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NUCLEAR
Iran delays entry into service of first reactor until 2006
Iran's Bushehr Atomic Power Plant Faces More Delays
Generating a mystery: the story behind PG&E's missing nuclear fuel
MILITARY
Remote-Control Explosions Pose Threat in Afghanistan
Violence erupts in Bangladesh as government denies involvement in blasts
Soldier commits suicide after duty in Iraq
Security company broke own rules
Poland Wants To Leave Iraq As Soon As Possible: Defence Minister
Militia Clings To Najaf Shrine
U.S. Pressures Rebels in Najaf as Talks to End Fighting Stall
Al-Qaida Said to Recruit in Latin America
Egyptian cleric warns US of Najaf fallout
Pakistan Arrests Al Qaeda Suspects
U.N. Expert Reprimands U.S. on Afghan Prisons
Putin Visits Chechnya Ahead of Election
U.N. Expert Seeks Access to Afghan Detainees
In Najaf House for the Dead, a First Taste of War
U.S. soldier weds Iraqi love
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
U.S. OKs Status of 10 Guantanamo Prisoners
Poppies and Afghanistan
Block by Block, Access Denied
Senate Republican Unveils Plan for Intelligence
POLITICS
The Ammunition Bill for Each American (Hawk or Dove): $12
Bush Ad Causes Concern at the Olympics
Bush Campaign Drops Swift Boat Ad Figure
In a New Book, Buchanan Chastises Another Bush
ENERGY
Ready to Bet on Alternative Energy? Well, Think Again
New energy for reintegration
OTHER
Bush Health Care Plan Seems to Fall Short
ACTIVISTS
If a Protest Is Planned to a T, Is It a Protest?
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- iran
Iran delays entry into service of first reactor until 2006
TEHRAN (AFP)
Aug 22, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040822113207.o8m53u7i.html
Iran's first nuclear reactor, being constructed with Russian help in the Gulf port of Bushehr, will not enter service until 2006, a year later than originally planned, atomic energy officials revealed Sunday.
And no agreement has yet been reached with the Russians over the delivery of nuclear fuel, which could delay the project even further.
The new commissioning date of October 2006 was marked on a document shown at a press conference by project manager Assadollah Sabouri.
He said the process of starting up the reactor would take seven months, giving a start date in the first months of the year and would be totally operational by October of the same year.
Sabouri pointed out that Iran had until the end of 2005 to reach an agreement with the Russians over fuel for the plant. "The final date for delivery of the fuel is in the last few months of 2005", otherwise the start-up would be further delayed, he said.
"The fuel has to be introduced in February 2006," said head of technical operations Mehran Zia Sheikholeslami, and he admitted: "We are already behind schedule, that's why we are putting pressure on the Russians to speed things up."
Neither he nor Sabouri offered any reason for the delays, but delivery of the Russian fuel has been put back as Moscow bowed to pressure from the United States, who believe it could be used for military purposes.
Both the US and Israel are convinced that, under cover of producing nuclear power, the Islamic republic is secretly developing an atomic bomb, something Tehran strenuously denies.
The IAEA governing body will consider the question of Iranian nuclear power projects at a meeting at its headquarters in Vienna in September.
Iran, which has repeatedly claimed its nuclear programme is entirely for civil purposes, believes it has given sufficient assurances and is demanding that the issue be left off the IAEA agenda.
However, far from agreeing, the IAEA demanded further cooperation from Iran at its June meeting to provide conclusive proof that it is not secretly developing nuclear weapons.
Iran intends to produce its own fuel for the next stage of its nuclear programme after making "important advances" in its production, Sabouri said.
"Important advances have been made, it will not be many years before we are in a position to produce our own fuel," he said.
Iran's ability to master the uranium enrichment cycle is a cause for concern in the international community and the IAEA has expressed reservations that Iran could use the technology to produce its own bomb.
As a gesture of good faith, Iran agreed last year to suspend enriching uranium used for nuclear fuel but has always insisted that it was a temporary measure.
"Our programme is very clear," Sabouri said. "For the first stage we have a contract with the Russians for the supply of fuel for 10 years."
But he added: "We are counting on the fact that the second phase will use fuel produced by Iran."
In addition to the current nuclear plant at Bushehr, Iran plans six other stages of nuclear development, at Bushehr and elsewhere, to arrive at a producion of 7,000 megawatts of electricity by 2020.
Sabouri said that if Iran had gone ahead and built a brand new reactor rather than taken up with the Russians where German contractors had left off when they abandoned the project, the plant "would have been up and running two years ago".
The plant "will have a life of 35 years" instead of the usual 50, he added, but said Iran was not worried about a possible Israeli attack on Bushehr. "Measures have been taken and will be taken" to protect the plant, he said.
----
Iran's Bushehr Atomic Power Plant Faces More Delays
Sun Aug 22, 2004
(Reuters)
By Parinoosh Arami
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=IOBMBL25VXHEICRBAELCFEY?type=topNews&storyID=6036986
TEHRAN - Iran on Sunday announced a further substantial delay in the long overdue project to complete its first nuclear power plant, part of a program which Washington says could be used to make atomic arms.
But the delay to the Bushehr reactor in southwestern Iran, now due to come onstream in October 2006, will do little to allay international concerns about Iran's atomic ambitions which focus more on its uranium enrichment efforts.
Bushehr, being built with Russian help despite strong U.S. opposition, has seen its start date pushed back steadily in recent years from an earlier target of 2003. Russian officials had recently said it would start up in 2005.
"One of the reasons that the project has faced delay is our precise attention to international standards" on safety and the environment, Asadollah Sabouri, deputy head of Iran's Atomic Energy Organization, told a news conference.
Another factor holding up the 1,000 MW plant is the failure to agree on a contract to return spent fuel to Russia. The agreement is designed to ease fears that Iran could reprocess the spent fuel and turn it into bomb-grade material.
Sabouri said Iran and Russia had yet to agree on the cost and procedures for returning the spent fuel, but said both sides were committed to reaching a deal.
Iran rejects U.S. accusations that it is secretly developing nuclear weapons. It says that despite its large oil and gas reserves it needs to generate 7,000 MW from nuclear power by 2021 to meet rising electricity demand.
Sabouri said Russia had agreed to build at least one further reactor at Bushehr and that two European countries had expressed interest in building some other plants.
"My message to the Europeans is... we are ready and we have to move toward implementation contracts," he said. He declined to name the countries.
While fuel for the first Bushehr reactor will be provided by Russia under a 10-year supply agreement, it is Iran's plans to produce its own nuclear fuel though sophisticated uranium enrichment plants that has proven most controversial.
Tehran kept its uranium enrichment facilities secret until 2002. Low-grade enriched uranium is used as fuel in power plants but highly-enriched uranium is used to make bombs.
Sabouri said Iran should be able to produce its own fuel in time for completion of the second reactor at Bushehr.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- california
Generating a mystery: the story behind PG&E's missing nuclear fuel
Sunday, August 22, 2004
Andrew Bird
The Times-Standard
http://www.times-standard.com/Stories/0,1413,127~2896~2352004,00.html
KING SALMON -- It was fall of 1968.
Steppenwolf's top hit, "Born to be Wild," roared from the radio. The summer's blockbuster movie, "2001, a Space Odyssey," was still captivating theater audiences. Ford introduced the California Special, a high-performance edition of its top-selling Mustang.
At Pacific Gas and Electric's 5-year-old nuclear power generating unit at the Humboldt Bay Power Plant south of Eureka, technicians cut three 18-inch-long segments from a spent fuel assembly -- labeled A-49 -- containing enriched uranium oxide.
What became of these segments, weighing about 4 pounds total, has evolved into a 36-year-old mystery that has PG&E's nuclear power officials and representatives from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission bewildered as they search for the radioactive material in the spent fuel pool at a plant next to King Salmon.
After an initial search of the pool -- which took more than a month -- was completed this week, the utility announced the segments were not in the most likely places in the pool, and it will conduct a more intense search, lasting several more weeks.
"We are bound and determined to find it," PG&E spokesman Lloyd Coker said on Friday.
In 1968, General Electric Co. notified PG&E and other customers that nuclear fuel it had manufactured -- enriched uranium pellets packed into 84-inch-long, half-inch-diameter rods called "pins" -- might be defective, Coker said.
The reason, Coker added, was the "cladding," or casing. These pellets were cased in stainless steel. The industry later switched to zirconium alloy.
According to a document PG&E sent to the NRC detailing its search for the missing fuel, the minutes of an October 1968 Onsite Review Committee meeting state that the segments cut from A-49 -- removed from plant's reactor core in 1965 -- "were placed into a small container in preparation for shipment to Battelle Memorial Institute in Columbus, Ohio, for analysis.
"The meeting minutes further state that the shipment to Battelle was subsequently canceled," and the segments, still in the shipping container, were returned to the pool.
However, the "specific location of this container in the (pool) was not identified," the document says.
Fast forward three dozen years.
PG&E is permanently decommissioning Unit No. 3 at King Salmon -- the unit with the nuclear reactor that was shut down in 1976 after it was discovered to be lying atop a fault line.
Part of this process involves moving spent fuel and other contaminated material and equipment from the storage pool built in 1963 to a "dry cask storage" unit, consisting of steel containers.
When technicians started inventorying the pool, they discovered in late June this year the existence of the segments cut in 1968, but there was no record of them in the pool's inventory records, Coker said.
Using a remote-controlled robotics arm with a camera attached, PG&E technicians, with NRC investigators looking over their shoulders, searched the pool in early July.
This pool -- 28 by 22 feet with depths varying 26 to 36 feet, is much like a swimming pool, Coker said.
It is lined with two feet of concrete on top of a stainless steel liner, Coker said.
The pool is packed with 390 used fuel assemblies along with radioactive material, equipment and tools left from when the nuclear reactor was active, Coker said.
The initial search -- a process that must be executed slowly to be thorough, Coker said -- consisted of looking inside four containers where material similar to the missing segments is stored.
These consist of two containers that resemble 55 gallon drums and two that resemble crab pots, Coker said.
Satisfied the missing segments are not in these containers, technicians are now searching the nooks and crannies of the pool that are more inaccessible, Coker said.
These areas include spaces between large pieces of equipment and among the 390 spent rods, Coker said.
Meanwhile, other employees are poring over volumes of old records, Coker said.
It is possible the segments were shipped to one of three facilities in the 1960s: Battelle in Ohio, General Electric's Vallecitos Nuclear Center in Livermore or Nuclear Fuel Services in West Valley, N.Y.
It's also possible, but "highly unlikely," Coker said, the segments were shipped to one of three radioactive waste disposal sites at Beatty, Nev., Richland, Wash., or Barnwell, S.C.
There is no chance the segments were stolen, Coker said.
An NRC spokeswoman agreed.
"To take this material out of the plant would have sent off radiation alarms," said NRC public affairs officer Beth Hayden.
The segments would have to be properly encased in containers a potential thief would have no access to, Hayden said, adding that without the containers the radiation would probably kill them.
PG&E is not the only company to lose track of nuclear fuel, Hayden said.
A plant in Connecticut has never found several full-size rods discovered missing in the late 1990s, she said.
In April this year, a plant in Vermont also discovered some fuel missing, Hayden said, but it turned up last month in the plant's storage pool.
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
TERRORISM
Remote-Control Explosions Pose Threat in Afghanistan
August 22, 2004
By CARLOTTA GALL
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/22/international/asia/22afghan.html?pagewanted=all
ARDEZ, Afghanistan - In late June, just two weeks into his tour here, Pvt. Jeremy Kretz from Dubuque, Iowa, was driving in a convoy near the border with Pakistan when a remote-controlled explosion hit his Humvee, causing him to black out and blasting him and his companions with rocks and dust. The American soldiers got away with concussions, ruptured eardrums and gravel-peppered skin.
"Head's pretty full of gravel anyway," joked his commander, Lt. James Avrams, who is in charge of the protection force at Gardez, raising a laugh among his men, all from the 34th Infantry Division, Iowa National Guard.
But for the American military, and foreign and Afghan officials, remote-controlled explosions have become the biggest threat in Afghanistan. Although they are not being used on nearly the scale found in Iraq, they are becoming more common and increasingly sophisticated, military and other officials said in interviews.
That point was driven home over the weekend of Aug. 7, when two American soldiers and an Afghan interpreter were killed, and three more men were wounded, south of here by a powerful explosion that tossed their Humvee over and over in the air. The explosion was not only set off by remote control, probably with a radio set, but also was a "daisy chain" explosion, with explosives laid along the road and linked, to ensure a lethal blow.
Twelve election workers have been killed in explosions over the last few months as they have registered voters nationwide. Thirty-one American soldiers have been killed - 23 of them in combat - this year, most of them in roadside explosions or ambushes, a sharp increase over the same period last year. In the first week of August, the Gardez team recorded an incident every day, whether a clash with fighters suspected of being members of the Taliban or Al Qaeda, or explosions aimed at American forces or supply trucks, Lt. Evan McCrann said.
Lieutenant Avrams said, "We are expecting it to get worse."
In the period leading to Afghanistan's presidential elections, which are scheduled for Oct. 9, in which President Hamid Karzai is facing 22 challengers, United States troops have been ordered to make the election process, and security for the elections, their priority. It will be a combined effort, with American conventional and Special Forces going after insurgents, often with help from the newly trained Afghan National Army. Civil affairs teams will travel the regions to extend the government's reach and deliver assistance, and the Afghan police will provide security for election officials and voting sites.
The American-led coalition forces now number about 20,000, and are spread across the troubled southern and eastern parts of the country. They will provide the backbone of the security effort, even if the Afghan services appear in the forefront. The "bad guys," as the soldiers call the suspected Taliban and foreign Al Qaeda fighters along with other groups opposed to the American presence in Afghanistan and to the American-backed election process, remain active along the eastern border with Pakistan, and across southern Afghanistan. United States marines and Special Forces have been brought into specific areas on request to tackle known troublemakers or groups of insurgents.
Civil affairs teams, based in provincial centers, have their own protection units, which also conduct regular patrols and security operations. For one such team in Gardez, the threat of improvised explosive devices, or I.E.D.'s as they are known, is one of the most difficult to combat.
"They tell us to watch out for stacks of rocks, but there's stacks of rocks everywhere here," said Jon, a sergeant who spoke on the condition that his surname not be published. Specialist Leo Pins added: "Or watch for wires, but when you are rolling down the road with lots of dust, you don't see much. You drive down and pray."
And Specialist Toby Handy said, "Just hope you don't go boom."
The sergeant added: "It's also frustrating. It's hard to find the guys trying to do the things against us."
The danger and fear are even greater for government and election officials and aid workers, who do not have the protection of armored vehicles or body armor but have increasingly been the targets of attacks this year. The attacks that have been most shocking to people here have been an explosion in a mosque in Ghazni, where voters were registering, and a bomb in a bus carrying women who were going to register voters in Jalalabad, which killed 3 and wounded 10 more. "The biggest threat to the electoral process is clearly I.E.D.'s," said Brian Nelson Smith, the regional security officer for the election commission. Yet most of the people interviewed here who were involved in preparing for the elections agreed that unless the Taliban, the remnants of the former rulers of Afghanistan, made major changes in tactics, the explosions would not prevent or seriously disrupt the election. The voter registration campaign has created strong momentum for the election, they say.
"They are going to do what they can, but they are not going to stop the process," said Maj. William Renaldo, deputy commander of the American civil affairs team in Gardez.
He pointed to the example of Paktika Province, one of the most dangerous parts of the country, which runs along the Pakistani border and has been almost a free zone for Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters in the last two years. The provincial governor has made a major push, backed by the United Nations and a substantial American-led coalition force, to win over the tribes and start reconstruction. As a result, registration has progressed across the province, he said.
The Taliban are not powerful enough to go against the wishes of the tribal leaders, he said.
A spokesman for the Taliban, Abdul Latif Hakimi, claimed responsibility in a telephone interview for recent remote-controlled explosions against American forces, but denied involvement in the Ghazni mosque bombing. Mr. Hakimi said there would be more attacks.
The weak link in the country's security remains the local Afghan police. In southeastern Afghanistan, the police are so poorly equipped and understaffed that the tribes have assembled their own militia forces in the last two years. Now the officers of an American-led program are scrambling to train and equip the local police in time for the elections. In Gardez, they have been delivering vehicles and radios to the police in the region, but cannot provide them with needed weapons or ammunition.
"They are having a real hard time," Major Renaldo said of the local police. "They have no weapons. They are not in very good shape."
-------- asia
Violence erupts in Bangladesh as government denies involvement in blasts
Agence France Presse
Aug 22, 2004
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=1512&ncid=731&e=10&u=/afp/20040822/wl_afp/bangladesh_blast
DHAKA (AFP) - Strikes and violent demonstrations erupted across Bangladesh after a grenade attack at an opposition party rally killed 19 people, as the government denied opposition charges that it was behind the blasts.
Saturday's attack occurred as Awami League leader Sheikh Hasina was finishing a speech outside of the party's headquarters in Dhaka, and many party officials have called the blasts an assassination attempt against the main opposition boss.
"A series of grenades went off at five to seven-second intervals giving the attackers smoke cover; as (Hasina) was rushed away by bodyguards, her bullet-proof car was hit by at least seven bullets," Sheikh Hasina's political secretary, Saber Hussain Chowdhury, told AFP.
"She came as close as you can possibly come to being assassinated. It was a well planned assassination attempt because even as she was herded into the vehicle, shots were fired. It was a very well coordinated and well thought out attack."
Hasina escaped with minor leg injuries, officials said, while Awami League secretary general Abdul Jalil said the number killed rose to 19 following the death of another blast victim at a private hospital.
Doctors at two Dhaka hospitals said 21 people were still being treated for serious injuries although an unknown number had also gone to private clinics.
The government Sunday denied any involvement with the blasts.
"No government can stage such (an) incident," said Abdul Mannan, secretary general of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, a member of the government's four-party coalition.
"I have no language to condemn the incident," the official BSS news agency quoted him as saying.
"(The) Government is determined to arrest the offenders and give exemplary punishment. Terrorists are enemies of the nation and the country. They are also enemies of all political parties," he added.
Saturday's blasts sparked violent anti-government protests.
In the southeastern port of Chittigong 230 people were arrested after opposition supporters rampaged through the city Sunday torching vehicles, a police official told AFP.
Another angry mob set a Dhaka-bound express train alight in central Bangladesh as police fired blanks to disperse the crowd, a rail official said, adding that no one was injured in the riot.
Wildcat strikes brought several other cities to a standstill, officials and media reports said, and the Awami League called a two day country-wide general strike to start Tuesday to protest the attack.
Universities, higher education institutions and schools closed Sunday after the Awami League's student body announced an indefinite nationwide strike, the private NTV television reported.
Traffic was light Sunday on Dhaka's roads amid fears for a repeat of overnight clashes between police and political activists who set cars alight and damaged property, witnesses said.
Officers in riot gear blocked off the area around the Awami League party headquarters in the capital.
The government had appointed a senior High Court judge to carry out an judicial inquiry into the attack, BSS news agency added.
-------- britain
Soldier commits suicide after duty in Iraq
August 22 2004
By Jonathan Brown
Independent Foreign Service
http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=3&art_id=vn20040822122009232C531229
Peter Mahoney found it hard to settle into normal life after returning from the war in Iraq. Two weeks ago he put on his army uniform for the last time, his head freshly shaved, and returned to the home that he had, until five weeks earlier, shared with his wife and four children.
Attaching a hosepipe to the exhaust of the family car, parked in the garage of their home on the outskirts of Carlisle near the Scottish border, he started the engine.
His experiences as a soldier attached to the Royal Logistics Corps, ferrying medical supplies and injured soldiers between the front line and the British Army field hospitals near the Kuwait border, had left him deeply scarred and suffering from depression.
He had never believed in the war He had never believed in the war and had been a vocal critic within his local community of the British government's decision to invade Iraq. He had publicly accused Prime Minister Tony Blair of being President George Bush's "puppet".
Like many who opposed the invasion, he thought weapons of mass destruction were a smokescreen. The real issue, he contested, was seizing Saddam Hussein's oilfields.
He was discovered by Donna, his childhood sweetheart to whom he had been married for almost 21 years. Even though the couple had been recently separated, they were trying for a reconciliation, hoping to go on a family canal-boat holiday.
Emergency services were unable to resuscitate Mahoney. He was 45.
During the war, Donna, a staff nurse at the Cumberland Infirmary, had set up a support group for other wives facing the worry and isolation of being left at home while their partners fought in Iraq.
'I really don't know what happened out there' She also kept a diary revealing the distress the conflict was causing their children - Matthew, 18, Ashley, 16, Ben, eight and Vicky, five.
Soon after his return, Mahoney gave an interview to his local newspaper revealing the deep-rooted concern among many of those he served with in the Gulf. The Iraqi military, far from being well equipped with the latest weaponry, were firing "sticks and stones", little match for the might of the coalition.
Mahoney was not afraid of military conflict. He had volunteered to serve in Bosnia, but this time it had been different and he had been on the verge of quitting the army when his call-up papers arrived.
In March last year, the family travelled to a military centre at Salisbury barracks to say farewell to Mahoney before he flew to Kuwait.
He had spent three weeks in training, receiving a cocktail of anti-biological warfare injections. But despite the doubts, his curiosity and sense of adventure prevailed.
"He joined the army because he wanted to experience military life and to do something useful for his country," said Donna, whose father had served in the army for 24 years.
She watched the ferocity of the war unfold on television. "Iraq changed him. He was a broken man. I really don't know what happened out there," said Donna.
Mahoney became depressed but did not undergo treatment.
At his funeral, Canon David Baxter, who led the service, said: "I hear his personality changed dramatically. If that is the case, the war in Iraq has done him a great disservice."
-------- business
Security company broke own rules
Four U.S. civilians ambushed and killed in Fallujah, Iraq, lacked some protection their contract promised
Aug 22, 2004
newsobserver.com
By JAY PRICE AND JOSEPH NEFF
http://www.newsobserver.com/news/story/1552996p-7741192c.html
Blackwater Security Consulting violated its own standards in March by sending four contractors on an undermanned mission in Fallujah, Iraq, where they were ambushed, mutilated, burned and dragged through the streets, the company's contract for the job shows.
Wesley Batalona, Scott Helvenston, Michael Teague and Jerry Zovko worked for Blackwater, a private security company based in Moyock in northeastern North Carolina.
The four men drove into an ambush March 31 along a main road in Fallujah without the full six-man team specified in Blackwater's contract to protect a company feeding U.S. troops. The contract was obtained by The News & Observer.
Iraqi insurgents riddled their vehicles with bullets before a mob defiled their bodies and hung two of them from a bridge over the Euphrates River. The incident, shown on television and front pages around the world, kicked off the bloodiest month in the Iraq war and led to a U.S. assault on Fallujah in which 600 Iraqis and 10 U.S. Marines died.
The four men were riding in a pair of Mitsubishi Pajero sport utility vehicles while guarding three flatbed trucks operated by Eurest Support Services, a European food company. Blackwater said the convoy was en route to a military base to pick up kitchen equipment. The Pajeros had no armor on the sides, just one plate in back.
All the factors that led to the ambush may never be clear. But several people who worked with Blackwater said the company should have sent its standard six-man team and two armored vehicles.
Also, they said, squabbling with its client over the vehicles didn't leave Blackwater operators enough time to familiarize themselves with their routes before starting work.
The contract for the work, which Blackwater signed March 12, says that such security teams would include at least six people because of the high risks in parts of Iraq. Topping the danger list: Fallujah.
"Further to Blackwater's analysis of ESS requirements and the current threat in the Iraqi theater of operations as evidenced by the recent incidents against civilian entities in Fallujah, Ar Ramadi, Al Taji and Al Hillah, there are areas in Iraq that will require a minimum of three Security Personnel per vehicle," the contract states. "The current and foreseeable future threat will remain consistent and dangerous. Therefore, to provide tactically sound and fully mission capable Protective Security Details, the minimum team size is six operators with a minimum of two vehicles. ... "
The U.S. military seldom ventured into Fallujah with fewer than four trucks loaded with heavily armed troops. Many private security contractors in Iraq work with at least three people in a vehicle so that the two armed passengers can "scan" 360 degrees around it to try to prevent ambushes.
Blackwater officials declined to discuss the company's decisions.
Kathy Potter, a former worker in Blackwater's Kuwait office, said the team shouldn't have gone out without more men and properly armored vehicles.
"We just shouldn't have gone in" to Iraq, she said in a telephone interview from Alaska, where she now lives. "But these guys are go-getters, and they'll make do with what they get. ... I guess they thought the threat was lower for them because they weren't military."
Parsing 'protection'
The contract is vague on what sort of vehicles were required, saying that Blackwater's client was to provide 12 "vehicles, security, with protection kit."
Blackwater spokesman Chris Bertelli said that means better protected than a civilian SUV, but less so than an armored vehicle. He said the Pajeros met that definition.
Potter, though, said that Blackwater expected trucks with more than the single improvised steel plate installed in the rear of the Pajeros.
Blackwater is one of dozens of private security companies in Iraq doing jobs once performed by the military. It now protects John Negroponte, the U.S. ambassador in Iraq, along with the food shipments destined for U.S. soldiers.
Blackwater's contract to provide security for ESS was actually made with Regency Hotel & Hospital Co., a Kuwait business headed by the owner of the Regency Hotel in Kuwait City. Kuwaiti law forbids foreign firms from operating independently in Kuwait, so Blackwater needed a local middleman to work out of Kuwait and buy equipment there.
The relationship between the two companies was sometimes strained, according to Potter. She said that for months before the mission, her husband John Potter, a Blackwater contract employee, fought with Regency to get better equipment -- particularly armored vehicles -- for the Blackwater job providing security on convoys throughout Iraq.
Regency promised for weeks that they would provide armored vehicles but didn't, Kathy Potter said.
"Regency, all they cared about was money," she said. "They didn't care about people's lives."
The contract gives Blackwater complete control over how and when the convoys move, based on its judgment and the threat level. Kathy Potter said that Blackwater signed off on the mission.
Costly squabbling
But the protracted squabbling with Regency left too little time to equip the men with such vehicles.
Also, this haggling kept Blackwater contractors from having time to learn established convoy routes from the British security company it was replacing, Control Risk Group, she said.
John Potter, a former Navy SEAL, was reassigned by Blackwater before the Fallujah ambush. Kathy Potter was fired about the same time after being told some of the workers couldn't get along with her. Kathy Potter said her husband is working for Blackwater in Afghanistan and wouldn't comment.
Other Blackwater contractors gave identical accounts of John Potter's dealings with Regency. They asked not to be named so as not to jeopardize their careers.
Blackwater negotiated the contract mainly with one man at Regency, Robert "Tim" Tapp, a 1973 West Point graduate and native of Evansville, Ind. Tapp spent 17 years in the U.S. Army before joining a private company called Conventional Munitions Systems of Tampa at the time of the first Persian Gulf War.
Tapp was working for Jameel Al Sane, chairman and managing director of Regency. Al Sane did not return phone calls; a spokeswoman for Tapp said that he "will not be available for comment on this or any other issue." Tapp and Al Sane wanted to use small Honda SUVs for the ESS contract, Kathy Potter said, because Al Sane had connections that could get him a great deal on Hondas.
According to Kathy Potter, John Potter told the men that the Hondas wouldn't work for the high-speed, high-risk escort missions: The vehicles were too small, they wouldn't bear the weight of armor and the fuel tank was too small. The Hondas also were built to collapse in the front and back to absorb the brunt of a crash.
"That's not what you want," Kathy Potter said. "You want to be able to hit something and keep on driving."
Improvised armor
Kathy Potter said she rounded up two lightweight Mitsubishi Pajeros for temporary use until armored trucks could be found. The only armor on the vehicles was a single improvised steel plate in the back.
It was of little use when Batalona, Helvenston, Teague and Zovko drove the Pajeros into Fallujah on March 31. Videotape shot by the attackers shows bullet holes in the sides of the vehicles, in the windshield of at least one, and side windows shot out of both.
Some of the attackers are shown carrying AK-47 assault rifles. There's no visible evidence that the vehicles were hit by heavier weapons, such as rocket-propelled grenades.
Bertelli, the Blackwater spokesman, said that armored vehicles would not have made a difference in Fallujah. Bulletproof windows can stand up to automatic weapon fire only for so long, he said.
"At point-blank range, three rounds from an AK-47 is enough to shatter a window," Bertelli said. "Everything was done at point-blank range that day."
Mike Geylin, a spokesman for Armor Holdings, an Ohio company that installs armor on military Humvees and civilian vehicles, said they can be made to withstand more than that. It just depends on how much the buyer is willing to spend.
After the ambush, Blackwater obtained at least some armored vehicles. That became clear when one was destroyed along with an unarmored truck in another ambush, this one in June in Baghdad. Four Blackwater contractors were killed in that attack, but three fought their way out.
Blackwater contractors were troubled by the thought of makeshift vehicles.
In an e-mail message before the Fallujah attack, obtained by The N&O, Blackwater contractor Jim Graham discussed a long list of modifications he thought would be needed to the Honda SUVs proposed by Regency -- including armor "halfway up the window on all doors" and a horseshoe-shaped barricade in the rear.
Graham then expressed his frustration with the project.
"This is not an armored vehicle," Graham wrote. "In my opinion, the way to do this, and the safest, is obviously to buy from someone who has reenvented [sic] the wheel, and learned lessons in blood, but if that is not an option, what then?"
-------- europe
Poland Wants To Leave Iraq As Soon As Possible: Defence Minister
AFP
8/22/2004
http://www.turkishpress.com/turkishpress/news.asp?ID=25064
WARSAW, Aug 22 (AFP) - Poland wants to pull out of Iraq as soon as possible, Defence Minister Jerzy Szmajdzinski said on Sunday as he arrived at a Polish military base in southern Iraq, the PAP news agency reported.
Szmajdzinski left Warsaw for Iraq overnight Saturday, on a mission to assess the political and military situation in the area under Polish command, his office said in a statement.
"We want to get out of Iraq as soon as possible, but first we have to build solid security conditions there," the minister was quoted as saying following a religious ceremony for a Polish soldier who was killed in a car bomb attack on Saturday.
"Only a democratic Iraq" can ensure world security and therefore Poland's security, he said.
The defence minister announced that he would travel to Iraq to see the situation for himself following the car bombing, the third of a string of attacks that have left three soldiers dead and more than a dozen wounded in the past week.
"Our contingent is carrying out its mission at a difficult time, marked by a power struggle, which explains the attacks and guerrilla activities," the minister added.
Szmajdzinski said the next Polish contingent to leave for Iraq would be "smaller", without giving further details.
US ally Poland heads a multinational force of 6,500 administering a swathe of Iraq south of Baghdad. Warsaw has already said it hopes to reduce the number of troops it has in the country from 2,500 to 1,500 soldiers in early 2005.
Fourteen Poles have been killed in the country since the start of the US-led war -- 10 were soldiers and four were civilians.
Polish public opinion remains overwhelmingly opposed to Poland's participation in the US-led multinational force in Iraq.
-------- iraq
Militia Clings To Najaf Shrine
Shiite Factions Fail To Agree on Terms For a Handover
By Naseer Nouri and Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, August 22, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A22296-2004Aug21?language=printer
NAJAF, Iraq, Aug. 22 -- Loyalists of Shiite Muslim cleric Moqtada Sadr remained in control of the gold-domed Imam Ali shrine on Saturday after failing to reach an agreement with representatives of Iraq's most senior Shiite leader on how to hand over the holy site.
Sadr and his lieutenants have promised to vacate the shrine as ordered by Iraq's interim government, but there was no indication Saturday that they were moving to comply with that provision or with another, equally important government demand: that Sadr disband his armed militia, known as the Mahdi Army.
Although public areas of the shrine were empty of militiamen and weapons on Saturday afternoon -- the crowd inside appeared to be composed of unarmed Sadr loyalists -- hundreds of the cleric's militiamen, many carrying assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenade launchers, remained quartered in the network of narrow alleys that lead to the shine. As an announcement from the shrine's crackly loudspeakers urged militiamen to keep fighting, several of them insisted they would stay in their positions to resist the encroachment of U.S. military and Iraqi security forces.
"We will continue to fight," vowed Ali Smeisim, Sadr's chief deputy. He said the militia would use the labyrinthine urban landscape "to take cover and to fight the Americans."
The challenge facing U.S. and Iraqi forces, should they mount a full offensive against Mahdi Army militiamen near the shrine, was starkly evident on one road leading toward the holy site. Militiamen had set up sniper nests atop buildings. On the road, a thin wire led to a wooden cart stacked with bricks. Concealed amid the bricks was a homemade pipe bomb.
"Be careful! Be careful!" an old woman shouted. "Those wires are for bombs."
At the shrine, a top Mahdi Army commander, Akram Kaabi, said his men would "continue defending the city and our holy places."
The crisis had appeared on the verge of resolution Friday, when Sadr's aides announced they would remove weapons from the shrine and turn over the brick-walled compound to representatives of the country's most senior Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani.
But aides to Sadr and Sistani were unable to agree Saturday on how to turn over keys to the shrine's gates, doors and safes, which are believed to contain millions of dollars deposited by religious pilgrims. Sadr's aides said they tried to hand over the keys to Sistani's representatives, who refused to accept them, demanding that the shrine first be evacuated. Smeisim said he wanted a delegation from Sistani's office to inspect the shrine and make sure its treasures were intact before a turnover.
Representatives of Sistani, who is undergoing medical treatment near London, refused. They said they would not travel to the shrine because it was unsafe.
Clashes around the shrine resumed Saturday evening after a relatively quiet day. Militiamen fired mortars toward U.S. Marine positions north of the shrine, prompting the Marines to respond with 155mm artillery. Loud bursts of small-arms fire echoed though the warrens around the shrine as militiamen skirmished with Iraqi police patrols on the outskirts of Najaf's old city area, which is home to the shrine.
Shortly after midnight Sunday, a line of tanks from the 5th Cavalry cascaded down from the cemetery and approached a split-level parking garage at the west side of the mosque complex.
As Bradley Fighting Vehicles fired tracers toward defensive machine-gun positions and an AC-130 Spectre gunship circled overhead, the Abrams tanks punched round after round into the concrete garage and the building above it, collapsing much of the westernmost end of the structure in a series of deafening roars.
Commanders declined to discuss the purpose of the raid, which lasted less than three hours and brought U.S. armor closer to the militants' refuge around the mosque -- and for the first time, from the rear. But major combat missions proceed only with the approval of the interim prime minister, Ayad Allawi, who has apparently sought to demonstrate to Sadr the urgency with which the government seeks a solution -- and the potency of the U.S. forces at its disposal if negotiations fail yet again. Sadr took the only visible step toward a solution, moving his militia's arms out of the shrine building Friday.
Seeking to encourage a peaceful resolution to the standoff, U.S. forces had paused offensive operations and patrols that might appear provocative. Sadr's aides had complained that the last attempt to negotiate a settlement, on Tuesday, was undermined by combat operations.
"No one can say we're not giving them a chance to work this thing out," said Army Maj. Bob Pizzitola, executive officer of the 1st Battalion, 5th Regiment of the 1st Cavalry Division, which patrols the vast Valley of Peace cemetery north of the shrine with U.S. Marines. The unit's log of enemy contacts included 13 entries over a period of 12 hours.
"Normally we have 13 in an hour," Pizzitola said. "This is one of the slowest days we've had since this started."
U.S. military commanders in Najaf and Iraqi leaders in Baghdad sought to determine whether Sadr's pledge on Thursday night that he would vacate the mosque was genuine and whether he would comply with demands to dissolve his militia. Hussein Mohammed Hadi Sadr, an elderly Shiite cleric who led a delegation to Najaf Tuesday representing a 1,200-member national political conference, urged Moqtada Sadr to "understand the depths of this crisis" and make a clear statement indicating whether he will hand over the shrine and dismantle his militia.
"The crisis in Najaf is tiring us and we are eager to reach a peaceful solution, a speedy solution, for we are in a race with time," said Hussein Sadr, who is a distant relative of Moqtada Sadr.
The suspension of offensive operations earlier Saturday did not extend to Kufa, the city adjoining Najaf that is also a Sadr stronghold. In an operation early Saturday, Marines stormed a police station held by Sadr forces, killing several militiamen and detaining more than two dozen young men found in a basement.
Elsewhere in Iraq, the U.S. military announced that two soldiers from the U.S. Army's 1st Infantry Division were killed Friday evening by a roadside bomb near the city of Samarra, about 65 miles north of Baghdad. Another soldier was killed in a rocket-propelled grenade attack in Baghdad on Saturday, the military said. Also on Saturday, one Polish soldier was killed and six were injured when a booby-trapped car exploded next to their convoy near Hilla, about 60 miles south of the capital.
An aide to Sadr said kidnappers had lifted their threat to kill a U.S. journalist who was abducted in the southern city of Nasiriyah with his Iraqi interpreter, the Associated Press reported. The kidnappers, calling themselves the Martyrs Brigade, had threatened on Thursday to kill Micah Garen of New York within 48 hours if U.S. troops did not leave Najaf. But Sadr aide Aws Khafaji said Saturday in Nasiriyah that he had spoken to mediators who said the death threat had been lifted. Khafaji said the mediators were working to have Garen released.
Chandrasekaran reported from Baghdad. Correspondent Karl Vick in Najaf contributed to this report.
--------
U.S. Pressures Rebels in Najaf as Talks to End Fighting Stall
August 22, 2004
By ALEX BERENSON
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/22/international/middleeast/22CND-IRAQ.html?hp
NAJAF, Iraq, Aug. 23 - As negotiations between Moktada al-Sadr and the interim Iraqi government stalled today, American forces intensified pressure on rebels loyal to Mr. Sadr, briefly pushing within 400 yards of his base at the shrine of Imam Ali.
Ayad Allawi, Iraq's interim prime minister, has sent conflicting signals about whether he will order an all-out attack on Mr. Sadr's forces. But after basically halting their operations Friday and Saturday, American commanders here are again preparing for an assault on the area known as the Old City, which surrounds the shrine.
Early this morning, one group of American tanks fired from close range on a parking garage just west of the shrine before pulling back. Others approached the center of Najaf's Old City from the south. Commanders at a Marine base in northern Najaf said they have more attacks planned, as they seek to kill as many of Mr. Sadr's guerrillas as possible and show him that they can easily seize the Old City if ordered.
Talks appear to have stalled between Mr. Allawi and Mr. Sadr, a young Shiite cleric who has become the most prominent opponent of the interim government and the American presence in Iraq. Still, both sides have strong incentives to continue negotiations and avoid a pitched battle. So does the American military, which has carried out almost all the fighting in Najaf so far and is certain to lead any assault on the Old City, despite promises from senior Iraqi and American officials that only Iraqi forces will fight within the shrine area itself.
Any attack on the Old City could easily damage the shrine, commanders here say. The mosque is the holiest Shiite shrine in Iraq, and severe damage to it could provoke rebellion among Iraq's Shiites, who are a majority of the population.
With the stakes so high, the Iraqi government has been careful not to set a deadline for a resolution. But Mr. Allawi also knows that Mr. Sadr grows stronger each time he survives a standoff with the interim government and the American military.
Those competing incentives have led to confusion among American commanders here, who have repeatedly planned attacks on Mr. Sadr's forces, only to see them called off just before they were to begin. It is not yet clear whether the fact that Saturday night's assault went forward shows that Mr. Allawi is serious about forcing Mr. Sadr to disband, or whether it was simply another false start.
Last week, Mr. Sadr offered to concede control of the mosque to Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq's most revered Shiite cleric. But so far Mr. Sadr remains in control of the shrine.
Meanwhile, Mr. Sadr is still resisting the government's demand that he disband his militia, called the Mahdi Army, and join the political process. The Mahdi Army fighters are the core of Mr. Sadr's power, and their attacks on Americans are a crucial source of his legitimacy as an opposition leader, so he has balked at the government's demand.
On Saturday, the two sides appeared to be moving toward a compromise in which Mr. Sadr would give up control of the mosque without having to disarm his militia fully, but now the Iraqi government has renewed its demands that the militia disband.
"There is no place for militia in democratic Iraq," Mowaffak al-Rubaie, the interim National Security Advisor, said in an interview Sunday with ABC News. "These two, militia and democracy, cannot go together. They are incompatible."
Inside the Old City, residents said they had seen many American vehicles on Sunday, making passage in the area extremely dangerous. Three people died and 18 more were injured in fighting this morning, according to officials at al-Hakim Hospital, the main hospital here. American commanders claimed they had killed at least 30 rebels in their attack, but body counts in night fights are notoriously inexact.
Sabrina Tavernise contributed reporting from Najaf for this article.
-------- latin america
Al-Qaida Said to Recruit in Latin America
By OLGA R. RODRIGUEZ
Associated Press Writer
Aug 22, 2004
http://ap.washingtontimes.com/dynamic/stories/T/TERROR_LATIN_AMERICA?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
MONTERREY, Mexico (AP) -- Governments throughout Mexico and Central America are on alert as evidence grows that al-Qaida members are traveling in the region and looking for recruits to carry out attacks in Latin America - the potential last frontier for international terrorism.
The territory could be a perfect staging ground for Osama bin Laden's militants, with homegrown rebel groups, drug and people smugglers, and corrupt governments. U.S. officials have long feared al-Qaida could launch an attack from south of the border, and they have been paying closer attention as the number of terror-related incidents has increased since last year.
The strongest possible al-Qaida link is Adnan G. El Shukrijumah, a 29-year-old Saudi pilot suspected of being a terrorist cell leader. The FBI issued a border-wide alert earlier this month for Shukrijumah, saying he may try to cross into Arizona or Texas.
In June, Honduran officials said Shukrijumah was spotted earlier this year at an Internet cafe in Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras. Panamanian officials say the pilot and alleged bombmaker passed through their country before the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States.
U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft in May singled out Shukrijumah as one of seven especially dangerous al-Qaida-linked terror figures wanted by the government, which fears a new al-Qaida attack. A $5 million reward is posted for information leading to his capture.
Mexican and U.S. border officials have been on extra alert, checking foreign passports and arresting any illegal migrants. In a sign of a growing Mexican crackdown, eight people from Armenia, Iran and Iraq were arrested Thursday in Mexicali on charges they may have entered Mexico with false documents, although they did not appear to have any terrorist ties.
Jose Luis Santiago Vasconcelos, Mexico's top anti-crime prosecutor, said Mexican officials have no evidence that Shukrijumah - or any other al-Qaida operatives - are in Mexico. But Mexican authorities are investigating and keeping a close eye on the airports and borders.
"The alert has been sounded," Vasconcelos told The Associated Press last month.
In Central America, Honduran Security Minister Oscar Alvarez said officials have uncovered evidence that terrorists, likely from al-Qaida, may be trying to recruit Hondurans to carry out attacks in Central America. He did not offer details.
El Salvador authorities last week reinforced security at the country's international airport and along the borders after purported al-Qaida threats appeared on the Internet against their country for supporting the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq. President Tony Saca, undeterred, is sending the country's third peacekeeping unit - 380 troops - to Iraq.
Terrorists have struck in Asia, Europe, Africa, the Middle East and the United States. Latin America could be next, analysts say, especially as it becomes harder to operate elsewhere.
"If there is a crackdown, they are going to pick up shop and move," said Matt Levitt, a terrorism analyst and senior fellow at the Washington Institute.
Officials worry the Panama Canal could be a likely target. In 2003, boats making more than 13,000 trips through the waterway carried about 188 million tons of cargo.
Earlier this month, the United States and seven Latin American countries - including Argentina, Chile, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Honduras, Peru and Panama - carried out a weeklong anti-terror exercise aimed at protecting the canal.
In South America, U.S. officials have long suspected Paraguay's border with Brazil and Argentina as an area for Islamic terrorist fund-raising. Much of the focus has fallen on the Muslim community that sprouted during the 1970s, and authorities believe as much as $100 million a year flows out of the region, with large portions diverted to Islamic militants linked to Hezbollah and the Palestinian militant group Hamas.
The more immediate concern is Mexico, which shares a porous, 2,000-mile border with the United States and is the home to widespread organized crime.
In December, Mexican officials canceled two Aeromexico flights from Mexico City to Los Angeles, and a third was forced to turn around after takeoff because of terrorism concerns.
At the time, the United States, Canada and Interpol told Mexico that officials suspected terrorists might be using Mexican soil to plan an attack, Vasconcelos said.
Concerns increased this summer about whether Mexico was doing enough to screen international visitors after a 48-year-old South African woman arrived in Mexico with a passport that was missing several pages and then waded across the Rio Grande into Texas.
Farida Goolam Mahamed Ahmed was arrested July 19 while trying to board a flight in McAllen, Texas. She pleaded innocent Friday to immigration violations and was under investigation for links to terrorist activities or groups. Court testimony indicated she traveled from Johannesburg on July 8, via Dubai, United Arab Emirates, to London, then to Mexico City on or about July 14. The countries she traveled through do not require South Africans to have visas.
Mexican officials said Ahmed was not stopped upon entering Mexico because her name did not appear on any international terrorist watch-lists.
Mexican officials say they are closely scrutinizing visa requests from the Middle East and have heightened surveillance at the nation's largest airports since Sept. 11.
"The requirements for a visa for people from the Middle East have not changed, but all requests are being checked more thoroughly," said Mauricio Juarez, a spokesman with Mexico's Migration Institute.
The country is a popular U.S. entry point for people trying to sneak into the United States, and the majority - 46 percent - of all people arrested on immigration violations in Mexico come from Brazil. The rest are largely from the Americas, China or Singapore.
It has become nearly impossible for people from Muslim countries to get visas to come to Mexico since the Sept. 11 attacks.
Fayesa Amin, a 37-year-old Pakistani, started the process to get a Mexican visa two months before she was to attend a wedding in Mexico. The Mexican consulate in Karachi asked her to fill out several forms and to turn in copies of her credit card and bank statements for a full year.
Amin, who runs three beauty salons in Pakistan, said Mexican authorities told her a visa had been approved and it could be picked up in London. But Mexican officials there said her visa was being held in Ankara, Turkey. In the end, she ended up spending her holiday stranded in London.
"I knew it would be hard to get to that part of the world and that everything had become more difficult," Amin said in a telephone interview from Islamabad. "But I didn't realize how hard it could be."
On the Net:
www.fbi.gov
-------- mideast
Egyptian cleric warns US of Najaf fallout
aljazeera
22 August 2004
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/AA843409-E1C1-47F9-9717-DF04DA8BC53A.htm
A leading Egyptian Islamic leader has warned that a "volcano of anger" could explode in response to US-led military action in Najaf and Falluja.
In a statement on Saturday, Ali Gumaa, the mufti of Egypt and the country's highest authority on Islamic law, condemned the "continuing aggression by US-led forces on the Imam Ali shrine and Islamic holy places" in Iraq.
"After the attack on the shrines of the Prophet's noble companions, after the humiliations and the terrorizing and killing of civilians, the world cannot expect... that a volcano of anger and indignation will not explode," Gumaa said.
Gumaa is second in the Islamic hierarchy only to the shaikh of al-Azhar, Cairo's ancient university and institute of religious learning.
Unjustified
Gumaa said since occupation forces claimed to have saved Iraq from dictatorship, "the Dar al-Ifta cannot accept any justification... that enables them to play this ugly role, rejected by the world's reasonable people and lovers of peace".
"The Dar al-Ifta wonders why the world is seeking the reasons for terrorism, hatred of others and the clash of civilizations," he said.
Gumaa, however, appealed for restraint "so that events do not slip out of control and the situation does not deteriorate into an unjustified sea of blood, since regret would then be futile".
-------- pakistan / india
Pakistan Arrests Al Qaeda Suspects
Reuters
Sunday, August 22, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A22473-2004Aug21.html
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Aug. 21 -- Pakistan has arrested up to 10 al Qaeda suspects, including two Egyptians, suspected of planning major suicide attacks against the government and the U.S. Embassy this month, cabinet ministers said Saturday.
Information Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed said that up to six people had been arrested over a period of about a week, in advance of attacks that were planned for Aug. 13, the eve of Pakistani Independence Day. He said group members were found with rockets, grenades, rifles and explosives.
Their targets, Ahmed said, included the presidency, the military residence of President Pervez Musharraf, the U.S. Embassy, the office of the chief minister of Punjab province and the national convention center. The targets are all in the capital, Islamabad, or in nearby Rawalpindi.
Interior Minister Faisal Saleh Hayat said "eight to 10" people were being held, including two Egyptians, whom he identified as Qari Ismail and Sheikh Essa, both suspected of being "key elements" of the group.
Hayat said the plots bore the hallmarks of Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network. "We have obtained valuable information from the foreigners. . . . We have unearthed a big and sinister plan," he said.
Hayat said the men were found with "the latest gadgetry and equipment."
The arrests follow a crackdown launched since the arrest last month of an alleged al Qaeda computer expert, Mohammad Naeem Noor Khan, in Pakistan. Security officials say Noor Khan has proved a key source of information on the identity of operatives from the organization. Ahmed said, however, that the latest arrests were not connected to that of Noor Khan.
Suspected al Qaeda militants tried twice in December to kill Musharraf, a key ally of Washington's global war on terrorism. Last month, a suicide bomber killed himself and eight others in an attempt on the life of Finance Minister Shaukat Aziz, who is soon to become prime minister.
-------- prisoners of war
U.N. Expert Reprimands U.S. on Afghan Prisons
WORLD IN BRIEF
Washington Post
Sunday, August 22, 2004; Page A21
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A22550-2004Aug21.html
KABUL, Afghanistan -- A U.N. human rights expert on Saturday slammed U.S. military authorities in Afghanistan for barring him from visiting detention centers and pronounced a Kabul prison "inhuman."
The U.S. refusal to allow people to see the facilities represents "a lack of transparency that raises serious concerns about the legality of detention . . . and conditions of those detainees," said the expert, Cherif Bassiouni.
Former prisoners say they were tortured and abused while in U.S. custody, raising concerns that the scandal over the mistreatment of prisoners at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison earlier this year was not an isolated episode.
The U.S. military, which had earlier this month been expected to release an internal report into allegations of prisoner abuse, turned down Bassiouni's request to visit centers where suspected militants are held.
Bassiouni was allowed to visit Kabul's notorious Pul-i-Charkhi jail, run by the Afghan authorities, where about 725 members of the Taliban militia and their Pakistani allies are being held.
...
------- russia / chechnya
Putin Visits Chechnya Ahead of Election
Associated Press
August 22, 2004
http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,1280,-4442475,00.html
VLADIKAVKAZ, Russia (AP) - Russian President Vladimir Putin made an unannounced visit to Chechnya on Sunday, laying flowers at the grave of the war-ravaged region's assassinated president a week before elections for a new leader.
Putin arrived in slain president Akhmad Kadyrov's home village of Tsentoroi early in the morning and placed red carnations at his grave.
In televised footage, he stood solemnly with Kadyrov's son Ramzan and the Kremlin's favored candidate in the Aug. 29 election, Chechen Interior Minister Alu Alkhanov.
Putin's visit followed heavy fighting Saturday night in the Chechen capital Grozny, where authorities said rebels attacked a police station near a central square as well a police patrols and polling stations set up for next week's vote.
Putin rarely visits Chechnya, where rebels have shot down Russian military aircraft in the past, and his trips are not announced in advance. Just a few hours his arrival, Putin was back in the Black Sea resort city of Sochi along with Alkhanov and the powerful Ramzan Kadyrov, a first vice-premier of Chechnya.
The visits appeared aimed to show Kremlin concern about Chechnya's fate and to further boost the chances of Alkhanov, who vowed to continue Akhmad Kadyrov's ``course and policy.''
Putin had last visited Chechnya in May, two days after Kadyrov was killed by a bomb at a Grozny stadium.
Accounts of casualties from Saturday's fighting varied widely. An official in the Moscow-backed government said more than 30 people were killed in fighting in two Grozny neighborhoods, including at least 23 Chechen police or Russian servicemen and some civilians. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said three polling stations came under fire.
Chechen Interior Ministry spokesman Ruslan Tatayev said six policemen were killed and five lightly injured. Tatayev said the city was closed Sunday, and that 10 rebels were surrounded on its outskirts.
A spokesman for Russia's military campaign in Chechnya, Maj. Gen. Ilya Shabalkin, said on NTV television that least 18 militants were killed - and as many as 50 killed or seriously wounded - and that 12 were detained. Both Russian forces and rebels often overestimate casualties on the other side, and the figures could not be independently confirmed.
Putin's visit came a day before Akhmad Kadyrov's birthday. While many Chechens feared or disliked Kadyrov, a former separatist who became the Kremlin's most powerful ally in the region, Russian and Chechen officials have lionized him since his death.
Kadyrov's election last October, in a vote human rights groups called fraudulent, was part of a Kremlin strategy to bring the region under closer control and weaken militants who have fought two wars against Russian forces in the past decade. But deadly fighting persists nearly five years after the start of the second war, launched when Putin took a tough stance on Chechnya as prime minister in 1999.
-------- un
HUMAN RIGHTS
U.N. Expert Seeks Access to Afghan Detainees
August 22, 2004
By AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/22/international/asia/22kabul.html?pagewanted=all
KABUL, Afghanistan, Aug. 21 (Agence France-Presse) - The American military in Afghanistan should open its detention centers to independent inspectors to address any questions about the legality of holding prisoners, a United Nations human rights expert said Saturday.
Sherif Bassiouni, an independent expert on human rights in Afghanistan appointed by the United Nations, called on the United States military to allow rights workers to visit the 300 to 400 detainees held at Bagram Air Base near the capital, Kabul, and in Kandahar.
"The lack of giving an opportunity for people to go and see these facilities is a lack of transparency that raises serious concerns about the legality of the detention of those persons and the conditions of their detention," Mr. Bassiouni said at a news conference.
Speaking before the release of a progress report on human rights in Afghanistan, Mr. Bassiouni said the country had made steps in the right direction, but he identified seven areas in which immediate action should be taken.
One of the issues was the military's treatment of detainees in Afghanistan. In addition to holding detainees in two main centers, the United States military has numerous holding centers in the field that even International Committee of the Red Cross workers were denied access to, he added.
Mr. Bassiouni said the United States had "de facto" denied him access to detainees by sending him through a bureaucratic maze searching for the right person to ask about visitation rights.
Furthermore, about 725 suspected Taliban combatants had been detained at Pol-e-Charkhi prison since 2001 in conditions that Mr. Bassiouni described as inhuman.
There had been no charges, investigation or trial for any of the combatants and they were being held in contravention of both the Geneva Conventions and Afghan law, as a likely result of American pressure, he said.
Mr. Bassiouni said he had detected no resistance from Afghan officials to releasing the prisoners and added that "all of the indications are that they want them to be released and that someone else is putting the hold on" the prisoners.
He said that if allegations were true that the F.B.I. had intervened to extend the prisoners' detention until they could find people to "investigate them or interview them," then the F.B.I. was "certainly taking their sweet time."
Mr. Bassiouni said other human rights issues that should be dealt with immediately were a review of prisoners detained by the Afghan intelligence services and the police without judicial basis, the improvement of conditions of detention centers and the need for a crackdown on child trafficking.
He said women should also not be punished for so-called moral crimes by being confined to the custody of tribal chiefs in a "de facto condition of slavery."
In addition, Afghanistan must address a culture of impunity among warlords, some of whom are also drug barons, Mr. Bassiouni said.
Although disarmament was a long-term goal, he said that the Afghan government also should identify the perpetrators of gross human rights violations.
"If that is not done rapidly, seriously and with commitment, the risk will be that people who have committed serious crimes against humanity, war crimes and torture, massive killings of people will benefit from impunity," he said.
-------- us
In Najaf House for the Dead, a First Taste of War
August 22, 2004
By ALEX BERENSON
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/22/international/middleeast/22troops.html?pagewanted=all&position=
NAJAF, Iraq, Aug. 21 - After years of training, years of waiting, the marines of C Company 1-4 finally got to fight this month, when they entered into a battle as fierce as any that American troops have seen since Vietnam.
Now, as the battle in Najaf lurches toward a possible cease-fire, the 120 men in the company that spearheaded the attack are grappling with what they saw early this month during the opening days of the fight. They were pitted against the militia of Moktada al-Sadr, the rebel Shiite cleric who is basing his insurgency at a famous shrine here, in an immense 1,000-year-old cemetery where much of the warfare ensued.
Iraq is trying to control the religious and political effects of the battle, but the men who fought it face more personal consequences.
"You spend eight years training for days like these, and it seems like your entire goal is to get in an environment like this," said Capt. Matthew T. Morrissey, the company commander. "But when you get into it, the reality of it smacks you in the face."
Some marines have told friends and family members back home about killing enemy fighters who were only a few yards away, about the sight and stench of bodies baking in the sun, about mortar shells that exploded just a few feet from them and sprayed them with shrapnel. Others keep the details to themselves, hoping to avoid frightening their wives or parents.
Marines pride themselves on their willingness and ability to fight. At least since the Vietnam War, the marines' unofficial combat motto has been "get some." The unit stationed in Najaf, the First Battalion of the Fourth Marines, saw almost no action last year during the first phase of the Iraq war, and many marines here say they looked forward to changing that when they arrived in the holy city in July.
But the fight with Mr. Sadr's guerrillas has left the men of C Company with a different perspective. The marines remain confident in their abilities, proud of the fight, and many are eager to finish off Mr. Sadr.
But others say they would be satisfied with a peaceful solution, acknowledging that the risk of damage to the shrine of Imam Ali means that American forces cannot bring the full power of their heaviest weapons to bear on Mr. Sadr's guerrillas.
On Wednesday, the Army battalion at this dusty base on the northern edge of Najaf held a funeral for two soldiers killed in fighting in the cemetery. But the marines have not yet held funerals for five marines who died, including four in the first two days of fighting.
While fighting here has slowed in the last two days, the men here do not delude themselves about the reason for the delay. Until Mr. Sadr and the interim Iraqi government agree to a truce, the battle is not over, and they must be prepared for the reality that more men may die. They would rather see one joint funeral than a succession of individual services, they say.
"There's a possibility that there's gonna be more," said Cpl. Joey W. McBroom of Lafayette, Tenn. "We should do it all together, because they all died together."
But the cemetery fight sticks in the minds of the men. C Company was not the only unit in the cemetery, a warren of graves and mausoleums that is nearly two miles wide and three miles long. Nearly the entire battalion of 1,200 troops participated in the battle, at least on the fringes.
Even on the edge of the cemetery, fighting was heavy, said Cpl. Greg Confer, who joined in the battle that C Company led. Corporal Confer said his most vivid memory of the attack was the moment that he and other marines killed a guerrilla who had been shooting at him.
"The guy didn't move, he just stood there," Corporal Confer said. "He already had his try. It's him or me. I'm just pretty happy it was me." Corporal Confer said he had thought about the man he killed since the battle ended.
"I wondered if he was a father," he said. "What did he have going for him?"
But the marines in C Company were at the point of attack. They pushed their way on foot through the crumbling brick graveyard, which is filled with memorials to Shiite Muslims buried there from far and wide.
With graves stacked nearly on top of each other and burial chambers the size of small houses, the cemetery is a complex and forbidding place. Mr. Sadr's guerrillas knew the terrain intimately and had spent months setting up arms caches and snipers' nests.
The result was combat at extremely close quarters, nearly hand-to-hand, carried out in 120-degree heat. Insurgents popped up from catacombs and sprayed automatic rifle fire as marines approached. From positions near the shrine, Mr. Sadr's guerrillas launched hundreds of mortar shells, forcing marines to hide behind graves or even in mausoleums.
C Company pushed almost a mile west into the cemetery and killed scores, if not hundreds, of guerrillas. After two days of fighting, the marines reached the inner ring of Najaf's Old City, just a few hundred yards from the shrine of Imam Ali, which Shiite Muslims hold sacred.
The fighting was exciting and frightening, said Sergeant Phillippi J. Ledesma, of Panama City, Fla.
"You do get afraid a little bit," he said. "There's nothing that can prepare for fighting in a cemetery, especially going down catacombs."
Sgt. Ledesma said the fighting had not bothered him personally, but he said the fact that one of the marines in his platoon had died in the cemetery had troubled him deeply.
"I'd actually rather go down myself than lose one of mine," he said. "It is my obligation to bring them home alive, do everything in my power to keep them safe." His family does not fully understand that feeling and grows upset when he mentions it, he said.
Nearly every marine in C Company has a story of a close call. In many cases, mortars landed within lethal range of marines, who survived only because tombs or walls in the cemetery blocked shrapnel.
"A mortar hit behind me and shrapnel went into my hand," said Pfc. Heladio Zuniga of Jackson, Miss. "It was an interesting experience, I'd have to say."
Corporal McBroom said a mortar shell had landed less than 10 feet from him, temporarily deafening him and knocking the air from his lungs. His hearing is still impaired, and he does not know if the damage is permanent, he said. A few minutes later, he saw another marine killed by a shell a few yards from his position, he said. "You think it could be you, but it's not, so you've got another day to do your job," he said.
After the battle, he spoke to his wife, but gave her few details about what had happened, he said. "I told her a little bit about it, and I told her I never wanted to talk about it again," he said. "I wanted to spare her it going through her mind like it goes through my mind."
--------
U.S. soldier weds Iraqi love
cnn
August 22, 2004
http://www.cnn.com/2004/US/West/08/22/war.bride.ap/index.html
PORT ORCHARD, Washington (AP) -- A Washington state soldier has married the Iraqi woman he met and fell in love with while in Baghdad.
Robert Hall, 23, says he knew within a month that he would marry Vivian Mansour, 21, of Baghdad, even though at first neither spoke a word of each other's language.
Hall, an Army reservist who earned a Bronze Star for meritorious service during his one-year tour, said he's never been happier. The two were married here Saturday.
"I never in my life saw this coming," he said.
For them, cultural differences are offset by a shared Christian faith. Mansour is a Kurdish Christian -- a population that makes up just 3 percent of Iraq's 24 million people.
"It's such a learning experience," Hall said. "Our cultures are different, but the way we look at it is, we're both children of God."
The Christian population was persecuted by Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's regime, but after his ouster they have been targeted by other groups. A recent wave of church bombings has prompted about 40,000 Iraqi Christians to leave the country.
Mansour's family has been in danger not only because of their faith, but because they worked for the U.S. military.
Hall was with the 4022nd Civil Affairs Battalion, which set up camp inside the Baghdad palace complex. The battalion worked closely with Iraqis, helping to resolve infrastructure problems and clear weapons caches. He met Mansour -- and her mother and sister -- when they were hired as cleaning women.
"Every time she came over, I kind of followed her and watched her clean," Hall said.
"Yes, everywhere," Mansour recalled, laughing.
He met with his unit's attorney to make sure the interactions were legal. The couple met in open settings when Hall was off duty.
"I made sure every step of the way I wasn't doing anything illegal," Hall said. "I wouldn't suggest having a relationship over there at all. It makes it that much harder. But I find myself blessed for what happened."
Mansour, who had never before left Baghdad, misses her parents, her sister and four brothers. Relatives from San Diego flew north to attend the wedding. Hall says his main focus initially will be to help her feel at home.
Mansour's English is still a work in progress, but she knows what attracted her to Hall.
"Heart first," she said, pointing to her chest.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- courts / tribunals
U.S. OKs Status of 10 Guantanamo Prisoners
guardian.co.uk
August 22, 2004
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uslatest/story/0,1282,-4442453,00.html
GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba (AP) - U.S. military review panels have decided not to release 10 Guantanamo Bay detainees, concluding they were properly classified as ``enemy combatants,'' a military official said Saturday.
The decision brought to 14 the number of cases decided by the panels, said Navy Cmdr. Katy Wright, a spokeswoman at the Pentagon. The panels decided to hold all 14.
The military so far has reviewed the cases of 31 detainees, including that of a 30-year-old prisoner on Saturday who allegedly served as a bodyguard for Osama bin Laden. All 585 Guantanamo detainees are accused of links to al-Qaida or Afghanistan's former Taliban regime.
The military would not release details of the concluded cases, including when the detainees went before the review panels, their names, nationalities or the circumstances surrounding their capture.
In Saturday's case, the prisoner, whose name and nationality were not released, received training in explosives at al-Qaida's al-Farouq training camp in Afghanistan, Wright said.
He allegedly participated in military operations against U.S.-led coalition forces and was caught trying to cross into Pakistan. The prisoner, who has been held at Guantanamo for 33 months, called no witnesses, Wright said.
Human rights lawyers have criticized the review hearings, saying they fail to satisfy a recent ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court that prisoners may contest their detention in U.S. civilian courts. Some have been held since the detention mission began in January 2002.
The review tribunals are separate from military commissions, where some prisoners will be tried on war crimes conspiracy and other charges. Pretrial hearings for the commissions are to begin Tuesday.
-------- drug war
Poppies and Afghanistan
August 22, 2004
Washington Times Editorial
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20040821-103818-4245r.htm
Afghanistan's proliferating poppies pose an obvious threat to the government in Kabul, U.S. forces and the countries that opium and heroin are trafficked in, often en route to Western Europe. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld recently said an overall master plan is being developed to deal with Afghanistan's growing drug production. Such a plan is needed, but U.S. and NATO planners should craft it with a long-term vision.
Mr. Rumsfeld recently noted, "The problem is a demand problem, in its essence." Demand will find its supply, he said. More narrowly, though, producing countries such as Afghanistan do have a supply problem, he added, because of all the associated problems that production brings. For Afghanistan, those problems are particularly alarming, since the heroin trade can enrich pro-Taliban and al Qaeda factions.
Tackling the drug trade could also create a new set of troubles, though. The deployment of U.S. military personnel on counter-narcotics missions risks the corruption of U.S. troops. For that reason, the military has traditionally steered clear of assuming a counter-drug role. Also, a number of heavily armed Tajik tribal leaders that have not been hostile to U.S. forces could lash out if their drug interests are directly and aggressively challenged. Finally, poppy growing and heroin production and trafficking are among the few ways to make a living in Afghanistan. If that trade is to be countered, Afghans need to have other sources of income.
Nearly half of Afghanistan's $4.5 billion economy comes from opium cultivation and trafficking. Afghanistan has suffered over two decades of war and a prolonged drought. Last year in Afghanistan, according to the U.N. Office of Drugs and Crime (UNODC), 1.7 million people were directly engaged in producing more than 3,600 metric tons of opium, which amounts to three-quarters of the world's illicit opium production. In a UNODC survey, 69 percent of last year's poppy farmers said they planned to increase their production.
Unless the United States and the international community can raise funds to allow farmers to subsist on legitimate crops, efforts to eradicate poppies in the fields are likely to fail. Donor countries - particularly those upset at seeing Afghan heroin pushed on their urban youth - should see development funds as part of the counter-narcotics effort. But security forces, preferably Afghan forces, can be involved now in aggressive interdiction efforts on main roads and borders. Laboratories can also be targeted by security forces.
This highlights the need to deploy more Provisional Reconstruction Teams under NATO's umbrella and bolster efforts to train Afghan police and national army forces. Currently, there are only two such NATO teams working in Afghanistan. Without the cover provided by these teams, aid workers will continue to be targeted and killed.
A British-trained Afghan drug interdiction force is slated to be 200-strong. A German-led effort on law-enforcement training has produced about 20,000 police officers. But the international community currently is committing about one-fourth the level of per capita support to Afghanistan that it did in Bosnia. Without greater support, it is difficult to see how any master plan could reduce opium and heroin production.
-------- homeland security / national intelligence
Block by Block, Access Denied
Security Just One Reason D.C. Has Moved Beyond L'Enfant
By Maureen Fan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, August 22, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A22340-2004Aug21?language=printer
Drive southeast on Massachusetts Avenue toward Union Station, hang a right on New Jersey and, five blocks down, it should be a smooth left onto Constitution. But suddenly at Louisiana, there are those concrete barriers, again. And parked cars where an open street should be. And officers in shorts.
Instead, go out of your way and turn right, then left on First Street NW. But there's another police officer, looking in your back seat to make sure you're not concealing explosives or terrorists. It's not a huge imposition, but life in the nation's capital is different.
This month's street and sidewalk closures were the result of heightened security alerts, but they were hardly the first. In fact, almost from the moment the Capitol was built, the powers that be have found reasons to close roads in the name of progress, development and the national interest.
Washington, as planned by Pierre L'Enfant in 1791, has lost about 22 miles of streets over the past two centuries, most disappearing in a slow creep of small changes, block by block, over 100 years, according to local architect Donald Hawkins.
Although most of the lost miles were long gone with the advent of freeways in the 1960s, a recent rash of security-related restrictions since the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and Sept. 11 terrorist attacks has commandeered more streets than in the previous two decades, raising tempers and questions about public safety.
A historical view serves as a reminder that access doesn't really vanish overnight but disappears gradually, slowly erasing a city's flexibility and choice. Cities evolve, of course, but modern security concerns have prompted more teeth-gnashing than usual: There's an emotional cost as citizens are repeatedly told what to do and where to go.
Closing the steps and terraces on the west side of the Capitol, for example, "is like closing the rim of the Grand Canyon," said Ken Jarboe, the advisory neighborhood commissioner for the area. "It's one of the most awe-inspiring views in the country."
The latest losses are the result of new dictates on where it is safe to drive and park and walk as Washingtonians and visitors navigate the symbols of power that make this city a likely target. New roadblocks and checkpoints have gone up around the Capitol, diverting pedestrians as well as motorists. Traffic is choked along 17th Street near the White House, where Pennsylvania Avenue is closed. And another block has closed just north of the World Bank on H Street.
"Oklahoma City kind of started the ball rolling at a bigger level, because you took Pennsylvania Avenue out and that kind of crossed the Rubicon," said Dan Tangherlini, the District's director of transportation, who gets daily requests to seal off streets or block lanes every time there's a new terror alert. "Then September 11th opened the floodgates. The streets that are closed don't even reflect a portion of the desire for people to close streets or take lanes."
Many people seem resigned to the increased scrutiny. But longtime residents argue that the average citizen isn't equipped to sensibly evaluate such threats. And as risk-wary experts push for maximum protection, those who live with the results say the small sacrifices of public access here and there have changed not only the way Washington works, but also the pace and feel of people's lives.
"It really is a shame to see our Capitol roped off. If security measures are really necessary, are only the top leaders being protected or is the public at large really safer?" asked Joe Baghetti, a graduate student visiting last week from Johnson City, Tenn.
"Cities are about options and variety," said Hawkins, who has studied the L'Enfant design for 30 years. "If you don't have the combination of streets and pedestrian areas, the streets lose life."
Hawkins heads the historic preservation subcommittee of the Committee of 100 on the Federal City, a planning advocacy group. He layered maps over the original plan to come up with his 22-mile estimate of lost streets, not including the more recent closings around Capitol Hill. The culprit over time, he said, is a combination of railroad tracks, highways, federal office construction and decades-old security concerns.
"The hugest portion of this mileage is one little block here and another block there," Hawkins said. "There are 100-plus different closures. It's a lot of little things."
About nine or ten miles have actually been added to the original plan. Riggs and Corcoran streets and Sunderland Place near Dupont Circle, for example. Streets near the National Portrait Gallery have disappeared and reappeared, closed for pedestrian malls but later reopened to traffic.
Not all street closures leave dead neighborhoods in their wake. Union Station dug up roads but invited progress, redevelopment and millions of visitors and commuters.
But scores of those visitors and commuters must now navigate checkpoints and concrete barriers as they visit the Capitol grounds, whose gently curving roads serve as parking for Hill employees. Pedestrians slip past barriers that have been in place since the early '90s to get to several of the paths. Watching over the scene are police cradling automatic weapons.
In Foggy Bottom, security patrols spend all day reversing their Jeeps and vans a few feet to let State Department employees into sections of C and D streets that are closed to the public. Next door, a block of street parking in front of the Federal Reserve has been sacrificed for a security buffer -- the city is collecting an annual fee as a tradeoff.
Construction continues just north of the White House, where Pennsylvania Avenue will become a multimillion-dollar pedestrian park before the next inauguration.
"We've lost access to the symbols of freedom, and in some cases we've changed the symbols of freedom to symbols of fear," Hawkins said.
Larry Molumby, who can see the Capitol dome from his home on East Capitol Street, remembers his daughter sliding down the west front of the Capitol on a sled in the mid-'70s.
"Maybe that's part of the problem. People wouldn't even think of recreating there now. It used to be like a neighborhood park," said Molumby, a retiree who still walks the grounds with his wife, Patricia, nearly every evening but notes that the military band concerts in the park now have more restricted seating. "It's just not the same."
Calculating the permanent loss of streets and right of ways in the capital is hard to do. For one, there are definitions to tangle with. Streets closed to cars but open to pedestrians are not always "closed" but merely "restricted."
Then there is the problem of memory. People feel strongly about the closure of Pennsylvania Avenue and E Street near the White House. They forget that West Executive Avenue between the Old Executive Office Building and the White House was closed during World War I.
By World War II, East Executive Avenue between the White House and the Treasury Department was shut. It reopened and then closed again after the 1983 bombing of Marine barracks in Beirut.
The U.S. Secret Service does not invite a discussion of alternatives.
"These measures are in place because we take our mandated responsibility seriously in providing the president and the occupants of the White House a safe and secure environment," spokeswoman Lorie Lewis said.
Street closures are also a muddle complicated by competing city and federal agencies that don't always work together.
District officials, who have jurisdiction over all streets except those on the Capitol grounds, say that only Congress and the D.C. Council can close roads. In practice, the Secret Service, the State Department and Capitol Police have all acted without first discussing alternatives with the city.
"Consultation doesn't mean they've sought our approval. They've just told us what they're going to do," Tangherlini said. "It still leaves the problem in my lap."
The problem with closing streets one by one is the lack of a broader review that takes into account citywide evacuation routes and other congested spots, Tangherlini said. D.C. officials sometimes describe the scope of the problem by naming roads not yet closed.
The Energy Department, for example, wanted to block off 10th Street just south of Independence because part of the street runs under a department building.
"What happens with the Labor Department -- do they then want to close Third Street because it runs under their building?" Tangherlini asked. "Trust me, they did."
Over on Independence and Constitution avenues, hydraulic metal plates are embedded in the ground, ready to cut off traffic on both major east-west arteries at the push of a button during the next emergency, Tangherlini said.
While city officials and community leaders say they wish that he public would ask more questions about losing access -- Are we really safer? What's the price in freedom and mobility? -- there are those who shrug at the latest inconvenience.
"I would have liked to walk up the Capitol steps, but they say you can't," said Sandie Byer, a retired school secretary from Sterling who sat listening to a fountain at the base of the west front of the Capitol this week. "I can accept that because of the terrorist threat."
Her husband, Frank Byer, retired from the Navy Department, conceded that it was a tough balancing act.
"You have six million people living in the greater metropolitan area, and they have a different need than the people who visit from Iowa and Illinois and across the country. I can come in or not come in. But this is a problem your generation is going to have to solve -- how to live this way and still be free."
--------
Senate Republican Unveils Plan for Intelligence
August 22, 2004
By BRIAN KNOWLTON,
International Herald Tribune
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/22/politics/22CND-INTE.html?hp
WASHINGTON, Aug. 22 - A Republican senator unveiled today what he called "a very bold plan" to broadly remake United States intelligence agencies, giving a new national intelligence director far greater authority than the White House has suggested.
Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas, chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, presented a summary of the plan, called "The 9/11 National Security Protection Act," on the CBS News program "Face the Nation."
The plan would give the proposed national director responsibility for the intelligence-gathering operations of the Central Intelligence Agency and the Defense Department.
President Bush has not said precisely what powers the new office should have, but the Roberts plan appears to go well beyond what the White House has in mind, and seems sure to face reservations in the Pentagon.
Still, coming from an influential Republican, and with similar proposals backed by the national commission on the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and by family members of Sept. 11 victims, the plan might make it difficult for the White House to move less aggressively.
The new plan would transform the three main C.I.A. directorates - Operations, which manages covert actions and collects intelligence; Intelligence, which analyzes data; and Science and Technology - into new agencies, each under an assistant to the national intelligence director.
It would do much the same to the main Pentagon intelligence agencies, including the National Security Agency, a vast entity that is responsible for collecting electronic intelligence, and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which analyzes satellite photos.
The director would have "complete budget and personnel authority over intelligence units at Treasury, Energy, Homeland Security, the State Department, and the remaining analytical elements of the Defense Intelligence Agency," the plan said.
Mr. Roberts said that "we've been talking with the White House and the National Security Council people" about the proposal, although he did not describe their reaction.
He said he had received a positive reaction from some members of the Sept. 11 commission, which proposed such a broadly powerful national director.
But the fate of Mr. Roberts's proposal was far from clear. The proposal appears to go well beyond Mr. Bush's plan for a national director who would coordinate budgets but not necessarily have final authority over them.
It almost certainly would engender opposition, at least behind the scenes, from Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, whose department would stand to lose control of billions of dollars in spending.
Mr. Rumsfeld has urged that any intelligence overhaul be conducted with great caution, particularly in decoupling military commanders from the Pentagon intelligence units supporting their operations. "If we move unwisely and get it wrong," Mr. Rumsfeld said last week, "the penalty would be great."
The Roberts plan, apparently in response to such concerns, would create a special assistant national intelligence director in charge of military support and a director of military intelligence to oversee tactical intelligence units who would answer to the defense secretary.
While Mr. Roberts said that one influential Democrat, Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, was "pretty excited" about the proposal, Mr. Roberts said he regretted very deeply that other Democrats were not yet supportive.
One leading Democrat on the intelligence committee, Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, criticized Republicans for advancing legislation on so crucial a matter without adequately consulting Democrats or seeking their support.
Mr. Levin said Mr. Roberts's proposal "is not a bipartisan bill, and I think it's a mistake to begin with a partisan bill, no matter what is in it." Mr. Levin added that neither he nor the committee's ranking Democrat, John D. Rockefeller of West Virginia, had seen the proposal.
Mr. Levin added that "in any bold move if we're going to give more power to the intelligence director, we've got to take steps to make sure that that director is just not a yes man for any administration."
But Mr. Roberts said he was prepared for opposition, expected counterproposals and was ready to compromise on the plan.
"We just sort of stepped back from the trees and instead of worrying about boxes and agencies and turf," he said, "looked for ways to address what is right for our national security, what is real reform. We've put that together."
He added: "It's not a tablet written in stone. If anybody wants to make changes or if anybody wants to lob a brick bat or two, well, you know, we're perfectly ready."
-------- POLITICS
-------- budget
THE COUNT
The Ammunition Bill for Each American (Hawk or Dove): $12
August 22, 2004
By HUBERT B. HERRING
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/22/business/yourmoney/22count.html
In simpler times, a lone angry human had to be within a spear's throw to harm anyone with differing views on the issues of the day. But in the 14th century, some mischievous souls started turning out brass and bronze tubes, about 10 inches long, for dispatching "bullets" of a sort at distant foes. The gunpowder to effect this propulsion was typically ignited by a glowing coal.
It was not until the 16th century that paper cartridges were invented, and not until the 19th that someone came up with smokeless gunpowder, which led to the metal-jacket cartridge. But then the history of ammunition fast-forwards to today's high-tech fireworks display.
With the war in Iraq now well into its second year, the market for small-arms ammunition is bigger than it has been in decades. This year, every American spent, through tax dollars, some $12 on ammunition for the military. One company alone, Alliant Techsystems, is turning out a billion rounds of small-arms ammunition this year.
-------- propaganda wars
Bush Ad Causes Concern at the Olympics
USOC to Review Campaign Spot's Use of Brand; Iraqis Express Anger
By Sally Jenkins
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, August 22, 2004; Page A12
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A22355-2004Aug21.html
ATHENS, Aug. 21 -- The U.S. Olympic Committee, concerned that President Bush's reelection campaign is using the Athens Games for political purposes, will review a copy of a televised campaign ad that credits Bush with liberating athletes from Afghanistan and Iraq so they can compete here.
"In 1972, there were 40 democracies in the world. Today, 120," a narrator intones, over images of an Olympic stadium with flags flying and swimmers racing in a pool. "Freedom is spreading like a sunrise. At this Olympics, there will be two more free nations. And two fewer terrorist regimes."
The word "Olympic," as well as the brand and concept of Olympianism, belongs exclusively to the International Olympic Committee worldwide and to the USOC in the United States. The bylaws of both organizations prohibit the use of the Olympics for political ends, as does an act of Congress, which states that the USOC "shall be non-political and may not promote the candidacy of any individual seeking public office."
The Bush campaign, however, defended its usage of the ad and said it would continue to run through August. "We are on firm legal ground to mention the Olympics and make a factual point in a political advertisement," Bush spokesman Scott Stanzel told the Associated Press. The Bush reelection committee contends that the USOC technically only has exclusive rights to the Olympic brand to sell products or promote competition.
A USOC spokesman said the ad would be reviewed by the organization's director of government affairs, Steve Bull. "We're aware of it, but we haven't had an opportunity to review it," USOC spokesman Darryl Seibel said. "We have contacted the reelection committee and asked for a copy, and once we've received [it], that will give us a chance to determine the extent to which marks and terms may be used."
The ad, which can be viewed over the Internet, also shows the flags of Iraq and Afghanistan as swimmers plow through the water. Iraq sent one swimmer here; Afghanistan sent none. The majority of Iraq's Olympic team consists of 24 soccer players, who did most of their training outside of the country, because it was too torn by violence.
Some members of the Iraqi soccer team have said they are angered by Bush's reference to use them. "Iraq as a team does not want Mr. Bush to use us for the presidential campaign," midfielder Salih Sadir told Sports Illustrated for its online edition. Iraqi head coach Adnan Hamad said, "What is freedom when I go to the stadium and there are shootings on the road?"
The Iraqi soccer players have asked their countrymen to support them in the interest of national unity, regardless of differences.
--------
Bush Campaign Drops Swift Boat Ad Figure
Democrat's Team Says Veteran's Role in Drive to Discredit Kerry Shows a Link
By Dana Milbank
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, August 22, 2004; Page A13
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A22957-2004Aug22.html
CRAWFORD, Tex., Aug. 21 -- The Bush campaign said late Saturday that it dismissed an adviser on veterans issues after learning that he is part of an independent group that has been running anti-Kerry ads.
The Bush campaign said Kenneth Cordier, who appears in a new advertisement to be aired by the anti-Kerry group, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, will no longer serve in his voluntary position on Bush's veterans steering committee. A Bush spokesman said Cordier had not previously informed the campaign that he had been involved with the group, but the Kerry campaign said the matter provides evidence supporting its complaint to the Federal Election Commission alleging illegal cooperation between the campaign and the independent group.
"Col. Cordier did not inform the campaign of his involvement in the advertisement being run by a 527 organization," Bush campaign spokesman Steve Schmidt wrote in a statement, referring to the technical name for independent groups such as the Swift boat organization. Schmidt said Cordier "will no longer participate as a volunteer for Bush-Cheney '04."
Cordier's connection to the Bush campaign was made public yesterday by the Kerry campaign, which found that Cordier had been named on the Bush Web site earlier this month as a member of the veterans committee but that his name had subsequently been removed. A Bush aide said Cordier, who spent six years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam and was a Bush supporter in 2000, called the campaign to disclose his involvement on Friday and was told he could no longer serve as an adviser to the campaign.
The ads by the Swift boat group, named for the type of boat Kerry commanded during the Vietnam War, has been causing a furious debate between the campaigns, with Kerry demanding that Bush condemn the ads that suggest that Kerry did not earn his war decorations and that he betrayed his fellow veterans by his later antiwar activity. The Bush campaign has said it opposes ads by all outside groups but declined to specifically criticize the Swift boat ads.
The Swift boat veterans ad featuring Cordier, to air this week in Pennsylvania, New Mexico and Nevada, shows footage of Kerry's antiwar testimony from 1971. "He betrayed us in the past -- how can we be loyal to him now?" Cordier said in the ad.
Cordier could not be reached at his home in Dallas last night.
Kerry campaign spokesman Chad Clanton said the Cordier matter added more weight to its complaint filed last week with the FEC. "This is another brick in the wall of evidence that the Bush campaign is behind this smear," he said. "No wonder the president won't condemn the ads."
Under law, political campaigns cannot coordinate with the 527 organizations, which are funded with unregulated "soft" money and have proved to be an enormous loophole in the new campaign-finance legislation. Bush aides have said there has been no coordination with the Swift boat group. "We've already said we weren't involved in any way in these ads," White House spokesman Scott McClellan said last week. "We've made that clear."
But the Kerry campaign said that claim is put in doubt both by the Cordier issue and by various news accounts demonstrating close relationships between the Swift boat veterans and key Bush advisers. The Kerry campaign also asserts that a Kerry campaign volunteer picked up a Swift Boat Veterans for Truth flier at the Bush-Cheney office in Gainesville, Fla.
-------- us politics
NEMESIS
In a New Book, Buchanan Chastises Another Bush
August 22, 2004
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/22/politics/22buchanan.html
Patrick J. Buchanan, the conservative commentator whose Republican primary challenge and divisive convention speech weakened the first President Bush's campaign for re-election in 1992, is publishing a book excoriating the second President Bush over the invasion of Iraq, just in time to grab a share of the limelight at another Republican convention.
The arguments in the book, "Where the Right Went Wrong," which was released late last week, may be familiar, at least to readers of his magazine, The American Conservative, which was founded as a forum for opposition from the right to the invasion of Iraq. Calling the invasion "the greatest strategic blunder in 40 years," Mr. Buchanan writes, "If prudence is the mark of a conservative, Mr. Bush has ceased to be a conservative."
But the release of the book, which coincides with the Republican National Convention, gives Mr. Buchanan a new occasion to lay out his case on television and in book promotions just as the Bush campaign seeks to project an image of unity.
"He has a following in conservative circles," said Paul Weyrich, a veteran conservative organizer. "It is not what it once was just because the religious right is not particularly enamored with him. But it is going to have an effect."
In an interview, however, Mr. Buchanan said publishing a book during the campaign was the best way he knew to inject what he considers important ideas into the debate. "The reason I wanted it out now is, it addresses big issues that are not being addressed in this campaign: the massive and growing deficit, the disintegration of the culture and a Wilsonian foreign policy that means war ad infinitum," he said.
On war, trade and immigration, "both Kerry and Bush have agreed on the positions that are producing this,'' he said. "True conservatives are not getting a hearing."
Mr. Buchanan also stood by his address at the 1992 Republican convention, which alarmed many moderates with talk of a "culture war,'' saying that if the first President Bush had heeded the speech he might have won re-election.
He said: "Was I not right? When you take a look at how everybody says there is a dividing line between red states and blue states, and the dividing line is between people who go to church at least once a week and people who don't, there is a culture war going on in this country." Moral and social issues were winners for the Republicans, he argued, which is why the Democrats tried to keep the focus on the economy in 1992.
His new book reprises some of the themes of his 1992 speech, likening the task facing cultural conservatives to that of soldiers sweeping black neighborhoods after riots.
But in the main Mr. Buchanan's book may be the most thorough exposition yet of the conservative case against the invasion of Iraq. He notes that American conservatives have traditionally opposed foreign interventions, and that Mr. Bush campaigned against "nation building." But after Sept. 11, he argues, Mr. Bush embraced the views of a group of neoconservative thinkers who Mr. Buchanan contends had been looking to justify a march on Baghdad.
He aims some of his fiercest attacks at Mr. Bush's frequent statement that perceptions of weakness, not the use of force, invite terrorist attacks. Mr. Buchanan contends that containment has often proven an effective strategy, while intervention sows the seeds of terrorism.
Noting that he criticized the first President Bush for the first gulf war, Mr. Buchanan quotes himself campaigning as the Reform Party candidate in 2000. "How can all our meddling not fail to spark some horrible retribution?" he said then. "Have we not suffered enough - from Pan Am 103 to the World Trade Center [bombing of 1993] to the embassy bombings in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam - not to know that interventionism is the incubator of terrorism? Or will it take some cataclysmic atrocity on U.S. soil to awaken our global gamesmen to the going price of empire?"
Still, Mr. Buchanan said he could not bring himself to support another candidate. "Conservative differences with a party led by John Kerry are monumental and legion," he wrote. In the interview, Mr. Buchanan said of the antiwar candidacy of Ralph Nader: " I like Ralph very much. He has been enormously courageous on trade issues and on the war issue, but I am right-to-life all the way."
David Frum, a supporter of the war who wrote an article in The National Review last year criticizing Mr. Buchanan and his allies as "unpatriotic conservatives," said that ambivalence betrayed inconsistency. "If Pat Buchanan supports President Bush for re-election, that shows a guy who in the end is unwilling to follow his logic where it leads him," Mr. Frum said. "Pat Buchanan said that the United States brought the 9/11 attacks on itself - he said that within a week of 9/11. It is not surprising that a man who believes in negotiating with terrorists - wooing them, trying to find what they want and giving it to them - is going to be unsatisfied in George Bush's Republican Party."
About Mr. Frum's criticism, Mr. Buchanan said, "I take that as vindication that we were right in speaking out at a time when everybody else was going along with the war."
-------- ENERGY
-------- alternative energy
INVESTING
Ready to Bet on Alternative Energy? Well, Think Again
August 22, 2004
By CONRAD DE AENLLE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/22/business/yourmoney/22alte.html?pagewanted=all&position=
WHEN oil prices rise, public interest in alternative energy often does, too. Tapping into renewable sources of power like wind, solar power and hydrogen, which are inexhaustible but far from inexpensive, seems to make more commercial sense when crude oil costs $47 a barrel.
But the logic is evidently escaping Wall Street. Many companies involved in alternative energy have missed out on the rally that has lifted shares of oil and gas companies.
Some investors, particularly advocates of what is known as socially responsible investing, expect the cost gap to narrow. They say that producing energy from renewable sources is becoming cheaper, while fossil fuels will become more expensive as supplies dwindle, long after the current pressures that have been pushing prices higher have receded.
Those advocates also say that concerns about pollution and climate change make alternative energy more politically palatable than energy from conventional sources. In many countries, they say, that should help producers benefit from government subsidies and ambitious production targets.
But skeptics closer to the investment mainstream argue that renewable energy will not become commercially viable for many years. In the meantime, they warn, these industries will have to depend on continual new financing and, as a result, are best avoided.
"The overriding issue is that the economics have to work, and for many companies that hasn't been the case," said Wenhua Zhang, an analyst at T. Rowe Price in Baltimore. "These are capital-intensive industries. There are very few of them where you don't have to spend a lot of money."
Alternative energy sources typically require huge infrastructure investment to deliver power to electricity grids, or to cars in the case of hydrogen as a substitute for gasoline.
"Energy is not like other technologies, where you can get started for $15 million," Mr. Zhang said, referring to the dot-coms that proliferated in the late 1990's. "You need half a billion."
Portfolio managers and small investors may be reluctant to dip into their pockets when any payoff may be years away, but some big-name industrial companies that can afford to be patient have been making significant investments in alternative energy. Ford Motor and DaimlerChrysler recently agreed to acquire part of the vehicular fuel-cell business of Ballard Power Systems.
General Electric is one of the world's largest producers of wind turbines and is heavily involved in solar power, too, as are the Japanese companies Matsushita Electric Industrial and Kyocera and the oil producers Royal Dutch/Shell and BP.
"G.E. is likely to become the largest alternative energy company in the world in a short time," said James Cameron, a founding partner of Climate Change Capital, a venture capital firm in London that specializes in alternative energy. The investments by G.E. and other multinational companies "are signs that the industry is about to grow up," Mr. Cameron said.
He added that pressure on pension plans to invest in socially acceptable ways would bring more money to the sector.
For now, though, many investors remain reluctant to commit capital to companies that will not show a profit for a long time, if ever. Yet Charlie Thomas, a manager of environmental funds at Jupiter Asset Management in London, pointed out that some makers of wind turbines were already in the black, including two of his favorites, Vestas Wind Systems of Denmark and Gamesa of Spain.
"Wind is becoming more and more interesting," he said. With oil and gas prices so high, he added, "onshore wind is just about the most efficient source of energy and is providing increasing competition against fossil-fuel energy sources."
But stocks of wind companies have not performed particularly well during the spike in crude prices over the last few months. One reason, Mr. Thomas said, is that investors jumped the gun last year, driving prices so high that "alternative energy became a bubble issue." They have spent the last several months digesting last year's gains.
Another reason for the weakness, he said, is that Congress in the United States has delayed a vote on renewing the production tax credit, which benefits makers of wind turbines and other alternative energy equipment. The credit expired at the end of last year but is included in versions of a corporate tax bill that have passed each house. If it is reinstated, Mr. Thomas said, "We could get improvement in profitability in the United States, which is a very large market."
Mr. Thomas advised sticking with wind companies, like Vestas and Gamesa, that have large market shares. Vestas has close to one-third of the global wind turbine business. The stock trades at about 16 times his estimate of 2005 earnings.
Gamesa is even cheaper, he said, about 12 times estimated 2005 earnings, after rising 67 percent in the last year, making it one of the best performers among energy companies, alternative and ordinary alike.
"Gamesa has done very well in the last year," Mr. Thomas said. "They make good turbines at the right prices." The company's main markets are Spain and Latin America, and sales to China are increasing, he noted.
TIMOTHY O'BRIEN, manager of the Evergreen Utility and Telecommunications fund, declines to invest directly in wind technology, saying that "an awful lot of money has been poured into this, and the returns have been de minimus." But he does invest in a utility that invests heavily in wind: FPL, the holding company for Florida Power and Light and other companies. It owns wind turbines across the country and around the world and sells the power they generate to local utilities.
"One reason we own it is the wind play," Mr. O'Brien said. FPL, like many other utility companies, faces large tax bills, which the production tax credit should help mitigate, he said. Under regulations in many states, "utilities have to design renewable into the energy mix, and wind is the easiest way to do it," he explained.
Mr. O'Brien also owns three utilities - Entergy, Exelon and Dominion Resources - that produce much of their power from nuclear generators bought cheaply in the 1990's. They look to be especially good bargains now, he said, because prices for natural gas, used to produce electricity, have risen so high.
"They bought nuclear plants at what looked like deeply discounted prices at the time," he said of the utilities. "Now they look like extremely advantageous prices. The higher natural-gas prices go, the more money these guys make."
Producers of solar power have further to travel on the path to commercial viability than producers of other alternative energy sources, said Mr. Thomas, at Jupiter, but he has found a few small companies that he said are successfully occupying niches in the area. They include Carmanah Technologies, a Canadian company that incorporates solar panels into marine lights and bus shelters; Solar Integrated Technologies, a British company that makes solar roofing materials that can be unrolled like mats; and Romag, a British glass maker that BP has contracted to place solar panels into glass panes.
Mr. Thomas is less optimistic about companies that make fuel cells, saying that he has cut his investment in the sector in the last year. "Most haven't got earnings at this stage," he said. "Companies that haven't got sustainable earnings, and are just bets on future growth, can suffer."
That is why Mr. Zhang, at T. Rowe Price, is not willing to make such a bet. "Long term, there will be breakthroughs that make these technologies commercially viable," he said, "but so far it's more science fair than reality."
-------- energy
New energy for reintegration
August 22, 2004
By I-wei J. Chang
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20040821-111140-6646r.htm
Russia's energy exports to East Asia may drive the Eurasian country's reintegration with the region and enhance the security and stability of an area marked by long-standing rivalries and growing energy demands, observers said at a recent conference in Washington.
"Energy will drive Russia's role of influence and integration in northeast Asia" after Russia disengaged from the region for more than a decade after the Soviet Union's demise, said John Fetter, president of FSI Energy, a Pennsylvania-based organization specializing in energy and environmental projects. Mr. Fetter made his remarks at a July 22-23 conference on Russia-Asia relations at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
In possession of the world's largest natural-gas reserves and eighth-largest oil reserves amidst substantially growing Asian energy demand, Russia could use its energy trade to improve bilateral relations with Asian countries, some scholars say. The building of pipelines crossing through Siberia and Sakhalin Island to China, Japan and the Korean peninsula would bring the region closer together, they say.
The industrialized societies of Japan, South Korea and Taiwan lack natural energy resources and heavily depend on foreign oil imports. China, largely self-sufficient in providing for its energy needs until 1993, when it became a net oil importer, replaced Japan last year as the second-largest petroleum consumer, trailing only the United States.
China's demand for oil will continue to surge as the country puts millions of new cars on the road, said James Dorian, a Washington-based international energy economist. Mr. Dorian noted that passenger car sales increased 75 percent in 2003.
Asian oil demand is predicted to outpace that of Western industrialized nations two- to threefold, according to the Energy Information Agency (EIA) of the U.S. Department of Energy.
Most Asian oil imports come from the Middle East, but the looming crisis in Iraq and terrorism have generated fears of a disruption in oil supply.
Diversifying oil sources is a common strategy, and Russia's energy market is an attractive alternative. Pipeline gas would be cheaper than oil imported from the Middle East and would reduce northeast Asia's foreign exchange burdens, some scholars say.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has made energy trade and developing the Russian Far East's economy among the main priorities for his second administration, is deciding whether to construct pipelines connecting the Russian city of Angarsk in eastern Siberia to Daqing, China, where there's an oil pipeline network, and another one to Nakhodka, Japan. Transneft, Russia's state-owned pipeline monopoly, is said to favor the Angarsk-Nakhodka option.
Natural gas is expected to be sent to Japan through a proposed pipeline, called Sakhalin I. Gas exports are scheduled to begin in 2008. Japanese companies Mitsubishi and Mitsui are partners with Shell in another project, Sakhalin II, to develop Russia's first liquefied natural gas (LNG) facility.
Russia's gross domestic product (GDP) grew by 7.3 percent in 2003, with petroleum, petroleum products and natural gas its main exports, according to the EIA, which says it has proven 60 billion barrels of oil reserves.
The Russian Far East, remote and largely economically isolated from the rest of the country, has considerable natural resources. However, much of the Russian Far East's vast volumes of untapped gas, condensate and oil reserves lack critical infrastructure and require foreign technology and investment to become profitable. The natural gas industry, in particular, is underdeveloped.
For Russia, which hasn't worked out a comprehensive policy for Asia, geopolitics may trump geoeconomics on energy issues. The Turkey-Russia oil pipeline has taught Russia it's risky to depend solely on a country to buy its major exports, said Michael Bradshaw, professor of human geography at the University of Leicester in Britain.
Proposed pipelines, such as the Angarsk-Nakhodka option, appeal to Russian leaders because they skirt China and won't make Russian dependent on China, with which it had turbulent times in its relations, as an outlet for its energy sources, Mr. Bradshaw said.
Russia and its Asian neighbors lack a solid track record of multilateral cooperation, and the relationship is characterized by "competition and conflicts of interest," Mr. Bradshaw said. Russia likely will opt for bilateral agreements, he said.
Though China is Russia's fourth-largest trading partner, Russia's trade relationship with China is the fastest growing among its trade partners. Last year, Sino-Russian trade reached a record high of $15.76 billion, according to China's General Administration of Customs.
Russian-Japanese trade reached $5 billion in 2003, an increase of 40 percent. Russian trade with South Korea increased by 27.3 percent to $4.18 billion last year.
The possibility that Russia will fail to provide supplies, due in part to the dominance of the Russian government in its energy industries, manifested recently with the controversy over Yukos, a private Russian oil company that the Kremlin accused of tax evasion. In late July, Yukos, the country's largest petroleum producer, was ordered to stop production, causing crude oil prices to jump to record-high levels.
Nevertheless, Russia could become a positive player in East Asia, with a potentially more significant role in security than in economics and trade, said Robert Sutter, professor in Asian Studies at Georgetown University. Regional rivalries dampen prospects for East Asian cooperation and create an uncertain security environment, Mr. Sutter said. As a result, nations start "hedging for security," he said.
"This pervasive hedging, which I think arises from these uncertain security situations in East Asia, provides, I think, the most important opportunity for Russia in the region," Mr. Sutter said. "They are a power that can be used in this hedging game that's very active in East Asia."
The rivalry between China and Japan has evolved from the Japanese military conquest of China and is now accentuated by the rise of China and the relative decline of Japan as economic and political leaders in Asia. China's economic and military modernization plus tensions over Taiwan make the Taiwan Strait a dangerous flash point of military conflict.
Japan generally has uneasy relations with its neighbors in East Asia and Southeast Asia, because of a history of Japanese colonialism and militarism, and North Korea's nuclear program has kept other countries on edge.
Historic mistrust has been exacerbated by a traditional view among Asian nations that energy resources are scarce, said Joseph Ferguson, director of Northeast Asia Studies at the National Bureau of Asia Research in Seattle.
"Very much in Asia, still, you have a mind-set of a zero-sum outcome to things and a mercantilist bent to economic and energy strategy," Mr. Ferguson said. "There's the perception that if we don't get these supplies, someone else is going to get them."
Asian governments continue to view energy in strategic terms, and the market plays a significant, though often subordinate, role to resolve energy questions. "There's less of a tendency to rely on markets to help resolve these issues," Mr. Ferguson said.
Asian governments are deeply involved in the energy sector. China National Petroleum Corp, a state-owned oil company, dominates energy production, price subsidies, imports and exports. However, Robert Manning, senior counselor of energy, technology and science policy in the U.S. State Department, said he doesn't agree with a zero-sum game to energy.
"There's plenty of oil and gas. The only problem is politics. The more oil and gas there is, the more everyone benefits in terms of supply and prices," Mr. Manning said. "There is more to be gained on a cooperative basis."
Energy is critical to the economic and industrial development of North Korea and thus constitutes a critical element of South Korea's unification plans, said Mr. Fetter of FSI Energy. Seoul has expressed a desire to reintegrate with North Korea economically and industrially, such as employing low-wage North Korea workers to remain economically competitive with Asian countries, Mr. Fetter said.
The geopolitical implications include economic growth, jobs and social stability. A gas industry in North Korea would enable massive employment of North Korean workers, Mr. Fetter said.
Mr. Fetter said he believes energy could prove useful in defusing the tensions on the Korean peninsula, especially in light of the North Korean nuclear crisis. "If North Korea is depending on gas and depending on their neighbors for their industrial and economic survival, the likelihood of them being in conflict with their neighbors is hugely diminished," Mr. Fetter said.
The Russians want to participate in the Korean energy situation, seeing that a decade of ceasing assistance to Pyongyang has created "a detrimental effect" on North Korea and on Russia's role and influence in the area, Mr. Fetter said. However, the Bush administration opposes pipelines running through North Korea to South Korea.
"The Russians are basically saying, 'Whether or not the U.S. is on board, we plan to reintegrate with our neighbors in northeast Asia. It's going to happen,' " Mr. Fetter said.
-------- OTHER
-------- health
Bush Health Care Plan Seems to Fall Short
Gap Grows Between Hard Data, Projections for Covering 10 Million Uninsured
By Ceci Connolly
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, August 22, 2004; Page A04
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A21929-2004Aug21?language=printer
If the Republican-controlled Congress enacted President Bush's entire health care agenda, as many as 10 million people who lack health insurance would be covered at a cost of $102 billion over the next decade, according to his campaign aides.
But when the Bush-Cheney team was asked to provide documentation, the hard data fell far short of the claims, a gap supported by several independent analyses.
Projections by the Congressional Budget Office, the Treasury Department, academics and the campaign's Web site suggest that under the best circumstances, Bush's plans for health care would extend coverage to no more than 6 million people over the next decade and possibly as few as 2 million.
"There's little reason to expect that there would be any reduction in the overall numbers of Americans without health insurance," Brookings Institution health policy expert Henry J. Aaron said. "We're swimming against a rather swift current in our efforts to reduce the number of uninsured, and the power of President Bush's proposals to move against that current is, it seems to me, very, very limited."
In his bid for a second term, Bush is reprising much of the health care agenda he ran on in 2000, including tax credits for individuals who purchase insurance, and the formation of new, largely unregulated purchasing pools for small businesses called association health plans.
His Democratic challenger, Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.), has released a health care agenda that is more ambitious and more expensive, with plans to expand government health programs, offer tax credits similar to Bush's and reimburse businesses for some of their most costly catastrophic cases.
Forecasting the cost and impact of policy proposals is always complicated, and both presidential campaigns try to spin the numbers to their advantage. Kerry, for example, estimates his health care proposals would cover 27 million people at a 10-year cost of $653 billion. But that assumes $300 billion in "savings" that the Bush team says might prove elusive. Without the savings, the cost of the Kerry package jumps to nearly $1 billion.
Health experts inside and out of the administration say many of the assertions Bush makes about his first-term health care record and his health proposals for a second term are exaggerated, incomplete or contrary to widely accepted analyses .
On the campaign trail, the president trumpets last year's enactment of a Medicare prescription drug package as his signature health achievement. In monetary terms, the new policy -- estimated to cost $564 billion over 10 years -- goes far beyond the $158 billion proposal candidate Bush ran on in 2000.
"When we came to office, too many older Americans could not afford prescription drugs. Medicare didn't pay for them," he said last month. "Leaders in both political parties had promised prescription drug coverage for years. We got it done. More than 4 million seniors have signed up for drug discount cards that provide real savings."
Left unsaid is that 2.9 million of them had no choice; they were enrolled automatically. And full implementation of the drug benefits will not occur until 2006.
Since Bush took office, the number of Americans without health insurance has climbed by 4 million, to nearly 44 million. On its Web site and at news briefings, the Bush campaign says that through its actions overseeing Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Program, the administration has "expanded eligibility to more than 2.6 million people."
The statement gives the impression "they have extended coverage to 2.6 million more, and that is not really true," said Diane Rowland, executive director of the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured. "In reality, only 200,000 of them got coverage" because of Bush administration efforts.
Megan Hauck, deputy policy director for health care of the Bush campaign, did not have figures but said she thought the Kaiser data were "awfully low."
Total enrollment in the two government health programs did rise during Bush's tenure -- by about 7.5 million. But for the vast majority, coverage was required by law, not the result of any policy change.
"Part of the reason more people were covered is the economy got so bad that people lost income," Rowland said. "There were more low-income people under Bush than previously, so they became eligible for public programs."
Although Hauck generally touts the campaign's projection that the Bush proposals would expand coverage to 10 million Americans, she said it could be as few as 6 million. Of the 10 million, half will use the proposed $1,000 tax credit ($3,000 for families) to buy insurance. The estimate comes from congressional testimony by a Treasury Department official who speculated that the 10-year, $70 billion proposal could result in coverage for 4 million to 5 million people.
One year earlier, the Bush budget set aside $89 billion for the same credit, claiming it would cover 4 million. Analysts say it is impossible to see how spending $20 billion less, at a time when premiums are much higher, could achieve the same level of coverage.
If the tax credit were passed, Jonathan Gruber, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, predicts some businesses will drop health insurance. If just 1 percent of people who currently receive coverage from an employer bought individual insurance instead, the Bush policy would result in 1.8 million newly insured, according to Gruber's analysis.
The next-largest element in the Bush agenda is a proposal to allow small businesses to band together to purchase insurance through new association health plans. Hauck said 2 million people would be covered if this were enacted. The figure came from a January 2000 CBO report in which the nonpartisan agency said 10,000 to 2 million people might join association health plans.
But in its July 2003 analysis of the Republican bill, the CBO concluded that 600,000 Americans would likely buy into the pools, at a cost of $254 million. Even the Bush campaign Web site reports that "600,000 would be newly insured," or 1.4 million fewer than Hauck's tally. And a recent study by Mercer Risk, Finance and Insurance Consulting found the proposal could result in a decline of 1 million insured, because small-business insurance premiums would likely rise.
Finally, the Bush campaign projects that 3 million people would be covered through new health savings accounts, which allow people to save money tax-free for out-of-pocket medical expenses. The new accounts, purchased in combination with high-deductible, catastrophic insurance, were created as part of last year's Medicare prescription drug package.
Hauck said an "internal estimate" by the campaign indicates the provision would extend insurance to 1.1 million people, though she could not provide supporting material. The Joint Committee on Taxation estimated the proposal would cost $6.7 billion, but officials there declined to say how many people that figure was based on.
MIT's Gruber and Paul Ginsburg, president of the Center for Studying Health System Change, said the impact would be minimal, because some people likely to purchase the new accounts are currently insured. Democrats say it is unfair for the Bush campaign to include the provision at all, since it is current law, not a proposal.
Bush wants to expand use of health savings accounts by also making the premiums tax-deductible, a proposal Gruber said would increase the number of uninsured by 350,000.
But Hauck said the campaign assumes that making the premiums deductible will result in coverage for an additional 1.9 million people. That figure is based on an article by Dan Perrin and Richard Nadler at the HSA Coalition, a group that has worked for the past decade to pass medical savings account legislation, according to its Web site.
The coalition includes conservative members such as the Christian Coalition, the 60 Plus Association and the Small Business Survival Committee.
-------- ACTIVISTS
TACTICS GALORE
If a Protest Is Planned to a T, Is It a Protest?
August 22, 2004
By MICHAEL SLACKMAN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/22/weekinreview/22slac.html
THE mayor of New York is approaching the coming protests at the Republican National Convention like a professional. A professional manager, that is, borrowing from a business school textbook.
He has set parameters (metal gates along demonstration routes). He has offered performance incentives (discounts at New York hotels, restaurants and stores for demonstrators). He has made sure that everyone knows what to expect (crowd-controlling hardware from handcuffs to $35,000 acoustic devices that emit ear-piercing shrieks at the demonstrators). And he has a vision for the future (one day, demonstrators will be able to gather in comfort at a new stadium).
But for the protest groups, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg might as well be Mayor Richard J. Daley of Chicago in 1968. Billyclub or no billyclub, they claim, his aim is to block dissent, to sanitize and strip it of all meaning.
"Protests have to have a leitmotif of disturbing ordinary life," said William Dobbs, a spokesman for the group United for Peace and Justice, which has battled Mr. Bloomberg for a permit to rally in Central Park. "Otherwise, it becomes meaningless. Protesting is an outcry. That doesn't mean it has to cause chaos, but there has to be a way for a protest to breathe. It's got to have an impact."
Of course, the activist groups themselves have tried to script their events to Broadway standards, and are as concerned with how their actions will be covered by television as they are with the actions themselves. In that sense, what United for Peace and Justice organizers might regard as government regulation of free speech by the police could also be seen as counter-programming by the city - an attempt to deliver competing messages to a mass audience.
The city takes the view that it is simply trying to accommodate the protesters while at the same time safeguarding everyone else. The New York Police Department said it thought that it had achieved a reasonable compromise in allowing protesters to march past Madison Square Garden and still gather in large numbers in the street.
"We have a lot of communication, there is a lot of negotiation, everybody knows everybody else," said Raymond W. Kelly, the New York City police commissioner. "I think it's a good thing. We are not stifling protest. In my mind we are facilitating it by doing that."
But John Lewis, an early leader of the civil rights movement, said that his activities in the 1960's almost never had the sanction of a permit.
Mr. Lewis, a Democratic Congressman from Georgia, said in an interview that it was dangerous when the government tried to manage opposition speech, or intimidate people from speaking out. "I think we lose a great deal," he said. "We lose what the founding fathers had in mind when they suggested that under the First Amendment people could come together and dissent."
The authorities counter that in light of the chaos at the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle in 1999, and the terror attacks of 2001, they must be more vigilant. United for Peace and Justice had sought a permit for 250,000 people for a rally in Central Park, but agreed to the city's demand that they gather on the isolated pavement of the West Side Highway. The group backed out when its coalition began to collapse.
Some protest leaders said that the city, through its refusal to grant the Central Park permit, in effect undermined the main group that was trying to work within the system.
"A deep concern," said Jason Flores-Williams, a law student at Rutgers and a protest organizer, "was that in some way the city was so dominating U.F.P.J. it was becoming a wing of the police. They were helping the city control protest."
As the convention nears, the city seems to be sending a signal. When Mr. Bloomberg announced his program for discounts to local businesses and attractions at a news conference, a group called Code Pink dropped a 40-foot banner from a hotel window nearby, reading, "They say, Welcome. We say, Where? Let us protest in Central Park." The city had the protesters arrested.
"We have hung banners out of other hotels and were kicked out," said Andrea Buffa, a national organizer with the group. "We were never arrested before. I think they were trying to make a point about political protests. I think it backfired. We got way more media coverage."
On the other hand, demonstrations that turn violent can backfire on the protesters. Jeff Jones, who works for an environmental advocacy group in New York, was a young protester in Chicago in 1968. He said that the debate then - whether confrontational tactics would undermine or assist their cause - is identical to the one now.
There is still no consensus on whether the events of 1968 helped the antiwar cause or backfired, helping to elect Richard Nixon. And there is still no agreement among the antiwar groups on whether to display as much anger as possible in New York, or to protest in a way that won't risk increasing voter sympathy for President Bush.
Then again, the events of this week could be driven as much by happenstance as by calculation. If tens of thousands of people do rush over to Central Park on Sunday, how will the police respond?
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