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NUCLEAR
Barrow ships sail into a worldwide nuclear storm
Vieques Bomb Targets Proposed for Superfund Listing
Army Will Pay $75 Million to Clean San Bernardino Water
Gulf war inquiry checks evidence for libel
US: Iran Says Can Make Uranium for Nuke in a Year
Iran Warns Israel on Nuclear Facilities
IAEA report will not rule on Iran nuclear programme: diplomats
Iran's nuclear program must be brought to UN
State Dept. Presses Case Against Iran
China says N. Korea will not be pulling out of nuclear talks
Korea talks still on, Downer says
South Korea's Roh Urges North to Ditch Atomic Arms Now
Kerry would reduce missile defense spending
Bush Defends Pursuit of Missile Defense System
Nuclear danger doesn't worry politicians
Nuclear power still a deadly proposition
Entergy chief cancels visit
MILITARY
U.S. Knew All About Private Jail in Kabul, American Tells
Three on Trial in Afghanistan Gain Access to F.B.I. Files
Sri Lankan navy detects Tamil rebels smuggling weapons
Halliburton Now Says It Will Not Get Extension From Army
Army Boosts Boeing's Future
Iraqis Sending Group to Seek Deal With Sadr
Iraqi Delegation Arrives in Najaf in Mission to End Fighting
From street bards to Saddam, everyone's a poet in Iraq
Arafat outfoxes his political foes - again
Sharon Proposes New Housing in West Bank Settlements
New Cooperation and New Tensions in Terrorist Hunt
Abu Ghraib Policy Defended
Rumsfeld and Key Senator Signal Disagreement With 9/11 Report
C.I.A. Officer Denounces Agency and Sept. 11 Report
Ex-CIA heads say czar needs teeth
C.I.A. Officer Denounces Agency and Sept. 11 Report
U.N. seeks more 'neutral' posture
More U.N. Troops Proposed For Congo Annan Seeking Force of 24,000
US whistleblower faces death threats
Rumsfeld Says US Forces "Unlikely" To Storm Holy Places In Najaf
US to withdraw up to 70,000 troops from Europe and Asia
President Outlines Overseas Troop Cut
Bush Tells Veterans of Plan to Redeploy G.I.'s Worldwide
Uzbekistan base plans could rile radical groups
Chavez survives recall; observers find no fraud
Chavez Defeats Recall Attempt
Venezuela Votes by Large Margin to Retain Chávez
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Man says U.S. knew of rogue Afghan prison
Federal agents added to flights
Deadlines Urged for Terror Fixes
Government to Take Over Watch-List Screening
Conflict Erupts on Effort to Identify Travelers
British Charge 8 Tied to Terror Plot With Murder Conspiracy
Is torture OK for UK courts?
POLITICS
Panel's Call for Strong Intelligence Chief Wins Crucial Ally
OTHER
Explosives Pollute Wells Near Wisconsin Army Ammunition Plant
Federal managers are told to protect wildlife and delay energy projects
Journalist groups complain Homeland Security is skirting
Homeless camps cleared near Clinton library site
ACTIVISTS
Americans Invited to Help Clean Up the World
'04 Edition of Addicted to War Is Issued
Behavior May Cost Protesters 'Privileges,' Bloomberg Says
New York Vs. the Protesters City Must Balance Freedom, Security
Syrian Court Releases Rights Activist on Bail
Protestors accuse political bigwigs of hijacking Iraq
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- britain
Barrow ships sail into a worldwide nuclear storm
17/08/2004
Northwest Evening Mail (UK)
http://www.nwemail.co.uk/news/viewarticle.aspx?id=125061
TWO BARROW nuclear ships guarded by "sea plods" are set to be at the centre of a world nuclear storm.
They will sail to the USA next month to pick up a controversial consignment of former nuclear weapons plutonium.
The ships, Pacific Teal and Pacific Pintail are each armed with two military cannon and will be manned by Atomic Energy Authority police sharpshooters - dubbed sea plods by anti-nuclear groups.
The police officers, some of them from Sellafield will guard the American consignment which is a flask containing 140kg of weapons grade plutonium - enough critics claim to make about 50 nuclear bombs.
It will be taken to France for it to be turned into mixed oxide fuel.
Anti-nuclear protestors staged a demonstration at Barrow Docks in 2002 when the two vessels were last used to transport radioactive mox fuel back to Barrow after it had been rejected by the Japanese authorities.
Anti-nuclear campaigners are predicting the ships and the consignment could run into serious opposition from opponents in France.
The Barrow ships will later return the plutonium as fuel assemblies to the USA where it will be tested in a nuclear power station.
The controversial shipments are likely to attract criticism from anti-nuclear groups around the world including Cumbrians Opposed to a Radioactive Environment.
Since the September 11 attacks the possibility that fuel shipments could be ambushed by terrorists has made the job of guarding such cargos more critical than ever before.
-------- depleted uranium
Vieques Bomb Targets Proposed for Superfund Listing
August 17, 2004
NEW YORK, New York, ENS
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/aug2004/2004-08-17-09.asp#anchor2
The Atlantic Fleet Weapons Training Area (AFWTA) on and around the islands of Vieques and Culebra, Puerto Rico used for live fire training for 100 years may soon be declared a Superfund site.
Responding to the request of Puerto Rico Governor Sila Calderon, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Friday proposed to add the area to the list of the country's most contaminated hazardous waste sites. The listing would make the site eligible for federal cleanup funding.
The Superfund law entitles each state to designate a single facility for inclusion on the National Priorities List without ranking it against other sites for its potential threat to people's health or the environment. In June 2003, Governor Calderon exercised Puerto Rico's one-time right to select its highest priority facility with the request to list areas of Vieques and Culebra.
The U.S. Navy used the eastern portion of Vieques for training from the 1940s until it ceased operations there on May 1, 2003.
Areas of Culebra were used for military exercises from 1902 until July 1975.
Contaminants of the land and water resulting from these activities may include mercury, lead, copper, magnesium, lithium, perchlorate, TNT, napalm, depleted uranium, PCBs, solvents and pesticides, the EPA said.
The EPA is seeking public comments on the proposed listing during the 60 day public comment period that began August 13.
On May 30, the Committee for the Rescue and Developmnet of Vieques (CRDV) mobilized some 100 people in fishing boats to the bombed area to dramatize the urgent necessity for decontamination and the return of Vieques' lands to its people.
Representatives of religious communities, labor and political leaders joined dozens of Vieques residents in the activity they called "The Return to the Camps," in reference to the civil disobedience camps that stopped the Navy bombing for a year following the death of local man David Sanes in April 1999. Protesters camped, demonstrated and were arrested repeatedly until the Navy agreed to cease the live fire practice in 2003.
The Superfund listing proposal advanced by the EPA would separate the final decision on listing Culebra from the final listing of Vieques. The EPA said it will go forward with a final rule listing Vieques and postpone the final listing of Culebra to allow the completion of a Memorandum of Agreement between Puerto Rico and the Army.
The terms or progress under such an agreement "may determine the point at which it may be appropriate to withdraw the proposal to list the Culebra areas," the EPA said.
The government of Puerto Rico and the Army have begun discussions with the goal of reaching an agreement on the timely investigation and cleanup of Culebra through the Army's Formerly Used Defense Sites Exit EPA disclaimer program.
The EPA is currently addressing contaminated areas on the eastern side of Vieques through a consent order with the Navy under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act. Under the order, the agency is overseeing the investigation of 12 contaminated areas outside of the live impact area, which was active when the order was signed, and has identified close to 40 additional areas of concern.
EPA is also providing guidance on the Navy's investigation of potentially contaminated sites on the western end of Vieques to determine what cleanup actions are needed. The progress made on these investigations will be incorporated into the Superfund work.
Detailed information on the proposed Superfund listing, including the Federal Register notice announcing the listing, supporting documents and instructions for submitting public comments, can be found at: http://www.epa.gov/superfund/sites/npl/p040813.htm
----
Army Will Pay $75 Million to Clean San Bernardino Water
August 17, 2004
SAN BERNADINO, California, (ENS)
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/aug2004/2004-08-17-09.asp#anchor1
The city of San Bernardino will receive $69 million and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) $6.5 million from the U.S. Army, as part of a consent decree for the Newmark Groundwater Contamination Superfund site, located near San Bernardino, federal, state, and local officials said Friday.
This consent decree resolves claims by the city of San Bernardino and the California Department of Toxic Substances Control against the U.S. Army over alleged groundwater contamination, and provides funds for the cleanup of the contamination.
Signatories to the consent are the U.S. EPA, the Department of the Army, the city of San Bernardino, and the California Department of Toxic Substances Control.
The Newmark Groundwater Contamination site covers a portion of a groundwater aquifer used as a public water supply source for San Bernardino. Although the contamination is believed to date from World War II, the pollution was not discovered until 1980, when tests revealed the presence of chlorinated solvents, tetrachloroethylene (PCE), and trichloroethylene (TCE).
More than 25 percent of the municipal water supply for the city of San Bernardino's 175,000 residents has been affected by the water contamination, which runs in two plumes under the Newmark site.
Under the settlement agreement, the city will provide clean replacement water for area residents and prevent contamination from reaching downstream production wells, which affect over 800,000 people in several nearby counties.
The city of Riverside, with a population of approximately 250,000, relies on wells downgradient from the Newmark plume for approximately 75 percent of its total water supply.
The rapidly growing communities of Colton, Loma Linda, Fontana, Rialto, with approximately 115,000 people, and several unincorporated areas also use well water unprotected from the contamination. No alternative water sources currently are available.
The city of San Bernadino is required to use most of the funds to operate and maintain the EPA's groundwater extraction and treatment remedies at the Newmark Groundwater Contamination Superfund Site for up to 50 years. The city of San Bernardino may use some of the funds to build additional treatment plants to expand its water delivery capacity.
To provide clean drinking water, the EPA and the city of San Bernadino are drilling and developing five pumping wells, a five phase pipeline, five monitoring wells, a booster pump station and the expansion of the 19th Street Treatment Plant.
The five pumping wells will pump the contaminated water up and into the underground pipeline, which carries the water to the 19th Street Treatment Plant. The plant will treat the water with the support of the additional 24 carbon filtering units that are part of the expansion. Some of the treated water will then be boosted by the pump station at Encanto Park to where it will be distributed by the San Bernadino Municipal Water District.
"San Bernardino is an area of rapid expansion, which places huge demands on area water sources," said Wayne Nastri, EPA's regional administrator for the Pacific Southwest Region. "The EPA is pleased to be part of the team that is working to improve the water quality for generations to come."
The EPA believes that a likely source of the contamination is a World War II Army Base which had been on 1,600 acres of leased land from 1942 until it was closed in 1947. The source investigation has been complicated by difficult geological conditions and the lack of good records of the Army activities.
----
Gulf war inquiry checks evidence for libel
James Meikle, health correspondent
Tuesday August 17, 2004
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,1284545,00.html
The independent inquiry investigating whether illnesses among veterans of the first Gulf war were related to their service is taking legal advice about whether it should publish claims from a doctor who said many veterans he examined on behalf of the Ministry of Defence were liars.
Tony Hall, employed for a year on the MoD's medical assessment programme, said many veterans were obese, smoked nicotine or were alcoholic when he presented evidence to Lord Lloyd's inquiry. Others smoked cannabis, had criminal records for violence after drinking or had difficulty keeping jobs.
He named individuals, prompting the inquiry secretariat to examine whether he had committed libel in his written statement and slander in his oral evidence last week.
The MoD, which has refused to allow any serving ministers, officials or service personnel to give oral evidence, said it had contacted the inquiry and "discussed" Dr Hall's evidence.
"Our interest stems from a complaint received from a veteran who is named in Dr Hall's evidence who was concerned about medical confidentiality."
A spokeswoman added: "We would not want to influence Lord Lloyd in any way."
She said Dr Hall's views were "not the views of the MoD".
The inquiry is being held in public and journalists have been regularly handed copies of written evidence, although the Guardian and other media did not attend the session at which Dr Hall spoke. He sent his evidence to the Daily Telegraph. The Guardian has also seen a copy.
Dr Hall trained in London but moved to the US and was drafted into the army. When he returned to Britain he joined the MoD's medical assessment programme to investigate whether there were Gulf-related illnesses at St Thomas' hospital in London.
In his evidence he said he had taken detailed histories of 460 veterans and measured the height, weight and body mass of 222 of them. Of these, 60% were overweight "and indeed 20% were obese".
He called for a ban on contact sports, "smoking nicotine, cannabis, cocaine, magic mushrooms and the use of any other recreational drugs" and alcohol on military premises.
He continued: "The Gulf war syndrome ... is not due to physical disease. A few individuals may have developed a disease due to such factors as vaccinations, depleted uranium, etc, but the plight of Iraqi civilians is much more acute than that of soldiers who spent four days in a war zone. The Gulf war veterans who have complained to the press, thereby breaching their own right to confidentiality, are liars."
Dr Hall told the Guardian he had been suspended half way through his year's contract on December 10 1997, and was sent on "gardening leave" by the MoD after complaints about him. But the MoD had continued to pay him £1,000 a week until his contract ended.
His allegations were condemned as "unprofessional" by the medical adviser to veterans who believe their illnesses are war-related.
Malcolm Hooper, who was at the hearing, said: "He exposed the medical assessment programme as the sham it was."
-------- iran
US: Iran Says Can Make Uranium for Nuke in a Year
By REUTERS
August 17, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-nuclear-iran-usa.html?pagewanted=print&position=
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A hawkish U.S. official said on Tuesday that Iran has warned it could make enough bomb-grade material in a year to produce a nuclear weapon, a threat that may boost a U.S. push to report Tehran to the United Nations.
In recent weeks, Iran has intensified its standoff over its nuclear programs and the United States has said it is increasingly likely the U.N. Security Council would take up the case against the Islamic republic for possible sanctions.
U.S. Under Secretary of State John Bolton said Iran had sought in negotiations with European powers to pressure them to ease their opposition to its suspected weapons programs.
``They've told the EU threethat they could produce, they could enrich enough uranium for a nuclear weapon within a year and they could produce nuclear weapons within the range of our own assessment, which is a way of threatening the Europeans to get them to back down,'' the senior official said at a Washington think tank session on Iran.
U.S. officials with access to intelligence estimates say Iran can achieve a bomb in three to five years and the United States believes that would be a danger in the Middle East, notably to its close ally Israel.
Oil-rich Iran says its nuclear programs, which the U.N. nuclear watchdog has been monitoring, are for peaceful energy projects.
Bolton, a hawk in the Bush administration who is skeptical talks with Iran will be successful, said the Europeans had assured the United States they would not bow to the pressure.
The European Union three have been negotiating with Iran and share information with the United States on the talks, although they have given few details publicly about high-level meetings they held last month, diplomats said.
The three won a promise from Iran last year to suspend uranium enrichment.
But Iran was angered when the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency issued a tough rebuke over cooperation with its inspectors in June. And last month, it said it would resume the manufacture, assembly and testing of enrichment centrifuges, which can be used to enrich uranium for weapons.
Despite reluctance among the 35-nation IAEA to ratchet up the diplomatic pressure on Iran by referring it to the Security Council, Bolton said that move was ``long overdue'' and the watchdog had an opportunity to do so at a meeting next month.
``The odds of referring the issue to the Security Council whether in September or at some point in the near future are rising rapidly,'' he said.
----
Iran Warns Israel on Nuclear Facilities
Voice of America,
August 17, 2004
http://www.truthnews.net/daily/2004080291.htm
A senior Iranian military commander says Iran would destroy Israel's Dimona nuclear reactor, if the Jewish state were to attack Iranian nuclear facilities.
Iran's first nuclear power station, at Bushehr on the Persian Gulf coast, is scheduled to begin operating next year.
Israel has not directly threatened to attack the facility. But the United States says it suspects Iran is secretly building nuclear weapons, and Israel says it will not allow Tehran to have a nuclear bomb.
Iran insists its nuclear program is for generating electricity and other peaceful uses.
Israel has never confirmed or denied having a nuclear arsenal. But its reactor at Dimona is widely believed to be the source of plutonium used to build as many as 200 nuclear warheads.
----
IAEA report will not rule on Iran nuclear programme: diplomats
VIENNA (AFP)
Aug 17, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040817184451.a6nbft47.html
The UN's nuclear agency will not say in a report next month whether Iran's nuclear activities are of a military nature, nor will it recommend bringing the case before the UN Security Council, diplomats said on Tuesday.
"I suspect that this will be another of those reports where there is no 'smoking gun' which would allow the hardline countries to send this to the Security Council," a diplomat told AFP here.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is conducting a major probe into Iran's bid to generate electricity through nuclear power -- seen by the United States as a cover for secret weapons development.
The IAEA board is due to deliver the report on Iran's nuclear activities during a meeting at the organisation's headquarters from September 13 after the last of a group of IAEA inspectors returned from Iran last week.
However, the source said the report would not deliver "a so-called clean bill of health, which would allow Iran to say that they should be taken off the agenda of the board of governors" of the Vienna-based agency.
According to the source, neither will it contain conclusive findings about traces of highly enriched uranium discovered, which can be used to manufacture an atomic bomb, detected at facilities in Iran.
He said the IAEA had not yet concluded that the traces came from equipment bought on a black market network run by Pakistan's former nuclear chief scientist, Abdul Qadeer Khan, as reported by Jane's Defence Weekly this month.
"That source was not entirely correct -- some of the samples support the idea that some of the protocols came from Pakistan but (IAEA inspectors) don't have the complete set of analysis and samples and are not yet able to say what Jane's said."
The IAEA inspectors "are not going to say in the report that the contamination came from abroad," he said.
The traces of 54 percent-enriched uranium have been at the heart of an ongoing international dispute over whether Tehran has reneged on its obligations to inform the IAEA of all enrichment activities.
The Islamic republic, which insists that its nuclear program is peaceful in nature, says the traces were brought into the country on imported equipment and wants its dossier to be taken off the agenda of the UN nuclear watchdog.
A spokesman for the IAEA, Mark Gwozdecky, said that the body would be conducting more inspections of Iran on the spot in the future. "This round of inspections is finished, they will be more in the future.".
Iran has agreed to temporarily suspend uranium enrichment pending the completion of the IAEA probe, but is working on other parts of the fuel cycle and has recently resumed making centrifuges used for enrichment.
Tehran has asserted that it has a "legitimate right" to enrich uranium, which is permitted under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).
But the concern is that once fully mastered, a country possessing such technology can easily divert it into military usage.
The European Union's "big three" -- Britain, France and Germany -- have been pressing Iran to cease working on the nuclear fuel cycle in exchange for increased trade and cooperation and the guaranteed supply of nuclear fuel.
----
Iran's nuclear program must be brought to UN Security Council: senior US official
WASHINGTON (AFP)
Aug 17, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040817191147.bj7vkwsz.html
Iran's nuclear program, which the United States charges is a front for atomic weapons development, must be referred to the UN Security Council for possible sanctions to be imposed on the Islamic Republic, a senior US official said Tuesday.
The under secretary of state for arms control and international security, John Bolton, a noted hawk in President George W. Bush's administration, would not say whether Washington would insist that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) send the matter to the council when it meets next month, but said failure to do so would be a mistake.
"We ... believe that the Iranian nuclear weapons program must be taken up by the UN Security Council," Bolton told a forum on US policy toward Iran at the Hudson Institute, a Washington think-tank.
"Clearly, the time to report this issue to the Security Council is long overdue," he said. "To fail to do so would risk sending a signal to would-be proliferators that there are not serious consequences for pursuing secret nuclear weapons programs."
Bolton called for the international community to isolate Iran over the program, which Tehran adamantly insists is simply for civilian energy purposes, until it comes clean and dismantles any weapons components under independent supervision.
"We cannot let Iran, a leading sponsor of international terrorism, acquire nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them to Europe, most of central Asia and the Middle East, or beyond," he said.
"Without serious, concerted, immediate intervention by the international community, Iran will be well on the road to doing so," Bolton added.
He spoke after diplomats at IAEA headquarters in Vienna said the agency's governing board was unlikely say in its report next month whether Iran's nuclear activities are of a military nature and would not recommend referring the case to the Security Council.
However, one source said the report would not deliver "a so-called clean bill of health, which would allow Iran to say that they should be taken off the agenda of the board of governors" of the Vienna-based agency.
The board is due to deliver the report on Iran's nuclear activities during a meeting at the organization's headquarters from September 13 after the last of a group of IAEA inspectors returned from Iran last week.
----
State Dept. Presses Case Against Iran
Tuesday August 17, 2004
By BARRY SCHWEID
AP Diplomatic Writer
http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,1280,-4428674,00.html
WASHINGTON (AP) - The Bush administration will keep using diplomacy to try to end Iran's drive for nuclear weapons, but there is no sign yet that Iran - or North Korea - has decided to follow Libya's lead and abandon its dangerous goal, a senior Bush administration official said Tuesday.
``The path we are pursuing is the path of diplomacy,'' Undersecretary of State John Bolton said. He said the administration is working with European and other nations to seek a peaceful end to more than 18 years of a large-scale nuclear program by the Tehran government that poses a ``grave threat'' in the Middle East and beyond.
The diplomatic drive is focused on the United Nations, where the Security Council has the power to impose economic and other sanctions on Iran, he said.. ``Never has the Security Council been so feared,'' Bolton said.
And by trying to rally other nations to call for Council sanctions, the administration is contradicting accusations of it having a go-it-alone foreign policy, Bolton said in apparent reference to attacks by Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry and other critics of the administration's overseas actions, especially the war against Iraq.
Bolton cited more than a half-dozen activities by Iran that he said could not be explained except as being part of a program to develop nuclear weapons. This included uranium enrichment and plutonium programs.
Iran has never explained itself to the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency and to European intermediaries, offering instead lies and deceptions,. Bolton said. ``There isn't a thread of credibility,'' he said.
``If we permit Iran's deception to go on much longer it will be far too late,'' he said at a conference sponsored by the Hudson Institute, a private research group, and New Republic Magazine.
``This regime has to be isolated for its bad behavior,'' Bolton said.
Neither Iran nor North Korea, cited by President Bush along with Iraq as part of an ``axis of evil,'' has made a strategic decision to give up nuclear weapons, he said.
-------- korea
China says N. Korea will not be pulling out of nuclear talks
17 August 2004
(AFP)
http://www.khaleejtimes.com/DisplayArticle.asp?xfile=data/theworld/2004/August/theworld_August431.xml§ion=theworld
BEIJING - China on Tuesday said its close ally North Korea will not be pulling out of six-party talks over its nuclear program, despite Pyongyang hinting it may not turn up for a next round of negotiations.
"I think North Korea won't, under the current circumstances, pull out of the six-party process," China's ambassador for the Korean peninsula Ning Fukui told reporters after meeting with senior North Korean officials.
"North Korea didn't say they won't join, they are just currently stating the differences between North Korea and the US. They don't think there is much of a foundation there."
Chinese Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing also played down suggestions the Stalinist state might pull out of the discussions.
"I haven't heard about this," he said.
"There are still some difficulties. But I believe our work ... will continue to overcome the problems."
Pyongyang on Monday hinted through its official media that it might not attend a next round of multi-party talks expected by the end of September, citing what it called a hardline US policy on the stand-off.
"It is clear that there would be nothing to expect even if the DPRK (North Korea) sits at the negotiating table with the US under the present situation," a foreign ministry spokesman told the state-run Korean Central News Agency.
While optimistic Pyongyang would attend the talks, Ning, who met in Beijing Monday with Li Gun, head of the North Korean delegation to working level sessions of six-nation talks, could not say if September was a realistic option for a meeting of the working level groups.
"It is difficult for me to say when the work group can meet," he said.
"We hope that, as long as all parties have a sincere, flexible and pragmatic attitude they can further explain and interpret their solutions and positions.
"We believe it is possible to come to a new compromise and consensus, and it is possible to really push forward the preparations of the meeting."
A third round of talks which brought together the United States, the two Koreas, China, Japan and Russia in Beijing in an effort to resolve the impasse ended in June without tangible progress.
The stand-off over North Korea's quest for nuclear weapons erupted in October 2002 when the United States accused Pyongyang of operating a nuclear weapons program based on enriched uranium, violating the 1994 nuclear freeze of its separate plutonium producing program.
Pyongyang has denied running the uranium-based program, but has again fired up its once-mothballed plutonium-based program.
----
Korea talks still on, Downer says
Downer, left, with Wen Jiabao in Beijing.
Tuesday, August 17, 2004
CNN
http://edition.cnn.com/2004/US/08/16/nkorea.aus/
BEIJING, China -- China has told Australia that talks on the North Korean crisis have not been cancelled, one day after Pyongyang ruled out attending another round.
After meeting with Chinese officials, Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer told a news conference on Tuesday the message he had received was "no scheduled time has been determined for that meeting, not that the meeting has been cancelled."
On Monday, North Korea said it wouldn't participate in working-level meetings connected to six-party talks on its nuclear program.
A North Korean foreign ministry statement accused the United States of not being interested in a meaningful dialogue and said there were no plans to shut down the country's nuclear facilities.
Australia has joined efforts to help resolve the 22-month nuclear impasse, with Downer discussing the issue with Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao in Beijing on Monday.
Downer is set to head to Pyongyang for a rare visit on Tuesday, where he has said he would try to convince the isolated state of the advantages to be gained by abandoning its nuclear program.
Delegates attending six-nations talks in June had planned a fourth round of talks, after a third round ended in Beijing.
The nations -- the two Koreas, China, the United States, Russia and Japan -- said at the time they had agreed to hold further talks by the end of September.
They had also pledged to take the first steps to resolve the 20-month old nuclear deadlock as soon as possible.
Host China said the six nations found some common ground, with all parties agreeing that a freeze of the North's nuclear program should be a first step, but an official said that the United States and North Korea were still poles apart.
A key issue separating the two is Washington's claim that the North is operating a secret uranium-based nuclear program in addition to its declared program based on plutonium.
The North denies having a uranium program, but Washington says it must be included in any settlement.
The United States has labeled the reclusive North part of an "axis of evil" alongside Iran and pre-war Iraq.
North Korea has offered to freeze its nuclear program in exchange for compensation, including large amounts of energy aid.
----
South Korea's Roh Urges North to Ditch Atomic Arms Now
August 17, 2004
REUTERS SOUTH KOREA:
by Jack Kim and Kim Kyoung-wha
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/26622/story.htm
SEOUL - South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun stepped up calls Sunday for communist North Korea to drop its nuclear ambitions promptly and reap the benefits of joining the international community.
In a Liberation Day speech to mark 59 years of independence as a republic, Roh also spoke of his determination to disperse the imbalance of development in the country by moving the administrative capital away from crowded Seoul. He said the country's economic difficulties would be overcome quickly.
"North Korea must make a decision now," Roh said, reiterating Seoul's proposal that it would offer "comprehensive and specific" assistance to help the impoverished and reclusive North to undertake reform and open up to the world.
"The North Korean nuclear problem must be resolved peacefully and quickly for the sake of a brighter future," Roh said in his speech from the Independence Hall in central South Korea, minutes from the proposed site of the new capital.
Negotiations to convince Pyongyang to dismantle its nuclear weapons programs in exchange for aid and acceptance into the world community have hit a snag after 12 months, with Pyongyang and Washington demanding the other give ground first. Roh's remarks appeared aimed at injecting fresh urgency.
Roh has continued his predecessor Kim Dae-jung's policy of reconciliation with the North, even as the two Koreas remain technically at war under a 51-year-old truce.
UNIFICATION UNLIKELY SOON
A united Korea is the ultimate goal of the nation and efforts to increase exchanges across the world's most heavily fortified border cannot pause for a moment, Roh said.
"It would be difficult to accomplish unification right away," Roh said.
He said the South was doing its part by putting into action pledges made by the two Koreas' leaders four years ago by holding rare military talks, joining North Korean athletes to march in Athens at the summer Olympic games and building an industrial complex in the North.
North Korea must do its part by giving up its nuclear ambitions and join hands with the South, the president said.
"The precious experience of the six-party talks we participated in with the United States, Japan, China and Russia can be used to develop a new framework of new cooperation for peace and prosperity of Northeast Asia," he said.
As the country remembered the day Korea achieved independence from colonial Japan in 1945, Roh did not directly mention unresolved issues with Japan, including controversial visits by Japanese leaders to a shrine where World War II criminals are among the war dead remembered.
Instead, he called for resolution of questions about Koreans who collaborated with colonial rulers during the 1910-1945 occupation by Japan and proposed the creation of a non-partisan special parliamentary committee to investigate.
Roh's remarks were short on economic focus, despite signs of trouble that prompted the central bank to cut the key lending rate to a record low last Thursday and the government to ponder fiscal measures to boost domestic spending.
"It is true we have big concerns because we can feel the economy is difficult," he said. But he warned against excessive pessimism, saying policies to encourage job creation and investment will begin to show results soon.
-------- missile defense
Kerry would reduce missile defense spending
Boeing is one of major contractors in program
BLOOMBERG NEWS
Tuesday, August 17, 2004
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/186550_missiledefense17.html
The $53 billion U.S. missile defense shield being developed by The Boeing Co., Lockheed Martin Corp. and Northrop Grumman Corp. may be derailed by a John Kerry presidency.
Kerry, the Democratic nominee, plans to rein in spending on the program, which President Bush has doubled since taking office. Kerry's "New Military to Meet New Threats" platform includes "reducing total expenditures on missile defense" and shifting money from other large weapons programs, according to campaign literature.
Advisers say Kerry will focus on boosting military pay, troop levels and readiness.
"Given our national security priorities, the question is how much money do we need to spend on this system that has yet to complete operational testing," campaign spokesman Mark Kitchens said yesterday in an interview.
The United States will spend $7.7 billion this year to develop the shield, the most for any Pentagon program, which includes a number of separate contracts for different parts of the system, budget documents show. Work on the shield pushed Boeing's military sales to a record $27 billion last year and provided 10 percent of Lockheed's $32 billion in sales. Congress approved $9.2 billion for fiscal 2005, and Defense Department documents show the Missile Defense Agency intends to ask for $10.2 billion in 2007.
"Under Bush, missile defense was a top priority and the biggest single line for a program in the defense budget for the past two years," David Baker, managing director of Schwab Soundview Capital Markets' Washington Research Group, said in an interview. "Kerry would do more than just tap the brakes," he said. Kerry "would slam on the emergency brakes."
Credit Suisse First Boston analyst James Higgins said in a report last month that government officials considered missile defense under a Kerry presidency to "be at real risk of curtailment -- although not outright cancellation."
Bush, after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, ushered in the largest increases in U.S. military spending since the 1980s as the United States waged war in Afghanistan and Iraq and expanded development of weapons programs.
More than $100 billion has been added to the Pentagon's budget since the attacks, government data show, and the Pentagon has been allotted a record $416 billion for fiscal 2005, which begins Oct. 1.
----
Bush Defends Pursuit of Missile Defense System
By REUTERS
August 17, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/politics/politics-campaign-bush.html?pagewanted=print&position=
RIDLEY PARK, Pa. (Reuters) - President Bush defended his pursuit of a costly missile defense system on Tuesday and said those who oppose the idea do not understand the dangers the country faces in the 21st century.
In his 32nd visit to Pennsylvania, a state he lost in 2000 but which is considered a major battleground this time, Bush portrayed himself as a decisive war leader, unlike his Democratic opponent John Kerry.
Bush appeared at a Boeing Co. plant in this Philadelphia suburb that employs 4,700 people and manufactures CH-47 Chinook helicopters that the U.S. Army used in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Bush said a system to shoot down any incoming missiles armed with chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons is needed to defend the country.
``We want to continue to perfect this system, so we say to those tyrants who believe they can blackmail America and the free world: 'You fire, we're going to shoot it down.'''
Bush said those who oppose the system ``really don't understand the threats of the 21st century. They're living in the past.'' A theme of the Bush campaign is that Kerry is weak on defense.
Kerry has promised to cut spending on missile defense but has not said by how much. About $50 billion has been budgeted over the next five years for the program, which Bush promoted heavily before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Boeing engineers lowered the first ballistic missile interceptor into its silo at Fort Greely, Alaska.
Critics say the system remains unproven and is too costly. Last March 49 retired generals and admirals, some of them Kerry supporters, urged Bush to suspend plans for it and use the money to secure nuclear materials abroad and ports and borders at home, out of fears terrorists would smuggle destructive weapons into the country.
In Washington, Kerry's national security adviser, Rand Beers, said Bush had his priorities wrong.
``Despite this administration's near obsession with missile defense, the greatest threat facing our homeland comes from terrorists who would do us harm. In the months preceding 9/11 George W. Bush and his closest advisers were preoccupied with missile defense and their misunderstanding about the threats we face continues to this day,'' Beers said....
-------- terrorism
Nuclear danger doesn't worry politicians
Tuesday, August 17, 2004
NY TIMES / Seattle Post-Intelligencer
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF SYNDICATED COLUMNIST,
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/186511_kristof17.html
If a 10-kiloton terrorist nuclear weapon explodes beside the New York Stock Exchange or the U.S. Capitol, or in Times Square, as many nuclear experts believe is likely in the next decade, then the next 9/11 commission will write a devastating critique of how we allowed that to happen.
As I wrote in my last column, there is a general conviction among many experts -- though, in fairness, not all -- that nuclear terrorism has a better-than-even chance of occurring in the next 10 years. Such an attack could kill 500,000 people.
Yet U.S. politicians have utterly failed to face up to the danger.
"Both Bush administration rhetoric and Kerry rhetoric emphasize keeping WMD out of the hands of terrorists as a No.1 national security priority," noted Michelle Flournoy of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "And when you look at what could have been done in the last few years versus what has been done, there's a real gap."
So what should we be doing? First, it's paramount that we secure uranium and plutonium around the world. That's the idea behind the U.S.-Russian joint program to secure 600 metric tons of Russian nuclear materials. But after 12 years, only 135 tons have been given comprehensive upgrades. Some 340 tons haven't even been touched.
The Nunn-Lugar program to safeguard the material is one of the best schemes we have to protect ourselves, and it's bipartisan, championed above all by Sen. Richard Lugar, a Republican of Indiana. Yet President Bush has, incredibly, at various times even proposed cutting funds for it. He seems bored by this security effort, perhaps because it doesn't involve blowing anything up.
Joseph Cirincione of the Carnegie Endowment sees the effort against nuclear terrorism as having three components. One is the Pentagon's version of counterproliferation, which includes the war in Iraq and the missile defense system; this component is costing $108 billion a year, mostly because of Iraq. Then there's homeland security, costing about $37 billion a year. Finally, there's non-proliferation itself, like the Nunn-Lugar effort -- and this struggles along on just $2 billion a year.
A second step we must take is stopping other countries from joining the nuclear club, although, frankly, it may now be too late. North Korea, Iran and (perhaps to a lesser extent) Brazil all seem determined to go ahead with nuclear programs.
Dennis Ross, the former Middle East peace negotiator, notes that if Iran develops nukes, jittery Saudi Arabia will seek to follow, and then Egypt, which prides itself as the leader of the Arab world. Likewise, anxiety about North Korea is already starting to topple one domino -- Japan is moving in the direction of a nuclear capability.
The best hope for stopping Iran and North Korea (and it's a bleak one) is to negotiate a grand bargain in which they give up nuclear aspirations for trade benefits. Bush's current policy -- fist-shaking -- feels good but accomplishes nothing.
President Clinton's approach to North Korea wasn't a great success, but at least North Korea didn't add to its nuclear arsenal during his watch. In just the past two years, North Korea appears to have gone to eight nuclear weapons from about two.
A third step is to prevent the smuggling of nuclear weapons into the United States. Bush has made a nice start on that with his proliferation security initiative.
A useful addition, pushed by Sen. Charles Schumer, would be to develop powerful new radiation detectors and put them on the cranes that lift shipping containers onto U.S. soil. But while Congress approved $35 million to begin the development of these detectors, the administration has spent little or none of it.
Finally, Bush needs to display moral clarity about nuclear weapons, making them a focus of international opprobrium. Unfortunately, Bush is pursuing a new generation of nuclear bunker-buster bombs. That approach helps make nukes thinkable, and even a coveted status symbol, and makes us more vulnerable.
At other periods when the United States has been under threat, we mustered extraordinary resources to protect ourselves. If Bush focused on nuclear proliferation with the intensity he focused on Iraq, then we might secure our world for just a bit longer.
Right now, we're only whistling in the dark. Nicholas D. Kristof is a columnist for The New York Times
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
Nuclear power still a deadly proposition
August 17, 2004,
Baltimore Sun
By Helen Caldicott Originally
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/oped/bal-op.nuclear17aug17,1,4947698.story?coll=bal-oped-headlines
WHILE VICE PRESIDENT Dick Cheney is actively promoting nuclear power as a significant plank in his energy plan, he claims that nuclear power is "a safe, clean and very plentiful energy source."
The Nuclear Energy Institute, the policy organization of the nuclear energy and technologies industries, is currently running an energetic campaign for the revivification of nuclear power. Ubiquitous TV and radio ads carry the admonition that "Kids today are part of the most energy-intensive generation in history. They demand lots of clean electricity. And they deserve clean air."
Also, a consortium of 10 U.S. utilities has requested funding from the federal government for the construction of new reactors based on a European design, and they hope to receive government approval by 2010. This is a major policy change since no new nuclear reactors have been ordered in the United States since 1974.
Nevertheless, the claims of the Mr. Cheney and the nuclear industry are false. According to data from the U.S. Energy Department (DOE), the production of nuclear power significantly contributes both to global warming and ozone depletion.
The enrichment of uranium fuel for nuclear power uses 93 percent of the refrigerant chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) gas made annually in the United States. The global production of CFC is banned under the Montreal Protocol because it is a potent destroyer of ozone in the stratosphere, which protects us from the carcinogenic effects of solar ultraviolet light. The ozone layer is now so thin that the population in Australia is currently experiencing one of the highest incidences of skin cancer in the world.
CFC compounds are also potent global warming agents 10,000 to 20,000 times more efficient heat trappers than carbon dioxide, which itself is responsible for 50 percent of the global warming phenomenon.
But nuclear power also contributes significantly to global carbon dioxide production. Huge quantities of fossil fuel are expended for the "front end" of the nuclear fuel cycle -- to mine, mill and enrich the uranium fuel and to construct the massive nuclear reactor buildings and their cooling towers.
Uranium enrichment is a particularly energy intensive process which uses electricity generated from huge coal-fired plants. Estimates of carbon dioxide production related to nuclear power are available from DOE for the "front end" of the nuclear fuel cycle, but prospective estimates for the "back end" of the cycle have yet to be calculated.
Tens of thousands of tons of intensely hot radioactive fuel rods must continuously be cooled for decades in large pools of circulating water and these rods must then be carefully transported by road and rail and isolated from the environment in remote storage facilities in the United States. The radioactive reactor building must also be decommissioned after 40 years of operation, taken apart by remote control and similarly transported long distances and stored. Fully 95 percent of U.S. high level waste -- waste that is intensely radioactive -- has been generated by nuclear power thus far.
This nuclear waste must then be guarded, protected and isolated from the environment for tens of thousands of years -- a physical and scientific impossibility. Biologically dangerous radioactive elements such as strontium 90, cesium 137 and plutonium will seep and leak into the water tables and become very concentrated in food chains for the rest of time, inevitably increasing the incidence of childhood cancer, genetic diseases and congenital malformations for this and future generations
Conclusion: Nuclear power is neither clean, green nor safe. It is the most biologically dangerous method to boil water to generate steam for the production of electricity.
Helen Caldicott, a pediatrican, is president of the Nuclear Policy Research Institute and author of The New Nuclear Danger, George Bush's Military Industrial Complex (The New Press). She lives near Sydney, Australia.
-------- vermont
Entergy chief cancels visit
August 17, 2004
By Susan Smallheer,
Rutledge Herald staff
http://www.rutlandherald.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20040817/NEWS/408170350/1003
The appearance of the chief executive officer of Entergy Corp., the corporate parent of Entergy Nuclear, was canceled late Monday because of the looming threat of a strike at Vermont Yankee later this week.
J. Wayne Leonard had been scheduled to talk to all Vermont Entergy Nuclear employees Thursday morning at the Vernon Elementary School.
Entergy Nuclear spokesman Brian Cosgrove said that the plant would start to implement its emergency contingency plan today, which would have managers shadow the 150 union workers so that they would be prepared to take over their jobs Friday if a contract agreement is not reached by Thursday.
This week's visit by Leonard was to be his first visit to Vermont since Entergy bought Vermont Yankee in July 2002 from a group of New England utilities. The visit will be rescheduled.
"With the contingency plan in place, it makes it very difficult to have an all-hands meeting," Cosgrove said. "This has been scheduled for quite a while, probably a couple of months. I think everybody was hopeful this would be settled by now."
Cosgrove said the decision to cancel Leonard's appearance was done in Vermont, not by Entergy corporate headquarters in New Orleans.
Also Thursday, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani will be in Brattleboro to talk to Vermont emergency first responders on behalf of Entergy Nuclear. Giuliani is an emergency planning consultant to major international corporations.
Giuliani's appearance at the Quality Inn has spawned promises of anti-nuclear and pro-union pickets, since his visit coincides with Thursday's contract vote for the 150 members of the International Brother of Electric Workers. The union represents Vermont Yankee electricians, mechanics, radiation protection technicians and control room operators.
Cosgrove said the appearance of Giuliani before about 200 Vermont emergency responders and planners had been in the works for quite a while. He said that Giuliani would speak about "lessons learned" from the terrorist attack on New York City in 2001 and takes questions from the audience. The meeting, which includes dinner, is being paid for by Entergy Nuclear, Cosgrove said
Raymond Shadis, senior technical adviser for the nuclear watchdog group New England Coalition, said that it was a "shame" that Giuliani had affiliated himself with Entergy.
"His goodwill effort is misplaced," he said. "Rudy was good at comforting people after a disaster. This is misplaced. We need to plan for an accident or an act of terror."
Cosgrove said contract negotiations continue and a mediation session is scheduled for Wednesday. A contract vote is set for Thursday, the day the current contract expires.
"We have a responsibility to provide one-third of the electricity in Vermont and to continue the safe operation of the plant," he said.
Cosgrove said he didn't know if there had ever been a strike at a nuclear power plant.
"Management tomorrow begins shadowing the union folks," he said. "That means that not only the union people, but the management people will be working all shifts."
One of the top managers at the plant, Kevin Bronson, is a former control room operator and member of the union, Cosgrove said.
Gary Sachs, an anti-nuclear activist from Brattleboro, said he was organizing a protest at Giuliani's appearance in support of the union workers, as well as to show that Vermonters are very concerned about safety at Vermont Yankee.
Sachs, who has been picketing with the Entergy Nuclear union workers in downtown Brattleboro in recent days, said that the picketing workers told him that Entergy's CEO Leonard "chickened out" of coming to Vermont on the morning of the strike vote. Corey Daniels, the president of the IBEW union, couldn't be reached for comment Monday.
Contact Susan Smallheer at susan.smallheer@rutlandherald.com.
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
U.S. Knew All About Private Jail in Kabul, American Tells
Court Seized Material Is Said to Show 'Constant Contacts'
By Pamela Constable
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, August 17, 2004; Page A10
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A4821-2004Aug16?language=printer
KABUL, Afghanistan, Aug. 16 -- Jonathan "Jack" Idema, the American accused of illegally detaining and torturing prisoners in a private jail in Afghanistan, testified in court Monday that he could prove U.S. and Afghan authorities were fully aware of his actions and accused the FBI of confiscating evidence that would support his claim.
Idema, who frequently interrupted the judge and laughed in apparent disgust at the proceedings, said FBI agents in Kabul had seized hundreds of documents, photographs and videotapes from his base here that showed "constant contacts" between him and U.S. military and intelligence officials this spring and summer.
"They knew every single thing we did, every single day," he said.
Idema, who claims to have been running an anti-terrorism operation, said FBI agents had questioned several Afghans after he took them prisoner and confirmed that the agents knew of a plot to kill two Afghan cabinet ministers. He also read from a printed e-mail about his operations that he said had been sent to him from the Kabul office of the multinational peacekeeping force.
U.S. military and intelligence officials here have repeatedly denied any affiliation with Idema, although they acknowledge having received one prisoner from him. International peacekeeping officials in Kabul say they cooperated with him briefly until learning he was an impostor.
Idema and two American associates, along with four of their Afghan employees, were arrested July 5 and have been charged with entering the country illegally, operating an illegal jail, detaining and imprisoning eight Afghan citizens, kidnapping and torture. If convicted, they could face 20 years in Afghan prisons.
Idema, 48, a flamboyant, burly man from Fayetteville, N.C., claims to be a former U.S. Army Special Forces operative and says he has been involved in various conflicts across the world. He served prison time for fraud in the United States on charges related to his mail-order military supply business.
In listing the charges Monday, the prosecutor said police found "torture equipment, bloody clothing, handcuffs, blindfolds and stored water" when they raided a building used by Idema to hold his prisoners. He said Idema's detainees had all proved to be "innocent Afghan citizens."
Although Idema did not deny holding a group of Afghans prisoner, he adamantly denied having tortured them, saying, "I assure this court, no one was burned with cigarettes, no one was hung upside down, no one was beaten, no one was in body bags. . . . None of this happened."
Noting that his operations this spring coincided with the allegations of abuse by U.S. military guards and interrogators at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, he said: "Everyone was very concerned about the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. . . . We were very careful to use standard interrogation techniques."
At an initial court hearing in July, several Afghans testified that they had been detained and abused by Idema and his group and were hung by their feet and doused with extremely hot and cold water. The alleged victims, including a senior religious judge, were all present in court Monday.
A second American suspect, Edward Caraballo, testified quietly that he had acted only as a journalist and had accompanied Idema here to film his operations. He said he was "very sorry for any pain I caused the people of Afghanistan by my involvement in a mission I believed to be sanctioned by the American and Afghan governments."
Caraballo's American lawyer, Michael Skibbie, described his protracted and unsuccessful efforts to obtain the documents and other evidence taken by the FBI. He said the evidence might have been tampered with or lost in the agency's custody, and he called the FBI's actions "insulting to this court."
The third American defendant, Brent Bennett, stood silently all day in the dock.
After six hours of testimony that was by turns contentious and inaudible, Judge Abdulboset Bakhtiary postponed the trial a week to allow Idema and his co-defendants time to examine the evidence taken by the FBI, which Skibbie said had finally been returned to Afghan intelligence police on Sunday.
A spokesman for the U.S. Embassy said Monday night that he had no information about the FBI's role in the case. He said the embassy had had little contact with Idema except to ensure that he, Bennett and Caraballo were being treated well in custody.
Another defendant, a young Afghan named Abdul Wahid, told the court he had been introduced to Idema by an Afghan military commander, had witnessed him meeting senior Afghan officials and believed he was acting on orders from the U.S. intelligence services.
Wahid, 19, said he had worked as an interpreter for Idema but had committed no crime. He said he had seen prisoners kept in bathrooms, tied in chairs, covered with hoods and immersed in cold water until they started choking. "The first time I saw this, I was shaken and shocked," he said.
Standing in the dock with the other defendants, Wahid also apologized to the religious judge Idema had arrested -- a turbaned, bearded man who sat in the second row of the courtroom.
"I was rude to him as a clergyman," Wahid said. "I told him to put up his hands. I hope he forgives me."
But Idema, wearing military-style fatigues and acting as his own defense attorney, aggressively interrupted Wahid and every other speaker, including Bakhtiary, Caraballo and the prosecutor. He insisted that the men he had arrested were terrorists involved in plots to kill senior Afghan officials by planting bombs in taxis.
"This is insane. . . . This is crazy. . . . This is a classic case of an unfair trial," Idema burst out at frequent intervals.
"Just put me in jail for 15 years, and let's get this over with," he exclaimed sarcastically several times. Each time the public address system failed, he loudly demanded to have the testimony repeated.
Bakhtiary, robed in red and black, never reprimanded Idema but repeatedly asked him to return to the central issues of the case. The judge said that even if Idema had arrested terrorists, thereby doing Afghanistan a service, he still had to answer whether he had been acting under legal Afghan or U.S authority at the time.
Idema repeatedly responded that if he were allowed to view and present the confiscated evidence, he could prove he was acting with official consent.
He complained that he and his co-defendants had not been allowed to see written or translated copies of the charges against them, and he said they had been regularly beaten in jail until the prosecutor ordered the abuse halted.
--------
FREELANCERS
Three on Trial in Afghanistan Gain Access to F.B.I. Files
August 17, 2004
By CARLOTTA GALL
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/17/international/asia/17afghan.html
KABUL, Afghanistan, Aug. 16 - Three Americans on trial Monday on charges that they ran a vigilante jail and interrogation operation here accused the F.B.I. of removing evidence needed for their defense, and they were given a seven-day extension to prepare after the agency returned the evidence later that day.
One of the defendants, Jonathan K. Idema, a former Special Forces soldier who says he was running a legitimate counterterrorism effort, said that the F.B.I. had taken videotapes, photographs and documents that had been seized from his house by Afghan authorities after his arrest on July 5, and that the American Embassy in Kabul had then blocked all access to it.
He said the evidence would show that the F.B.I., the C.I.A. and the military had approved his operation, even though the United States government has denied any connection with it or the defendants. "Everyone knew what we were doing," he said. "We were not in the United States military, but we were working with the United States military."
Mr. Idema was defending himself, and he appeared to speak for another defendant, Brent Bennett, 28, a former soldier who was silent during the daylong session. Their defense lawyers had not yet arrived from the United States, Mr. Idema said.
Michael Skibbie, an American member of the team defending Edward Caraballo, the third American, made similar accusations about lacking access to evidence. The defense team had been promised the material by the embassy by the end of last week, he said, but it had not arrived. "We had to finalize our defense without the evidence," he told the court.
He said the F.B.I. contacted him just hours before the trial to say it was giving back the documents to the National Security Directorate, from which they had been taken. "Returning substantial evidence after the trial begins shows an incredible insult to the Afghan justice system, an insult to the court and to the defense," he said. He added that because the evidence had not been seen before it was taken by the F.B.I., it was impossible to know if parts of it had been lost or mislaid while in its hands. He asked the court to request a report from the agency detailing where the evidence had been held and by whom.
Judge Abdul Baset Bakhtiari, presiding over the trial, agreed to a week's extension to allow the defendants access to the returned evidence.
The prosecutor, Muhammad Naeem Dawari, repeated the charges against the three Americans of entering the country illegally, running an illegal jail, operating with illegal weapons and illegally imprisoning people.
The prosecution had eight witnesses who were held prisoner in Mr. Idema's house and also had instruments of torture and video footage found in the house, he said. He accused the four Afghans arrested with them - two translators, a cleaner and a guard - of being accomplices to the illegal operations. All of the defendants pleaded not guilty.
Mr. Idema denied accounts by witnesses in pretrial hearings that he had tortured detainees. "No one was hung up by their feet; no one's fingers were cut off; no one's head was beaten," he said. "We used very standard interrogation techniques."
Despite repeated requests from the judge to answer the question of how he entered the country and under what authorization he had been operating, Mr. Idema answered neither question directly. He showed flashes of contempt and anger at the proceedings, complaining about poor translation and microphones.
"I can't defend myself like this," he said. "Just give me 15 years and let's get it over with. Or hang me and let the others go free."
Mr. Caraballo, a freelance journalist who has won four Emmy awards for his work, said he had come to Afghanistan to document on film "that Afghanistan is America's best Muslim ally." In a statement he read to the court, he said he had come to Afghanistan with Mr. Idema because of his extensive knowledge of the area and his experience fighting alongside the anti-Taliban resistance in 2001.
After seeing high-level meetings with Afghan and American officials and military officers, he said, he believed that Mr. Idema's operation had been approved by both the Afghan and American governments.
After the trial, he told journalists that after coming to Afghanistan, he had sent photographs to his agency, Polaris, and video footage to Dan Rather, the CBS News anchor.
A spokeswoman for CBS News, Kelli Edwards, said Edward Caraballo was not working for the network, although he had done some freelance work for it in the past. CBS did not broadcast any of his recent video footage from Afghanistan, she said.
The judge rejected a request that Mr. Caraballo's case be dealt with separately because he was a journalist, saying he would be tried with the group because he had been present and filming throughout their operations.
-------- arms
Sri Lankan navy detects Tamil rebels smuggling weapons
(Xinhua)
Aug. 17, 2000
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2004-08/17/content_1807598.htm
COLOMBO, (Xinhua) -- The Sri Lankan navy on Tuesday detected a trawler of the Tamil Tiger rebels suspected of smuggling weapons in seas close to Mullaitivu in northeast of the country, the Defense Ministry said.
The navy spotted the trawler of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) rebels during early hours on Tuesday and found out that several boxes suspected to be containing military hardware isbeing unloaded from the trawler to a fireglass dinghy moving alongside the trawler, a statement issued by the ministry said.
The navy informed the Scandinavian monitors, Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission, of the incident but LTTE rebels barred the monitors from inspecting the trawler and examining the contents ofthe boxes.
The government and the LTTE rebels have been observing a Norwegian-brokered cease-fire since the two sides entered a truce agreement in February 2002.
The truce has been largely held but both sides have been blamedfor occasionally violating the agreement.
-------- business
Halliburton Now Says It Will Not Get Extension From Army
August 17, 2004
The New York Times
By JENNIFER BAYOT and MARIA NEWMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/17/business/17CND-HALLIB.html?hp
The Halliburton Company said today that the United States Army had decided not to grant it additional time to substantiate its costs in Iraq and Kuwait, a decision that could cost the company 15 percent of its payment.
Government contractors normally cannot be paid more than 85 percent of their invoices until they fully account for their costs. Twice this year, the Army set this rule aside for Halliburton as the company cataloged its costs and explained how it was billing the government. The most recent reprieve expired on Sunday, and on Monday company officials said that the Army had given them assurances they could have another extension.
Today, however, the company issued a press release reversing that, saying that the Army would not grant them the reprieve after all.
"Halliburton announced that it was advised this morning that the Army Materiel Command has refused to grant an extension" of the 15 percent clause, the statement said.
Company officials said they believed they had the extension "based on clear oral assurances from senior Pentagon representatives." The statement went on to say about their statements on Monday that a "politically charged environment and leaks to news media have likely contributed to yesterday's events."
On Monday, Linda Theis, a spokeswoman for Army Field Support Command in Rock Island, Ill., a part of the Army Matériel Command, said that Army personnel were talking with representatives of Kellogg Brown & Root, the Halliburton subsidiary that is working in Iraq, to resolve the billing dispute.
The waivers granted to Halliburton have annoyed several members of Congress, who say the company has enjoyed undue privileges because of its former ties to Vice President Dick Cheney. Mr. Cheney led the company from 1995 until he became the Republican vice presidential candidate in 2000.
Halliburton, an oil services and construction company based in Houston, said the government's shifting needs and the intricacies of providing logistical support to American troops made it difficult to quickly account for its many costs.
"Because of the size and scope of the tasks in Iraq and the fact that the process is complex and constantly changing," the Army Matériel Command and Kellogg Brown & Root "have agreed to work closely together to produce the final results," Wendy Hall, a Halliburton spokeswoman, said Monday in an e-mail message.
Although hundreds of millions of dollars are at issue, withholding payments would have no effect on Halliburton's cash flow, the company said. Kellogg Brown & Root would simply deny its subcontractors that money, Ms. Hall said. "This is in accordance with contract agreements with subcontractors," she said. Even so, she added, "we believe these issues will be resolved in our favor."
As the largest corporate recipient of the government's Iraq-related contracts - worth more than $8 billion - Halliburton has been accused in Congressional hearings of overcharging and overspending in Iraq.
Last week, the Pentagon said an internal audit had found that Kellogg Brown & Root had failed to report fully some of the $4.2 billion it had received for its work in Iraq and Kuwait. The Pentagon did not say how much money was in dispute.
Ms. Hall said the company disagreed with the report and said that the Pentagon office responsible for it - the Defense Contract Audit Agency - was only advisory and has "no authority to determine the adequacy of our systems."
"Normally, these kinds of audit reports are part of a lengthy but routine process that is amicably resolved," Ms. Hall said in the statement Monday. The audit dispute is attracting news media attention only because this is an election year, she said.
--------
Army Boosts Boeing's Future
Combat Program Value By Up To $6.4 Billion
Aug 17, 2004
St. Louis (SPX)
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/milspace-04x.html
Boeing and the U.S. Army signed an agreement August 7, to provide up to $6.4 billion in additional funding for the System Development and Demonstration (SDD) phase of the Future Combat Systems (FCS) program.
The modification to the existing agreement for the SDD phase and additional funding enables the FCS program to expand its scope and to accelerate delivery of FCS technologies and capabilities to current forces.
"This agreement underscores the importance of the new capabilities we are developing for the nations' warfighters, "said Roger Krone, senior vice president, Boeing Army Systems. "In our role as the Lead Systems Integrator team for FCS, we will continue working closely with our defense industry partners to help the Army address current and future challenges."
The expansion of the program's SDD phase will be accomplished by adding four distinct "spirals" of capabilities for current forces. It also will fully fund the FCS network and its 18 core systems including four systems which were previously deferred.
The changes to the program will allow the Army to field accelerated capabilities beginning in 2008, to add FCS capabilities to more than 30 modular brigades through 2014 and to field the first fully-equipped FCS Unit of Action in 2014.
"This is a strong endorsement of our partnership with the Army and our performance on FCS," said Dennis Muilenburg, vice president and general manager of FCS for Boeing. "Our new task requires us to get these critical capabilities to our warfighters even faster. Working closely with our FCS One Team industry partners, we have demonstrated we are ready for the challenge."
Boeing and Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) are partnered as the Lead System Integrator (LSI) team for FCS. In this role, Boeing and SAIC function as a "general contractor" for the Army and are responsible for total system-of-systems engineering and integration, development of the core network and architecture, and identification, selection and procurement of the program's major systems and subsystems.
In May 2003, the Defense Acquisition Board approved the FCS program's entrance into the SDD phase. In December 2003, Boeing and the U.S. Army signed a definitized $14.78 billion Other Transaction Agreement (OTA) for the SDD phase of the FCS program following six months of effort by a U.S. Army/Boeing team to complete detailed planning and establish programmatic and technical baselines.
The agreement announced today sets a ceiling of $6.4 billion for the modification of the existing OTA. Program officials expect the agreement to be definitized in early 2005.
FCS is a networked "system-of-systems" combining advanced communications and technologies to link soldiers with both manned and unmanned ground and air platforms and sensors.
As the basis for the Department of Defense's visionary transformation plan, FCS will significantly increase the Army's agility and reduce logistics requirements, allowing it to go anywhere and to overcome any adversary. FCS is also designed from the ground up to enhance joint operations and coordination between U.S. and coalition forces.
-------- iraq
Iraqis Sending Group to Seek Deal With Sadr
By Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, August 17, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A4366-2004Aug16?language=printer
BAGHDAD, Aug. 16 -- Iraqis attending a national political conference agreed Monday to dispatch a delegation to the embattled city of Najaf to persuade rebellious Shiite Muslim cleric Moqtada Sadr to disband his militia, vacate a religious shrine and participate in the country's political process.
The initiative was described by political leaders as a final attempt to forge a deal with Sadr that would flush his militia out of the gold-domed Imam Ali shrine without the use of force. The delegation of more than 60 people was scheduled to leave Baghdad early Tuesday morning. An aide to Sadr said the delegation would be welcomed in Najaf, but he refused to say whether the cleric would meet with the group or accept the terms.
In Najaf, scattered fighting continued for a second day after a pause to accommodate the previous attempt to negotiate a settlement. U.S. Marines reinforced Army patrols in a vast cemetery where two soldiers from the 1st Cavalry Division were killed Sunday, while armored patrols pushed closer to the shrine to raid what commanders called militia gathering points. U.S. forces also used artillery to pound suspected militia positions in the cemetery.
The political conference, which has been attended by more than 1,100 Iraqis, had been convened to select an interim national assembly. But that task has been subordinated by an overwhelming desire among the participants to find a solution to the standoff in Najaf.
After issuing a manifesto on Sunday calling for the interim prime minister to refrain from offensive military operations against Sadr and his militia, the conference on Monday denounced Sadr's use of shrines as a refuge for his militia and condemned the very existence of armed militias in the new Iraq.
"The presence of an armed militia means there is a state within a state, and this won't work," said a statement of principles approved by the conference on Monday. The statement, which delegates approved with a standing ovation, called on Sadr to leave the shrine -- noting that it is "not the personal property of anyone" -- and urged him to transform his militia into a nonviolent political organization.
Clerics and representatives of the interim government have tried without success to mediate the Najaf standoff, but they did not wield the same clout as a request from more than 1,000 Iraqis, many of them Shiites who sympathize with Sadr but object to his violent methods.
Many delegates, however, remained skeptical that the mercurial Sadr, who has dismissed the conference as illegitimate, would accept their proposal. Even if he did, they questioned whether he would follow through, noting that he had repeatedly reneged on previous agreements.
Despite the efforts in Baghdad to broker a deal, Sadr's supporters spent the day preparing for a showdown. News services reported that thousands of Sadr loyalists from southern Iraq have converged on the shrine in Najaf, promising to act as human shields in the event of a military assault.
In Baghdad, fighting erupted between U.S. soldiers and Sadr's militia in the Shiite slum of Sadr City, where militants detonated a bomb under a tank and then set the vehicle on fire. The tank's crew escaped with minor wounds, and a helicopter gunship later strafed the street where the tank was hit, while militiamen responded with rocket-propelled grenades and assault-rifle fire. Sadr City residents reached by telephone said heavy fighting resumed in the area Monday evening after a U.S. military vehicle was attacked with a roadside bomb.
In the southern city of Nasiriyah, local officials said a journalist with dual U.S.-French citizenship and his interpreter were kidnapped in a market on Friday, the Associated Press reported. The journalist, identified as Micah Garen, was working on a documentary project.
Although U.S. and Iraqi forces have pursued Sadr's militia in various parts of Najaf, they have refrained from entering the Imam Ali shrine. Iraqi government officials have said any assault on the shrine would be conducted by Iraqi security forces, but they have insisted that such an order would be issued only if Sadr and his militia, called the Mahdi Army, refused to budge.
Hussein Mohammed Hadi Sadr, an elderly Shiite cleric and distant relative of Moqtada Sadr, read to the conference a communique that offers the outlaw cleric and his followers amnesty if they leave the shrine and lay down their weapons. Calling mediation a "holy mission," the document urged Sadr to "respond to the urgent national request to change the Mahdi Army into a legitimate political entity . . . and to give the holy shrine of Najaf to the Iraqi people with the assurance of non-judicial pursuit of all those who withdraw from there."
The communique also invited Sadr "to participate in the political process of Iraq."
"We hope that he will accept" the terms, said Deputy Prime Minister Barham Salih. "This country has seen so much violence, so much bitterness. It's time that we seek a way out."
But if Sadr fails to comply, Salih said, the shrine "must be vacated of militants" with military force.
"That situation cannot be allowed to continue," he said.
Any recalcitrance by Sadr, many delegates say, could strengthen the hand of interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi if he chooses to authorize the use of force. Sameer Shaker Sumaidaie, a Sunni Muslim who served as interior minister and as a member of the U.S.-appointed Governing Council during the occupation, said the conference's communique gives Sadr a "clear choice."
"He has to say yes or no," Sumaidaie said. "If he does not say yes and he says no, then the government to a large extent will be absolved" if it has to use force.
Ahmed Shyaa Barak, a human rights lawyer and former Governing Council member, called the effort to negotiate with Sadr "a golden opportunity."
"We have good suggestions and a good delegation," he said. "I think they will be able to encourage him to agree."
Hussein Sadr, the cleric who drafted the communique, was far less optimistic. Asked whether he thought the younger Sadr would accept the demands, he shrugged. "We must try," he said.
After the participants approved the communique, one delegate stormed out of the hall in protest, growling that overnight clashes in Najaf suggested the government had not upheld its pledge to refrain from attacks on the shrine until negotiations had been exhausted.
"By besieging Najaf, is that a response to the representatives of the people at this conference?" said Falah Hassan Shanshel, a member of the Shiite Political Council. "I decide to withdraw from this conference and I wish to congratulate the others for contributing to the slaughter."
Even if Sadr agreed to disband his militia, the process of disarming and demobilizing its members would likely be long and complicated. U.S. officials say that many, if not most, members of the Mahdi Army are young men who joined not out of religious fervor but because the militia offered them a job and a chance to vent their anger at the U.S. occupation.
Jamal Benomar, the senior U.N. political adviser to the conference, said demobilization would require financial incentives, job-training programs and other measures the government has not implemented. Without such compensation, there would be little to dissuade the militiamen from regrouping.
"We learned the hard way at the U.N. from experiences in various other conflicts that peace agreements involving militia groups will require both political and rehabilitation measures," Benomar said. "The demobilization, disarmament and reintegration of armed combatants is a big challenge that requires planning, proper design, significant resources and monitoring. It doesn't happen overnight."
Conference organizers had wanted to send the delegation to Najaf on Monday afternoon. They requested a fleet of cars and a team of private security guards. (Iraqi policemen refused to accompany the delegates because they judged the trip too dangerous.) But after four hours passed -- and a down payment had been made -- there were no drivers or guards to be seen. At 7 p.m., the organizers chose to delay the mission until Tuesday morning.
Correspondent Karl Vick in Najaf and staff writer Jackie Spinner in Baghdad contributed to this report.
--------
Iraqi Delegation Arrives in Najaf in Mission to End Fighting
August 17, 2004
By ALEX BERENSON
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/17/international/middleeast/17CND-IRAQ.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
NAJAF, Iraq, Aug. 17 - A delegation of Iraqis arrived in Najaf today to try to persuade a rebellious Shiite cleric and his militia to evacuate a shrine in the holy city and end fighting with American and Iraqi government forces.
The delegation, formed on Monday at a conference of Iraqis who had gathered to form a national assembly, flew in by United States Army Blackhawk helicopters to an American military camp on the outskirts of the city.
They had been briefly delayed in Baghdad this morning after fighting between American forces and Shiite militiamen flared again in the southern city of Najaf, where fighters loyal to the cleric, Moktada al-Sadr, are holed up in a Shiite shrine and battling American and Iraqi forces.
The delegates hope to convince Mr. Sadr to disarm his militia - the Mahdi army - to leave the shrine and to join the political process.
"This is not a negotiation," said a senior delegate heading the group, Hussein al-Sadr, who is distantly related to the militia leader. "This is a friendly mission to convey the message of the national conference.
"We want to change the Mahdi army into a political organization and to evacuate the shrine of Ali with the promise not to legally pursue those taking shelter there," he said. "This is what the government and all Iraqis want."
Asked if the delegation was supported by the government, Mr. Sadr, the delegate, said: "The government wishes this delegation to achieve its goals to end the crisis forever to protect the people and the holy sites. This is for the benefit of Najaf and Iraq and every Iraqi."
The eight-member delegation included members of Iraqi political parties and distant relatives of Moktada al-Sadr. Its demands were drafted by Hussein al-Sadr, who is also a Shiite cleric. It was not clear whether Moktada al-Sadr would attend or send aides, as he did with government envoys late last week.
In violence today, a mortar round hit a busy street in Baghdad this morning, killing 6 people and wounding 35, the Interior Ministry and hospital officials said, according to a report by The Associated Press.
On Monday, Hussein al-Sadr's proposal in Baghdad appeared to have broad support among the 1,100-member conference, which is to choose a national assembly that will oversee the interim government until national elections, scheduled for January, are held.
While making his proposal, he had stayed away from the sharp criticism that other delegates expressed for Prime Minister Ayad Allawi and his interim government.
Instead, he expressed understanding of the government's challenge: keeping order while taking care not to enrage the large swaths of dispossessed Shiites who are Mr. Sadr's followers. "The presence of the militia in the eyes of the law in advanced countries is wrong," he said. "The presence of armed militia means a state within a state, and this won't work."
According to a pool report distributed by a journalist accompanying the delegation, the members were requesting unmarked vehicles to leave the base, and the military was trying to locate some.
The United States Army has been skirmishing with insurgents in the huge cemetery that has been the scene of the heaviest fighting, just north of Najaf's Old City, and has attacked buildings around the outer edge of the Old City, where insurgents were believed to be hiding.
The showdown with Mr. Sadr, which began in early August, has posed the single biggest challenge to Dr. Allawi's government. Mr. Sadr has brazenly defied Dr. Allawi, but has proven elusive mainly because he is a popular cleric based in the holiest Shiite shrine, and storming his hide-out would be politically explosive.
Mr. Sadr has previously refused requests to disarm and leave the shrine. But those demands were set by Dr. Allawi's government, which Mr. Sadr has called illegitimate, and the hope was that Mr. Sadr would be more receptive to the conference delegates, who represent an ethnic, religious and social cross section of Iraq's 25 million citizens.
"Now he's in a good position to accept these suggestions," said Ahmad Barak, who was a member of the now defunct Governing Council set up by the Americans to help run the country after the war. "The solution is being offered not by the government but by the conference. It's a big difference."
A critical aspect of the negotiations is how the Iraqi public will perceive them.
Many Iraqis say Mr. Sadr needs to be given a chance to get out of the deadlock gracefully, and the delegation from the conference offers one, said Samir Sumaitey, who served as interior minister during a previous round of fighting with Mr. Sadr's forces this spring.
"They're very much behind giving an opportunity first," Mr. Sumaitey said. "The resolution gives him that clear choice. He has to say yes or no. If he says no, the government will to a large extent be absolved" of having to handle him so carefully.
The government, for its part, still seemed willing to talk. On Monday afternoon, Dr. Allawi's spokesman reiterated in a statement the government's request that Mr. Sadr disarm.
"We guarantee his security and safety if he gives up his armed militias and considers mixing with the groups of civilian society," said the spokesman, George Sada.
The Iraqi government has promised that Iraqi troops will carry out any future battles with Mr. Sadr's militia, although whether Iraqi forces are capable of defeating the guerrillas without American aid is unclear.
Even if Mr. Sadr does agree to disarm, the longer-term problem of what to do with his armed followers, and of how to court the thousands of mostly poor Shiites who support him, still hangs over the new government.
"The big challenge would be how to integrate a dissolved Mahdi Army back into social life," said Jamal Benomar, the United Nations diplomat who is advising Iraq on the conference. "This will require serious planning, resources and special expertise."
Alex Berenson reported from Najaf for this article and Sabrina Tavernise reported from Baghdad.
--------
From street bards to Saddam, everyone's a poet in Iraq
August 17, 2004
By Annia Ciezadlo
Christian Science Monitor
http://csmonitor.com/2004/0817/p01s03-woiq.html
BAGHDAD - In Iraq, there is a saying that beside every palm tree, you will find a poet. To give you some idea of how many poets that is, there are 25 million people in Iraq, and 38 million palm trees.
In this country, poetry is like national therapy, a cure for ills in the body politic.
"As Iraqi people, we like to celebrate our state, our country," says Harith Ismail Turki, a professor of English literature who is, of course, also a poet. "People sometimes resort to poetry, not as a way to escape, but as a way to mitigate the agony inside themselves."
The palm tree proverb, for example, was coined by urban intellectuals during the Baath regime to describe a time when poetry served two masters: Often used to praise Saddam Hussein, it was also one of the few safe ways to criticize the government. But now that Mr. Hussein sits in prison, where he spends his days writing poetry of more vigor than quality, Iraqi poets have a new injustice to protest: the US military presence.
"Don't trouble yourself with the dirty Americans, and don't trouble yourself with her dirty servants," chants a heavyset man, stepping into the middle of an admiring circle of men. In a poem addressed to the renegade Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, he compares Paul Bremer to the founder of the Baath Party, Michel Aflaq: "Why does the family of al-Sadr threaten America?" he sings, as the men around him clap rhythmically. "People were loyal to Aflaq, and now they have became loyal to Bremer / But we will always be ready to fight with you whenever you want."
Picking up the theme, another poet tries to outdo his rivals. "Look, people, the eagle of Kufa came home to his city," he cries. "Moqtada, the Eagle of Kufa, to whose will both America and the Governing Council submitted! / He has at his command al-Mahdi soldiers who are ready to sacrifice their souls."
Cheering, the men begin to jump up and down, waving daggers and Kalashnikovs in the air.
A vernacular poetry
You won't find these verses in any anthologies or literary magazines. These anonymous poets star on a compact disc, a low-quality digital video of a tribal gathering that you can buy in Sadr City's Mraidi market for a couple of dollars. Intoning their poems in low, dramatic voices, the poets are singing a traditional form of Iraqi oral poetry called darmee, with a complex and untranslatable rhyme scheme and a rollicking, irresistible rhythm.
Sometimes called "popular poetry," darmee is composed in the spoken slang of Iraq's Shiite south, not the written Arabic of classical poetry. Pop singers like Kazem al-Saher, "the Iraqi Elvis," take song lyrics from old darmees. Often performed in groups in a freestyle competition, darmee is a bit like Iraqi rap.
Shiites from the south of the country began composing darmee when the country was under the rule of the Ottoman Empire. While classical poetry dwelt on elevated historical themes, like the prophet Muhammad's battles, darmees bemoaned everyday woes: faithless lovers, cruel landlords, heartless females.
"During Ottoman times, darmee poets addressed the women - either to complain or to praise," says Abu Hatem, a poet and scholar who lives in Sadr City. "Sometimes a woman, if she missed her lover for a long time, might write one herself."
Abu Hatem, who treasures the folkloric poems, has nothing but scorn for contemporary darmee. "They represent the primitive stages of the mind," he says. "Sometimes they praise someone by a darmee, and this person doesn't deserve it."
He won't cite specific examples, but Iraqi poets still relish the memory of May 1, when a poetry reading at the headquarters of the Iraqi Communist Party erupted in scandal. When one poet got up to recite a darmee, another poet stood up in the audience and denounced him. "You scoundrel," said the heckler, "you used to write poems praising Saddam Hussein!" Kicked offstage by the Communists, the turncoat poet hasn't been heard from since.
Allusions to 1917
In Iraq, poetry and politics have always intertwined. In 1917, as revolt brewed in Iraq against British rule, the Iraqi poet Saad Salih sent a letter to another poet, asking him to spread rebellion and enclosing a poem: "Oh, Ahmed, stand and call the brave free men of Iraq," he wrote. "Perhaps blood, pouring over the earth, will utterly cleanse our disgrace."
The image - of blood rinsing away national shame - lives on to this day in a poem called "A Page of Miracles" that is dedicated "To Fallujah: the City of endurance and Jihad." Dated May 10, 2004, for the day American troops left Fallujah, the poem honors the Fallujan fighters.
"The precious blood of your people has washed away / The disgrace of their submission to the enemy, of those who accepted humiliation and lick the boots of those who invaded our country," writes poet Muhammad Said al-Jumeily. "The blood which watered our fields / Will remind us forever that we should take revenge."
In stirring language, Mr. Jumeily likens Fallujah to a banner, a sword, a moon, a light, and a castle: "You are a castle, in which young men became old / When they fought the marines."
Naming specific neighborhoods in Fallujah, he celebrates their ouster of American troops: "Ask people in al-Sinaa about the American herds which / Lick their wounds after being defeated. / Remember al-Nazzal and remember how the American armor melted / And how it proved to the world that the mythical glory of America is false after their defeat."
The irony is that Jumeily used to write poetry denouncing the Baath regime. "He never hesitated to state - even in front of the governor - his revulsion and abhorrence publicly," says Mr. Turki, who knows Jumeily. "I saw the bitterness in his eyes against the ex-regime."
Swift, Shaw, and Jumeily
A grave and bespectacled young poet who loves Jonathan Swift and George Bernard Shaw, Turki makes photocopies of "A Page of Miracles" for all of his friends. He's not anti-American, he just wants people to see the battle of Falluja through Fallujan eyes.
"It is a celebration of the die-hards," explains Turki, who teaches English literature at Anbar University in Ramadi, close to Fallujah. "They are celebrating their heroic actions and the Iraqi exploits. They believe that they won, because they prevented the American troops from reentering the city."
During the Fallujah uprising in April and May against the US occupation, Turki's classes stopped. When he came back to the English literature department, he found the black banners that commemorate the dead. Many of his students, most of whom were from Fallujah, had been killed in the fighting.
Turki, who teaches Orwell and Shaw to students from Fallujah, hopes that Iraqi poetry can help Americans identify with Iraqis.
"Somebody might come read our poems to try to understand us better," says Turki. "And they might find some kind of mutual understanding."
-------- israel / palestine
Arafat outfoxes his political foes - again
NYT
Steven Erlanger
August 17, 2004
http://www.iht.com/bin/print.php?file=534194.html
GAZA With Palestinian politics in an extraordinary ferment, Yasser 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.
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, 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 Dahlan and other Gaza-based Palestinians, including major figures in the Palestinian legislature, to a form of power struggle with Arafat, whom they regard as a paramount figurehead but uninterested in democracy or in efficient administration. At the same time, Hamas, no friend to Arafat, is weighing its own opportunities in Gaza.
Dahlan, a member of Arafat's Fatah movement who has had past disputes with him, has accused 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 Arafat and his allies to dismiss Dahlan's critique as selfish, ill-timed, even unpatriotic.
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 ordinary people under occupation.
The population reveres 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 of some French aid workers, and the off-again resignation of the Palestinian prime minister, Ahmed Qurei, Dahlan effectively sued for peace, asking for a face-saving meeting with Arafat.
But Arafat, an experienced and talented politician, after having initially agreed to the meeting, is now delaying, Palestinian officials say, and suggested that Dahlan be given 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 Dahlan may yet take a new portfolio in 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 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 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 Arafat and Qurei to define in law the roles of the various and overlapping Palestinian security forces and to streamline them.
The report also urges 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 rockets from Gaza into Israel, which caused the Israeli incursion. It is unclear whether 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, Kanafani said the report also calls for the resignation of the government and new elections - the first and last were in 1996, with a scheduled 1999 vote put off because, the Palestinians said, of the occupation. Dahlan's challenge "is not really a move for reform but a very simple conflict between two security forces," Kanafani said.
"Reform must be through elections and laws, and not through guns and accusations," he said. "But democracy is not giving the people the right to vote one time only."
Ziad Abu Amr, 44, another reform legislator, warned that Arafat need be wary of the temptation to sit tight and ignore the cries for reform. "Part of these internal struggles were exploratory," 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, contends that Arafat has been weakened, with corruption, criminality, administrative disorder and the conduct of the intifada now firmly on the table.
"Arafat is no longer the sacred cow in the Palestinian community," he said. "He has been criticized personally, and not just his ministers."
It was shocking enough when Terje Larsen, the longtime United Nations special envoy, criticized Arafat by name last month in a report to the Security Council, or when Jordan's ruler, King Abdullah, suggested that 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 Arafat's Fatah movement. Still, Arafat must not be underestimated. Few Palestinians want to pull him down.
"You can't bypass a historical figure like Arafat," 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."
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."
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 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 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."
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," the diplomat said.
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."
--------
Sharon Proposes New Housing in West Bank Settlements
August 17, 2004
By STEVEN ERLANGER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/17/international/middleeast/17CND-MIDE.html?pagewanted=all&position=
JERUSALEM, Aug. 17 - The day before Prime Minister Ariel Sharon faces sharp debate about his policies at his own Likud Party convention, his government made an effort to pacify his critics today, issuing tenders for 1,001 new, government-subsidized apartments for settlers in the occupied West Bank.
The decision will annoy Washington, Western diplomats said. The road map to peace, which Israel accepted, calls for a freeze on all Israeli settlement activity.
While Israeli officials insisted the new housing was long planned and remained within current settlement boundaries, it will renew the debate in Washington over Israeli compliance.
"It's difficult to see how 1,001 new housing starts are consistent with the road map," a Western diplomat said today. "It's a big number."
Israel has been building settlements for years, no matter the ideology of the government, in the face of American opposition. Building within current settlement boundaries - filling in empty spaces or building more stories on to existing structures - is referred to by the Israelis as "thickening," and they argue that such thickening does not violate a freeze.
The Bush administration has not publicly agreed or disagreed with that Israeli interpretation, and the White House and the State Department do not always agree, either.
The Israeli lobby Peace Now criticized today's announcement, saying it shows Mr. Sharon's intention to "continue the occupation." Its director, Yariv Oppenheimer, said, "Sharon has decided to scoff at his government's promise to freeze construction in settlements."
But some settlers see the announcement as a political ploy by Mr. Sharon to pacify them and his critics. "Sharon has no intention of building even one of those houses," Pinhas Wallerstein, a leader of the Yesha settlers' council, told the newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth. "This is ugly manipulation, a political ploy and fraud with a view to the Likud convention."
President Bush has been a strong supporter of Mr. Sharon, and on a recent trip here the Middle East director of the National Security Council, Eliot Abrams, told the Israelis that Mr. Bush trusts them on the settlement issue. That trust is not entirely shared among some career diplomats or in the European Union.
Next month, a team of American experts is scheduled to arrive to examine aerial photographs and maps to help decide whether Israel is living even within its definition of a settlement freeze, a United States Embassy spokesman, Paul Pattin, said today in Tel Aviv. "We expect Israel to abide by its commitments in the road map," Mr. Pattin said.
The tenders - which are likely to be followed in the next few months by approval of another 633 housing units - were previously approved, but suspended several months ago by Mr. Sharon. A new housing minister, Tzippi Livni, has reviewed the tenders and has now had permission from Mr. Sharon to issue them.
The American ambassador here, Daniel Kurzer, was not informed in advance of the announcement.
The tenders are for units in the West Bank settlements of Karnei Shomron (42 units), Ariel (214), Maale Adumim (141), and Beitar Elite (604), near Bethlehem. A housing ministry spokesman, Kobi Bleich, said that these settlements are all within "the Israeli consensus," meaning that Israel wants to annex them in any future peace deal.
They are also within the boundaries of the barrier Israel is building on the West Bank, which the International Court of Justice has declared illegal wherever it is built on occupied land. The Israeli Supreme Court has judged the barrier legal, but has demanded some changes to its route to make it less onerous on Palestinians.
For these tenders, the state offers to subsidize up to 50 percent of development costs, including paving roads, sewage, electrical lines and street lamps, and is expected to spend nearly $15 million.
Saeb Erekat, a spokesman for the Palestinian Authority, said: "This shows Sharon has no respect for the commitments he gave to President Bush to dismantle outposts and freeze construction in settlements."
Mr. Sharon faces opposition within Likud to his plan to form a unity government that includes the opposition Labor Party. Mr. Sharon wants to ensure that his proposal for a unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip can get through the government and Parliament; he lost his formal parliamentary majority several months ago over opposition to the plan.
In Nablus today, Israeli troops searching for weapons and enforcing a curfew, shot and killed a Palestinian boy, aged 9, Palestinian medics told The Associated Press. They did not see the shooting they said, but the boy, Khaled Usta, was hit in the chest by a bullet and died outside his house.
Soldiers also shot and wounded two Palestinians who threw stones at military jeeps. In house-to-house searches, the soldiers discovered explosives and two homemade rockets, along with a handbook on how to prepare them, the army said. They also found a cache of guns, ammunition and equipment used to prepare explosives.
In the Gaza Strip, Israeli soldiers killed two Palestinians as they approached the settlement of Atzmona carrying what appeared to be a bomb. A militant faction affiliated with Yasir Arafat's Fatah movement said the two men, from Khan Yunis, were shot while planting a bomb near an army jeep.
At Wednesday's convention, there will be a secret ballot on the plan to bring in Labor - opposed by key government ministers like Benjamin Netanyahu, the finance minister, and Silvan Shalom, the foreign minister. Mr. Netanyahu's free-market policies would likely be constrained by Labor, and Mr. Shalom would probably lose his job to the Labor Party leader Shimon Peres.
But Mr. Sharon, who is lobbying party members on the telephone to vote with him, may ignore the vote of the convention if it goes against him. He sees a realignment that would involve breaking up Likud in any event.
Under the road map, Israel is also obligated to dismantle "outposts" erected by settlers in the occupied territories since Mr. Sharon took office in 2001. But only a handful of the 100 or so outposts have been taken down, partly because of court challenges by the settlers.
The American secretary of state, Colin Powell, recently told his counterpart, Mr. Shalom, of his disappointment over the government's slow pace.
-------- pakistan / india
TERROR ALERT
New Cooperation and New Tensions in Terrorist Hunt
August 17, 2004
The New York Times
By AMY WALDMAN and ERIC LIPTON
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/17/international/asia/17terror.html?pagewanted=all&position=
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Aug. 16 - Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan walked into the Lahore International Airport on the morning of July 13, in search of a package that had been sent to him by his father in Karachi, some 600 miles away.
But something other than his package was awaiting him. A group of Pakistani security officers detained Mr. Khan, a tall, heavy-set 25-year-old computer engineer, on suspicions that he was the same elusive operative for Al Qaeda whom United States intelligence sources had tipped them off to two months earlier.
The apprehension of Mr. Khan, in this ancient Punjab city not far from the Indian border, was wrapped up with almost no notice; his arrest did not even make the local papers. But before the end of the month, that single act would have enormous global repercussions.
The government's alert level would be raised in the financial sectors of Washington, New York and Newark, warning that financial buildings might be the targets of an attack. Commandos elsewhere in Pakistan, using information gathered after Mr. Khan's detention, would apprehend one of the suspected masterminds behind the bombing of two United States Embassies in East Africa in 1998. And a string of arrests would be made in Britain, rounding up 13 men who the authorities there suspected might be terrorists.
Just how imminent any threat related to Mr. Khan might have been and how much progress was made in defeating Al Qaeda as a result of his arrest remains unclear. The synchronicity of the arrests may have also given the impression that an organized crime ring has been broken up on two continents; that too remains unclear.
But the rush of activity demonstrates the extraordinary interconnection among international intelligence services that has surfaced since the Sept. 11 attacks. It also exposes the awkward and at times clearly testy antiterrorism partnership between the United States, Britain and Pakistan - tension that has been so evident in the past few weeks that the British have suggested that undisciplined acts by their two partners may have compromised the ultimate success of the operation and unnecessarily alarmed the public.
The British are not alone in expressing some frustration. One senior American official said last week that the United States was letting Pakistan and Britain take the first passes through material from computer records seized in Pakistan. "It's not going as fast as we would like," the administration official said. "But the Pakistanis work at a different pace than we do."
The differences in how swiftly the distinct intelligence services have gathered and analyzed the data and whether details are then shared with the public are examples of the varying tactical styles that the United States, Britain and Pakistan have shown as they work together to dismantle the Qaeda terrorist network.
A Collaborative Hunt
It was back in May that Pakistani officials received from their American counterparts a somewhat murky tip that would eventually lead them to the Lahore Airport and the arrest of Mr. Kahn.
There was a man, Pakistani officials said they were told by their American counterparts, who represented the "new Al Qaeda." He spoke Urdu and Arabic, as well as English with a British accent. He was apparently based in Karachi, Pakistan's largest city, but he frequently moved to tribal areas, sometimes driving a motorcycle and at other times a car. And he was believed to be helping plan some kind of operation against United States or other Western targets, perhaps a kidnapping or another relatively modest-scale attack. Officials, however, did not know the man's name.
Mr. Khan, at least superficially, offered no obvious hints that he might have been that man. He was raised in a professional middle-class family and had studied at a respected engineering university in Karachi. Two years ago, he traveled to London to take a course at City University in human resource management. His father works as the senior purser for state-owned Pakistan International Airlines; his mother is an assistant professor of botany at St. Joseph College in Karachi.
There have been conflicting reports from Pakistan about how investigators ultimately tracked down Mr. Khan, finding at first his family and then the suspect himself.
"Three years ago, you wouldn't have believed that we could have this kind of cooperation from Pakistan on counterterrorism," Frances Fragos Townsend, President Bush's homeland security adviser, said in an interview on Fox News in the weeks after Mr. Khan's arrest. "They were not our strongest partners, and now they really have come around."
The description of Pakistan's new spirit of cooperation has been voiced broadly across the Bush administration and has been backed up with both money and military and espionage equipment. But it remains a delicate relationship; the United States has not sold the Pakistanis the additional F-16 fighter jets it had promised and the Pakistanis have not allowed the Americans to directly interrogate Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of the Pakistani nuclear program, who has acknowledged that he shared nuclear technology with Iran, North Korea and Libya.
Two assassination attempts against Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, last year may have also played a role in that country's cooperation with the United States. "Those Al Qaeda attempts focused Musharraf's mind," a senior administration official said. "He understands that Al Qaeda is coming straight at him. So we've got a common interest here."
Key to Qaeda Transmissions
Even before this summer, the collaboration had produced some major gains: the apprehension in March 2003 of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, one of the masterminds of the Sept. 11 attacks, as well as two other major Qaeda leaders, Abu Zubaydah and Ramzi bin al-Shibh. Muhammad Khan, the arrested computer engineer, is not in this league. But only after his arrest on July 13 would investigators learn that he had been part of an apparent terror plot that reached far beyond Pakistan.
Mr. Khan, investigators say, was at the center of a complex communications network in which he would take messages from Qaeda operatives he had met in the tribal areas of northwestern Pakistan and send them on in coded e-mail messages or in a covert way on the Internet. This window into how Al Qaeda communicates inside a global network may prove to be one of the most important outcomes of his capture.
And ultimately, investigators say, the computer and other equipment seized when Mr. Kahn was arrested held something else critically important: the highly detailed information about the surveillance of financial buildings in Washington, New York and Newark.
Yet it was still the middle of July. And before they would find those surveillance details, investigators said, they would need to figure out a way to get access to the heavily protected and encrypted computer files.
Local police officers and commandos wearing T-shirts labeled "No Fear" surrounded a two-story house in Gujarat-a city 110 miles southeast of the Pakistani capital, Islamabad-on the night of July 24, 11 days after the arrest of Mr. Khan. Gunfire soon erupted, echoing through the darkness.
The siege, recorded on a private television station, ARY-One World, had none of the bravado of a Hollywood takedown: a shot would be fired, long periods would pass with no action, and then perhaps a shot would be fired back.
But when it was over, officials said, Pakistani forces, relying on information received from Mr. Khan and other sources, had tracked down what they said was a star target: Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani. News of the surveillance information that apparently was in Mr. Khan's computer still had not broken. But already the investigation was expanding.
Mr. Ghailani, a native of Tanzania, had long been listed by the United States government as one of its 25 most wanted international terrorists. He was indicted six years ago for the central role United States officials say he played in the bombings in August 1998 of the United States Embassies in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and Nairobi, Kenya, which killed more than 200 people.
He is believed to have spent most of his years on the run in West Africa, working with rogue nations like Liberia to help Al Qaeda secure a lucrative piece of the diamond trade, according to a report by the United Nations.
When the gun battle ended, investigators took Mr. Ghailani into custody, along with weapons, foreign currency, two laptop computers and computer discs that suspects had unsuccessfully tried to destroy.
His arrest would be announced at midnight in Pakistan on July 29. But so far, this still was a relatively low-profile case.
It was not until investigators found the surveillance information in the computer equipment recovered earlier in the month that the isolated arrests became an international incident. Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge called a news conference on Sunday, Aug. 1.
"We do have new and unusually specific information about where Al Qaeda would like to attack," Mr. Ridge said, in announcing that the alert status for the financial sectors in New York, Washington and northern New Jersey was being elevated. "The reports that have led to this alert are the result of offensive intelligence and military operations overseas, as well as strong partnerships with our allies around the world, such as Pakistan."
The New York Stock Exchange and Citigroup in Manhattan, Prudential's headquarters in Newark and the headquarters buildings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in Washington would immediately be surrounded with armed security and other new antiterror measures.
Much of the focus of news reports about the threat would be on how Mr. Ridge and others failed to emphasize that the information recovered from the computers in Pakistan was, in most cases, at least three years old. The administration defended elevating the alert status, offering more details about what led to the decision.
"There were multiple reporting streams that came together in such a way that gave us grave concern," Ms. Townsend said at a White House news briefing on Aug. 2.
There were also repeated statements by senior officials in Washington and Pakistan saying that regardless of how old the information was, a strike in the United States might still be imminent, that it was perhaps part of a plan to attack before the Nov. 2 election.
"Much of the information in the market is raw," a senior Pakistani intelligence official said, adding that both Pakistani and American intelligence officials were under pressure to produce results.
What this means, he said, is that unsorted and unanalyzed intelligence sometimes now reaches the public domain after a remarkably short time in the classified realm. It was just this trend that was about to start evoking complaints from Britain.
A 13-Suspect Sweep
In a middle-class suburb on the outskirts of northwest London called Willesden, a caravan of cars pulled up to a two-story apartment building, and officers with automatic weapons drawn spilled out, smashing their way into the building and rounding up several men, witnesses said.
Several blocks away, another man sought by the authorities tried to elude capture by ducking into the Golden Touch Barber and Beauty Salon, which sits among takeout chicken restaurants and betting shops on a busy two-lane main road through Willesden.
"He's a very dangerous man," a police officer told Stephanie Walker, who witnessed the arrival of the officers at the salon.
It was midday on Aug. 3, and the police in Britain were moving quickly to detain 13 terror suspects, all in one swoop.
Among the men arrested that day would be a Qaeda operative named Issa al-Hindi, who had apparently been sent to New York three years ago to scope out possible targets on American soil. Mr. Hindi, along with an explosives expert, had visited Mr. Khan in Lahore back in March 2004 for some kind of a strategy session, Maj. Gen. Shaukat Sultan, a Pakistani government spokesman, said in an interview on Monday, citing Mr. Khan as the source for the details about the secret gathering.
But the exact connection between Mr. Khan and Mr. Hindi remains difficult to decipher, as there have been differing reports from different sources - a common occurrence in the entire affair - as to where and with whom the two might have met, or whether they have met at all in person.
How details of the arrests emerged in the United States and in Britain illustrates that despite the cooperation between the countries' intelligence services, tensions remain. In Britain, the police would not confirm Mr. Hindi's name, saying little more in an official release than that the arrests were "part of a preplanned, on-going intelligence operation" and that the 13 suspects were involved in the "commission, preparation or instigation of acts of terrorism."
As for the timing of the arrests, British officials hinted that they were concerned that the investigation might be compromised by the flurry of news reports about the heightened alert in the United States and the details about the life and activities of Mr. Khan.
The release of Mr. Khan's name - it was made public in The New York Times on Aug. 2, citing Pakistani intelligence sources - drew criticism by some politicians, like Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, who charged that this leak might have compromised the search in Britain and Pakistan for Mr. Khan's Qaeda partners. (No officials in Britain, Pakistan or the United States have told The Times on the record that identifying Mr. Khan had such an impact).
It was American officials, meanwhile, who released Mr. Hindi's name, details about his possible connection to Mr. Khan and information on his suspected role as the leader of a three-man team that surveyed the New York Stock Exchange and other buildings in New York.
"It's a big moment; and it's also very visible, and that's okay," Ms. Townsend, the homeland security adviser to President Bush, said in the Aug. 8 interview on Fox News. "People ought to feel good about the fact. What we're seeing now are the dividends based on the president's counterterrorism policies." The same day Ms. Townsend and other Bush administration officials were on television heralding progress that had been made in American antiterrorism efforts, David Blunkett, who as home secretary in Britain serves as one of the country's top antiterrorism experts, was emphasizing his very different approach to making public comments about the Qaeda threat.
"I could have appeared a dozen times last week on radio and television, but I turned down the offers," he wrote in a commentary piece published in The Observer in Britain. "I would have merely added to the speculation, to the hype, to the desire for something to say for its own sake. In other words, to feed the news frenzy in a slack news period.
"Is that really the job of a senior cabinet minister in charge of counterterrorism? To feed the media? To increase concern? To have something to say, whatever it is, in order to satisfy the insatiable desire to hear somebody saying something? Of course not. This is arrant nonsense."
Amy Waldman reported from Islamabad for this article and Eric Lipton from Washington. Patrick E. Tyler and Richard A. Oppel Jr. contributed reportingfrom London.
-------- prisoners of war
Abu Ghraib Policy Defended
Having MPs Assist Intelligence Didn't Cause Abuse, General Says
By Jackie Spinner
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, August 17, 2004; Page A11
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A6000-2004Aug16.html
ABU GHRAIB, Iraq, Aug. 16 -- The general in charge of detention operations in Iraq defended his recommendation, made last fall, that military police at the prison here work closely with military intelligence, saying the procedure was still being followed and had not led to abuse of prisoners.
Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, whose proposals were criticized in a report on mistreatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, said in an interview this weekend that abuses were caused by "a small number of leadership and small number of soldiers who violated regulations and procedures and committed criminal acts."
"It was an enormous leadership failure," said Miller, who was dispatched by the Pentagon last September to assess the U.S. military's interrogation and detention operations in Iraq. "As painful as this has been, we have corrected this, and we are now bringing those responsible to justice."
Seven soldiers from the Army's 372nd Military Police Company have been charged with criminal misconduct in connection with abuses at Abu Ghraib. After photos emerged this year showing soldiers beating and sexually humiliating detainees, the case became an international scandal.
Spec. Jeremy Sivits pleaded guilty in May and is serving a one-year prison sentence in Germany. Four others, including the suspected ringleader, Spec. Charles A. Graner Jr., face pretrial court-martial proceedings next week. Charges against the remaining two have not been referred to a court-martial.
Commanders at Abu Ghraib have responded to the scandal by implementing new controls over military police and intelligence operations and by bringing in Army corrections specialists to advise and help run the facility.
Miller, who took over detention operations in Iraq in March, said that during his initial visit to Abu Ghraib last fall, he recommended some changes at the prison, many of them based on practices at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where he was the commander. Those changes included better coordination between military police and intelligence.
"We left lots of good notes, standard operating procedures," Miller said. "But any commander has to put those regulations in context. You can't make enormous change overnight."
Some of the most striking images to emerge from the scandal showed terrified, naked prisoners crouching near growling, unmuzzled dogs. The top intelligence officer at Abu Ghraib when the abuse took place has said in sworn testimony that Miller told him military dogs were effective in "setting the atmosphere" to get information from detainees.
The intelligence officer, Col. Thomas Pappas, said Miller indicated that the dogs could be used without or without a muzzle in the interrogation booths.
Miller has repeatedly denied that such a conversation took place. In an interview in June, Miller said he told Pappas that dogs were used at Guantanamo Bay to control prisoners and keep them "behind the lines."
The soldiers accused of abuses have based much of their defense on the contention that military intelligence personnel encouraged them to set the tone for interrogations and use such tactics as withholding sleep and food and forcing detainees to stand in painful positions for long periods.
Miller has denied that he encouraged military police to help prepare detainees for interrogations. But in his written report after visiting Iraq last fall, Miller wrote that it was "essential that the guard force be actively engaged in setting the conditions for successful exploitation."
In the interview, Miller said he meant that military police should monitor the behavior of detainees and pass on useful information to the intelligence personnel -- which, he added, was still occurring.
Capt. Carolyn A. Wood, who was a company commander with the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion at Abu Ghraib when the abuses occurred, backed Miller up at a hearing this month for one of the accused soldiers. She testified that she took the general's suggestion to mean that military police should observe detainees to determine who might be cooperative.
"The MPs were privy to some very valuable information," Wood said at a hearing at Fort Bragg, N.C., for Pfc. Lynndie England.
Miller said better controls were now in place to make certain that soldiers did not act inappropriately, including after-action reviews to discuss how intelligence was gathered. But "a good soldier also does what's right when nobody is looking," he added.
Miller said he had undertaken a massive overhaul of two U.S.-run prisons in Iraq, improving conditions for detainees as well as the soldiers who guard them. At Abu Ghraib, the 1,900 soldiers and U.S. Marines based there have a new dining facility, post exchange, workout rooms and hot showers.
The large, dirty and overcrowded tent camp where detainees had been housed has been razed to make room for a new camp for those about to be released. A 52-bed field hospital and a small in-patient mental health ward are being built.
Col. Tom Schmitt, director of treatment at the U.S. Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., has been at Abu Ghraib for two months, working to implement a new mental health program, which he said was modeled after U.S. corrections standards.
Schmitt said he was sent to the prison last fall to assess morale and health conditions of detainees but that he didn't "pick up" on any abuses taking place.
"Did I observe anything directly? No," Schmitt said. "But the system was broke, and we said that."
-------- spies
Rumsfeld and Key Senator Signal Disagreement With 9/11 Report
New York Times
By DAVID STOUT
August 17, 2004
WASHINGTON, Aug. 17 - Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and a key Senate chairman signaled today that they favor a slower, more cautious approach to revamping the United States intelligence network than has been advocated by the Sept. 11 commission.
"In pursuit of strengthening our nation's intelligence capabilities, I would offer one cautionary note," Mr. Rumsfeld told the Senate Armed Services Committee. "It's important that we move with all deliberate speed. We need to remember that we are considering these important matters, however, while we are waging a war. If we move unwisely and get it wrong, the penalty would be great." But a moment later, Mr. Rumsfeld said, "I doubt that we should think of intelligence reform being completed at a single stroke."
At another point in the session, the committee chairman, Senator John Warner, Republican of Virginia, gave his view in practically the same words: "I'm of the opinion that we should not try and do the whole 9/11 in a single stroke. That's my opinion."
Mr. Warner's statement seemed to indicate a disagreement, for the moment at least, with another key Republican, Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas, who heads the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Mr. Roberts said on Monday that he favored quick approval of a central recommendation of the 9/11 commission: the creation of a new post, an intelligence director who would have broad power to hire and fire people and control the budgets of the government's 15 intelligence agencies.
Mr. Roberts said he and his committee's ranking Democrat, Senator John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, would introduce legislation this week built around the final report of the commission, formally the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, which was headed by former Gov. Thomas H. Kean of New Jersey and former Representative Lee Hamilton of Indiana.
The differences in Congress, and between some lawmakers and the White House, indicated that the debate over the 9/11 commission's findings, which have already prompted unusual August sessions on Capitol Hill, could grow more heated.
President Bush has said he too favors creation of a new national intelligence post. But - in an all-important difference - he has made it clear that, so far, he favors giving the new director far less sweeping budgetary and hiring-and-firing authority.
Members of the 9/11 commission have criticized the White House stance, saying that the new intelligence director should have full authority over budgets and people, or else the turf battles and miscommunications that have sometimes plagued the intelligence bureaucracy will continue. (The White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, said today that Mr. Bush still has not ruled anything out. "It's important for the national intelligence director to have the authority he or she needs to do the job," Mr. McClellan told reporters traveling with Mr. Bush to Pennsylvania and West Virginia, according to The Associated Press.)
Given the background of disagreement, there was some anticipation over what Mr. Rumsfeld would say before the Armed Services Committee today, especially since the Defense Department controls about 80 percent of the overall intelligence budget.
The secretary, a seasoned bureaucrat whose Washington experience goes back three decades, spoke in neutral-sounding generalities, as is his custom.
Mr. Rumsfeld spoke of the need for crisp analysis of intelligence, to avoid the "group think" that the Kean-Hamilton commission warned against, and he spoke of the need for military commanders to get the best intelligence available - positions unlikely to stir dissent.
"Information security and access policies, information technology standards and architectures across the community are also enormously important, and reallocating resources in the year of budget execution," Mr. Rumsfeld said. "As I said, the precise extent of such authorities and other issues are still under consideration."
A new national intelligence director "likely will need some authorities of these types," Mr. Rumsfeld said.
The committee's ranking Democrat, Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, tried to pin down the secretary, asking him whether he agreed with the 9/11 commission's recommendation to create a new intelligence directorship (which would take some power over the present position of director of central intelligence, who heads the Central Intelligence Agency) as well as a new national counterterrorism center. Mr. Rumsfeld answered at some length, alluding to "statutory responsibilities of departments and agencies," prompting Senator Levin to break in.
"If you can't give us personally agree, personally disagree, or it's not that simple - I'll accept that you can't give us one or the other," Mr. Levin said. "That's acceptable to me; you can neither agree nor disagree with that. I mean, that's a specific recommendation. Mr. Secretary, we got specific recommendations - "
"I understand," Mr. Rumsfeld said.
" - from the 9/11 commission," Mr. Levin went on. "I'm quoting them. I just want to ask you your personal agreement or disagreement. If you can't give us that, that's okay, but just say you can't give us a personal yes or no from your perspective."
"I can't do it with yes or no, that's for sure," Mr. Rumsfeld said, adding that the question was "vastly more complex."
"Okay," Mr. Levin said. But apparently not satisfied, he added, "It's a very specific recommendation."
One area of disagreement between Mr. Rumsfeld and the 9/11 commission was underlined today, when Mr. Kean testified before the House Select Committee on Homeland Security. The topic was "information sharing," which many critics of the American intelligence network have said there was far too little of before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Mr. Kean was no doubt aware of Mr. Rumsfeld's call last week for a go-slow approach to eliminating barriers to the flow of information among the nation's 15 intelligence agencies. In the jargon of the intelligence world, those separate realms are called "stovepipes."
"Every time you bust down a stovepipe, you run the risk of information getting compromised," Mr. Rumsfeld said.
But Mr. Kean offered a different perspective today.
"Agencies live by the need-to-know rule," he said, using the shorthand for the long-standing principle that there should be no more sharing of sensitive information than is necessary. "Each agency has its own computer system, its own security practices, and these are outgrowths of the Cold War. Implicit in their practice is the assumption that the risk of inadvertent disclosure outweighs the benefits of larger sharing among agencies, and we believe, as a commission, that that's a Cold War assumption, and it's no longer appropriate."
-----
C.I.A. Officer Denounces Agency and Sept. 11 Report
nytimes
August 17, 2004
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/17/politics/17intel.html?pagewanted=2&ei=1&en=fb1b9366525b1470&ex=1093758799
WASHINGTON, Aug. 16 - A senior officer for the Central Intelligence Agency who led the unit that tracked Osama bin Laden has written a blistering letter to the Sept. 11 commission, attacking both the C.I.A. and the commission itself over what he sees as a failure to punish "bureaucratic cowards" in the intelligence agencies.
The officer, Michael F. Scheuer, has written a best-selling book under the pseudonym "Anonymous" that is sharply critical of the way the United States has pursued its global campaign against terrorism.
In a signed e-mail letter sent to the commission, he lashed out in angry and highly personal tones at the failure by the commission and the C.I.A. to hold anyone directly accountable for Sept. 11 failures and aimed sharp criticism at George J. Tenet, the former director of central intelligence, without mentioning his name.
In the Sept. 11 commission's final report, "you never mention that the D.C.I. starved and is starving the bin Laden unit of officers while finding plenty of officers to staff his personal public relations office, as well as the staffs that handled diversity, multiculturalism, and employee newsletters," he wrote in a letter that was sent July 31.
He also said that the United States gave short shrift to protecting American lives before the Sept. 11 attacks so that it could pursue the sale of fighter jets to an unnamed Arab government, which other officials identified as the United Arab Emirates.
Mr. Scheuer's e-mail, a copy of which was made available to The New York Times, was a dissenting note in what has otherwise been largely glowing reaction to the Sept. 11 commission's final report last month, which has set off broad debate about how best to restructure the intelligence community. His letter, which says restructuring is not the answer, is also extraordinary in that it comes from a current senior case officer at the C.I.A., where internal whistle-blowers are rare. From 1996 to 1999, he led the C.I.A. unit that tracked Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan and he continues to serve in a senior counterterrorism post.
While some intelligence officials took issue with Mr. Scheuer's version of events, the C.I.A. and the Sept. 11 commission declined to respond to his specific accusations.
"A lot of people call and e-mail us with their thoughts," said Al Felzenberg, spokesman for the Sept. 11 commission. "Some people criticize us, some people praise us and we don't respond. The report is out there for the American people to judge. "
In recent weeks, Mr. Scheuer has given numerous anonymous interviews promoting his book, "Imperial Hubris," including some television appearances in which his face was not shown. But the C.I.A. has now ordered him to curtail his public commentary sharply, and to get advance approval for future statements. A publicist for Mr. Scheuer's book said Monday that he could not comment on the letter to the commission because of the C.I.A.'s new restrictions.
While some Web sites and media outlets have disclosed Mr. Scheuer's identity before, The Times has previously referred to him only as "Mike" at the request of an intelligence official because of concerns about his safety. Now that he has signed his name in his letter to the Sept. 11 commission and the C.I.A. has sought to curb his public comments, the newspaper is using his name.
Some government officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Monday that they regarded Mr. Scheuer's latest accusations as exaggerated or unfounded.
On the question of whether Mr. Tenet put public relations staffing ahead of combating terrorism, for instance, an intelligence official said that the C.I.A. quadrupled the number of counterterrorism analysts and doubled the number of counterterrorism officers in the year after the Sept. 11 attacks and that these numbers have risen further since then.
A second intelligence official noted that Mr. Scheuer had testified privately at length before the Sept. 11 commission. "If they didn't buy what he had to say, that ought to tell you something," the official said.
Mr. Scheuer said in his letter that he found the commission's final report "disappointing in the extreme" and that it "seems to deliberately ignore those who were clearly culpable of negligence or dereliction" for failing to deal adequately with the bin Laden threat. "By finding no one culpable, you will allow the mindset that got America to 9/11 to endure and thrive in whatever new community structure is established." He said human failings, not the organizational problems that have been so widely discussed in recent weeks, allowed the Sept. 11 attacks. "Perhaps most damaging, your report will accelerate the growth of cynicism among the men and women of America's clandestine service who risk their lives every day to collect the information which would allow America to be defended - if their leaders were not such bureaucratic cowards."
Mr. Scheuer had pushed for more aggressive covert and military action, but he says he was rebuffed. In his letter, he pointed with frustration to' failed American plans to assassinate Mr. bin Laden, saying that "there is much more to the failure to fire cruise missiles at bin Laden" in the late 1990's than the report suggested. And he said that "you know that on at least one occasion the sale of F-16's to an Arab government was considered more important than acting to protect American lives."
He did not elaborate on that accusation, but officials said his comments appeared to refer to the United States' approval of Lockheed Martin's pending sale of 80 fighter jets to the United Arab Emirates.
The Sept. 11 commission found that an American plan in early 1999 to launch a missile attack against a hunting camp in Afghanistan, which Mr. bin Laden appeared to be using, was postponed because three Emirates officials were also at the camp at the time. Policymakers "were concerned about the danger that a strike would kill an Emirati prince or other senior officials who might be with bin Laden or close by," and Mr. bin Laden moved on after the strike was put off, the report said.
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Ex-CIA heads say czar needs teeth
August 17, 2004
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20040817-120122-5212r.htm
Three former CIA directors said at a Senate hearing yesterday that creating the post of national intelligence director would be worthless without giving that person authority over the budgets of the nation's spy agencies.
"The intelligence community does not need a feckless czar, with fine surroundings and little authority," said William Webster, who has led the CIA as well as the FBI.
And the power of the purse will help the new director make the nation's 15 intelligence agencies cooperate, as well as listen to what he or she has to say, James Woolsey told the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee and Select Committee on Intelligence. "Whoever has the gold makes the rules," he said.
Mr. Webster, who was CIA director from 1987 to 1991; Mr. Woolsey, who led from 1993 to 1995; and Stansfield Turner, who was chief from 1977 to 1981; were reacting to the September 11 commission's suggestion that Congress create an intelligence director of near-Cabinet rank to coordinate all the intelligence agencies.
The Governmental Affairs Committee is readying legislation that would create the intelligence director post and a national counterterrorism center, as envisioned by the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States to coordinate and control the intelligence community.
Democratic presidential nominee Sen. John Kerry has endorsed the commission's proposals. President Bush also supports creating the position but has publicly rejected the commission's call to let the director control all intelligence budgets and choose who leads the CIA, FBI, Defense Intelligence Agency and other intelligence agencies.
There have been reports in the past week, however, that he has softened his stance on the matter.
Mr. Turner told the senators, "The worst thing that can come of this is we create an NID and not give him authority."
Although the Governmental Affairs Committee is writing the legislation, intelligence committee Chairman Pat Roberts, Kansas Republican, said he would submit a draft bill to the other committee's chairman, Susan Collins, Maine Republican, for discussion by tomorrow.
Mr. Roberts said he expects his committee's draft bill to be close to the September 11 commission's suggestion of a director who has control over the budgets and the authority to hire and fire people.
"Control of the money, after all, is tantamount to power," said Sen. Joe Lieberman, Connecticut Democrat.
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INTELLIGENCE
C.I.A. Officer Denounces Agency and Sept. 11 Report
August 17, 2004
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/17/politics/17intel.html?pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, Aug. 16 - A senior officer for the Central Intelligence Agency who led the unit that tracked Osama bin Laden has written a blistering letter to the Sept. 11 commission, attacking both the C.I.A. and the commission itself over what he sees as a failure to punish "bureaucratic cowards" in the intelligence agencies.
The officer, Michael F. Scheuer, has written a best-selling book under the pseudonym "Anonymous" that is sharply critical of the way the United States has pursued its global campaign against terrorism.
In a signed e-mail letter sent to the commission, he lashed out in angry and highly personal tones at the failure by the commission and the C.I.A. to hold anyone directly accountable for Sept. 11 failures and aimed sharp criticism at George J. Tenet, the former director of central intelligence, without mentioning his name.
In the Sept. 11 commission's final report, "you never mention that the D.C.I. starved and is starving the bin Laden unit of officers while finding plenty of officers to staff his personal public relations office, as well as the staffs that handled diversity, multiculturalism, and employee newsletters," he wrote in a letter that was sent July 31.
He also said that the United States gave short shrift to protecting American lives before the Sept. 11 attacks so that it could pursue the sale of fighter jets to an unnamed Arab government, which other officials identified as the United Arab Emirates.
Mr. Scheuer's e-mail, a copy of which was made available to The New York Times, was a dissenting note in what has otherwise been largely glowing reaction to the Sept. 11 commission's final report last month, which has set off broad debate about how best to restructure the intelligence community. His letter, which says restructuring is not the answer, is also extraordinary in that it comes from a current senior case officer at the C.I.A., where internal whistle-blowers are rare. From 1996 to 1999, he led the C.I.A. unit that tracked Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan and he continues to serve in a senior counterterrorism post.
While some intelligence officials took issue with Mr. Scheuer's version of events, the C.I.A. and the Sept. 11 commission declined to respond to his specific accusations.
"A lot of people call and e-mail us with their thoughts," said Al Felzenberg, spokesman for the Sept. 11 commission. "Some people criticize us, some people praise us and we don't respond. The report is out there for the American people to judge. "
In recent weeks, Mr. Scheuer has given numerous anonymous interviews promoting his book, "Imperial Hubris," including some television appearances in which his face was not shown. But the C.I.A. has now ordered him to curtail his public commentary sharply, and to get advance approval for future statements. A publicist for Mr. Scheuer's book said Monday that he could not comment on the letter to the commission because of the C.I.A.'s new restrictions.
While some Web sites and media outlets have disclosed Mr. Scheuer's identity before, The Times has previously referred to him only as "Mike" at the request of an intelligence official because of concerns about his safety. Now that he has signed his name in his letter to the Sept. 11 commission and the C.I.A. has sought to curb his public comments, the newspaper is using his name.
Some government officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Monday that they regarded Mr. Scheuer's latest accusations as exaggerated or unfounded.
On the question of whether Mr. Tenet put public relations staffing ahead of combating terrorism, for instance, an intelligence official said that the C.I.A. quadrupled the number of counterterrorism analysts and doubled the number of counterterrorism officers in the year after the Sept. 11 attacks and that these numbers have risen further since then.
A second intelligence official noted that Mr. Scheuer had testified privately at length before the Sept. 11 commission. "If they didn't buy what he had to say, that ought to tell you something," the official said.
Mr. Scheuer said in his letter that he found the commission's final report "disappointing in the extreme" and that it "seems to deliberately ignore those who were clearly culpable of negligence or dereliction" for failing to deal adequately with the bin Laden threat. "By finding no one culpable, you will allow the mindset that got America to 9/11 to endure and thrive in whatever new community structure is established."
He said human failings, not the organizational problems that have been so widely discussed in recent weeks, allowed the Sept. 11 attacks. "Perhaps most damaging, your report will accelerate the growth of cynicism among the men and women of America's clandestine service who risk their lives every day to collect the information which would allow America to be defended - if their leaders were not such bureaucratic cowards."
Mr. Scheuer had pushed for more aggressive covert and military action, but he says he was rebuffed. In his letter, he pointed with frustration to' failed American plans to assassinate Mr. bin Laden, saying that "there is much more to the failure to fire cruise missiles at bin Laden" in the late 1990's than the report suggested. And he said that "you know that on at least one occasion the sale of F-16's to an Arab government was considered more important than acting to protect American lives."
He did not elaborate on that accusation, but officials said his comments appeared to refer to the United States' approval of Lockheed Martin's pending sale of 80 fighter jets to the United Arab Emirates.
The Sept. 11 commission found that an American plan in early 1999 to launch a missile attack against a hunting camp in Afghanistan, which Mr. bin Laden appeared to be using, was postponed because three Emirates officials were also at the camp at the time. Policymakers "were concerned about the danger that a strike would kill an Emirati prince or other senior officials who might be with bin Laden or close by," and Mr. bin Laden moved on after the strike was put off, the report said.
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U.N. seeks more 'neutral' posture
August 17, 2004
ASSOCIATED PRESS
By Donna Abu-Nasr
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20040816-103607-7213r.htm
BEIRUT - The United Nations should find ways to demonstrate political independence, regain the neutrality it lost after the September 11 attacks and better communicate with the world's 1 billion Muslims, a top U.N. official said yesterday.
Mark Malloch Brown, administrator of the U.N. Development Program, also said the Arab region, compared with other parts of the world, is stagnating and governments must institute reforms if they want to compete in the global economy.
Mr. Malloch Brown was on an official trip to Lebanon, where he met with President Emile Lahoud yesterday.
The UNDP chief said the Aug. 19, 2003, suicide bombing on U.N. headquarters in Baghdad that killed 23 persons - including U.N. representative Sergio Vieira de Mello - forced the world body to question whether it had compromised its neutrality.
While saying "broadly we don't believe we had," Mr. Malloch Brown added that the bombing was "indicative of the fact that in this highly polarized post-September 11 world, this sort of 'with us or against us' mentality which has infected both sides has dramatically reduced the space for a neutral third force like the U.N. to operate."
"We have to find ways of regaining that space and making sure that what we do in Iraq is seen as for Iraqis, not for outside forces angling for advantage over the political process," Mr. Malloch Brown said. "We've somehow become detached from that."
After the attack on the U.N. post, Secretary-General Kofi Annan ordered all U.N. international staff to leave Iraq. On Friday, new U.N. envoy Ashraf Jehangir Qazi arrived in Baghdad to set up the international body's first official presence there since the attack.
The UNDP administrator said the lessons learned from the Iraq experience go beyond Baghdad. For example, more than 100,000 people demonstrated in Sudan earlier this month against a Security Council resolution giving Sudan 30 days to stop Arab militia violence in the western region of Darfur - where more than 30,000 people have been killed - or face economic and diplomatic penalties.
"This polarization is affecting us everywhere," Mr. Malloch Brown said. "All of it is a steady erosion of the independence of the U.N., and I feel very strongly that we are failing to communicate with a billion Muslims in the world in an effective way."
He said the world body is in a "spiral of increasing security" that is widening its gap with the Muslim world.
The United Nations should be neutral, Mr. Malloch Brown said.
For example, in the 1990s, when the Taliban movement was still an Afghan opposition group, the United Nations had contact with them "because it was important that you talk to all sides," he said.
"A lot of that space has got crushed because what ultimately is a highly localized set of confrontations between groups embracing violence, confronting international actors in their own country.
"[This] has been turned into this single alleged global struggle between something called al Qaeda and the coalition," he said.
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More U.N. Troops Proposed For Congo Annan Seeking Force of 24,000
By Colum Lynch
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, August 17, 2004; Page A10
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A6473-2004Aug16.html
UNITED NATIONS, Aug. 16 -- U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan on Monday proposed expanding the peacekeeping force in Congo from 10,800 to nearly 24,000 troops, making it the largest and costliest U.N. mission in the world.
The move comes as the United Nations-backed peace process in Congo is facing increased challenges from armed groups seeking to disrupt the country's fragile political transition. It is designed to present a greater international show of force as the country moves closer to elections in July 2005.
The enlarged mission calls for the deployment of thousands of fresh U.N. troops in Congo's most violent areas, including Ituri, the North and South Kivu, and Katanga. Annan said in a 33-page report to the Security Council that he will need an additional 37 attack, support and reconnaissance helicopters, along with two transport planes, to support a new rapid-reaction force that can travel to trouble spots.
The Bush administration reacted cautiously to the request, which could more than double the $700 million annual cost of funding peacekeeping in Congo. The United States is assessed 27 percent of the total.
"We have many questions for the United Nations, and we would like to understand the basis for their substantial request," said Richard Grenell, a spokesman for the U.S. mission to the United Nations.
"We obviously agree that adjustments are necessary," he added. "We agree that a more mobile force that is capable of rapid response is needed, but it's important to remember that there is no peacekeeping operation on its own that can possibly guarantee security everywhere. We've said all along that we think it's important for the Congolese political actors to do what they can to create a stable environment."
U.N. officials said they anticipate little trouble recruiting peacekeepers from poor countries, including Pakistan. But Annan said he will need commitments from wealthy Western nations to provide advanced aircraft, communications and other logistical equipment.
"Countries from the developing world have been providing most of MONUC's military assets since the inception of the mission," Annan wrote. "But the Security Council should not rely only on troop contributors from developing countries. Other troop contributing countries must also play an active role in assisting the Congolese peace process."
The former Belgian colony of Congo, once called Zaire, has been the scene of some of Africa's worst violence since its former ruler, Mobutu Sese Seko, was overthrown by rebel forces led by Laurent Kabila. In 1998, it set the stage for the continent's deadliest regional war as Kabila's erstwhile sponsors, Rwanda and Uganda, sought to drive him from power.
Angola, Namibia and Zimbawe entered the war on behalf of the Congolese leader. Under a 1999 peace accord, the five countries agreed to withdraw their troops from the country. U.N. peacekeepers sent to Congo to help implement the accord have faced a series of challenges from government troops and scores of armed groups, including some who have received the support of Congo, Rwanda and Uganda.
The report expressed "deep concern" over rampant human rights abuses in Congo since late March, citing cases of mass rape, looting, abductions and executions by scores of armed militias. It also noted that government forces have detained civilians, holding them in illegal underground cells, and "frequently" turned to crime to make a living.
In early June, one Rwanda-backed rebel group led by two renegade Congolese officers temporarily seized control of the strategically important town of Bukavu. A force of 400 U.N. peacekeepers based in Bukavu was unable to repel the attack.
Annan sought to dampen expectations that the reinforced U.N. peacekeeping mission would be robust enough to impose peace in Congo, a country of 58 million people that spans a territory the size of Western Europe. But he suggested that the beefed-up force could "deter spoilers from derailing the transition."
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US whistleblower faces death threats
Tuesday 17 August 2004,
Aljazeera
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/93DFEA2A-BBA2-429A-8EA1-79FEAF474CC5.htm
Relatives of the US soldier who sounded the alarm about abuse of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison say they are living in protective custody because of death threats against them.
Reservist military police officer Staff Sgt Joseph Darby alerted US Army investigators about the abuse by fellow soldiers of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad, a move his wife says has angered people in their community in western Maryland.
"People were mean, saying he was a walking dead man, he was walking around with a bull's eye on his head. It was scary," said Bernadette Darby from Corriganville, Maryland on Monday.
Darby said it was difficult living in protective custody, and she missed her privacy. She did not say who was providing the protection.
"There's always someone with you," she told ABC's Good Morning America show.
'The right choice'
Despite the threats, Darby said she believed her husband made the right choice exposing the abuse.
"People were mean, saying he was a walking dead man, he was walking around with a bull's eye on his head.
"Joe is the type of person to take what is going on around him and be like, 'How would I feel if that was my wife?' ... He just could not live with himself knowing that that was happening and he did not do anything about it," she said.
Darby's sister-in-law, Maxine Carroll, said people had written graffiti on her fence, but she also applauded what her brother-in-law did and said she was horrified by a series of graphic photographs Darby handed over to investigators.
"That's not what we are there for (in Iraq). We are there to show them the right way. When Joe can talk, then that is what he will say," she said.
In testimony this month at a hearing for one of the soldiers accused of abusing prisoners, Darby said he struggled with the decision to turn over the photos because he was friendly with one of the accused.
What he saw on the CDs containing the photos, he said, "violated everything I personally believed in and everything I had been taught about the rules of war". Reuters
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Rumsfeld Says US Forces "Unlikely" To Storm Holy Places In Najaf
AFP:
8/17/2004
http://www.turkishpress.com/turkishpress/news.asp?ID=24773
WASHINGTON, Aug 17 (AFP) - The United States pulled its punch in Iraq late Tuesday as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld announced US forces arrayed in Najaf against Shiite militants of firebrand cleric Moqtada Sadr were "unlikely" to storm the town`s holy places to deal the militia a fatal blow.
The announcement, made in a lengthy interview with PBS`s "The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer" program, followed days of intensifying protests by Shiite communities throughout the Middle East against what they saw as a heavy-handed assault on one of the most sacred sites of Islam as well as fears that the anti-American revolt could spread throughout the Iraqi south.
Najaf is revered by Shiites all around the world because it is the site of the Imam Ali mosque, the presumed burial place of Imam Ali ibn Abi Talib, son-in-law of the Prophet Mohammad, the fourth caliph and founder of the Shiite branch of Islam.
"It`s unlikely that the US forces would be the ones that would deal with the holy places," Rumsfeld said. "That`s just not something that we are likely to do."
He said he believed soldiers from Iraq`s fledgling national army "would be the ones that would deal with that because it`s such a significant thing to the religion."
It was not immediately clear if the Iraqi army and a multitude of other security forces created in the wake of the March 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq would be capable of independently dealing with Sadr`s Mehdi Army that draws its recruits from impoverished young Shiites anxious to see US and other foreign forces leave the country.
Rumsfeld insisted the forces available to the interim Iraqi government now counted about 200,000 men, of which 110,000 "probably are well-trained and well equipped."
But a recent US congressional investigation has found the newly-created security forces are "unready" to fight insurgents because their units remain inadequately trained, underequipped and suffer from a desertion rate sometimes exceeding 80 percent.
As many as 82 percent of personnel deserted from Iraqi Civil Defense Corps units deployed in Western Iraq and around the town of Fallujah last April, when anti-American guerrillas launched a spate of deadly strikes against coalition forces, according to a report released in late June by the Government Accountability Office.
The desertion rate reached 49 percent in corps units deployed in and around Baghdad, while in towns like Baqubah, Tikrit, Karbala, Najaf and Kut, it stood at 30 percent.
Police squads hardly fared better. During just one week of April 17 to 23, the force lost 2,892 personnel because some of the officers either turned out to be rebel sympathizers or proved to be incompetent and had to be sent for retraining, the report pointed out. The figure also included those killed in action.
The defense secretary offered no specific evidence showing the situation had since improved.
But he said the United States was ready to lend unspecified other military assistance to the interim government and blasted Sadr as an unstable and unreliable negotiating partner who could not be trusted.
"He clearly has behaved in an unstable manner," Rumsfeld said of the cleric. "He`s not a predictable person. He`s young. He`s not well thought of as a religious leader in the country."
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US to withdraw up to 70,000 troops from Europe and Asia
Aug 17, 2004
CINCINNATI, Ohio (AFP)
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040816220202.ss0rj67r.html
The United States will withdraw up to 70,000 troops from Europe and Asia over the next decade in a move to meet the new threats facing the world, President George W. Bush said Monday.
Germany will bear the brunt of the biggest US military reorganisation in 50 years with two army heavy divisions -- numbering about 30,000 troops -- to be brought home and replaced with a brigade of about 3,600, defence officials said.
The United States has already announced plans to withdraw some 12,500 troops from its 37,000-strong contingent in South Korea.
Bush said the United States wanted "a more agile and flexible force" and that between 60,000 and 70,000 troops would return to the United States along with about 100,000 civilian employees and families of soldiers.
An administration official said the changes will take seven-to-10 years to carry out.
"For decades America's armed forces abroad have essentially remained where the wars of the last century ended in Europe and in Asia," Bush told a convention of US veterans in Cincinnati as he presses his campaign for the November 2 presidential election.
He said the current US force posture was designed designed to counter Soviet aggression but added: "The threat no longer exists."
"We'll move some of our troops and capabilities to new locations so they can surge quickly to deal with unexpected threats. We'll take advantage of 21st-century military technologies to rapidly deploy increased combat power."
Bush promised the United States would retain "a significant presence overseas," but also that the changes "will reduce the stress on our troops and our military families."
Military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq have stretched the US military, but Bush reaffirmed the US commitment to finish the campaigns.
He said there would be savings from base closures but officials were unable to give figures.
The United States has been working on the reorganisation for more than three years.
Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has stepped up calls for change since the September 11, 2001 attacks, which unleashed the US "war on terror".
There are currently about 70,000 US troops in Germany. But the 1st Armored Division and the 1st Infantry Divisions -- each with about 15,000 troops -- will pull out of Germany some time after 2006 and be replaced with a Stryker combat brigade of 3,600, senior US defense officials said Monday.
Both tank-heavy divisions held the line against the Soviet Union during the Cold War, but have proved slow to deploy in fast-moving crises from the Balkans to Iraq.
The Stryker brigade is a new high-tech unit of armored vehicles designed to deploy quickly aboard C-130 aircraft. A US-based Stryker brigade is now in Iraq.
The United States will continue to have bases in Germany, Rumsfeld said. But it wants to rotate US-based troops through a network of lightly manned "forward operating locations," rather than permanent bases.
The United States has about 230,000 troops permanently based abroad -- a figure which does not include US-based forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to the administration.
There are about 117,000 forces in Europe and Africa, 98,000 in the Asia-Pacific region, mainly in Japan and South Korea, and the rest on postings in the Middle East and in the Americas.
Germany is home to the US European Command and the proposals have been watched warily because of the economic impact.
"The United States has informed Germany in several rounds of consultations -- the latest on May 28 -- about the state of planning on adjustments being made after the end of the Cold War and in light of new global challenges," a German foreign ministry spokeswoman said.
Reports have spoken of moving some troops to Poland or Romania in eastern Europe, but an administration official said details could not be given while negotiations are still being held.
"Our current base structure was built on the Cold War notion that that American forces would fight where they are deployed. That has not been true for a long time," said the official.
"Terrorism and weapons of mass destruction have changed that threat."
US Democrats called the plan ill-conceived and a political ploy to boost Bush's bid for re-election.
The announcement drew scathing criticism from former NATO commander Wesley Clark and ex-ambassador Richard Holbrooke, two senior advisers of Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry.
Clark said the plan would "significantly undermine US national security".
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President Outlines Overseas Troop Cut
70,000 Affected In Europe and Asia
By Mike Allen and Josh White
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, August 17, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A6461-2004Aug16?language=printer
CINCINNATI, Aug. 16 -- President Bush announced plans Monday to recall as many as 70,000 troops from Cold War-era bases in Europe and Asia as part of a global rearrangement of forces that is aimed at making the military more agile in an age of unpredictable enemies.
The plan could significantly change the face of the U.S. military at home and abroad, in what administration officials called the largest restructuring overseas since the end of the Korean War. The typical three-year tours abroad would be sharply curtailed, and administration officials hope to ease the pressures placed on military families by the need for frequent moves.
The repositioning is to unfold gradually over seven to 10 years and cut by one-third the 230,000 U.S. service members now stationed overseas. The largest reductions would occur in Germany, which would lose two Army divisions, and South Korea. The two countries account for more than half of the U.S. troops stationed permanently on foreign soil.
"For decades, America's armed forces abroad have essentially remained where the wars of the last century ended," Bush said at the annual convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, held in the swing state of Ohio. "The world has changed a great deal, and our posture must change with it."
Bush's announcement of the plan -- which drew mixed assessments from military analysts -- gave him a chance to talk about bringing troops home at a time when his opponent, Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), has pledged to substantially reduce U.S. troop levels in Iraq. The administration plan, which will not affect the number of troops in Iraq, has been under development for many months. Its main outlines were reported publicly last week.
Kerry, who was vacationing in Idaho, did not immediately respond to Bush, but several of his allies attacked the plan vigorously. The Democratic National Committee organized a conference call with retired Army Gen. Wesley K. Clark, NATO's former supreme allied commander, who said the plan "will significantly undermine U.S. national security."
"As we face a global war on terror with al Qaeda active in more than 60 countries, now is not the time to pull back our forces," Clark said.
Richard C. Holbrooke, a former assistant secretary of state and ambassador to the United Nations under President Bill Clinton, accused Bush of trying to deflect attention from the strain on the military by prolonged deployments in Iraq. He criticized Bush for slipping a "historic announcement" into essentially a campaign speech.
"It's not good diplomacy," said Holbrooke, who argued that the plan will undermine relations with allies. "It sends the message that this administration continues to operate in a unilateral manner without adequately consulting its closest allies. It's a mistake, driven by the fact that we're stretched too thin in Iraq and the presidential election."
Senior administration officials briefing reporters at the Pentagon, however, said the moves would make the military more flexible in a world where threats are less predictable, while allowing troops and their families to be stationed in the United States.
The shift is part of a broader Pentagon plan that includes closing bases in what Bush's aides have called "old Europe." Instead, the administration would build training camps and smaller bases in the former Soviet satellites of Eastern Europe that could be used for rapid deployments to the Middle East. The new bases would house equipment but would be sparsely staffed and far smaller than the massive, citylike bases in Germany.
"More of our troops will be stationed and deployed from here at home," Bush said. "We'll move some of our troops and capabilities to new locations, so they can surge quickly to deal with unexpected threats. We'll take advantage of 21st-century military technologies to rapidly deploy increased combat power. The new plan will help us fight and win these wars of the 21st century."
The plan prompted debate among military and government analysts over the potential costs and benefits of what was a relatively vague though dramatic announcement.
"I think the redeployment of U.S. overseas forces is long overdue, a decade or two," said Loren Thompson, a defense expert with the Lexington Institute. "The reason why the U.S. has 70,000 personnel in Central Europe is because that was the high tide line for communist expansion. There's no reason to be there in those numbers."
Retired Army Lt. Gen. Daniel Christman said U.S. forces would lose the intangible advantages of living and working in allied countries, and he said the moves could send the wrong messages to adversaries. The shift would pull some U.S. ground troops from the Korean Peninsula, a hot spot where the United States has been working to deter North Korea's nuclear capabilities.
"I couldn't imagine a worse time to be pulling troops out of Korea at the same time we're trying to get Pyongyang to give up its nukes," Christman said. "It seems like preemptive concession."
The White House provided few details of where troops would be moved beyond saying that, over the next decade, the military would close hundreds of U.S. facilities overseas and bring home 60,000 to 70,000 service members, plus about 100,000 family members and civilian defense employees.
Defense officials declined to talk about costs or specific redeployment figures, saying they are still working on details with several countries. The plan figures to be quite costly, as U.S. bases would have to be refurbished or expanded to handle the influx of troops and their families.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said in a report in May that greatly reducing the U.S. presence overseas could save more than $1 billion a year but could cost nearly $7 billion upfront.
"Restationing Army forces would produce, at best, only small improvements in the United States' ability to respond to far-flung conflicts," the CBO said.
John P. White, a lecturer in public policy at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government and a former deputy secretary of defense, said he believes such money should only be spent with an "imperative need" to do so. "I don't understand how we gain strategic ability to respond by moving people to the U.S., further away from the likely trouble spots," he said. "I don't get it."
Senior defense officials said yesterday that two heavily armored divisions now stationed in Germany would return to the United States as part of the realignment, and a Stryker brigade -- with its more modern attack vehicles -- would move into its place.
The major moves are not likely to begin until at least fiscal 2006 or later, with a bulk of those returning to the United States coming over several years.
Bush said changes are necessary "for the sake of our military families" and added: "Our service members will have more time on the home front, and more predictability and fewer moves over a career. Our military spouses will have fewer job changes, greater stability, more time for their kids and to spend with their families at home."
The overture to military families in a national security speech reflected the political stakes and timing of the speech. This is the second week of an effort by Bush and his campaign to undo any success Kerry had in using the Democratic National Convention to portray himself as worthy of the title commander in chief. Veterans and military families, traditionally a Republican constituency, are thought to be in play this year because of Kerry's credentials in Vietnam and concern over unexpectedly long deployments and continuing casualties in Iraq.
The appearance was paid for by Bush's reelection campaign, and he laced his remarks with digs at Kerry. He entered to "Hail to the Chief" and received standing ovations before, during and after his speech.
Continuing the two campaigns' mirrored schedules, Kerry is to address the VFW on Wednesday.
White reported from Washington.
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Bush Tells Veterans of Plan to Redeploy G.I.'s Worldwide
August 17, 2004
By ELISABETH BUMILLER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/17/politics/17prexy.html?pagewanted=all&position=
CINCINNATI, Aug. 16 - President Bush said Monday that the Pentagon would withdraw 60,000 to 70,000 troops during the next decade from Europe and Asia in the biggest realignment of the United States military since the end of the cold war.
In a speech to a convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars in the political combat zone of Ohio, the president said the redeployment would create a more flexible military that would be better positioned to fight terrorism. Many of the details of the plan had been reported in early June, after the proposal was circulated among European and Asian allies.
Some troops will be brought home, Mr. Bush said, while others will be rotated through locations closer to the terrorist threat - principally the Middle East and Central Asia, as well as Southeast Asia. The administration already is striking deals for greater access rights and temporary basing privileges in nations closer to locations believed to be terrorist headquarters and havens.
"For decades America's armed forces abroad have essentially remained where the wars of the last century ended, in Europe and in Asia," Mr. Bush told an enthusiastic crowd of veterans and their families at the Dr. Albert B. Sabin Cincinnati Cinergy Center. "America's current force posture was designed, for example, to protect us and our allies from Soviet aggression. The threat no longer exists."
The redeployment will affect an additional 100,000 military support staff and families, but it will not affect the troops now in Iraq and Afghanistan, deployments that have stretched the Army.
Mr. Bush's announcement, in a swing state that the White House has identified as essential to the president's chances for re-election, came with heavy political overtones. It is part of an effort leading into the Republican National Convention to promote Mr. Bush's record on national security, which polls show is his greatest advantage against his Democratic competitor, Senator John Kerry.
Mr. Kerry, a Vietnam combat veteran, is scheduled to address the same convention on Wednesday. Mr. Bush, who spent the Vietnam War in a noncombat role in the Texas Air National Guard, attacked Mr. Kerry several times in his remarks as being weak on defense.
"It's important we send the right signals when we speak here in America," Mr. Bush said. "The other day my opponent said if he's elected, the number of troops in Iraq will be significantly reduced within six months. 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."
Mr. Kerry has said he will try to withdraw some troops from Iraq during his first six months in office, but has proposed adding 40,000 troops to the Army and expanding the elite Special Operations Forces. On Monday, his campaign attacked Mr. Bush's redeployment plan as dangerous and politically motivated, and said it would weaken America's relationship with NATO.
"Withdrawing forces from Europe will further undermine already strained relations with long-time NATO allies, will be interpreted as the distancing of the U.S. from NATO and will set back U.S. efforts to encourage greater NATO participation in Iraq," Gen. Wesley Clark said in a statement issued by the Democratic National Committee. Mr. Clark, the NATO supreme allied commander during the Kosovo bombing campaign in 1999, withdrew as a Democratic candidate for president earlier this year.
The White House released few new details of the redeployment plan, but senior Pentagon officials said Monday that most of the troop reduction in Europe would come from the return to the United States of two heavy divisions that are now based in Germany.
A senior State Department official said Monday that American troop reductions in Asia would be "not very dramatic," but military and Pentagon officials declined to give any further details. The Pentagon has already announced the shift, now under way, of some 12,000 troops from South Korea to Iraq. The number represents about a third of the American force in South Korea.
That shift, which is occurring at the same time that the United States is trying to pressure North Korea to stop its nuclear weapons program, was also attacked by Mr. Clark. "Removing U.S. forces from the Korean peninsula at a critical juncture in diplomatic efforts to dismantle North Korea's nuclear program will send a dangerous signal of weak U.S. resolve to Kim Jong Il," Mr. Clark said in the statement, referring to the North Korean leader.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld told reporters on Sunday that the entire process of redeployments would take up to six years, and that he had extensively discussed the plan over the weekend in St. Petersburg with his Russian counterpart, Defense Minister Sergei B. Ivanov.
The restructuring of America's global military deployments, which has been under discussion for several years, also envisions closing scores of smaller installations in Europe as a cost-cutting measure.
The plan has a heavy domestic political component as well. Reshaping the military's global footprint, and bringing forces home, will coincide with a new round of efforts to close and consolidate bases in the United States, a lengthy process expected to run into fierce opposition from political figures from those districts where bases might be closed.
In his speech to the convention, Mr. Bush rolled out a list of what he said were his administration's commitments to veterans, a politically potent group that the president and Mr. Kerry are assiduously courting.
The president said that when his 2005 budget is approved, he will have increased overall financing for veterans since 2001 by almost $20 billion, or 40 percent. Mr. Bush also said his administration had enrolled 2.5 million more veterans in health care services since 2001, had begun a $35 million program to provide housing and medical care to homeless veterans, and was modernizing old veterans' health care centers and building new ones.
"All our nation's veterans have made serving America the highest priority of their lives, and serving our veterans is one of the highest priorities of my administration," Mr. Bush said.
The Kerry campaign responded that Mr. Bush's speech was misleading rhetoric and glossed over a failed record. Phil Singer, a Kerry campaign spokesman, said the administration had pushed for the closure of veterans' hospitals and had forced veterans to pay higher health care costs. Kerry campaign officials also released comments they said were made earlier this year by Edward S. Banas Sr., the commander of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, who Mr. Bush thanked from the lectern for his service.
According to the Kerry campaign, Mr. Banas called Mr. Bush's 2005 budget "a disgrace and a sham," and said that "what the administration is proposing for veterans is a shell game."
Thom Shanker contributed reporting from Washington for this article.
--------
Uzbekistan base plans could rile radical groups
Associated Press
By Bagila Bukharbayeva
August 17, 2004
http://www.marinecorpstimes.com/story.php?f=1-292925-309118.php
ALMATY, Kazakhstan - U.S. plans to beef up its military base in Uzbekistan as part of a realignment of troops abroad could increase tensions between the government and radical Islamic groups, analysts and opposition politicians said Tuesday.
Top U.S. defense officials said Monday that Washington would make greater use of training and logistics bases on the soil of new allies such as Uzbekistan, Poland and Romania, while closing scores of U.S. installations in Europe.
American troops arrived at the Karshi-Khanabad air base in southern Uzbekistan, 145 kilometers (90 miles) from the Afghan border, after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks - their first deployment in a former Soviet country.
The base, which currently hosts about 1,000 troops, served as a main hub for U.S. special operations in Afghanistan and there have been times when the number of forces there reached several thousand. The Americans had stressed that they intended the base to be temporary.
Atonazar Arifov, leader of the outlawed Erk party, said a more permanent U.S. military presence could strengthen anti-American feelings among Uzbeks who see it as a sign that Washington supports Uzbekistan's repressive government.
"I welcome American democracy, but I cannot respect the use of force," he said. "Uzbekistan might turn into a center of anti-Americanism."
President Islam Karimov's government has long struggled with radical Islamic groups, which find followers among Uzbeks frustrated by the lack of economic and democratic reforms.
In March and April, the capital Tashkent and the central Bukhara region were shaken by a string of explosions and assaults against police that killed 47 people. Last month, suicide bombers attacked the U.S. and Israeli embassies and the chief prosecutor's office in Tashkent, killing seven people and wounding another seven.
Authorities said both waves of attacks were the work of al-Qaida-linked groups based outside the country.
However, critics said the violence may have been triggered by Islamic fundamentalists' anger over Karimov's persecution of dissident Muslims, thousands of whom have been imprisoned.
Kamal Burkhanov, director of the Kazakhstan-based Institute of Russia and China, said Washington's plans to consolidate its military position in Central Asia could provoke further attacks by Islamic radicals.
"One or two more American bases will hardly improve the situation there, which is very explosive," he said.
Arkady Dubnov, Central Asia expert for Russia's Vremya Novostei newspaper, warned of a "fierce" reaction from Islamic radicals to the possible arrival of more U.S. troops.
"They are going to take it as justification of their recent attacks against the U.S. and Israeli embassies," he said.
-------- venezuela
Chavez survives recall; observers find no fraud
August 17, 2004
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
By Rachel Van Dongen
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20040816-103607-5957r.htm
CARACAS, Venezuela - President Hugo Chavez survived his country's fiercely contested recall election by a wide margin, election officials said yesterday, with former President Jimmy Carter and the Organization of American States rejecting opposition charges of massive fraud.
But opposition leaders refused to accept defeat and a throng of protesters took to the streets in the city center. One woman was killed and four were wounded by Chavez supporters who fired into a protest in eastern Caracas.
The National Elections Commission (CNE) announced just after 4 a.m. that Mr. Chavez's rule had been endorsed by 58 percent of the voters in Sunday's balloting, compared with 42 percent against.
"After a sufficient analysis from our own sources, we are in a position to say that our information coincides with the partial results of the CNE," Mr. Carter said several hours later. "My opinion is that all Venezuelans should accept the results of the CNE unless tangible proof is presented that the results are incorrect."
Mr. Carter went on to say that observers from his Atlanta-based Carter Center "haven't received any evidence" of fraud.
But anti-Chavez demonstrators took to the streets to protest the outcome, which was also endorsed by OAS Secretary-General Cesar Gaviria, chanting "Down with fraud," and "Gaviria, you know that Chavez engaged in fraud."
"We know that we won," marcher Daria Leal insisted with tears in her eyes. That conviction was encouraged by two opposition-friendly members of the election commission who refused to certify the results.
Mr. Chavez appeared on the balcony of his Miraflores presidential palace soon after the results were announced to proclaim his victory. "The Venezuelan people have spoken, and the people's voice is the voice of God," he told the cheering supporters.
At an evening press conference, the president called for all Venezuelans to support his victory, saying, "I repeat my call for unity ... to the people who are for me and those who prefer another political option."
Addressing international fears that the vote would destabilize the world's fifth-largest oil producer, Mr. Chavez said: "This government guarantees stability and fulfillment of the economic commitment Venezuela has with the world."
He said he was certain that Wall Street and even some in the White House "breathed easier" because of the outcome of the vote.
Even without the large turnout by Mr. Chavez's predominantly poor supporters on Sunday, his opponents failed to muster enough votes for a recall, the official results showed.
To end the president's term, the opposition needed to garner more than the 3.76 million votes that put Mr. Chavez in office two years ago. Despite reports of a huge turnout on Sunday, the election commission tallied only 3.58 million votes for the recall.
CNE official Jorge Rojas said Mr. Chavez had won all but two of the country's 22 states. The opposition took Miranda state, where opposition leader Enrique Mendoza is governor, and Tachira.
The results were partial and didn't include the 10 percent of voters who used paper ballots instead of electronic touch-screen voting machines, which were used for the first time.
Mr. Rojas invited international observers to review the results and come to their own conclusions. "Yesterday's elections were the most secure in the history of Venezuela," he said.
--------
Chavez Defeats Recall Attempt
Monitors Endorse Venezuelan Vote; Margin Is Wide
By Mary Beth Sheridan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, August 17, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A4208-2004Aug16?language=printer
CARACAS, Venezuela, Aug. 16 -- President Hugo Chavez was declared the winner of a national recall referendum by a substantial margin on Monday, and said he had won a fresh mandate for the highly centralized, populist style of government that has stirred fierce opposition at home and irritated the Bush administration.
About 58 percent of the voters in the Sunday ballot said "no" to a recall of Chavez, while 42 percent said "yes," according to nearly complete returns from the national elections council. Officials said that at least 8.5 million of the country's 14 million registered voters participated in the referendum.
Leaders of the coalition against Chavez, who has governed the country since 1999, summoned followers to the streets to protest what they said was vote fraud. But former president Jimmy Carter and a team of international monitors said the voting appeared fair and accurate.
The recall ballot was the culmination of a two-year campaign by opponents -- who include many in the country's middle and upper classes -- to drive out Chavez, a populist whose support is based among Venezuela's poor. The opposition backed a coup and organized strikes, demonstrations and other protests before finally gathering the millions of petition signatures needed to force a recall vote. Chavez's government resisted the recall attempt for months before allowing it to go forward.
Isolated clashes between the president's supporters and opponents were reported following his victory. Four Chavez opponents were wounded by gunfire, according to news media reports.
Despite the violence, the referendum clearly strengthened Chavez, a charismatic populist who has proclaimed a "revolution of the poor" in this nation of 25 million, championing like-minded movements throughout Latin America and maintaining close ties with Cuban President Fidel Castro.
Chavez, a former army lieutenant colonel who led a failed coup in 1992, struck a conciliatory tone on Monday toward those who voted against him.
"We recognize the existence of the other," Chavez said, referring to the opposition in a speech at the presidential palace.
"You have our respect and our recognition," he added, seated in front of a Venezuelan flag and a portrait of Latin American independence leader Simon Bolivar.
But Chavez blasted opposition leaders who refused to recognize his victory. He said the substantial vote in his favor indicated support for his policies, which include increased anti-poverty spending, social and health programs for the disadvantaged, and solidarity with Latin American protest movements.
"A new stage has begun -- of deepening our programs," Chavez said, without providing details.
Chavez's victory also indicated a power shift away from the small, wealthy elite that dominated the country until economic crises in the 1980s and 1990s shattered the legitimacy of the traditional two-party system in one of Latin America's oldest democracies. Chavez has endeared himself to the country's downtrodden with his rough-hewn style and delivery of numerous social programs.
In Washington, State Department spokesman Tom Casey did not mention Chavez by name in a statement about the recall. "We want to congratulate the Venezuelan people for the extraordinary civic spirit they demonstrated during yesterday's referendum," Casey said at a news briefing. He said the Bush administration, which has often harshly criticized Chavez, was awaiting final results and a report from election monitors.
But Carter and representatives of the Organization of American States endorsed the referendum process. "It's the responsibility of all Venezuelans to accept the results and work together in the future," Carter said.
Venezuela, which holds the largest oil reserves outside the Middle East, is the No. 4 supplier of crude to the United States. World oil markets have been occasionally rattled by the unrest that has wracked this country in recent years, including a short-lived 2002 coup against Chavez. A three-month general strike ending in February 2003 crippled the country's oil industry, the pillar of the economy.
Oil prices on the New York Mercantile Exchange reached a record high of $46.91 per barrel for U.S. light crude on Monday. But the price slipped to $46.30 after the report of Chavez's victory.
Venezuela has traditionally been a U.S. ally, but the relationship has soured as Chavez has condemned the Bush administration's policies on issues such as Afghanistan and free trade.
Yamira Leon, 27, a street vendor, was one of thousands of people who celebrated Chavez's victory on Monday.
"This is the best thing that could have happened. Before, we poor people didn't count. Now we're a majority," said Leon, who was watching red-shirted Chavez supporters blow whistles and wave Venezuelan flags outside the downtown presidential palace.
The opposition coalition received the results with disbelief, saying that its exit polls had predicted Chavez would suffer a stinging defeat in the recall.
"One result doesn't match the other," said Alberto Quiros, a spokesman for the coalition known as the Democratic Coordinator. He and other opposition leaders said they wanted a manual recount of the votes.
"We can't say to Venezuelans who came out to vote in massive numbers and who are being robbed of a huge victory that we are going to think for 24 hours," said opposition leader Antonio Ledezma. "We have to take to the streets."
Opposition supporters held small demonstrations in Caracas in the afternoon, yelling "Fraud!" and waving signs denouncing the results.
But analysts said the opposition would eventually have little option but to accept the results because the international monitors endorsed the process.
"With this, they are isolated," said Margarita Lopez, a professor at the Central University of Venezuela. "It would be political suicide to try to maintain this attitude."
Already, she said, some political parties and business executives have indicated they want to open talks with the government.
Many analysts said Chavez's victory had as much to do with the opposition's weakness as his strengths. As a loose-knit group, including conservative businessmen and former communist guerrillas, the coalition lacked effective leadership and a concrete program to convince voters, analysts said.
Chavez was also a formidable opponent. He has remained in power despite opposition from the United States and nearly every powerful group in Venezuela -- business leaders, oil workers, media executives, the Catholic Church and labor unions.
In the past year, the president has used the country's windfall from record oil prices to boost his popularity, funding a broad network of literacy programs, subsidized food stores and medical clinics in poor neighborhoods. He has welcomed hundreds of Cuban doctors and sports trainers to work in such programs.
A master communicator, Chavez has convinced many voters that the country's overall woeful economic performance during his presidency is the fault of opposition leaders associated with past politicians who are still reviled for their alleged corruption.
"There's no other politician in Venezuelan history, and no other politician in Latin America, who has been as skillful and effective," said Moises Naim, a Venezuelan-born economist who is editor of the journal Foreign Policy and has been a Chavez critic. "The tragedy is he has a blank check in many ways."
In fact, many of the president's detractors worry that a strengthened Chavez could tighten his grip on more of the country's institutions, as he has done with the judiciary, the military and the state-run oil company. He has concentrated power in the presidency, partly through public referendums.
Michael Shifter, an analyst at the Inter-American Dialogue in Washington, said the Venezuelan leader had enough money to aid like-minded movements in the hemisphere, but said he doubted the Chavez effect would catch on.
"Most people in Latin America recognize that his record has been pretty bad as president of Venezuela," he said. "I don't think this is the new hope, or the new way."
U.S. officials have expressed concern that Chavez could be emboldened to step up his activism in Latin America, where he has embraced anti-American groups in El Salvador, Ecuador, Bolivia and other countries. Chavez has denied any interest in exporting his policies.
--------
Venezuela Votes by Large Margin to Retain Chávez
August 17, 2004
By JUAN FORERO
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/17/international/americas/17venezuela.html?pagewanted=all&position=
CARACAS, Venezuela, Aug. 16 - Venezuelans voted overwhelmingly to keep President Hugo Chávez in power, electoral authorities and international monitors said Monday. But a strident opposition movement refused to accept the results of the recall referendum, raising prospects for more turmoil in Venezuela, the world's fifth-largest oil exporter.
Mr. Chávez, a pugnacious leftist populist who has already survived four national strikes and a brief coup, won handily after 8.5 million of Venezuela's 14 million registered voters swarmed polling stations in voting that began at 6 a.m. Sunday and ended well past midnight.
"The Venezuelan people have spoken, and the people's voice is the voice of God!" said Mr. Chávez, holding a microphone and standing in a balcony of the Miraflores presidential palace in a predawn address.
His victory eased world oil prices, which had been buffeted by concerns that a successful recall, and the ensuing violence that some expected, could disrupt production at the state oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela.
With 95 percent of ballots counted, Francisco Carrasquero, the president of the National Electoral Council, announced early Monday that Mr. Chávez had the backing of 58 percent of the voters, against 42 percent for the opposition. Mr. Chávez drew nearly 5 million votes, while the opposition collected about 3.6 million.
As of Monday night, opposition leaders had not backed off from their charges that a "gigantic fraud" had occurred. Anti-government protesters threw stones at a group of pro-government demonstrators, who witnesses said pulled out guns and fired shots that killed a 62-year-old woman and wounded several others.
But the Organization of American States and the Carter Center of Atlanta - monitors invited by the government and the opposition to validate the outcome - said the results were legitimate.
"There is a clear difference in favor of the government of President Chávez," former President Jimmy Carter, who heads the Carter Center, said at a joint news conference with César Gaviria, secretary general of the O.A.S. and a former president of Colombia.
The two men explained that the "quick counts" their organizations had conducted at various polling stations coincided with the outcome released by the Electoral Council. The quick counts, used in elections around the world, tally totals from various polling sites, have a margin of error of 1 percent and are more accurate than surveys of voters leaving the polls.
"We have found the information from the quick count was almost exactly the same as that presented" by the electoral authorities, said Mr. Carter, 79, whose organization has monitored elections in 51 counties. He added that "all Venezuelans should accept the results of the C.N.E.," the electoral body, "unless there is tangible proof that the reports are incorrect."
Shortly after the polls closed at midnight, opposition leaders were quick to predict victory. So when the computerized voting system used in the election tabulated the results, showing that the government had clearly won, the two of five electoral board members who side with the opposition were stunned, according to diplomats who were in the room.
Opposition leaders who met with Mr. Carter and Mr. Gaviria were further surprised when the monitors told them that they believed that the count was just, and that their own samples confirmed the outcome.
Mr. Carter, in a meeting with five American reporters Monday afternoon, said two or three of the opposition leaders in the two-hour meeting became "extremely irate."
"Their faces were white, and they were very condemnatory of our lack of objectivity and fairness," Mr. Carter said. Others, like the opposition's best-known leader, Enrique Mendoza, were clearly astonished and remained quiet, he said.
Soon after, Henry Ramos, a spokesman for the Democratic Coordinator, the umbrella of 27 opposition political parties, announced, "We categorically reject the results."
"They have perpetrated a gigantic fraud against the will of the people," he said.
Recent polls had indicated that Mr. Chávez would squeak to victory, though political analysts had hesitated to predict the outcome, saying the polls' results were too close to call. As it turned out, Mr. Chávez's fervent supporters - mainly people from the poor barrios who believe he is the first president to speak for them - voted overwhelmingly in his favor.
"The opposition has to recognize Chávez is our leader, that he has virtues," said Guadeth Peña, 35, who turned out to celebrate Monday at the presidential palace. "Venezuela has changed. The people are not ignorant like the opposition thinks. We are no longer blind. We will not longer be fooled."
Mr. Carter, in his meeting with the American reporters, expressed concern that the leaders of the Democratic Coordinator had not accepted the results and were instead insisting that the vote was fraudulent, citing surveys of voters at the polls that the opposition organizations had conducted.
Those polls, Mr. Carter said, "are quite unreliable," and have a high chance of being biased. "I wish they would accept the results," he said.
Mr. Carter and Mr. Gaviria said that there could be some discrepancies in the final tally, but that fraud was all but impossible. They said they would look into fraud claims, if proof were presented.
Mr. Chávez, in his early morning address after it was clear he had won, was relatively conciliatory toward the opposition, which in the past he has called "squalid ones" and a "rancid oligarchy."
"This is a victory for the opposition," he said. "They defeated violence, coup-mongering and fascism. I hope they accept this as a victory and not as a defeat."
Mr. Carter said he had talked to Mr. Chávez about the need to patch together a relationship with the opposition as well as scaling back his verbal outbursts against the Bush administration.
Mr. Chávez has declared himself at odds with nearly all facets of American policy in Latin America, like its military aid to neighboring Colombia and efforts to expand free trade agreements across the region. Although he has said repeatedly that Venezuela will continue providing oil to the United States, in recent months he had stepped up attacks on President Bush, whom he accused of backing the opposition.
The new lease on power of Mr. Chávez, a former army paratrooper and coup plotter, is a pivotal event in a country that has been roiled by protests since he first won election in 1998 promising to overturn the old social order, ease life for the poor and punish the corrupt elite the president's followers said plundered this country. But his leftist policies and sharp attacks on his political opponents have alienated Venezuelans who contend Mr. Chávez is taking Venezuela toward tyranny and ruin.
The results of the referendum mean that Mr. Chávez will finish the two years left of his term, which began with his re-election in 2000. His government pledged that it would continue with its so-called Bolivarian revolution, named for the hero of the country's independence wars, Simón Bolívar, purging elites from institutions and funneling hundreds of millions of dollars into health and social programs.
Buoyed by high oil prices that have left Venezuela awash in cash this year, Mr. Chávez's government worked for victory by embarking on a $1.7 billion social spending program. It also spent handsomely on a campaign that frightened many Venezuelans into believing that a yes vote to recall Mr. Chávez would be a vote for American imperialism and the corrupt political parties that ruled this country in the past.
Magnus McGrandle contributed reporting for this article.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- courts
Man says U.S. knew of rogue Afghan prison
August 17, 2004
The Washington Post
By Pamela Constable
http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/world/ny-woafgh173932260aug17,0,7889717.story?coll=ny-worldnews-headlines
KABUL, Afghanistan -- Jonathan Keith Idema, an American accused of running a freelance anti-terror operation and private prison in Afghanistan - and torturing his captives - testified in court yesterday that he could prove U.S. and Afghan authorities were fully aware of his actions and accused the FBI of confiscating evidence that would support his claim.
Often interrupting the judge and laughing in apparent disgust at the proceedings in Kabul's Primary Court of National Security, Idema, clad in military-style fatigues and acting as his own lawyer, said FBI agents in Kabul had seized hundreds of documents, photographs and videotapes that showed "constant contacts" between him and U.S. military and intelligence officials this spring and summer.
"They knew every single thing we did ...," said Idema, of Fayetteville, N.C. A lawyer for another defendant said the confiscated materials had been returned to Afghan intelligence police Sunday.
U.S. military and intelligence officials acknowledge having received one prisoner from Idema but have denied any real affiliation with him. U.S. Embassy staff at the trial declined to comment on the FBI's role. International peacekeepers in Kabul say they cooperated with him briefly until learning he was an impostor.
Idema said FBI agents had questioned several Afghans after he took them prisoner. He also read from a printed e-mail about his operations, which he said had been sent to him from the office of the multinational peacekeeping forces here.
Idema, two American associates and four Afghan employees have been charged with entering the country illegally, operating an illegal jail, detaining and imprisoning eight Afghan citizens, kidnapping and torture. All were arrested July 4 and could face 20 years in Afghan prisons.
The prosecutor said police had found "torture equipment, bloody clothing, handcuffs, blindfolds and stored water" when they raided Idema's makeshift prison and released the prisoners. He said Idema's detainees were "innocent" Afghans. Idema responded: " ... no one was burned with cigarettes, no one was hung upside down, no one was beaten, no one was in body bags ... none of this happened."
Noting his operations coincided with the widening scandal over abuse by U.S. military guards and interrogators at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, Idema said, "We were very careful to use standard interrogation techniques."
Several Afghans testified at a hearing last month that they had been detained and abused by Idema and his group, including being hung by their feet and doused with hot and cold water. The alleged victims, including a senior religious judge, were in court yesterday.
A second accused American, Edward Caraballo of New York, testified he was a journalist who was filming Idema and said he was "very sorry for any pain I caused the people of Afghanistan by my involvement in a mission I believed to be sanctioned by the American and Afghan governments." The third American, Brent Bennett, reportedly from Fayetteville, N.C., did not speak yesterday.
After six hours, Judge Abdul Boset Bakhtiary postponed the trial by one week to allow Idema and his co-defendants time to examine the evidence taken by the FBI. Afghan and American officials have left open whether the trio could face charges before U.S. courts.
Another defendant, Afghan Abdul Wahid, told the court he had been introduced to Idema through an Afghan military commander, had seen him meet senior Afghan officials and believed he was acting on orders from the U.S. intelligence services. Wahid, 19, apologized to Mohammed Sadiq, the religious judge Idema had arrested, who sat in the courtroom. "I was rude to him as a clergyman," Wahid said.
Idema insisted the men he had arrested were terrorists involved in plots to kill senior Afghan officials by planting bombs in taxis.
Idema, 48, is a former U.S. Army special forces operative and claims to have been involved in conflicts across the world. He served time for fraud in the United States on charges stemming from his mail-order military supply business.
-------- homeland security
Federal agents added to flights
August 17, 2004
By Audrey Hudson
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20040817-011446-4920r.htm
Homeland Security Undersecretary Asa Hutchinson yesterday told senators that Secret Service agents and other armed federal officials are being used to bolster the Federal Air Marshal Service's efforts to guard airplanes from terrorist attacks.
"We're trying to make sure, through additional resources, that we really increase the number of flights that are covered," Mr. Hutchinson told the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee during a hearing on the September 11 commission report.
Mr. Hutchinson denied that the number of marshals is declining and that few flights actually have them aboard, as marshals, pilots and an airline executive said in yesterday's editions of The Washington Times.
"We'll certainly agree - and Congress well knows - that not all flights are covered," said Mr. Hutchinson, undersecretary for border and transportation security.
The Washington Times reported Monday that less than five percent of 35,000 daily flights are protected by federal air marshals and that fewer than 3,000 out of nearly 100,000 pilots have been trained to carry guns in the cockpit.
Mr. Hutchinson did not discuss with the Senate panel the number of air marshals or the number of daily flights and called the story "misleading." Before the hearing, he told C-SPAN that there are "thousands" of marshals.
"I think the Federal Air Marshal [Service] is a strong program that is well-managed," Mr. Hutchinson told the Senate panel.
Sen. Barbara Boxer, California Democrat, called the low numbers "pathetic" and demanded that the committee receive a report on the exact numbers.
"This is a shocking story," she said.
Mrs. Boxer challenged Mr. Hutchinson's assertion that the number of marshals will not be reduced, citing a statement by Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge before a House panel in March.
"We went from a handful of [federal air marshals in fiscal year] '01 to literally thousands in '04, and there's been a modest reduction and I think we can manage that reduction through '05," Mr. Ridge said, according to CNN.
Mrs. Boxer said Mr. Hutchinson's answers were "not good enough."
"If I'm an average person sitting there, I'm not getting straight answers from you," she said.
Mr. Hutchinson said there "are targeted flights, special flights of concern," that all have air-marshal protection.
"The government won't disclose the number of air marshals or armed pilots because it would confirm our worst fears - that the vast majority of our flights are as defenseless as they were on September 11," said David Mackett, chairman of the Airline Pilots Security Alliance.
"Even if there were twice as many air marshals as reported - and there aren't - that would only protect a little more than 10 percent of our flights. The fact is the system is far too big to afford air marshals for more than a handful of flights," Mr. Mackett said.
Marshals and flight crews also are critical of the service's dress codes, which they say identify agents to terrorists and leave them vulnerable to an attack before a plane is hijacked. They have said two officials were yanked from a flight for violating dress codes.
Former New Jersey Gov. Thomas H. Kean, chairman of the September 11 commission, told the Senate panel that the dress code for marshals must be re-examined.
"Obviously, randomness is our best protection with air marshals, so they've got to be random. Nobody should be able to pick them out from the crowd," Mr. Kean said.
Mr. Hutchinson said he agreed that marshals should operate in an undercover capacity to which Mrs. Boxer responded, "You say you agree with that criticism, and ... you haven't changed the rules yet?"
Air marshals already blend in with the flying public, Mr. Hutchinson said.
"If we need to adjust the rules, we will look into that, but that is the objective."
Two air marshals were pulled from a Southwest Airlines flight last month, and the plane proceeded without protection because the men were not wearing sports coats.
"A sport coat should be a minimum!!!" Thomas Quinn, director of the air-marshal service, said in a May 14, 2003, e-mail obtained by The Washington Times. "Unless [special agents in charge] on a case-by-case basis approves something different for one specific mission."
After the hearing, Homeland Security spokesman Dennis Murphy told reporters that the dress code was established after pilots and flight crews complained.
"The problem we had was some air marshals showing up for duty in torn-up blue jeans and unshaven ... very disheveled, and when they presented themselves to the pilots as federal air marshals, [the pilots] were like, 'Are you kidding me?' " Mr. Murphy said.
However, several organizations have sided with the marshals and say the dress code is dangerous, including the Allied Pilots Association, Association of Flight Attendants and the Airline Pilots Security Alliance.
"None of us want to go out dressed like Serpico," one air marshal said. "We only want to look like other passengers and frequent fliers."
Shaun Waterman of United Press International contributed to this report.
-------
Deadlines Urged for Terror Fixes
9/11 Panel Wants Homeland Security Department Accountable
By Sara Kehaulani Goo
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, August 17, 2004; Page A13
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A6377-2004Aug16.html
Members of the Sept. 11 commission urged Congress yesterday to impose strict deadlines on the Department of Homeland Security to close loopholes in the nation's transportation system, even if it means going up against powerful interest groups and spending billions of dollars.
The chairman and vice chairman of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, which issued recommendations last month, said the administration has not developed strategic plans to protect the nation's rail system and ports and to correct technical communication problems among police and firefighters. The leaders of the commission also said aviation security, which has received the most government attention and money, has focused too much on "fighting the last war" instead of looking to prevent new threats.
Undersecretary Asa Hutchinson said the department is not "sitting idle."
The commission told the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee that it will cost at least $1 billion annually for the next five years in order to close remaining gaps in airline security.
"We are mindful that is a substantial investment," said the Sept. 11 panel's chairman, Thomas H. Kean (R). "But we have seen the devastating costs in human life and economic disruption that result from a successful attack. It is a worthwhile investment, and one necessary to fulfill the government's constitutional duty to provide for the common defense of its citizens."
The Homeland Security Department is already developing a broad plan and individual strategies for each transportation mode, said Asa Hutchinson, the agency's undersecretary for border and transportation security. The work is expected to be completed by the end of 2004. Hutchison said he agrees with the panel's findings and is already working to address its more specific recommendations.
One of the panel's main concerns involved the government's "no fly" lists and lists of other known suspicious people who are supposed to be stopped and questioned at airports. The panel recommended that the government immediately begin comparing every passenger against more comprehensive lists than those currently used at airports, even though some agencies do not want them in the hands of airlines. Airline employees are currently responsible for checking passengers against the lists.
Two of the hijackers involved in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks were placed on the State Department's terrorist watch list in August 2001, but the names were never reported to the Federal Aviation Administration, according to the commission's report. "This was a missed opportunity to foil at least part of the attack," Kean said.
Hutchinson said the TSA plans to take over checking the watch lists at some point, when it develops a new computer passenger-screening program. The administration's previous attempt, called CAPPS II, has been shelved because of privacy concerns. "We're not just sitting idle," Hutchinson said.
Although the TSA has taken several steps to fortify cockpit doors, add armed air marshals and pilots, and conduct background checks on more airport workers, the agency needs to be more aggressive about checking for explosives, the Sept. 11 panel members said. Passengers and carry-on luggage should be screened for bombs at security checkpoints, the panel suggested, and every airliner should carry at least one blast-proof container in the cargo hold for suspicious packages and luggage.
"TSA is now nearly three years old," said Lee H. Hamilton (D), the panel's vice chairman. "It has done much good work. However, the time for 'planning to plan' is past."
--------
AIRLINES
Government to Take Over Watch-List Screening
August 17, 2004
By RACHEL L. SWARNS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/17/politics/17nofly.html
WASHINGTON, Aug. 16 - Domestic security officials said Monday that they planned to begin screening airline passengers against a list of potential terror suspects, taking over a responsibility now carried out by the airlines.
Advocates for tougher screening requirements and civil libertarians have criticized the current system, under which airline employees check passenger names against government watch lists to ensure that terror suspects do not board airplanes and that law enforcement officials are promptly notified of potential security risks.
The system has been described as ineffective because the government does not provide the airlines with a comprehensive set of watch lists, in part because some of that information is classified. Civil libertarians also cite instances in which airlines have mistakenly denied passengers the right to fly.
Under the new system, government officials said, the airlines will provide the Department of Homeland Security with passenger lists and government officials will check those names against more expansive watch lists. Department officials declined to say when it would assume this responsibility, but said the shift would create a more thorough screening of passengers than is now possible.
Asa Hutchinson, undersecretary for border security at the Department of Homeland Security, described the decision at a Senate Commerce Committee on Monday. In its report, the Sept. 11 commission urged the government to take such a step.
"That is not the comprehensive check for security reasons because it's an airline-based system," Mr. Hutchinson said of the current system. "That's what has to change, and we recognize that, agree with that recommendation, and we'll be taking steps to accomplish that."
Lawyers with the American Civil Liberties Union, who sued the government earlier this year on behalf of passengers who said they were wrongly placed on no-fly lists, cautiously welcomed the change.
Catherine Kim, a lawyer with the civil liberties group, said the decision reflected an acknowledgement of the problems in the current system.
Ms. Kim said she hoped the government would bring more uniformity to the process and provide a centralized mechanism for passengers mistakenly identified as terror suspects to remove their names from watch lists.
"On the one hand, we are glad to see the government acknowledging the problems in the current implementation of the no-fly list and making efforts toward remedying those problems," Ms. Kim said.
"But it remains to be seen whether innocent passengers will continue to be identified and treated as potential terrorists repeatedly," she said. "To the extent that the government's decision would remedy that, it would be welcome."
In its report, the Sept. 11 commission called on the government to take over the screening of airline passengers, saying the current process was limited because "concerns about sharing intelligence information with private firms and foreign countries keep the U.S. government from listing all terrorist and terrorist suspects who should be included."
---------
Conflict Erupts on Effort to Identify Travelers
August 17, 2004
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/17/politics/17border.html
WASHINGTON, Aug. 16 - A leading Democratic lawmaker said on Monday that a multibillion-dollar effort to better protect the nation's borders from terrorists had so far been "a striking failure," but Bush administration officials defended the ambitious project.
The program, known as U.S.-Visit, is a cornerstone of the administration's domestic security efforts. It seeks to create a "virtual border" around the United States by using biometric identifiers for travelers and other new technology to bolster security.
The Department of Homeland Security has begun instituting some major security components at airports and elsewhere, and in June it named Accenture as the prime contractor for a project that could be worth as much as $10 billion in coming years.
Representative Jim Turner of Texas, ranking Democrat on the House domestic security committee, wrote in a letter on Monday to Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge that an investigation by his staff showed deep flaws. Mr. Ridge said that his department was relying on outdated technology and that the program's central goal, linking the databases of American intelligence, law enforcement, transportation and border agencies, appeared unmet despite three years of effort and $700 million.
"They're building a system that is not going to achieve that goal, and they're building a system here that's destined to fail," Mr. Turner said in an interview. "It appears that in their rush to get something out there quickly, they've gone down a path that's basically a repeat of our old technology systems."
As a result, he said, he was concerned that the aging computer systems that form the underpinnings of the border-protection program would soon need to be replaced at tremendous cost.
"These facts lead me to the conclusion that the administration has allowed three years to pass without making virtually any progress toward building the type of integrated, interoperable entry-exit system that the 9/11 commission has determined is necessary to protect America from the threat of global terrorism," he wrote. "This striking failure establishes the need for far more vigorous Congressional oversight."
Mr. Turner said a number of other leading Democrats shared his concerns. His harsh criticism suggested that the administration, which has included $350 million for the program in its current budget plan, could run into political and financial resistance from Democrats in Congress as the plan proceeds.
Asa Hutchinson, under secretary to Mr. Ridge for border security, said in an interview that Mr. Turner's letter "is puzzling, and it's based on some incorrect information.''
"It's certainly not an accurate appraisal of the U.S.-Visit program," Mr. Hutchinson added.
He said that the program had already successfully linked about six federal databases for fingerprints and other critical identifying information on travelers and that more upgrades were planned as officials moved toward a deadline on Dec. 31 to bring the nation's 50 busiest land ports on line.
"We've never lost sight of our objective of making these systems talk to each other," he said.
The Sept. 11 commission, in its final report, called the program a major element in deterring terrorists, and Mr. Hutchinson and Mr. Turner cited those findings to bolster their views.
Lee H. Hamilton, vice chairman of the panel, emphasized on Monday at a Congressional hearing that border protection must be a high priority.
"Our view,'' he said, "is that the current timetable for implementing the U.S.-Visit program is too slow."
-------- terrorism
British Charge 8 Tied to Terror Plot With Murder Conspiracy
August 17, 2004
By PATRICK E. TYLER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/17/international/europe/17CND-BRIT.html?hp
LONDON, Aug. 17 - The British police today charged eight men with conspiracy to murder and terrorism after finding that they possessed reconnaissance information on financial centers in Washington, New York and New Jersey that were the subject of a new terror alert this month.
They also had handbooks on explosives and other plans to use "radioactive materials, toxic gases, chemicals and explosives" to cause general panic and disruption against unspecified targets, the police said.
The eight men were among the 13 arrested two weeks ago in the wake of the American terror alert. Two were released without charge and two others were eliminated as terrorist suspects and re-arrested on suspicion of possessing forged documents.
Today's arrests officially connected for the first time the American terror alert, the London arrests and the arrest in July in Pakistan of Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan, a 25-year-old computer technician.
The Pakistanis say the technician was found to possess an archive of reconnaissance information about the International Monetary Fund and World Bank buildings in Washington, the Citigroup tower in Manhattan, the New York Stock Exchange and the Prudential Building in New Jersey, the financial centers that were the subject of the American terror alert.
Each of these sites was listed in today's charge sheet against the eight men in London.
The London police identified the charged men as Dhiren Barot, 32; Mohammed Naveed Bhatti, 24; Abdul Aziz Jalil, 31; Omar Abdul Rehman, 20; Junade Feroze, 28; Zia ul Haq, 25; Qaisar Shaffi, 25, and Nadeem Tarmohammed, 26.
Mr. Barot and Mr. Tarmohammed were charged with possessing a reconnaissance plan of the Prudential Building, in violation of the Terrorism Act.
Mr. Barot was charged with possession of a reconnaissance plan of the New York Stock Exchange, the I.M.F. building, the Citigroup building, and possessing two notebooks containing information on explosives, poisons, chemicals and related matters.
Mr. Shaffi was charged with possessing an extract of the "Terrorist's Handbook" containing information on the preparation of chemicals and explosive recipes.
All eight will appear on Wednesday at Bow Street Magistrates' Court, sitting at the high-security Belmarsh Prison, in southeast London.
A ninth man, identified as Matthew Philip Monks, 32, of Sudbury, London, is being charged with possession of a prohibited weapon.
Terence Neilan contributed from New York for this article.
-------- torture
Is torture OK for UK courts?
BBC
17 August, 2004
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/3563114.stm
As the full implications of last week's ruling on foreign terrorist suspects held in England start to sink in, questions are being asked about what it means for evidence obtained through torture.
Last week, the Court of Appeal ruled foreign terrorism suspects held without charge at Belmarsh Prison should not be released.
The men claimed their detention may rely on evidence extracted during torture of al-Qaeda suspects at Guantanamo Bay.
But the court said that as long as the UK neither supports nor participates in torture, ministers cannot ignore potentially vital evidence. So is information extracted during torture valid in UK courts?
What the law says
British law bans torture. The UK is one of 127 signatories to the United Nations Convention Against Torture.
But the Court of Appeal judgement said ministers had to be sensible about this law in light of current events.
Shafiq Rasul and Ruhal Ahmed allege abuse at Guantanamo "I am quite unable to see that any such principle prohibits the [home secretary] from relying on evidence which has been obtained through torture by agencies of other states," said Lord Justice Laws.
"If the Secretary of State is bound to dismiss [evidence from torture abroad] his duty becomes extremely problematic. He may be presented with information of great potential importance, where there is, let us say, a suspicion as to the means by which, in another jurisdiction, it has been obtained? What is he to do?"
International fears
The background to this ruling is the question mark over how the US is conducting its campaign against its enemies.
The US-run Guantanamo Bay detention camp for terrorism suspects, is as controversial today as when the first plane-load of suspects landed almost three years ago.
Three of five recently British men released without charge from the camp say they were tortured there. One said he admitted knowing Osama Bin Laden just to stop his interrogators.
Human rights groups claim the US secret services are sending terrorism suspects to friendly Middle East regimes to be interrogated in a harsh manner.
Accepting torture
Home Secretary David Blunkett says his position is clear.
Torture is the microcosm of terrorism - it's one individual terrorising another individual Prof Paul Wilkinson "We unreservedly condemn the use of torture. However, it would be irresponsible not to take appropriate account of any information which could help protect national security and public safety."
Liberal Democrat peer Lord Carlile, the official watchdog on terror laws, recently says he has sympathy with ministers. Should they ignore reports of a bomb plot, revealed during torture abroad, out of fear of encouraging the torturer - or act upon it, believing it may save lives?
The Telegraph newspaper supports this position. "Facts from torture, are still facts," it declares.
'Evidence unreliable'
But Ellie Smith, a lawyer with the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture, says history shows torture never reveals facts.
"It comes down the quality of proof," she says. "If you have evidence coming out of Guantanamo, there is no way you can establish the root of what is being said. "If you cannot cross-examine people, you cannot test their credibility. Torture evidence in inherently unreliable."
And Professor Paul Wilkinson, terrorism expert at the University of St Andrews, fears the West may begin to lose the "war of ideas" and provide a propaganda weapon to extremists.
"Torture is the microcosm of terrorism. It's one individual terrorising another individual," he says.
"Once you have done that, you have sacrificed the moral high ground - and the terrorists are then winning without having fired a single shot."
-------- POLITICS
-------- us politics
THE COMMISSION
Panel's Call for Strong Intelligence Chief Wins Crucial Ally
August 17, 2004
By PHILIP SHENON
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/17/politics/17panel.html
WASHINGTON, Aug. 16 - The Sept. 11 commission's major recommendation for the creation of a powerful new national intelligence director gained momentum on Monday, with an influential Republican senator suggesting that he was willing to oppose the White House and offer legislation providing the new intelligence director with broad budgetary and personnel authority over the nation's 15 intelligence agencies.
"That person would be empowered with the authority to really lead the intelligence community," said the lawmaker, Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas, chairman of the Senate intelligence committee. "These authorities include the ability to hire and fire, as well as the ability to exercise control over the budgets."
Mr. Roberts said a draft bill, written with his committee's ranking Democrat, John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, would be presented to Senate colleagues this week and would be built around the recommendations of the final report of the Sept. 11 commission.
The report, which has created a whirlwind of unusual midsummer activity on Capitol Hill, documented intelligence and law-enforcement failures before the Sept. 11 attacks and called for a shake-up of the C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies. It called for appointment of a national intelligence director to oversee all spy agencies, including those within the Defense Department.
While Senator Roberts did not say so explicitly, his description of the powers of the national intelligence director made clear that his bill would go far beyond what the White House and the Pentagon have said they are ready to accept. A spokesman for the senator, Sarah Little, said later that the bill would definitely "go beyond what the White House is talking about."
President Bush has said he supports the Sept. 11 panel's recommendation for a national intelligence director, who would replace the director of central intelligence as the nation's chief spymaster, but the White House proposal would not provide the post with the broad authority that the bipartisan commission wants.
Pentagon officials have suggested that a more powerful national intelligence director, by taking away power now held by Defense Department intelligence agencies, might interfere with military operations.
The White House proposal has been criticized by members of the commission, who say that the national intelligence director needs full budgetary and personnel control in order to end the turf battles and miscommunication that plague the government's intelligence agencies.
Mr. Rockefeller, appearing with Mr. Roberts at a hearing of the Committee on Governmental Affairs, praised President Bush's decision to support the creation of a national intelligence director. But he said the president's "decision to deviate from the commission's recommendation to give this director real budget and personnel authority was a bigger step, in my mind, backwards."
Mr. Rockefeller said Congress would have to "break some china around here" and "invest authority in the national intelligence director for budget and for personnel and the rest of it."
His remarks came at a hearing at which three former directors of central intelligence testified that if Congress created a national intelligence director, the job must have clear authority, including control over the intelligence community's estimated $40 billion annual budget.
"The intelligence community does not need a feckless czar with fine surroundings and little authority," said William H. Webster, who led the C.I.A. during the Reagan and first Bush administrations and is also a former director of the F.B.I. "That is the wrong way to go."
Mr. Webster testified that "the designated leader must be clearly and unambiguously empowered to act and to decide on issues of great importance to the success of the intelligence community."
Even as a large bipartisan group of lawmakers in both the House and Senate has made clear that they will support creation of a powerful post of national intelligence director, there was skepticism elsewhere in Congress, notably on Monday in the Senate Armed Services Committee.
In the committee's first hearing on the findings of the Sept. 11 commission, the panel's chairman and vice chairman joined with Pentagon officials to warn against haste in adopting the commission's findings, especially where they might interfere with the ability of troops on the battlefield to obtain intelligence.
"We have responsibility to ensure that our actions are prudent, carefully analyzed and thoroughly debated," said Senator John W. Warner, Republican of Virginia, the panel's chairman. "We simply must not make any changes which could, despite the best of intentions, hinder the ability of our troops successfully to fulfill their missions."
-------- OTHER
-------- environment
Explosives Pollute Wells Near Wisconsin Army Ammunition Plant
August 17, 2004
MERRIMAC, Wisconsin, (ENS)
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/aug2004/2004-08-17-09.asp#anchor3
The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (WDNR) has advised two families near Gruber's Grove Bay to not use their water for cooking or drinking after test results showed a chemical used in the production of explosives in their wells.
Analysis of their well water detected 2,6-dinitrotoluene (2,6-DNT), a compound that was used at Badger Army Ammunition Plant in the production of gun powder and rocket fuel, at concentrations above safe drinking water standards.
The WDNR said that the wells are located southeast of the plant in the Water's Edge subdivision, just north of Gruber's Grove Bay on Lake Wisconsin. Both families have been offered bottled water by the U.S. Army.
Sampling of the two wells in May and June 2004, found 2,6-DNT at concentrations of 0.06 to 0.07 parts per billion (ppb). The state Health Advisory Limit for 2,6-DNT is 0.05 ppb. Water in the subdivision's other wells was tested and 2,6-DNT was not detected.
While health officials said that these levels are not likely to cause adverse health effects, they have advised residents of these homes to not drink the water from their wells. DNT can affect the blood, nervous system, liver, kidneys, and male reproductive system in both humans and animals. DNT causes cancer in laboratory animals and is a suspected human carcinogen.
Previous testing by the Army in December 2003 also found DNT above safe standards in two private wells located one-quarter mile south of Badger along Keller Road in the nearby township of Prairie du Sac.
Testing was expanded in March 2004 to 91 private wells between Gruber's Grove Bay and the northern edge of the village of Prairie du Sac.
But any future testing must be requested by local residents. "The Army recently announced that it will discontinue testing your well unless you contact them and tell them you want them to keep testing it," said Laura Olah, Executive Director of Citizens of Safe Water Around Badger.
The group is advising residents to request continued quarterly testing because contaminant levels often go up and down. "Ongoing testing is the best way to know exactly what is in your water and if levels are changing over time," Olah said.
CSWAB, a community-led organization that has worked since 1990 to get Badger cleaned up and conserved as a green space, considers bottled water a stop-gap measure. "Bottled water does not stop exposure through inhalation and dermal exposure," Olah cautions. "Immediate steps are needed to ensure water is pure and completely free from these toxins."
Local officials agree that the military should continue testing and providing bottled water until a long-term solution is found. On July 13, the Township of Prairie du Sac board passed resolution stating that "the U.S. Army should provide a permanent solution to guarantee groundwater and private water wells are clean and free from any contamination from Badger."
Concerns about potential problems to the north have prompted action by the Merrimac Township board. On August 2, the town board passed a resolution urging the Army to begin private well testing in its jurisdiction.
--------
Federal managers are told to protect wildlife and delay energy projects
Associated Press
By John Heilprin,
August 17, 2004
WASHINGTON - The Interior Department said Monday it will begin delaying some new oil and gas drilling projects until the effects on wildlife are studied more thoroughly.
But environmentalists said they were skeptical, since the department has routinely ignored its power to defer energy leases for the sake of wildlife.
"Actions speak louder," said Peter Aengst, an energy policy analyst for the Wilderness Society in Bozeman, Montana. "I haven't yet seen where they're doing that. It's always been full speed ahead with energy development: lease, lease, lease."
Assistant Interior Secretary Rebecca Watson described the new policy as a response to American Wildlife Conservation Partners, a coalition of groups ranging from Ducks Unlimited to the National Rifle Association. She said it would apply to all 262 million acres - about one of every 10 in the United States - managed by Interior's Bureau of Land Management (BLM).
"We value them because we think they're the experts on wildlife," Watson said.
Robert Model, president of the Boone and Crockett Club in Missoula, Montana, said he was pleased the Bush administration "has taken to heart our recommendations.... It's been frustrating for us in the past not to have a voice in the decision-making."
The BLM is rewriting 162 plans for managing that vast acreage. Watson said federal officials who decide what to do for those areas can choose to hold off offering new oil and gas leases if they think the current plans for protecting wildlife are not adequate.
Watson said she told BLM managers to "use your power to temporarily defer leasing" for oil and gas drilling. "What this does is let the BLM managers hold back some areas while the new plans are being developed," she said.
Watson said 22 of the new plans are "time-sensitive" because they respond to lawsuits, apply to new national monuments without old plans, or speed energy development in New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, and Montana.
Both President Bush and Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry have been seeking votes among hunters and conservationists. Earlier this month, for example, Bush told several hundred farmers, ranchers, and sportspeople in Minnesota that the 2002 farm bill he signed would provide $40 billion over the next decade to restore millions of acres of wetlands, protect sensitive habitats, conserve water, and improve streams and waterways near farms and ranches.
The Kerry campaign, however, said Bush had consistently siding with industry when choosing between corporations and sportsmen.
"He's pursued policies that take direct aim at the laws that protect America's hunting havens and fishing holes instead of working to strengthen them," Kerry spokesman Phil Singer said.
Watson said the government also is developing new ways of monitoring wildlife, for which her agency now spends about $20 million a year. She pointed to a test project near Pinedale, Wyoming, involving the BLM, the Forest Service, and Wyoming officials.
In June, Wyoming Gov. Dave Freudenthal complained to BLM that it was "premature at best" to offer more land around Pinedale for oil and gas drilling while a new federal plan for managing the area was incomplete. The BLM went ahead with the lease sales anyway.
Freudenthal had told BLM officials that the leasing would "further jeopardize sage grouse habitat, migration corridors, crucial habitat, and other important resources" for wildlife.
-----
Journalist groups complain Homeland Security is skirting environmental disclosure rules
August 17, 2004
Associated Press
By Elizabeth Wolfe
http://www.enn.com/news/2004-08-17/s_26564.asp
WASHINGTON - About a dozen journalist organizations complained Monday that a proposed Homeland Security Department policy would impede the public release of information on environmental hazards.
In comments filed with the department, the groups said the agency is ditching some routine environmental oversight in the name of security.
"It must not be assumed that a choice needs to be made between the environment and security," the Coalition of Journalists for Open Government wrote in response to the agency's directive.
Their complaint involves the 1970 National Environmental Policy Act, which requires lengthy environmental studies and public comments to detail the effects a proposed project would have on the environment and ways to minimize that impact.
Homeland Security said it will still conduct its environmental assessments in accordance with federal standards as defined by the 1970 act. But the department added it would not release such assessments to the public if key material is deemed classified or protected.
"In such cases, other appropriate security and environmental officials will ensure that the consideration of environmental effects will be consistent with the letter and intent of NEPA," the department wrote in its notice in June.
But the coalition said the range of information Homeland Security could withhold is too broad, and the new policy could give the agency "a blank-check authority to declare information secret."
Homeland Security did not return calls seeking comment Monday.
The Bush administration, which has blamed the environmental act for bureaucratic gridlock, has been seeking to update it.
The public comment period on the department's directive ended Monday, and the agency must now present its final proposal.
Among the coalition's recommendations to the department is independent oversight for any nondisclosure decisions and narrower limits on classifying environmental information.
The signatories to the coalition's comments include the Society of Environmental Journalists, the Associated Press Managing Editors, the American Society of Newspaper Editors, and the National Press Club.
-------- homeless
Homeless camps cleared near Clinton library site
August 17, 2004
LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (AP)
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20040816-114811-7028r.htm
City officials want to eradicate 27 homeless camps, getting their occupants into shelters or out of town as Little Rock prepares for the high-profile opening of the Clinton Presidential Library.
Officials deny that the strategy has anything to do with the Nov. 18 opening, but homeless advocates fear that the city is being merciless - perhaps at the behest of the library.
The homeless were living at the library site before construction began.
An annual satirical stage show put on by the Pulaski County Bar Association this week depicts Clinton library officials driving away helpless residents of the camps.
"The idea that we want to clean up the homeless because of the opening is simply not the case," said Skip Rutherford, president of the nonprofit Clinton Foundation.
Mr. Rutherford said he is uncomfortable with the idea of displacing the homeless. He noted one man lived on the old railroad trestle that the library plans to turn into a pedestrian bridge across the Arkansas River.
The city began formulating a strategy to close 27 homeless encampments in the spring. City Manager Bruce Moore said the idea stemmed from Mayor Jim Dailey's tour of a homeless shelter run by Little Rock Compassion Center.
"Clearly, as Little Rock continues to grow, with a variety of projects on the horizon, we want individuals who come here to feel safe, but we also want individuals in our community to feel safe," Mr. Moore said.
"So there's a tourism component of this strategy, but there's more to it," he said.
He said the city is working with the Department of Veterans Affairs to reach those who are eligible for benefits. The city's board of directors created a task force last fall to look at the issue of chronic homelessness, Mr. Moore said.
Police Chief Lawrence Johnson said his department has been trying to handle the homeless camps for years.
The Little Rock Compassion Center's director, Rosemary Holloway, says she supports aggressive efforts to clear out encampments because they tend to contain vagabonds and "professional panhandlers" - people whom she accused of having tendencies toward violence and drug addiction.
-------- ACTIVISTS
Americans Invited to Help Clean Up the World
August 17, 2004
NEW YORK, New York, (ENS)
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/aug2004/2004-08-17-09.asp#anchor8
Clean Up the World and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) are encouraging Americans to clean their own small part of the environment for 2004 Clean Up the World Weekend, September 17 to 19.
Clean Up the World mobilizes over 30 million volunteers from more than 100 countries annually to clean up, fix up and conserve their local environment.
Communities throughout the United States are encouraged to hold activities to raise awareness of how rubbish in the environment affects waterways, seas and oceans.
Participation in Clean Up the World 2004 is expected to increase in states across the country this year over last.
Clean Ups will take place along the shores of San Francisco Bay where volunteers will remove marine debris from the marsh, beach and picnic areas of China Camp State Beach. The area crossed by 22 miles of scenic trails within 1,640 acres of parkland.
The Potomac River in Maryland is the wildest river running through a metropolitan area anywhere in the world and supplies fresh drinking water to more than 80 percent of residents in Washington, DC. Over 600 volunteers will collect waste and debris from several locations along the river.
In the Cove Palisades State Park, Oregon, more than 150 volunteers will take part in the Lake Billy Chinook Day Clean Up event. Volunteers will focus on problems such as erosion, aquatic weeds and dump sites formed at the canyon confluence of the Metolius, Deschutes, and Crooked Rivers.
Under the motto 'Bag it with Beckers!', volunteers in Portland, Oregon, are coordinating cleanups to remove debris along the Henry Hagg Lake shorelines. The lake, located in Scoggins Park, is inhabited by rainbow trout, small mouth bass, brown bullhead, and yellow perch.
PA Cleanways Westmoreland County in Greensborough, Pennsylvania is organizing Clean Up events to combat littering and illegal dumping. The Clean Ups will focus on items that are difficult to dispose of such as yard waste, tires, batteries, appliances, paper, Christmas trees, and household hazardous waste.
Graduate students in the Department of Biological Sciences at Old Dominion University, Norfolk, Virginia, work to conserve the Birdsong Memorial Wetland throughout the year by removing rubbish and undertaking vegetation management activities.
"It is important that everyone, from the East to West coast, helps reduce the impact of waste on the environment and the surrounding seas and oceans," said Ian Kiernan, an Australian who is founding chairman of Clean Up the World.
Clean Up the World members become part of a UNEP endorsed global network of people and organizations concerned about the environment and receive information and materials to assist with the promotion and implementation of environmental activities.
For more information about any of these activities or to register as a member visit: www.cleanuptheworld.org or contact world@cleanup.com.au.
----
'04 Edition of Addicted to War Is Issued
Wednesday, August 18, 2004
Santa Monica Mirror
http://www.smmirror.com/volume6/issue9/edition_of_addicted.asp
The new 2004 edition of Addicted to War: Why the U.S. Can't Kick Militarism, an anti-war comic book, is now available. It has been updated and eight new pages covering the war in Iraq have been added.
Written and illustrated by Dr. Joel Andreas, the book was number 9 on the Los Angeles Times' best-seller list last year and over 200,000 copies are now in print.
Documented with 161 reference notes, and heavily illustrated, Addicted to War reveals why the U.S. has been involved in more wars in recent years than any other country, and catalogues who benefits from these military adventures, who pays and who dies.
The book has been endorsed by Teaching For Change, Veterans For Peace, historian Howard Zinn, Martin Sheen, Dr. Helen Caldicott, Susan Sarandon, Ramsey Clark, Ron Kovic, Ed Asner, Medea Benjamin, Blase Bonpane, Michael Parenti, Colonel James Burkholder, Rev. James Lawson, Fernando Suarez, Michael Franti, Father Roy Bourgeois, Mimi Kennedy and Casey Kasem, among others and is used as a history book in hundreds of high schools and colleges.
A Spanish edition will be available at the end of August or early September.
For more information, go to fdorrel@addictedtowar.com. To purchase Addicted to War, send a check for $10 to Frank Dorrel, P.O. Box 3261, Culver City, California, 90231-3261.
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Behavior May Cost Protesters 'Privileges,' Bloomberg Says
August 17, 2004
New York Times
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/17/nyregion/17speech.html?ex=1093719382&ei=1&en=568c64d1294ff7d9
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg told a group of volunteers who plan to toil at the Republican National Convention yesterday that he expected most protesters who come to the event later this month would "be reasonable," but he warned that "if we start to abuse our privileges, then we lose them."
Coincidentally, his remarks followed a protest by a small group of police officers who were told to move away from the doorway of John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan or risk arrest. The group was there awaiting the mayor's arrival to address and thank the volunteers.
Mr. Bloomberg has been battling two disparate groups of protesters over the last few weeks: police and fire union officials, who have been trailing him at his public events and yelling at him to give them a raise, and antiwar protesters, who have been wrangling with the city over where they can stage a large demonstration the day before the convention, which will be held Aug. 30 to Sept. 2.
In recent days, as each group has gotten more aggressive, Mr. Bloomberg has been forced to address them in his public remarks as he goes about the city. Last week, during a briefing with police officials on the convention, Mr. Bloomberg suggested that antiwar protesters be mindful of American troops in Iraq.
When asked later if he meant that protesters were being unpatriotic, Mr. Bloomberg said he did not. "If you think the war is wrong you should say so," he said, adding that his point was that "we have freedoms that most other people do not have," including the right to protest.
Yesterday, a small group of police officers were reminded of the limitations they face when they stood outside the college waiting for Mr. Bloomberg to arrive, and handed out leaflets while blocking the entrance.
After being asked to move several times, the leader of the group, Walter Liddy, was told he would be arrested if he did not move to a penned-in area near the school. "I almost got arrested for exercising our civil rights," Mr. Liddy said.
Mr. Liddy seemed perplexed when asked if he had anything in common with the group that has been battling the city over its protest site the Sunday before the convention begins. "Because they're protesters and because they have a gripe," Mr. Liddy said, he saw some parallels, but added that their issues were very different.
That group, United for Peace and Justice, has repeatedly requested the right to protest on Central Park's Great Lawn and have been rejected each time by the city's Parks Department, whose officials say the lawn cannot handle the 250,000-odd protesters the city expects at their rally. The city offered the group the West Side Highway, which it accepted at one point but subsequently rejected last week.
Both the antiwar protesters and some of the police officers who could be assigned to watch over them used the same language to respond to the mayor's remarks about free speech being a privilege that can be lost.
"I never understood the rights guaranteed by the First Amendment were a privilege,'' said Leslie Cagan, national coordinator for United for Peace and Justice, "I don't know why he is framing it that way."
Mr. Liddy echoed that thought: "Unless the mayor paid someone to rewrite the Constitution."
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New York Vs. the Protesters City Must Balance Freedom, Security
By Michael Powell and Michelle Garcia
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, August 17, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A6404-2004Aug16?language=printer
NEW YORK -- Hundreds of thousands of antiwar protesters, abortion rights supporters, labor rights activists and anarchists are preparing to unfurl banners, march through the streets and rally in the parks, loosening a cacophonous roar of protest during the Republican National Convention.
As many as 250,000 people may march up Seventh Avenue by Madison Square Garden on the Sunday before the convention to protest the war in Iraq. Thousands of abortion rights and women's health advocates plan to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge to City Hall Park. And the Hip Hop Summit Action Network will lead a march of low-income people to Madison Square Garden, the convention site.
That's not to mention the Paul Revere impersonators who plan nightly horseback rides down Lexington Avenue in Midtown (their warning cry: "The Republicans are coming! The Republicans are coming!"). Or the bell ringers who plan to encircle Ground Zero and ring 2,749 bells in memory of the victims of Sept. 11, 2001, and in opposition to the Iraq war.
Or Cheri Honkala, a welfare mother from Philadelphia, who says she expects to bring in 5,000 rural and urban folks for a purposefully illegal march across town to Times Square. "The police told us there was no way in hell they were going to give us a permit to march," she said. Honkala, who led a similar march at the Republican convention in Philadelphia in 2000, shrugged. "We have to mess it all up. . . . Poor people have been living with terror every day."
New York has a proudly oppositional DNA -- Democrats outnumber Republicans 5 to 1 -- so protests come as no surprise. But at a time of terrorism alerts and deep liberal unhappiness with President Bush, the Aug. 30-Sept. 2 convention will test the government's ability to secure the safety of delegates while allowing hundreds of thousands of Americans to raise a constitutionally protected voice of dissent, civil libertarians and city officials say.
This is a test, activists say, that several city and state governments have failed. In Miami, for instance, a county review panel found that police had instituted martial law and trampled the civil rights of protesters during a free-trade conference last November. In Georgia, county officials mandated small protest signs and state police kept protesters miles removed from the Group of Eight summit at Sea Island.
Boston officials, too, came under criticism for herding protesters at the Democratic National Convention into fenced pens.
"Dissent is a cornerstone of a democratic society," said Norman Siegel, former director of the New York Civil Liberties Union. "It's how we measure whether we're an open society, and it's under a lot of stress now."
Tension is already evident. Marches will proceed under the eyes of a massive police, FBI and Secret Service presence, as more than 10,000 local officers will patrol the barricaded streets around the convention. Undercover police have infiltrated meetings of anarchist groups, and prosecutors are ready to process as many as 1,000 arrests per day.
The FBI acknowledged Monday -- after a report in the New York Times -- that agents have interviewed potential demonstrators across the nation. In some cases, protesters say they were asked about their political views. FBI officials insisted their agents conducted interviews only after learning of people planning disruptions at the conventions.
"The FBI conducted interviews, within the bounds of the U.S. Constitution, in order to determine the validity of the threat information," said FBI Assistant Director Cassandra M. Chandler.
Antiwar organizers here knew of no one who had been interviewed. But such interviews, they said, seemed intended to chill dissent. The National Lawyers Guild intends to distribute cards advising activists to say nothing if the FBI knocks. "It's a chilling reminder of the world we live in," said Tanya Mayo of Not in Our Name, an antiwar group.
Organizers of marches large and small complain of uncommon difficulty in obtaining permits from the city. The largest of the planned antiwar marches still has no terminus. Organizers with United for Peace and Justice, representing more than 100 antiwar, religious and social justice groups, sought to march through Midtown to a rally in Central Park on Aug. 29, the Sunday before the convention. Parks Department officials rejected this.
"You'll ruin the lawn," Republican Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said.
In a Jupiter-aligned-with-Mars-moment, the conservative New York Post and the liberal New York Times editorial boards both took up the protesters' cause. But, reluctantly, organizers accepted an alternate site along Manhattan's West Side Highway, only to reject it again last week after rank-and-file activists howled in anger. They said a long strip of concrete in midsummer makes for a hot and dispiriting protest site and is no substitute for Central Park, which has far greater symbolic value.
"We are under a constant pressure to give up freedom in the face of fear," said Bill Dobbs, an organizer with United for Peace and Justice.
City officials take strong exception to this. They have worked hard, they say, to ensure that legal protests will snake through Manhattan's office canyons. They speak of learning from mistakes and will not so tightly pen in protesters, as occurred at a large antiwar demonstration in February 2003.
"We're working to give them a large piece of city territory to stage protests," said Deputy Police Commissioner Paul J. Browne. "We've devoted a lot of resources and worked very hard to allow unfettered free speech despite the fear of terrorism."
Browne noted that the New York Police Department has traveled a long road since the anti-Vietnam War protests, when cops would show up in riot gear with no desire to compromise. "There was no conversation at all, and that didn't help anybody," Browne said, adding that the current department has posted directions to large protests on its Web site. "Now there's negotiation, but that opens some groups up to charges they are being co-opted."
The Parks Department has granted permits for 16 rallies in Manhattan parks, ranging in size from 20 people to 40,000. But officials recently denied a permit to the National Council of Arab Americans and the Act Now to Stop War and End Racism Coalition, a group that wanted to rally with 75,000 people on the Great Lawn, just below the official capacity of 80,000. These groups are suing.
To a large extent, police say, large rallies are easiest to handle. These demonstrations tend to be carefully choreographed, with experienced organizers and channeled, if genuine, outrage. The greater challenge, for police and organizers alike, is to handle the hundreds of decentralized protests that will pop up around the city.
Just last week, one found a provocatively named singing group in Times Square performing satirical and not exceptionally nice songs about Bush. Then there's Reverend Billy, who leads his flock from the Church of Stop Shopping about the city reciting the First Amendment into their cell phones. And a group of labor activists plan to stage the world's longest unemployment line, from Wall Street to 31st Street and Madison Square Garden, on Sept. 1. The line will form at 8:13 a.m. and dissolve at 8:31 a.m.
The Yippies stand amid such protesters as wiseacre elders. They applied for a camping permit for 20,000 people in Tompkins Square Park -- denied instantly. As a backup, they want to set up tables with free medical marijuana for bedraggled police officers, a kindness that seems no less doomed to rejection.
Then there are the anarchist collectives, a free-floating catchall term that incorporates hundreds of young activists, tattooed train hoppers and nomads. Their rhetoric is thick with talk of police states. The Web site, www.rncnotwelcome.org, includes detailed maps of surveillance cameras in Manhattan and lists of hotels housing Republican delegates. There are detailed instructions on the best public bathrooms and the best places to shoot heroin, not to mention lessons in the art of tossing a pie.
"Pieing 101: Step One, Choose a worthy target," the Web site advises. "Any pompous evil-doer will do."
The "hacktivist" wing of the anarchists wants to get wiggy with RNC Web sites. Others have already sneaked into Republican events and plastered revolutionary stickers on bathroom walls. Half a dozen groups plan to block streets peacefully. The Web site advises the proper anarchist to "dress for success," in a ski mask and a good pair of running shoes.
Deputy Commissioner Browne acknowledges that police will keep a close eye on the black-ski-mask set. In other cities, such as Seattle and Miami, police were accused of too brutal a pursuit. He promised that would not happen in New York.
"We would expect the real radical anarchists to number in the hundreds," he said. "We're familiar with them, and we're prepared to isolate them from the mass of peaceful protesters if necessary."
Siegel, the civil liberties lawyer, feels less certain. He has cautioned city officials that, by denying permits to many established groups and forcing others from Central Park, the department has engendered a distrust that could haunt it.
"Now the climate is so hostile, that when there are splinter groups or unplanned actions, the trust that's needed won't be there," Siegel said. "The present atmosphere in the nation is not conducive to trust."
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Syrian Court Releases Rights Activist on Bail
Reuters
Tuesday, August 17, 2004; Page A11
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A6383-2004Aug16.html
DAMASCUS, Syria, Aug. 16 -- A Syrian court has released on bail a human rights activist charged with tarnishing the country's image but considered by advocacy groups to be a prisoner of conscience, one of his attorneys said Monday.
Aktham Naisse, head of the Committees for the Defense of Democratic Liberties and Human Rights, was arrested in April after publishing a report on human rights in Syria and leading a campaign urging an end to 40 years of emergency law.
"It was a surprise, a positive one though. . . . The court accepted a request by the lawyers to release him on bail," one of Naisse's attorneys, Anwar Bunni, said after the court session. "He will still have to stand trial. The next session was set for October."
If convicted, Naisse, 53, could be sentenced to between three years and life in prison.
The London-based human rights group Amnesty International said his arrest was arbitrary and in violation of Syria's obligations under international law. Naisse was labeled a prisoner of conscience during an imprisonment from 1991 to 1998.
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Protestors accuse political bigwigs of hijacking Iraq's interim legislature
BAGHDAD (AFP)
Tue Aug 17, 2004
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=1514&u=/afp/20040817/wl_mideast_afp/iraq_politics_conference&printer=1
Some 450 delegates at a key national conference accused the main political parties of hijacking a scheduled vote for a new interim legislature for Iraq (news - web sites), saying most members were chosen long ago in secret.
Many of them threatened to quit the conference on its last day unless the voting mechanism was changed, before Fuad Maasum, head of the event's preparatory committee, agreed to put the voting procedure itself to a vote.
"The mainstream political parties have dominated the conference and have already drawn up their lists for selecting the national council," said Aziz al-Yasseri, from the broad coalition National Democratic Movement.
Nineteen of the 100 seats on the council have already been handed to members of the defunct Governing Council, created by the US-led occupation shortly after the fall of Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) in 2003 and including many exiled regime opponents.
According to conference rules, delegates of different leanings -- Islamists, secular, Kurdish, Arab or otherwise -- are supposed to draw up lists for the remaining 81 seats and submit them to an open vote.
The one gaining a 51-percent majority would be the winning list.
"We refuse this and if this is not dealt with today then the whole conference will fall apart and I will walk out, with hundreds with me," added Yasseri, a Shiite Muslim from Baghdad nominated for the council.
He lashed out at the mainstream Shiite parties, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) and Dawa, the prime minister's Iraqi National Accord, the two largest Kurdish parties and the communists as the main culprits.
Yasseri accused them of hooking up with "fly-by-night political parties" and pressuring those from civil organisations and independent delegates to join them on the closed lists that were to be voted on.
The dissident delegates who include many independents, women and members of Iraq's fledgling civil society groups are demanding that nominees to the national council be voted directly instead of the previously agreed method of voting on competing lists, said Safia al-Souhail, a member of the preparatory committee.
"We have people who know how to play and go through the process and they are benefiting from this at the expense of people who do not because they have never done this before," she said.
Women were particularly concerned that they would get only half of the 25 seats guaranteed to them in the council according to the transitional period laws passed under the US-led occupation administration because of the influence of Islamists.
"If women do not get the 25 percent in the council then let the conference fail," warned Sangool Chapook, a former governing council member who was already granted a seat in the interim legislature.
Ismail Zayer, editor of the leading Baghdad Al-Sabah al-Jadid daily, who has formed an independent coalition, alleged that the big political parties "are sitting in the back rooms, dividing the cake amongst themselves and then they will go on stage and say these are our lists take it or leave it."
The main parties "are saying we need a parliament working in harmony with the government. We don't like that," he added. "We would like a government under the control of parliament, and not the other way round."
"The average Iraqi must feel that this is truly an opportunity for him or her to enter political life," said former oil minister Ibrahim Bahr al-Ulum.
The idea of the conference was dreamt up under the previous US-led administration with UN blessing and enshrined in the country's interim laws, meant as a blueprint for elections and the drafting of a constitution in 2005.
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