral Turner said, "freed me up to participate very actively in the analytic portion of the intelligence process."
And unless the director "personally participates in the analytic process, it's not going to be as good as it should be," Admiral Turner said. "Only the director can adjudicate big differences between the various analytic agencies."
The three former directors of central intelligence also said that it was important for a national intelligence director to have broad - but not absolute - control of intelligence budgets.
"Control of the budget is essential to effective management of the intelligence community," Judge Webster said.
A pivotal issue, and cause of considerable resistance from the Pentagon, is that department's control of the enormous Defense Intelligence Agency budget in any new arrangement.
"The Defense Department will need some assurances that tactical military intelligence will not drift away from its military commanders," Judge Webster said.
Mr. Webster and Mr. Woolsey did take exception with the commission's recommendation to shift lead responsibility for paramilitary action from the C.I.A. to the military. The panel said that the C.I.A.-led model had worked well in Afghanistan. "I would prefer to keep that model on smaller, turn-of-the-dime activities with the C.I.A.," Mr. Webster said, while keeping responsibility for larger-scale actions in the Pentagon.
Mr. Woolsey agreed, saying that the idea of shifting all covert military work to the Pentagon was the only one of the commission's 41 recommendations that he did not fully or at least partly support.
That proposal, he said, "I could not disagree more with." It could "cripple our special forces in the war against terrorism" by placing them under added constraints.
Mr. Webster also said that he agreed with President Bush that a national intelligence director should not be a cabinet member, or based in the White House, because it was vitally important that he or she avoid even the appearance that intelligence was being "framed - read `spun' - to support a foreign policy of the administration." He had explicitly asked President Reagan not to put him in the cabinet, though his predecessor, William Casey, had been a cabinet member.
Judge Webster also strongly endorsed a call for reform of Congressional oversight of the intelligence community.
"I am told that over 88 separate committees and subcommittees now `oversight' the Homeland Security Department," he said. "This is really intolerable, not to say nonsensical."
Mr. Webster said would support creation of a joint intelligence committee picked carefully to include "a nonpartisan, highly respected membership."
-------- un
U.N. Demands Justice After Massacre of 150 Refugees in Burundi
August 16, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/16/international/africa/16burundi.html
UNITED NATIONS, Aug. 15 (AP) - The United Nations Security Council on Sunday condemned the massacre of at least 150 Congolese refugees at a United Nations camp in 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 the attack on Friday night at the camp in Gatumba.
A statement approved by the 15 Council members and read by the Council president, Russia's ambassador to the United Nations, Andrei 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 Tutsi known as Banyamulenge, who had fled fighting in their country. Officials said Hutu extremists from Congo and Rwanda were also suspected of taking part in the raid.
A spokesman for the rebels said that Burundian soldiers and Congolese Tutsi militia were hiding in the refugee camp. But most of those who were 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 United Nations envoy in Burundi, in consultation with the United Nations representative in Congo, "to establish the facts and report on them to the Council as quickly as possible."
A United Nations 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."
It also noted that Burundians in the camp were not attacked.
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."
Witnesses said the nighttime assault on the refugee camp was launched from across the border in Congo, about one mile away. One group of assailants opened fire on a nearby Burundian Army post to pin down troops while a second group raided the camp, they said.
The Security Council asked the United Nations 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 killing frenzy in Rwanda in 1994, in which at least 500,000 minority Tutsi and Hutu moderates died at the hands of Hutu..
It also raised fears of retaliatory violence that could undo peace efforts in Congo, where a 10,800-member United Nations peacekeeping force is working to prevent a return to war.
At least five countries were drawn into Congo's civil war from 1998 to 2003. The civil war claimed some three million lives, mostly through strife-induced hunger and disease.
United Nations officials said at least 150 people were killed and 108 wounded in the attack Friday, but survivors said at least 161 people were confirmed dead after more bodies were found on Sunday near the Congo border.
Burundi has also been engulfed in a civil war since 1993, when soldiers from the Tutsi minority assassinated the country's first democratically elected president, a Hutu.
-------- us
'Secret Pentagon' hidden under mountain
Place where Cheney, others stayed Sept. 11
By Steve Goldstein
Knight Ridder
Mon, Aug. 16, 2004
http://www.myrtlebeachonline.com/mld/myrtlebeachonline/news/nation/9412273.htm
PENNSYLVANIA SITE R - Welcome to the undisclosed location.
Known familiarly to government insiders as the "underground Pentagon," this is where Vice President Dick Cheney set up shop in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and where he sometimes is when his office is being secretive about Cheney's whereabouts.
The location is a highly secure complex of buildings inside Raven Rock Mountain near Blue Ridge Summit, Pa., close to the Maryland-Pennsylvania state line and about seven miles north of Camp David.
A recent book, "A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies," by James Bamford, was credited with spilling the beans about the supposedly super-secret hideaway.
Still, there is great sensitivity about the compound, as emphasized to an uninvited reporter who was inadvertently allowed to briefly enter a guardhouse.
"I work physical security at an undisclosed location in southern Pennsylvania, that's all I can say," said a well-armed fatigues-clad Army guard as he politely but firmly told the reporter that "everything you see is classified."
There is not all that much to be seen.
Site R - also known as Raven Rock or the Alternate Joint Communications Center - is a 53-year-old facility conceived at the start of the Cold War as an alternate command center in the event of nuclear war or an attack on Washington.
Sloping, round-humped Raven Rock Mountain sprouts a thicket of antennae, satellite dishes and a microwave tower.
From state Route 16, the main road that passes the mountain, two oversize metal doors in the hillside are visible through the heavy foliage, giving it that Fortress of Solitude touch.
Information about Site R is available on the Internet, and its location - and use by Cheney - appeared in several news stories even before the publication of Bamford's book.
Cheney's disappearance to undisclosed locations - a frequent occurrence after the Sept. 11 attacks - is believed to be unprecedented for the nation's highest elected officials.
As described by Bamford, the mountain also has a helipad.
"But deep inside the hard greenstone granite mountain is a secret world of five buildings each three stories tall, computer-filled caverns and a subterranean water reservoir," he writes.
Within hours of the Sept. 11 attacks, Bamford said, five helicopters landed on the helipad, a convoy of sport utility vehicles with black-tinted windows arrived at the main entrance, and tan buses "began laboring up the steep, two-lane road to the heavily guarded, unmarked service entrance. Among those early to arrive was Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz."
The unmarked back entrance is a twisting lane off Harbaugh Valley Road. To the unknowing, the chain-link fence with a double-wide coil of razor wire might be a tip-off, as would the guardhouse and a big red "warning" sign.
Confirmation came in the form of a station wagon with a U.S. Postal Service sticker; the carrier drove up the road, delivering mail to the half-dozen houses outside the gate. He acknowledged that this was one of the "four or five" entrances to Site R.
"We don't deliver their mail," he explained.
Asked whether Site R had its own service, he smiled and said: "I would say so."
----
Bush Announces Plan to Realign Thousands of Troops
August 16, 2004
New York Times
By DAVID STOUT
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/16/international/16CND-BUSH.html?hp
WASHINGTON, Aug. 16 - President Bush said today that American military strength in Europe and Asia would be reduced by 60,000 to 70,000 troops over the next decade in the biggest realignment of forces since the cold war.
"Over the coming decade, we'll deploy a more agile and more flexible force, which means that more of our troops will be stationed and deployed from here at home," Mr. Bush said at the Veterans of Foreign Wars Convention in Cincinnati, in a talk that had much to do with domestic politics as well as military strategy.
"See, our service members will have more time on the home front, and more predictability and fewer moves over a career," Mr. Bush said, acknowledging persistent complaints of military life. "Our military spouses will have fewer job changes, greater stability, more time for their kids and to spend time with their families at home."
Although the announcement was likely to be well received by those who are considering a military career, or wonder about trying to steer their children that way, it will not have an immediate effect as far as troop realignments are concerned.
For one, it will not ease the burdens of the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, some of whom have already been deployed for months longer than they anticipated. Then, too, any major shift of forces from one continent to another can take months or years to put into effect.
Today the chief White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, who was traveling with Mr. Bush, said aboard Air Force One that the redeployment would not be sudden but would, rather, take place "over the next decade" and "in close consultation with our friends and allies."
Pentagon officials said shortly after Mr. Bush's announcement that the units returning to the United States would include the First Armored Division and the First Infantry Division, both now stationed in Germany, and that the homecoming would not begin before 2006 at the earliest. The officials said the two divisions would be a replaced by a brigade, a much smaller unit.
Mr. Bush and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld have talked often about the need for a leaner, more agile fighting force to meet the needs of the 21st century, as opposed to those of the cold war era, and save money in the process. So Mr. Bush's announcement today was not a head-snapping surprise.
Mr. Bush also used the appearance before the veterans' group to recite a list of obligations to veterans that he said his administration was meeting, including more money for health benefits and improvements to veterans' hospitals.
Nor did Mr. Bush pass up the opportunity to tweak the Democratic presidential nominee, Senator John Kerry, on military issues.
"The other day my opponent said if he's elected, the number of troops in Iraq will be significantly reduced within six months," Mr. Bush said. "I think it sends the wrong signal. It sends the wrong signal to the enemy, who could easily wait six months and one day. It sends the wrong message to our troops, that completing the mission may not be necessary. It sends the wrong message to the Iraqi people, who wonder whether or not America means what it says. Our friends and allies must know that when America speaks, we mean what we say. We will stay until the job is completed."
The Kerry campaign immediately counterattacked. A campaign spokesman, Phil Singer, asserted that Mr. Bush had "overextended the military to its thinnest levels in years and forced thousands of soldiers to involuntarily extend their deployments."
"It is a fact that he threatened to veto the $87 billion supplemental and sent troops into battle without body armor," Mr. Singer said, alluding to the extra money, opposed by Mr. Kerry, appropriated last fall for Afghanistan and Iraq operations. "It is a fact that he has broken his promise to America's veterans and made it harder for them to access quality health care. George Bush is too busy attacking to get his facts straight, and he is out of credibility."
Mr. Kerry is expected to address the V.F.W. convention this week. In addition to trying to win the support of veterans, both candidates are eager to bolster their strength in Ohio, regarded as a swing state.
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Wounded Shelby soldier battles nightmares, injuries from Iraq
tuscaloosanews
By TOM GORDON
August 16, 2004
http://www.tuscaloosanews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20040816/APN/408160881
Some mornings, Tony Thompson opens his eyes and doesn't know that he's a lot closer to Birmingham than he is to Baghdad. Some nights, the bad dreams come and he finds himself reaching for an M-4 rifle that isn't there, and his parents have to reassure him that no one is attacking him, and that he doesn't have to fight back.
Thompson, a 20-year-old Army specialist, is back home in Shelby County recovering from wounds he suffered in a mid-July ambush while on patrol in Baghdad.
He's also trying to become mentally whole. His shattered jaw is wired together, so he slurps his food through a large syringe. A crisscross scar marks the spot below his left ear where a surgeon went in to remove a bullet from his jaw and some shrapnel that had lodged in his throat.
During the ambush, some of that hot metal severed a nerve in his face, leaving him numb and unable to notice when he spills slurped food on his chin.
"I don't even taste food no more," the 2002 Montevallo High graduate said. "I just swallow it."
Swallowing food is easy compared to disgorging bad memories. Last week, Thompson visited a VA psychiatrist to discuss his dreams.
"It's been hard emotionally dealing with it," said his father, Ronald Thompson, a retired Army first sergeant.
"Different families have different problems and situations," said Thompson's mother, Sadie, a juvenile detention officer. "But there's a lot to be thankful for."
The biggest thing for which the Thompsons are thankful is the presence of their only son. Broad-shouldered and clean-cut except for the wisp of beard now coming out of his chin, the 5-foot-7 Thompson was eager last week to talk through his involuntarily clenched teeth, roll his eyes and make a wrinkled frown when he disagreed with something.
"Some of the mornings I have woken up, I have not known where I was at," he said. "Sometimes I want to scream because I'm confused."
He did some screaming and more on the first night his family was able to see him after his wounding. Heavily sedated and with tubes attached to him, he had been flown from Germany to Walter Reed Army Medical Center. As he came out of sedation, he began struggling and pulling the tubes loose.
"He kept saying somebody was trying to kill him," said Ronald Thompson, who tried to physically restrain his son and received a kick in the chin for his trouble. "He thought he was in Iraq... It took six of us to hold him down."
In many ways, the younger Thompson has returned to his old ways of doing and being. He can talk some serious smack with his twin sister, Tonya, and his older sister, Olivia, both of whom joke that he's trying to take away some of the attention they would normally get at home. His mother says he seems needier, a little more impatient when something he wants done doesn't happen right away or in the way he wants it.
"They might be right, I don't know," Thompson said, though he also said his different temperament may come from him being on his own for two years.
But in other ways, much of his mind is marked by the seven months he spent in Iraq, driving a Humvee and taking and returning hostile fire.
"I still feel ... I gotta watch my back," he said.
The other day, he was standing in the kitchen when his mother was setting up her ironing board, and the board's sudden unfamiliar squeak caused him to whirl around in alarm.
While leaving his camp near Baghdad's Green Zone to go out on patrols was his regular routine in Iraq, he hasn't had much desire to get out now that he's home. If people see his scars or the wiring in his mouth, he thinks they might think he is some kind of freak.
He gets headaches, can hardly turn his head, and has bouts of pain in other parts of his body. One night the pain in his left leg became so intense that his parents took him to the Baptist Shelby emergency room. Thompson is scheduled to get out of the military next July, but he's worried that a prolonged stop-loss order could keep him past his discharge date.
He says he joined the Army to pay for his college education, not make it a career.
At the same time, he says he misses his fellow Colts in Iraq. The Colts make up the 2nd Platoon in the 1st Cavalry Division's 82nd Battalion out of Fort Hood, Texas. To them, Thompson was "Tiny T," and he and some of the Colts were assigned to a field artillery unit, Fox Battery 3-82.
During his time in Iraq, he directed some artillery fire, but mostly he was firing his M-4 rifle. Usually he was behind the wheel of an armored Humvee, driving his platoon commander, a lieutenant who was always eager to seek out "Ali Babas," the common name for insurgents. They were on the hunt for insurgents the night he was wounded.
His memories of that night include the boom from an improvised explosive device that detonated as his Humvee passed it, showers of metal passing in front of his face, the heat he felt from the bullet and shrapnel that hit him, driving the crippled Humvee out of the ambush area with no tires on his side and two flat ones on the other, the sounds of soldiers yelling above the gunfire, and his awareness of a wetness spreading on his body that he knew was coming from the flow of his own blood.
His family was told he pulled some of his fellow soldiers to safety, but he doesn't remember much about that.
"I thought I was just doing my job," he said. "I was just trying to get out of the line of fire, get out of the kill zone."
Not long ago, the family had a barbecue dinner, but Thompson couldn't eat any of it unless it had been run through a blender. He was content to simply hold some of the meat close to his face, so he could sniff it.
"I'm torturing myself," he said. "But I get pleasure out of it."
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Last U.S. Defector Said Living in N. Korea
Aug 16, 2004
Associated Press
By STEPHANIE HOO,
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=516&ncid=731&e=10&u=/ap/20040816/ap_on_re_as/nkorea_us_defector
BEIJING - The man believed to be the last American defector still living in North Korea (news - web sites) says he has no plans to return home, according to two British filmmakers who interviewed him for a documentary.
James Dresnok was a U.S. Army private when he crossed over the Stalinist state in 1962. He lives now in the North Korean capital Pyongyang, where he says he likes his "simple life," said filmmaker Nicholas Bonner, who met him there in May.
"To us he's the most fascinating character because he's still there," Bonner said Sunday in Beijing.
The U.S. military has said that Dresnok, from Richmond, Va., left the army in August 1962 at age 21.
The film crew met with Dresnok and with Charles Jenkins, an accused U.S. army deserter from Rich Square, N.C., who has since left North Korea for Japan.
"We were under the supervision of the North Korean military," Dresnok told the filmmakers, according to their news release. "They took good care of us and they requested us to teach English to military personnel."
Dresnok and Jenkins told the filmmakers that two other American servicemen had died in North Korea of natural causes - Pvt. Larry A. Abshier of Urbana, Ill, who the U.S. military says went missing from his unit in May 1962 at age 19, and Cpl. Jerry W. Parrish of Morganfield, Ky., who is accused of deserting in December 1963 at age 19.
"I did not want to stay in DPRK at first," Dresnok told the filmmakers, referring to North Korea by the initials of its formal name. "I wanted to go to Russia," he said.
"Having crossed, after a few months, I began thinking it over and decided to remain," he is quoted as saying.
"I'm glad I did, because about 10 years ago, Russia changed from socialism to capitalism. If I was in Russia right now, I would be out of work," he said. "It would be the same if I returned to America. I find it more convenient to live among peaceful people, living a simple life."
The interviews were arranged by the North Korean government, and it's unclear whether the Americans had any opportunity to make comments critical of life in the secretive and repressive state had they wanted to.
Jenkins' nephew in the United States believes he was coerced into working for North Korea, where he appeared in propaganda films.
Jenkins, who is still wanted by U.S. authorities on charges he deserted his post in 1965, arrived in Japan last month for medical treatment and to be reunited with his wife.
His wife, Hitomi Soga, was kidnapped from Japan by North Korean agents in 1978 and married Jenkins two years later. She returned home to Japan in 2002 along with other Japanese who had been abducted, following pressure on Pyongyang from the Tokyo government.
Bonner and fellow filmmaker Daniel Gordon plan to film interviews with Dresnok in September.
They have previously made two films in North Korea, in association with the BBC and with cooperation from Pyongyang.
(SUBS graf 4 bgng, 'The U.S. military ...,' to correct hometown to Richmond sted Norfolk)
-------- venezuela
Turnout Massive In Venezuela's Vote on Chavez
Polling Hours Extended for Recall
By Mary Beth Sheridan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, August 16, 2004; Page A12
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A3089-2004Aug15?language=printer
CARACAS, Venezuela, Aug. 16 -- Voters turned out in overwhelming numbers Sunday to decide whether to recall President Hugo Chavez, a populist whose rule has bitterly divided this major oil-producing country and strained relations with the United States.
The heavy turnout appeared to reflect a widespread desire by Venezuelans to end a three-year standoff between Chavez and his opponents that has periodically exploded in violence, including a short-lived coup in 2002.
Voters waited patiently at polling stations for as long as 10 hours, many huddling under umbrellas to ward off a blazing sun. The delay stemmed from the use of time-consuming fingerprint scanners aimed at deterring fraud, and from the massive electoral turnout, the highest in 30 years. With lines stretching for a mile or more, voting hours were extended beyond the initial 4 p.m. until midnight.
Opposition activists were jubilant about the vote and set off fireworks early Monday. Although election rules barred them from publicizing exit polls, they appeared on television Sunday night, predicting a win.
"All the tendencies indicate we're on the point of winning a democratic victory," said Felipe Mujica, a spokesman for the opposition coalition.
But a Chavez election official, Samuel Moncada, predicted that those opposed to the recall would prevail.
"We're winning," he said late Sunday. Hundreds of Chavez supporters gathered at the presidential palace, blowing whistles and chanting slogans in a victory celebration.
The referendum was the culmination of years of efforts by the opposition to oust Chavez, a charismatic former army officer who swept into office in 1998 pledging to replace the country's scandal-tainted two-party system with a government catering to the poor.
Chavez is a hero to many of the country's destitute. But critics, who include many in the middle and upper classes, accuse him of ruling in an inept, authoritarian style and fomenting class hatred.
The significance of the vote goes well beyond Venezuela. This South American country is the fourth-largest supplier of oil to the United States and has been a traditional U.S. ally. But the Bush administration has been irked by Chavez's close ties to Cuban President Fidel Castro and his support for left-wing movements in the hemisphere. Chavez, in turn, has been deeply suspicious of the Bush administration since it quickly recognized the coup in April 2002 that briefly deposed him.
Chavez, 50, voted in western Caracas on Sunday and promised to accept the results of the referendum.
"All those who were saying the dictator Chavez wouldn't agree to a vote. . . . Well, here's the proof," the president said.
Chavez has vowed that if he lost the recall, he would be a candidate in elections that would be triggered within 30 days.
Chavez supporters as well as opponents warned before the referendum that they would not accept the results if there was fraud, raising fears of violence or a disruption of oil exports. The slow pace of voting, caused mainly by mechanical delays in the scanning of fingerprints outside the voting booths, fanned concerns of irregularities, both among voters and opposition activists.
"We want to vote! We want to vote!" chanted citizens at polling stations in Caracas and other cities.
Former president Jimmy Carter, who led a team of international observers, said there were no major problems. The balloting was mostly peaceful, except for an incident in Caracas in which a gunman opened fire on voters, killing a 28-year-old woman and injuring 12 others, news services reported.
The opposition coalition collected more than 2 million petition signatures to trigger the recall vote two years before the end of Chavez's term. Under the terms of Venezuela's constitution, the opposition needs to surpass the 3.76 million votes Chavez received in his 2000 reelection in order to oust him from office. About 14 million people are registered to vote in the country.
The opposition also had to outpoll the millions of Chavez supporters who flocked to the polls Sunday, eager to retain a president who has used the country's soaring oil revenue to provide health, education and food programs for the nation's poor majority.
William Sutherland, 40, a university student, was among those who rose before dawn and stood in line for hours under a punishing sun to back Chavez.
"He's the only president who has paid attention to all Venezuelans," said Sutherland, dressed in a T-shirt depicting revolutionary hero Che Guevara.
Venezuela was blanketed with red "No" posters opposing the recall, and Chavez's well-organized supporters turned out with whistles and red shirts. However, Chavez's popularity has clearly diminished since he was first elected, during years of severe economic recession linked to the country's political instability.
Carmen Diaz, 43, an office worker voting in the same working-class neighborhood as Sutherland, said she wanted to recall the president because of high unemployment and what she called frightening levels of crime. "We have to get rid of this guy. Every day we're worse off," she said.
Chavez burst onto the national scene in 1992 when he launched an unsuccessful coup. Six years later, he won office in a landslide victory and set out to remake the country, charging that its then 40-year-old democracy was a sham benefiting only the "rancid oligarchy."
Chavez launched a self-declared "revolution" that included a new constitution and the use of soldiers to carry out social projects in poor areas. But his overtures to Cuba, and his concentration of power in the presidency, achieved in part through referendums, alarmed the country's business elite and middle class.
Violence has erupted periodically, with 19 people killed in an anti-Chavez protest shortly before the 2002 coup, and 12 people slain during anti-government riots in March. The coup, and a three-month general strike launched by the opposition in December 2002, have contributed to a sharp decline in the economy.
Economic growth in Venezuela has picked up this year, thanks to a 43 percent rise in world oil prices. While many Venezuelan businessmen are ardent foes of Chavez, he still enjoys support from some international investors, particularly in the oil sector. They had expressed hope that the president would defeat the recall, fearing that fresh elections that would be triggered by a successful recall would only produce more turmoil.
--------
Chávez Is Declared the Winner in Venezuela Referendum
August 16, 2004
By JUAN FORERO
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/16/international/americas/16CND-VENE.html?hp
CARACAS, Venezuela, Aug.16 - Venezuelans have voted to keep Hugo Chávez as their president, electoral authorities and international observers said today. But a vocal opposition movement refused to accept that a vast majority of the electorate sided with the firebrand leader in a recall election the day before.
The National Electoral Council president, Francisco Carrasquero, announced at 4 a.m. that Mr. Chávez had won in a landslide after 18 hours of voting on Sunday, securing the backing of 58 percent of voters compared to 42 percent against him.
"There is a clear difference in favor of the government of President Chávez," former President Jimmy Carter said. Mr. Carter, who heads the Atlanta-based Carter Center, which monitored the election with the Organization of American States, held a joint press conference with the OAS's secretary general, César Gaviria.
In the packed conference, shown on national television, the two men explained that the highly accurate "quick counts" their organizations conducted at various polling stations coincided with the outcome released by the Electoral Council.
The quick counts, used in elections around the world, tally up totals from various polling sites and have a margin of error of 1 percent.
"We have found the information from the quick count was almost exactly the same as that presented" by the electoral authorities, Mr. Carter said. The Nobel Peace Prize winner has monitored elections in 50 counties. He added that "all Venezuelans should accept the results of the CNE," the electoral body, "unless there is tangible proof that the reports are incorrect."
As of 3 p.m., the opposition movement, whose leaders had said last week that they would accept results as long as they were confirmed by the monitors, is clinging to the charge that a "gigantic fraud" has been committed.
Shortly after the polls closed at midnight, opposition leaders had giddily predicted victory. When informed in a two-hour meeting with Mr. Carter and Mr. Gaviria before dawn that they had lost, the leaders were stunned, according to people who were present.
"We categorically reject the results," said Henry Ramos, spokesman for the Democratic Coordinator, the umbrella of 27 political parties that opposes the government. In a televised announcement soon after the meeting, he said: "They have perpetrated a gigantic fraud against the will of the people."
Mr. Carrasquero said the government mustered 4,991,483 votes, while the opposition collected only 3.6 million votes, which was 200,000 short of what they would have needed to actually recall the president.
The latest polls, completed in July, had shown the president might squeak to victory, but political analysts had declined to predict an outcome, saying it was too close to call. As it turned out, Mr. Chávez's fervent supporters swamped the polls and voted overwhelmingly for him.
Mr. Carter and Mr. Gaviria said that there could be some discrepancies but said fraud was all but impossible. They said that they would look into fraud claims, if tangible proof were presented.
But the two former presidents - Mr. Gaviria from Colombia - cast doubt on fraud claims, saying that in addition to their quick counts, the opposition group, Sumate, had come up with similar results in their own samplings.
"We're willing to work with the opposition, if there are precise complaints," said Mr. Gaviria. "We haven't yet found any elements of fraud."
Opposition leaders, reached this morning by phone, insisted that the new computerized voting system had been tampered with, permitting the government to lose. But the O.A.S. and the Carter Center said that the results could not have been manipulated.
Antonio Mugica, the owner of the Smartmatic voting machines used in the election, said: "We know that it's impossible. All the machines were O.K. The votes were recorded in all the machines" and were then transmitted to the council.
He added: "The servers are in a highly secure area. The system is impenetrable."
Mr. Chávez, holding a microphone and standing in a balcony of the Miraflores presidential palace, spoke to a throng of supporters in a predawn address, telling them that the "the Venezuelan people have spoken."
"The Venezuelan people have spoken and the people's voice is the voice of God!" Mr. Chávez said. He was also conciliatory toward the opposition, which he has called "squalid ones" and a "rancid oligarchy" in the past.
"This is a victory for the opposition," the president said. "They defeated violence, coup-mongering and fascism. I hope they accept this as a victory and not as a defeat."
Bloomberg News reported that crude oil futures fell from record highs after the vote was announced. There had been concerns in the oil markets that a defeat would have disrupted supplies from this country, the world's fifth-largest exporter of oil and a key supplier to the United States.
Brent crude oil for September delivery, which expires today, fell as much as 58 cents, or 1.3 percent, on London's International Petroleum Exchange and closed down 21 cents at $43.67. On the New York Mercantile Exchange, crude oil for September delivery closed at $46.05, down 53 cents a barrel.
With about 60 percent of Venezuelans voting, the results appear to permit Mr. Chavez to finish out the two years left on his tumultuous term, which began after he won re-election in 2000.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- immigration / refugees
Detention of British Travelers Brings New Policy
August 16, 2004
By RACHEL L. SWARNS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/16/politics/16visa.html
WASHINGTON, Aug. 15 - One by one, the British travelers recounted their dizzying experiences upon arriving at American airports: One man was detained and denied the opportunity to call his wife and lawyer. One woman was handcuffed and another was placed in ankle cuffs that she complained were too tight.
United States officials said the travelers were not terrorists or criminals, but ordinary visitors who were handcuffed and detained this year for "minor, technical" violations of immigration law. In recent months, such stories have been splashed on television shows and in newspapers in Britain, giving what Commissioner Robert C. Bonner of the Department of Homeland Security described as "a black eye" to the United States' reputation.
On Thursday, Mr. Bonner announced that the department was changing its policy: Travelers from Britain and other countries that do not require visas to visit the United States will no longer be searched, handcuffed and detained if they overstayed their visas by a few days during a previous trip to this country.
"The consequences were grossly disproportionate to the minor, technical violations," said Mr. Bonner, who heads the department's customs and border protection bureau. "Typically these individuals were handcuffed during the time they were transported to and from detention. In other words, they were treated as criminals. "We said, 'Look, this doesn't make sense,' " Mr. Bonner said. "If the person doesn't pose any threat to us whatsoever, we want to find a way to let that person in. If they're not a risk to the United States, we want to find a way to do it."
The decision affects travelers from 27 industrialized nations, including Britain, Germany and Japan, who are allowed to visit the United States for 90 days without a visa. Under previous rules, visitors from those countries who stayed longer than the 90 days were detained, often overnight, when they tried to return to the United States; then they were put on the first plane back home.
Under the new policy, those travelers will be granted a one-time reprieve and allowed to enter the country for 90 days despite having overstayed their visit during a previous trip. For subsequent visits, they will have to apply for visas. The new policy will not apply to travelers deemed to be criminals, who pose security threats to the United States or seem likely to become illegal immigrants here. Those passengers will continue to be detained.
Mr. Bonner could not say how many travelers had been detained under the previous policy, but he said the number was significant. His announcement was cautiously welcomed by the British Embassy here, where officials said they hoped the decision would "result in a decline in the number of British citizens detained on arrival."
The policy shift was also applauded by the Travel Industry Association of America, which represents the nation's largest airlines, hotels, cruise lines and car rental companies, and the American Immigration Lawyers Association. The groups said negative publicity about the original policy had deterred visitors.
"Such incidents only deter future visitation to the U.S., damage our economy and perpetuate negative stereotypes about our great nation," said William S. Norman, president of the Travel Industry Association.
Mr. Bonner said the new policy would allow airport inspectors to focus resources on potential terrorists while displaying "a welcoming spirit" toward foreign visitors who mean the United States no harm.
"We can make judgments and exercise discretion to do something other than deny entry for minor technical violations of the immigration law and still do our priority mission, and that is preventing terrorists from entering the United States," Mr. Bonner said.
-------- police
F.B.I. Goes Knocking for Political Troublemakers
August 16, 2004
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
The New York Time
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/16/politics/campaign/16fbi.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, Aug. 15 - The Federal Bureau of Investigation has been questioning political demonstrators across the country, and in rare cases even subpoenaing them, in an aggressive effort to forestall what officials say could be violent and disruptive protests at the Republican National Convention in New York.
F.B.I. officials are urging agents to canvass their communities for information about planned disruptions aimed at the convention and other coming political events, and they say they have developed a list of people who they think may have information about possible violence. They say the inquiries, which began last month before the Democratic convention in Boston, are focused solely on possible crimes, not on dissent, at major political events.
But some people contacted by the F.B.I. say they are mystified by the bureau's interest and felt harassed by questions about their political plans.
"The message I took from it," said Sarah Bardwell, 21, an intern at a Denver antiwar group who was visited by six investigators a few weeks ago, "was that they were trying to intimidate us into not going to any protests and to let us know that, 'hey, we're watching you.' ''
The unusual initiative comes after the Justice Department, in a previously undisclosed legal opinion, gave its blessing to controversial tactics used last year by the F.B.I in urging local police departments to report suspicious activity at political and antiwar demonstrations to counterterrorism squads. The F.B.I. bulletins that relayed the request for help detailed tactics used by demonstrators - everything from violent resistance to Internet fund-raising and recruitment.
In an internal complaint, an F.B.I. employee charged that the bulletins improperly blurred the line between lawfully protected speech and illegal activity. But the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, in a five-page internal analysis obtained by The New York Times, disagreed.
The office, which also made headlines in June in an opinion - since disavowed - that authorized the use of torture against terrorism suspects in some circumstances, said any First Amendment impact posed by the F.B.I.'s monitoring of the political protests was negligible and constitutional.
The opinion said: "Given the limited nature of such public monitoring, any possible 'chilling' effect caused by the bulletins would be quite minimal and substantially outweighed by the public interest in maintaining safety and order during large-scale demonstrations."
Those same concerns are now central to the vigorous efforts by the F.B.I. to identify possible disruptions by anarchists, violent demonstrators and others at the Republican National Convention, which begins Aug. 30 and is expected to draw hundreds of thousands of protesters.
In the last few weeks, beginning before the Democratic convention, F.B.I. counterterrorism agents and other federal and local officers have sought to interview dozens of people in at least six states, including past protesters and their friends and family members, about possible violence at the two conventions. In addition, three young men in Missouri said they were trailed by federal agents for several days and subpoenaed to testify before a federal grand jury last month, forcing them to cancel their trip to Boston to take part in a protest there that same day.
Interrogations have generally covered the same three questions, according to some of those questioned and their lawyers: were demonstrators planning violence or other disruptions, did they know anyone who was, and did they realize it was a crime to withhold such information.
A handful of protesters at the Boston convention were arrested but there were no major disruptions. Concerns have risen for the Republican convention, however, because of antiwar demonstrations directed at President Bush and because of New York City's global prominence.
With the F.B.I. given more authority after the Sept. 11 attacks to monitor public events, the tensions over the convention protests, coupled with the Justice Department's own legal analysis of such monitoring, reflect the fine line between protecting national security in an age of terrorism and discouraging political expression.
F.B.I. officials, mindful of the bureau's abuses in the 1960's and 1970's monitoring political dissidents like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., say they are confident their agents have not crossed that line in the lead-up to the conventions.
"The F.B.I. isn't in the business of chilling anyone's First Amendment rights," said Joe Parris, a bureau spokesman in Washington. "But criminal behavior isn't covered by the First Amendment. What we're concerned about are injuries to convention participants, injuries to citizens, injuries to police and first responders."
F.B.I. officials would not say how many people had been interviewed in recent weeks, how they were identified or what spurred the bureau's interest.
They said the initiative was part of a broader, nationwide effort to follow any leads pointing to possible violence or illegal disruptions in connection with the political conventions, presidential debates or the November election, which come at a time of heightened concern about a possible terrorist attack.
F.B.I. officials in Washington have urged field offices around the country in recent weeks to redouble their efforts to interview sources and gather information that might help to detect criminal plots. The only lead to emerge publicly resulted in a warning to authorities before the Boston convention that anarchists or other domestic groups might bomb news vans there. It is not clear whether there was an actual plot.
The individuals visited in recent weeks "are people that we identified that could reasonably be expected to have knowledge of such plans and plots if they existed," Mr. Parris said.
"We vetted down a list and went out and knocked on doors and had a laundry list of questions to ask about possible criminal behavior," he added. "No one was dragged from their homes and put under bright lights. The interviewees were free to talk to us or close the door in our faces."
But civil rights advocates argued that the visits amounted to harassment. They said they saw the interrogations as part of a pattern of increasingly aggressive tactics by federal investigators in combating domestic terrorism. In an episode in February in Iowa, federal prosecutors subpoenaed Drake University for records on the sponsor of a campus antiwar forum. The demand was dropped after a community outcry.
Protest leaders and civil rights advocates who have monitored the recent interrogations said they believed at least 40 or 50 people, and perhaps many more, had been contacted by federal agents about demonstration plans and possible violence surrounding the conventions and other political events.
"This kind of pressure has a real chilling effect on perfectly legitimate political activity," said Mark Silverstein, legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado, where two groups of political activists in Denver and a third in Fort Collins were visited by the F.B.I. "People are going to be afraid to go to a demonstration or even sign a petition if they justifiably believe that will result in your having an F.B.I. file opened on you."
The issue is a particularly sensitive one in Denver, where the police agreed last year to restrictions on local intelligence-gathering operations after it was disclosed that the police had kept files on some 3,000 people and 200 groups involved in protests.
But the inquiries have stirred opposition elsewhere as well.
In New York, federal agents recently questioned a man whose neighbor reported he had made threatening comments against the president. He and a lawyer, Jeffrey Fogel, agreed to talk to the Secret Service, denying the accusation and blaming it on a feud with the neighbor. But when agents started to question the man about his political affiliations and whether he planned to attend convention protests, "that's when I said no, no, no, we're not going to answer those kinds of questions," said Mr. Fogel, who is legal director for the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York.
In the case of the three young men subpoenaed in Missouri, Denise Lieberman, legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union in St. Louis, which is representing them, said they scrapped plans to attend both the Boston and the New York conventions after they were questioned about possible violence.
The men are all in their early 20's, Ms. Lieberman said, but she would not identify them.
All three have taken part in past protests over American foreign policy and in planning meetings for convention demonstrations. She said two of them were arrested before on misdemeanor charges for what she described as minor civil disobedience at protests.
Prosecutors have now informed the men that they are targets of a domestic terrorism investigation, Ms. Lieberman said, but have not disclosed the basis for their suspicions. "They won't tell me," she said.
Federal officials in St. Louis and Washington declined to comment on the case. Ms. Lieberman insisted that the men "didn't have any plans to participate in the violence, but what's so disturbing about all this is the pre-emptive nature - stopping them from participating in a protest before anything even happened."
The three men "were really shaken and frightened by all this," she said, "and they got the message loud and clear that if you make plans to go to a protest, you could be subject to arrest or a visit from the F.B.I."
-------- prisons / prisoners
Israel turns up heat on prisoners
BBC
16 August, 2004
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3569760.stm
Israel has launched a psychological war against hundreds of Palestinian inmates on hunger strike for better conditions.
Prison officers are setting up barbecues outside cells and have told guards to eat in front of prisoners.
The fast has entered its second day as about 1,600 prisoners press for an end to strip searches, increased family visits and access to public telephones.
Organisers said the remainder of 7,500 detainees would join the liquids-only protest by the end of the week.
But Israel's security minister has said they would not bow to pressure and the prisoners could starve "until death".
"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," said Tzahi Hanegbi.
'Like animals'
Palestinians have held rallies in the West Bank and Gaza to support of the striking prisoners, and have called to hold a one-day solidarity fast on 18 August by the Palestinian Authority.
Arafat has joined calls in support of prisoners Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, himself a virtual prisoner of Israel at his West Bank headquarters, hailed the hunger strikers as "heroes... for their steadfastness".
Viewed by their own people as symbols of resistance, Palestinian prisoners held by Israel are accused by their captors of continuing to orchestrate violence from within their cells.
A statement from the Palestinian Prisoners Society announced the start of the hunger strike, accusing Israel of "robbing us of all our rights, treading on our dignity and treating us like animals".
The Palestinians are presenting the strike as non-political. Their demands include:
- guards to stop conducting strip searches
- more frequent contact with families; organisers say 40% of inmates are currently denied any visits
- improved sanitary conditions
- access to public telephones
Preventative measures
Israeli prison officials have already begun monitoring prisoners' body weight and will consider force-feeding inmates who became critically emaciated, reports say.
The strike is being organised by the three main Palestinian factions - Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Fatah.
One of the most well-known participants is Marwan Barghouti, who is currently serving five consecutive life sentences for murder.
As well as outdoor grills and the baking of extra bread and cakes in prison kitchens, the Israeli authorities have banned all family visits and restricted sales of sweets and cigarettes to prisoners.
Prisoners representatives said guards have confiscated salt that the inmates intended to use to stop themselves becoming dehydrated.
Hunger strikers were reported to be refusing to drink in protest at the strike-breaking measures.
-------- POLITICS
-------- budget
Audit of Child Care Finds Excess at IRS
By Mary Fitzgerald
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, August 16, 2004; Page A15
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A3656-2004Aug15.html
A Treasury Department review of Internal Revenue Service child care centers has called for improved policy and accounting procedures after highlighting shortcomings including one case in which the IRS spent $35,000 a year to keep one child of an employee in day care.
The audit was carried out by the Treasury inspector general for tax administration at the request of the IRS after the agency raised concerns about the high costs paid by the government for child care centers.
The General Services Administration is responsible for setting up and overseeing child care facilities in GSA-managed buildings. About 7,800 children are enrolled at 112 GSA centers, 47 of which are partly funded by the IRS.
The inspector general said that 4,297 of those children, or 55 percent, are dependents of federal employees but noted that federal law requires each child care center to meet a minimum of 50 percent enrollment of children of federal workers or federal contractors. Federal law also requires that the children of federal workers and contractors get enrollment priority.
It found that several of the centers for which the IRS pays part of the operating costs did not meet this requirement. Because the GSA allocates costs to federal agencies such as the IRS based on square footage occupied rather than number of children enrolled, this led to significant increases in costs per child, the report said. In one Denver center, the IRS estimated it paid $35,000 a year, despite the fact that only one IRS employee had a child in the center.
The report's authors said they were advised by the head of the GSA's child care program that the main reason for noncompliance with the enrollment minimum was that there are fewer federal workers with young children than in the past.
The inspector general said the GSA also noted that its policy allows children of non-federal employees to remain in a center even though there is a waiting list of federal employees' children "because of the importance of continuity in a child's care and education."
The report acknowledged that agencies cannot stop paying for joint use facilities even if their employees avail of none or only some of them.
"Thus there is little the IRS can do to reduce its payment to the GSA when employee participation in child care centers declines," the report stated.
The review found that the cost of child care facilities and employee participation had not been monitored, leading to difficulties in determining the costs and benefits to participating agencies. Noting that neither the IRS nor the GSA could provide the actual costs paid for IRS funded facilities, the report said child care programs "should be subjected to better financial management scrutiny than that currently performed at the IRS."
The audit also found that the IRS had been inconsistent in the child care subsidies it had paid. "As such, lower income employees receive very little benefit from the subsidy program," it noted. The IRS has now suspended funding for the subsidy because, the agency said, "it failed to directly support critical recruitment and retention objectives."
The IRS also said it is committed to addressing and resolving the other concerns raised in the report's findings.
Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, said the issue of inadequate accounting needs to be addressed.
"The government needs to track what it spends on child care and who uses it. That's just common sense," he said. "The GSA needs a better handle on child care programs government-wide. Otherwise, the taxpayers could continue to overspend, and nobody will really know whether government child care is going to eligible employees, as Congress intended."
-------- ENERGY
-------- alternative energy
UK Government Urges World Bank Towards Renewable Energy
August 16, 2004
LONDON, UK, (ENS)
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/aug2004/2004-08-16-02.asp
The UK Government has sent a letter to the World Bank saying that the bank has not gone far enough to implement recommendations of the Extractive Industries Review - a three year review of the bank's lending for oil, mining and gas projects. The letter was disclosed to Friends of the Earth, which has been lobbying the UK Government, represented on the World Bank Board and a major shareholder of the Bank, to ensure full implementation of the review's recommendations.
The Extractive Industries Review has been endorsed by hundreds of indigenous groups, European parliamentarians and religious leaders around the world.
Friends of the Earth's International Financial Institutions Campaigner Hannah Ellis said, "Friends of the Earth welcome with caution the government's agreement that the World Bank is not doing enough for the people and the environment it is supposed to serve. The government is yet to make clear what exactly the World Bank must do now and how the UK government, as a major shareholder of the Bank, is going to make them do it."
James Wolfensohn is chairman and president of the World Bank Group. (Photo courtesy World Bank) On August 3, the Board of the World Bank Group agreed that management's response to the Extractive Industries Review and internal reports on the Bank's Group's investments in the extractive industries - oil, gas, and mining - was "a balanced way forward" for the Bank Group.
Management, in its proposal to the Board, indicated that it would continue investments in oil, gas, and mining production, as these will continue to be an essential part of the development of many poor nations.
"The proposals of management are built around the central theme that our investments and policy advice in the extractive industries should benefit the poor first and foremost," said James Wolfensohn, chairman and president of the World Bank Group.
"The harsh reality is that some 1.6 billion people in the developing nations still do not have electricity, and some 2.3 billion people still depend on biomass fuels that are harmful to their health and the environment," Wolfensohn said. "That underscores the need for our continued but selective engagement in oil, gas, and coal investments." Oil spill on Navajo Nation land from a corroded oil production facility pipe. (Photo by Pete Reich courtesy EPA) At the same time management will invest in renewable energy generation. Following the renewable energy conference held in Bonn, Germany earlier this year, "we intend to take a leadership role on this issue and work with stakeholders to ensure the renewable and energy efficiency agenda is central to an environmentally sustainable energy policy," said Peter Woicke, executive vice president of the International Finance Corporation.
The World Bank Group "will seek to scale up its activities in this sector," said Woicke. Management has set an initial target to increase its renewable energy and energy efficiency portfolios by 20 percent annually over the next five years, which will increase the level of investments in this sector to more than $400 million per year. This target will be reviewed on a regular basis.
In addition, the World Bank Group management said it "will put an increased emphasis on the development of natural gas and other cleaner fuel alternatives, and has committed to working with stakeholders to update the Bank Group's renewable energy strategy, expand capacity, and identify opportunities for partnership."
The World Bank Group management told the Board that it "continues to refine and improve its approach to environmental and social issues."
The private sector lending arm of the World Bank Group, the International Finance Corporation, is currently revising its environmental and social safeguards to improve their clarity, accessibility, and implementation.
Kao and Malifut Community oppose Newcrest Mining in Halmahera, North Maluku, Indonesia. The Indonesian Human Rights Commission is investigating the allegations made by local people of human rights abuses by Brimob paramilitary police acting as security for Newcrest's mine. (Photo courtesy Mineral Policy Institute) In addition, the Bank Group will immediately put in place a process to ensure that the use of security forces to protect extractive industry project sites is in line with best practices. Clashes between local communities and extractive corporations have turned deadly in the past several years.
But the Extractive Industries Review went much farther. The Review concluded that in most cases, World Bank investments in oil, mining and gas were not alleviating poverty or promoting sustainable development.
The Extractive Industries Review recommended that the World Bank must phase out lending for oil and coal by 2008, and not lend for extractive projects in scientific or spiritual areas or places of civil unrest.
The Review recommended that the bank ensure the free prior and informed consent of affected communities, and invest much more in renewable energy.
In a position paper sent to Friend of the Earth, the UK Government, headed by Prime Minister Tony Blair, described the World Bank's response to the Extractive Industries Review recommendations to increase bank lending for renewable energy as "insufficient."
The position paper states, "The World Bank needs to make a greater and more urgent commitment to renewable energy, cleaner energy technologies, natural gas and improved energy efficiency."
British Prime Minister Tony Blair (Photo courtesy No. 10 Downing St.) But the environmental advocacy group says the Blair government's response comes too late to do much good. "It is very disappointing that it only now, when the final decision has already been made, that the UK Government has made its views regarding the Extractive Industries Review public," Ellis said.
"Now that the review process is over, how is the UK Government going to take this forward? It is all very well coming out with the right words after the event but it is time the UK demanded the World Bank make poverty alleviation and sustainable development a reality," she said.
Wolfensohn, however, says the process of review is not at an end. "It is important to understand that the various reports and the management response do not end with today's meeting," Wolfensohn said.
"We are engaged in a process aimed at improving the situation of those in poverty and ensuring that work with extractive industries and new initiatives on renewable energy continue to be developed," he said.
Management proposed, and the Board agreed, that the Bank Group would have an annual review with the Board of progress toward achievement of the objectives outlined in the management response and would remain engaged with all stakeholders.
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-------- environment
Technology Already Exists To Stabilize Global Warming
2004-08-16
Source: Princeton University
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/08/040816091135.htm
Existing technologies could stop the escalation of global warming for 50 years and work on implementing them can begin immediately, according to an analysis by Princeton University scientists.
The scientists identified 15 technologies - from wind, solar and nuclear energy to conservation techniques - that are ripe for large-scale use and showed that each could solve a significant portion of the problem. Their analysis, published in the Aug. 13 issue of Science, indicates that many combinations of these 15 technologies could prevent global emissions of greenhouse gasses from rising for the next five decades.
The finding counters the common argument that a major new technology needs to be developed before greenhouse gasses can be controlled, said professors Stephen Pacala and Robert Socolow, who conducted the study.
"It certainly explodes the idea that we need to do research for a long time before getting started," said Pacala, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and co-director with Socolow of Princeton's Carbon Mitigation Initiative.
"If we decide to act, we will need to reduce carbon emissions across the whole global economy," said Socolow, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering. "Fortunately, we have the tools to do this, especially if we think in terms of 50-year campaigns, not instant solutions."
Although the current study did not examine the costs of scaling up each of the 15 possible technologies, the authors point out that implementing the measures would likely generate economic benefits, including creating new industries, reducing the U.S. dependence on foreign oil and lessening the need for other pollution-control expenses associated with burning coal and other fossil fuels.
Carbon the culprit
The study focuses on the main contributor to greenhouse warming, carbon dioxide, which comes from burning carbon-based fossil fuels such as oil, natural gas and coal. Throughout Earth's history, changes in carbon dioxide levels have been linked to changes in climate. Current global emissions of carbon dioxide contain 7 billion tons of carbon per year. That amount is projected to double to 14 billion tons per year over the next 50 years as the world population increases and people consume more energy. To keep emissions stable, technologies and conservation efforts would have to prevent 7 billion tons worth of emissions per year by 2054.
Pacala and Socolow show how each of the 15 options they identified could prevent 1 billion tons a year worth of carbon emissions by 2054. To illustrate their idea, the researchers created a graph that divides the problem into seven 1 billion-ton-per-year "wedges." (See figures.) In their paper and 51 pages of supplementary online material, they identify opportunities and difficulties associated with each option and compare alternative combinations of seven "wedges."
Several of the options, for example, involve capturing carbon dioxide at power plants or other locations and storing it deep underground (carbon dioxide gas already is commonly injected into the Earth as part of some oil drilling operations). Others involve improving energy conservation faster than the modest improvements that are continually occurring. The researchers identify various renewable energy sources, including solar and wind, that could be scaled up faster than current projections. Changes in forestry and farming techniques also could lead to substantial reductions in carbon emissions.
Pacala and Socolow caution that scientists must continue researching alternative sources of energy because new measures will be required after 50 years. By that time, some of the 15 technologies will have reached their full potential and may not be able to keep up with increasing demand.
Case for action
Pacala and Socolow said that limiting carbon emissions to present-day levels for 50 years would put the world on a track to stabilize the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at about 500 parts per million. That would be roughly a doubling of the carbon dioxide content compared to the pre-industrial level of 280 parts per million. If emissions are left unchecked, it would be difficult to stabilize below a tripling. The current concentration is about 375 parts per million.
The authors acknowledged that their analysis does not address the question of why it is necessary to act in the first place. "Ideally, scientists and economists would produce a rigorous analysis showing that the benefits of controlling greenhouse gases outweigh the risks of not doing so," said Pacala. "But the rigorous analysis is not going to be possible until the warming is upon us - or not, as the case may be," Pacala continued. "The alternative to acting now is to watch the experiment happen and then find out how accurate we were."
A strong case for action comes from three lines of evidence, said Pacala. First, investigations of the Earth's climate over the last million years show that various factors, such as changing carbon dioxide levels, tend to reinforce each other and cause the temperature "to switch all at once" as it has during previous ice ages, Pacala said. "We understand those feedback mechanisms somewhat, but not completely, and that is scary."
A second reason for concern comes from current observations of change, including warming temperatures and the melting of ancient ice in glaciers, said Pacala.
Lastly, the computer models that explain past climate behavior and predict future changes indicate that increasing the level of carbon dioxide will cause long-term warming. "The models are not perfect but they are based on sound principles," Pacala said.
"You put it all together and you say, 'This looks dangerous.' And then when you find that we already have the technology to deal with it, we say, 'Why not?'" Pacala said.
"We'll have to spend real money," Socolow said, "but addressing the global carbon problem now will provide a tremendous stimulus to the economy and will promote the development of needed international institutions, while averting the most serious environmental consequences."
### Pacala and Socolow's research is part of the Carbon Mitigation Initiative, a project in the Princeton Environmental Institute funded by $20 million in grants from BP and Ford Motor Co. The researchers are continuing their work with more detailed analysis of the challenges and opportunities associated with the technologies they identified and with further studies of the magnitude and urgency of the carbon and climate problem.
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Polluted Sites Could Face Shortage of Cleanup Money
August 16, 2004
New York Times
By FELICITY BARRINGER
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/16/politics/16super.html?pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, Aug. 15 - With about six weeks left in the federal government's fiscal year, dozens of Superfund sites that are eligible for cleanup money are likely to be granted nothing or a fraction of what their managers say is needed because of a budget shortfall that could exceed $250 million, according to a survey by the Democratic staff of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
The list of sites was compiled from information provided privately by officials at the Environmental Protection Agency, according to a letter sent on Friday to Michael O. Leavitt, the agency's administrator, from Representative John D. Dingell of Michigan, the ranking Democrat on the committee.
The letter and an attached list indicate that at sites like Atlas Tack, a company that made tacks and nails in Fairhaven, Mass., Omaha Lead in Omaha and Woolfolk Chemical Works, in Fort Valley, Ga., cleanup managers are likely to fall behind in clearing toxic residue like lead particles, cyanide and arsenic in soil or groundwater.
The original cleanup fund, built on industry taxes, has dwindled to negligible levels in the nine years since Congress abolished those taxes, so the money is now almost entirely drawn from general tax revenue.
A subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee recently recommended rejecting the E.P.A.'s request for an additional $150 million for the next fiscal year, which begins Oct. 1. Money for cleanup can be allocated at any time in the fiscal year.
In the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, 2003, according to an inspector general's report, the shortfall amounted to about $175 million.
"The trend is clear and is being ignored at the expense of public health and the environment," Mr. Dingell said in his letter to Mr. Leavitt.
Thomas P. Dunne, the acting assistant administrator of the Office of Solid Waste and Emergency Response at the E.P.A., said that the final allocations "have to wait till the end" of the fiscal year because in the next few weeks, unspent money from other projects can be harvested to fill some of the gap.
He added that he did not expect the shortfall to continue growing indefinitely. "There are two questions," he said. "One, does Superfund have enough money to start all the sites that have come on line?" Indicating that the answer was no, he said, "obviously it is not a good thing to have that backlog remain in place for a long time."
The second question, he said, was what was the risk to the public. "In the short term it doesn't present any risk," he said.
"We're waiting for appropriations, and we've found that some sites that may be potentially serious aren't ready" for cleanup, Mr. Dunne said. The underlying issue, he said, is that more than half of the available cleanup money is being spent on nine huge sites, including the Bunker Hill Mining and Metallurgical Complex in Smelterville, Idaho; New Bedford Harbor in Massachusetts, which is contaminated by toxic chemicals once discharged by factories in the area; and three sites in New Jersey - the Chemical Insecticide site in Edison Township, the Federal Creosote site in Manville and the Vineland Chemical site in Vineland.
Katherine N. Probst, author of "Superfund's Future," a 2001 report to Congress that predicted a growing shortfall of money, said that people who live near the affected sites will feel the financing squeeze. "These people have been promised something they are not getting," she said. Delaying the cleanup of a problem like groundwater pollution, she said, means "it probably will cost us more in the long run."
The shortage of cleanup money has existed for two years, a period during which Superfund's budget has remained flat at about $1.3 billion.
Cleanup money is divided into three pots - one for emergency actions to safeguard human health, one for assessments of longer-term problems, and the third for "remedial action" or cleanup of pollution.
The E.P.A.'s money problems occur as the House Appropriations Committee is making its final decisions on the agency's budget for the next fiscal year.
The E.P.A.'s Superfund Web site said that as of Friday, there were 1,242 sites on the national priority list of sites approved for cleanup.
The most recent recommendations of a priority-setting panel within the E.P.A. leave more than two dozen sites that had been scheduled to receive planning or cleanup money without any money at all, Mr. Dingell's letter said. A dozen more are scheduled to get less than the directors of E.P.A.'s regional offices had requested, the letter added.
Around the Omaha Lead site - which was allocated about 15 percent less than the $6 million its managers had requested, according to the Democratic staff report - there are thousands of house yards where lead contamination is suspected to be two or three times greater than the level considered safe, according to the E.P.A.'s summary documents about the site; delaying financing is likely to mean delaying the sampling of yards and identification of hazards.
Marion Pressure Treating, a site in northern Louisiana, is facing its second rejection for financing in the last two years. The assessment of the site in the E.P.A.'s database indicates that the volatile chemicals from the creosote used in wood treatment presents "the potential for elevated health/ecological risk levels."
Woolfolk Chemical Works, in Fort Valley, Ga., is an old pesticide and herbicide plant that was partially cleaned in two projects in the 1990's. Officials at the site held a public meeting a year ago to unveil a further cleanup plan costing $21 million, The Macon Telegraph reported. The figures reported by the House Democratic staff members indicate that the site will get $1.5 million, 25 percent of what its managers had requested for this fiscal year.
Michael Cook, director of the Superfund office, said in an interview Sunday: "It will be funded at the level they can use this fiscal year, which won't be much because we are so close to the year's end. Then it will be much higher next year."
In the case of a site like Omaha Lead, he added: "We do have a number of sites that involve yard cleanups where we are working through the yards on a priority basis, but there definitely is exposure at the sites we have not been able to get to. That's a matter of the time it takes to undertake the cleanup actions."
-------- health
Marijuana Ingredient Useful in Treating Brain Tumors
August 16, 2004
PHILADELPHIA, Pennsylvania, (ENS)
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/aug2004/2004-08-16-09.asp#anchor8
Cannabinoids, the active ingredients in marijuana, have been shown by a team of Spanish scientists to block the blood supply to tumors of the brain.
According to a new study published in the August 15, issue of the journal "Cancer Research," a publication of the American Association for Cancer Research, the cannabinoids restrict the sprouting of blood vessels to brain tumors by inhibiting the expression of genes needed for the production of vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF).
The administration of cannabinoids significantly lowered this growth factor activity in laboratory mice and two patients with late stage glioblastoma.
Glioblastoma multiforme, the most aggressive form of glioma, strikes more than 7,000 Americans each year and is considered one of the most malignant and deadliest forms of cancer, generally resulting in death within one to two years following diagnosis.
"Blockade of the VEGF pathway constitutes one of the most promising antitumoral approaches currently available," said Manuel Guzman, professor of biochemistry and molecular biology, with the Complutense University in Madrid, Spain, and the study's principal investigator.
"The present findings provide a novel pharmacological target for cannabinoid based therapies."
The disease is usually treated with surgery, followed by conventional radiation alone or in combination with chemotherapy. However, the main tumor often evades total destruction, surviving and growing again, eventually killing the patient. For this reason, researchers are seeking other therapeutic strategies, some of which might be considered novel.
In this study, the investigators chose to work with cannabinoids which, in previous studies, have been shown to inhibit the growth of blood vessels to tumors in laboratory mice.
The scientists induced gliomas in mice, which were then inoculated with cannabinoids. Using DNA array analysis, the team examined 267 genes associated with the growth of blood vessels in tumors and found that cannabinoids lowered the expression of several genes related to the VEGF pathway.
To test the effectiveness of cannabinoids on humans with brain tumors, the scientists obtained tumor biopsies from two patients with glioblastomas who had failed standard therapy, including surgery, radiotherapy and chemotherapy. The biopsied tissue was analyzed before and after local injection of a cannabinoid.
"In both patients, VEGF levels in tumor extracts were lower after cannabinoid inoculation," said Guzman. The results suggest a potential new approach toward the treatment of these otherwise intractable brain tumors.
Also participating in the study were Cristina Blázquez and Amador Haro, from Complutense University; Luis González-Feria, from University Hospital, Tenerife, Spain; Luis Álvarez, from La Paz University Hospital in Madrid; and M. Llanos Casanova, from the Project on Cellular and Molecular Biology and Gene Therapy, also in Madrid.
-------- ACTIVISTS
Pro-Palestinian U.S. activist ordered expelled from Israel
August 16, 2004
DAN WALDMAN
Associated Press Writer
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/news/archive/2004/08/16/international1341EDT0542.DTL
An Israeli court ordered a pro-Palestinian American activist deported from the country Monday, the latest move against a foreign group opposing Israeli military activity in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
A Tel Aviv District Court judge ordered Adam Wilson, a 28-year-old union organizer from New Orleans, La., to leave the country by Tuesday.
Wilson is affiliated with the International Solidarity Movement, a Palestinian-sponsored group in the forefront of protesting Israeli military operations and the separation barrier Israel is building near its boundary with the West Bank.
ISM activists have sometimes disrupted Israeli military operations by placing themselves between soldiers and Palestinians.
The deportation order came as an Israeli court prepared to take up the case of Ewa Jasiewicz, 26, an ISM sympathizer from London who was stopped at Ben Gurion Airport on Aug. 11.
Wilson said he was detained by authorities at an airport detention center the same day as Jasiewicz after he refused an order to leave Israel.
"They interrogated me and I spent about 10 hours at the airport," he said, adding authorities later tried to put him on a plane but he refused to leave.
Wilson's attorney Yael Berda said the judge ordered Wilson's deportation after he was unable to pay some $890 to cover court costs.
"They're asking for money to be guaranteed for the state expenses of the court fees," Berda said. "(ISM activists) don't have that kind of money. They are here for their own volunteer opportunities."
In March 2003, ISM member Rachel Corrie, 23, of Olympia, Wash., was crushed to death by an Israeli army bulldozer in a Gaza refugee camp while trying to stop soldiers from demolishing a house. Her death was ruled accidental.
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Iraqi 'human shields' flock to Najaf
Reuters
16 August 2004
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/01277CBF-0075-4BD2-86D6-F772FFC50E82.htm
About 2000 Iraqi civilian "volunteers" have formed a human shield around Shia leader Muqtada al-Sadr in Najaf as US-led forces besiege the city.
The volunteers cheered al-Sadr in the marble-floored courtyard of the Imam Ali mosque on Monday in an impressive show of force.
Al-Sadr is holed up inside one of Shia Islam's most sacred shrines before an expected American-led offensive.
Travelling to Najaf from across Iraq, the volunteers are swelling the ranks of his supporters and could provide another reason for US troops to think twice before storming the shrine.
"These people are a deterrent to the Americans because they are civilians. They are here so that the Americans won't attack the Imam Ali shrine," said Shaikh Ahmad al-Shaibani, a senior al-Sadr aide.
Protecting shrine
Any serious damage to the revered site would enrage millions of Shia around the world. However, US commanders have said they do not intend to attack the shrine itself.
The volunteers said they had no serious military training. But they seem ready to fire an AK-47 rifle or rocket-propelled grenade and use any means to try to block an advance by US tanks positioned in neighbourhoods near the shrine.
"I will lie on the ground in front of tanks, or I will kill the Americans to defend al-Sadr and Najaf"
Fadil Hamid, volunteer "I will lie on the ground in front of the tanks, or I will kill the Americans to defend al-Sadr and Najaf," said Fadil Hamid, 30.
Last week, thousands of Iraqis staged pro-al-Sadr protests in several cities and called for the downfall of interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi.
Several of the volunteers referred to Allawi as Saddam Hussein the second, referring to the toppled former president accused of killing thousands of Shia.
"Allawi you coward, you agent of the Americans," the crowd yelled. "Allawi we don't need you."
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