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NUCLEAR
Plutonium Shipment Plan Worries Lawmakers
Lawmakers Question Security Preparations
France Gives USA Access to Next Generation Nuclear Technology
Hungary restarts troubled nuclear reactor
Iran Expects to Be Acquitted in Next UN Nuclear Report
5th Worker Dies From Japan Nuke Accident
Nuclear Reactor Project in NK Likely to Be Suspended Again
N. Korea Continues Criticism of Bush
Brazil police seize black market uranium ore
Analysis: Nuclear power gaining popularity
Naval Reactors Director Bowman Named President-Elect
Nuclear plant's owner says it's completely safe
Nuclear industry appeals Yucca ruling
NRC gives former nuclear plant a clean bill of health
State's only commercial nuclear power plant back in service
Workers and officials celebrate removal of 3 million gallons
Nuclear Waste: Not in My Backyard (5 Letters)
Kerry pandering to nuclear paranoia
MILITARY
U.S.: American Had Delusions of Grandeur
Sudan Govt. Agrees to Bigger AU Force in Darfur
Japan Plans to Launch Spy Satellites
Britain to Deploy Warplanes to Afghanistan
Auditor Criticizes Iraq Contract
Firms Chosen to Build Anti - Missile Defense
US Awards Airliner Antimissile Contracts
Iraqi Troops Join U.S. Najaf Patrols
Iraq's Leading Shiite Cleric Looks to Broker Deal With Rebels
Smell of burnt flesh, blood smeared on streets of Najaf's Old city
2 Russian Jets Crash Within Minutes
Just Deserters?
Senior Officers May Be Charged
Intelligence Personnel Are Implicated
Inquiry Faults Intelligence Unit for Abuses at Iraqi Prison
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
First War-Crimes Case Opens at Guantánamo Base
Bin Laden Aide Is Charged at First Tribunal
Journalist Testifies in CIA Case
Senate Names Intelligence Panel
'Half of govt secrets shouldn't be secret'
Trading Privacy for Convenience
Vast Force Is Deployed for Security at Convention
New Jersey Asks U.S. to Help Pay Its Costs for Convention Security
Ridge, in New York, Declares 'We Are Prepared'
In run-up to Republican convention
Large force will protect convention
FBI Recovers 6 Stolen Laptops in Seattle
Bail Set for 2 Leaders of N.Y. Mosque
General says U.S. forces tortured Iraqis
POLITICS
Bioterror money remains unspent
Top Pentagon Leaders Faulted in Prison Abuse
Analysis Rumsfeld's War Plan Shares the Blame
Abuse Panel Says Rules on Inmates Need Overhaul
Findings on Abu Ghraib Prison:
Bush-Cheney Lawyer Advised Anti-Kerry Vets
Bush Campaign's Top Outside Lawyer Advised Veterans Group
Olympics Chiefs Want Bush Campaign to Back Off
Anti-Kerry book selling swiftly in D.C. area
The Curse of Dick Cheney
Bush Campaign's Top Outside Lawyer Resigns
OTHER
E.P.A. Says Mercury Taints Fish Across U.S.
American Anglers Face Record Number of Mercury Warnings
Blueberry Compound Fights Cholesterol, Study Finds
Fixing economy vital to Yemen
ACTIVISTS
Police Tear Gas, Arrest Protesters in Bangladesh
New York Judge Rules City Can Ban Protesters From Park
Group Will Rally in Park or Not at All, Leader Says
NY Court Says Anti - Bush Protesters Can't Use Park
GOP Delegates Meet With Anti - Bush Signs
Greenpeace protests Ford's plans to destroy Norwegian-built electric cars
Protest Warriors fuel rage on left
Too late for park protest, N.Y. says
Clock in New York's Times Square Counts War Cost
Slavery-protest march stirs opposition
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- accidents and safety
Plutonium Shipment Plan Worries Lawmakers
August 25, 2004
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-US-France-Plutonium.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Some congressional Democrats raised security concerns Wednesday about a proposed shipment of 300 pounds of weapons-grade plutonium from the United States to France for conversion into a mixed-oxide fuel.
The Energy Department plans to send the plutonium by truck from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico to the navy yard in Charleston, S.C., where it will be loaded on a ship bound for Cherbourg, France, as part of a U.S.-Russian nonproliferation program.
Rep. Jim Turner of Texas, the ranking Democrat on the Homeland Security Committee, said in a letter to Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham that he was concerned about the security of the shipment, especially when it reaches France.
``It is clear that extraordinary security is planned for the shipment,'' Turner said in his letter.
But, he said, he wants greater assurances that security for the shipment in France would be of the same level as planned for in the United States. He also questioned whether there had been adequate ``independent oversight and review'' of the shipment plan by other agencies.
Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., also raised concerns about the shipments. Markey, a member of the Homeland Security Committee, questioned whether the Department of Homeland Security has reviewed the plan.
The Energy Department says the shipment has been meticulously planned with high levels of security incorporated.
Once the shipment arrives in Cherbourg, it is to go by land to a French reprocessing facility, where the plutonium can be turned into a less dangerous mixed oxide. Then it is to be returned to the United States.
The Energy Department plans to use that material in four fuel assemblies at Duke Energy's Catawba nuclear power plant in South Carolina. The test assemblies are part of a U.S.-Russian program in which each country has pledged to dispose of 64 metric tons of excess plutonium.
The United States plans to dispose of its material by burning it in commercial nuclear reactors as mixed oxide. However, the initial shipments have to be sent to France because the United States has yet to build a mixed-oxide processing facility.
Details of the shipment, including timing, are classified, but it is expected to occur later this year. According to the Energy Department, the plutonium would be carried on two British vessels guarded by specially trained British troops and escorted by the U.S. Coast Guard in U.S. waters.
On the Net:
Energy Department: http://www.energy.gov
----
Lawmakers Question Security Preparations for Planned U.S. Plutonium Shipment to France
By Mike Nartker
Global Security Newswire
http://www.nti.org/d_newswire/issues/2004_8_25.html#73BC06AF
WASHINGTON - Noting concerns that terrorists may attempt to influence the U.S. November elections through an attack, Democratic lawmakers this month have raised questions concerning the security of a planned shipment of more than 100 kilograms of plutonium to France (see GSN, June 14).
The U.S. Energy Department is expected next month to ship 140 kilograms of plutonium to France to be converted into mixed-oxide fuel for use in testing at a U.S. nuclear power plant for possible future energy generation. The project is intended to help advance a U.S.-Russian nonproliferation program to eliminate a combined total of almost 70 tons of plutonium.
Antinuclear activists such as Greenpeace have long opposed the shipment, arguing that such transports could be vulnerable to terrorist attacks. To demonstrate, Greenpeace activists last year were able to stop and chain themselves to a truck carrying a plutonium shipment as it traveled from a site in northern France to a facility in the south. French activists have also posted online information on the time and location of three plutonium shipments that occurred over the last two weeks, Tom Clements of Greenpeace International said today.
In an Aug. 12 letter to U.S. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham released today, Representative Jim Turner (D-Texas) requested information on the department's efforts to ensure that the security of the plutonium shipment would be equal to that given to shipments of nuclear material conducted within the United States. Turner also requested information on how much control the United States would relinquish over the plutonium once it leaves the country, who would assume liability in the event of an accident and whether the recent elevation of the U.S. terrorist threat level influenced security preparations for the shipment.
"The consequences of the theft of this plutonium - enough for over 20 nuclear weapons - would be catastrophic," wrote Turner, the top Democrat on the House Select Committee on Homeland Security.
Turner's letter was prompted by the findings of a U.S. Government Accountability Office investigation into security measures for the plutonium shipment that he requested in June. A spokeswoman for Turner said today that the Energy Department has yet to reply to his letter.
In addition, Representative Edward Markey (D-Mass.), a leading critic of U.S. nuclear energy officials, yesterday sent letters to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Homeland Security Department requesting security-related information by Sept. 10 on the plutonium shipment.
"It appears to me that an attack on the American plutonium that will soon be shipped to France would not pose much of a challenge, since publicly available materials suggest the trucks previously have been very easily identified, followed and filmed while traveling along highways in France, and were only lightly guarded," Markey said yesterday in a statement.
The Energy Department's National Nuclear Security Administration did not respond to calls for comment today.
NRC spokesman David McIntyre today refused to comment directly on Markey's letter, referring security-related questions concerning the plutonium shipment to the Energy Department.
McIntyre did say, though, that the physical security and protection of the shipment was a "very important" consideration in the commission's decision in June to approve the export of the plutonium to France. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is familiar with French practices, McIntyre said, and is "confident" that security arrangements for the plutonium once it reaches France will be "adequate."
-------- europe
France Gives USA Access to Next Generation Nuclear Technology
August 25, 2004
PARIS, France, (ENS)
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/aug2004/2004-08-25-02.asp
U.S. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham Monday signed an agreement with France's Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) Chairman Alain Bugat that will allow cooperation between the Department of Energy's (DOE) Office of Nuclear Energy, Science and Technology and the French Atomic Energy Commission.
The agreement provides DOE access to the French PHENIX fast spectrum test reactor, which has "a capability that no longer exists in the United States," said Abraham.
The research advances the DOE's plan to build a spent nuclear fuel reprocessing facility in the United States that produces nuclear fuel from the mixed oxides of plutonium and uranium (MOX) for use in nuclear reactors. France has such a facility, the Cogema MOX fabrication facility at La Hague.
Under the agreement signed Monday, the DOE's Office of Nuclear Energy, Science and Technology and the CEA will perform an experimental irradiation project in the PHENIX reactor.
The PHENIX fast spectrum test reactor is located in the south of France southwest of Grenoble. (Photo courtesy CEA)
PHENIX, which originally began operation in 1973, is the only European power reactor where experiments in the transmutation of long-lived radionuclides are conducted, as required by a 1991 French law on research into radioactive waste management.
The project will test various types of fuel loaded with minor actinides - highly toxic, long-lived radioactive material contained in spent nuclear fuel. The experiment is intended to acquire data that will permit selection of the best performing fuel for future use in high-level nuclear waste transmuting systems, the DOE said.
The transmutation of nuclear waste involves treating spent reactor fuel to fundamentally change its characteristics. Light water reactors using MOX fuel, fast-spectrum reactors, and accelerator-driven systems are the transmutation systems now under consideration by the Energy Department, according a 2003 document produced by the agency's Office of Nuclear Energy, Science and Technology.
Secretary Abraham said Monday, "Nuclear energy technology has the potential to improve the quality of life for people around the world if we are successful in solving issues such as economics, waste and proliferation."
"This new implementing arrangement with the CEA is a positive step forward and will provide for updating, strengthening and expanding the prior understanding of nuclear fuel and fuel cycle related research and development," he said.
U.S. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham (Photo courtesy DOE) Abraham said the cooperation has provided access to French research and development that has saved the United States tens of millions of dollars.
The agreement builds on a meeting between DOE and CEA in September 2000 during the Clinton administration, said Abraham. At that meeting both organizations signed an agreement covering research and development cooperation in such areas as the Advanced Fuel Cycle Initiative, Generation IV Nuclear Energy Systems Initiative and the Nuclear Hydrogen Initiative.
The Advanced Fuel Cycle Initiative is the Energy Department's term for the MOX fuel program.
In March 1999, the DOE signed a contract with a consortium comprised of Duke Energy, Cogema, and Stone & Webster to design and operate a Mixed Oxide (MOX) Fuel Fabrication Facility, design the commercial MOX fuel, and use MOX fuel in commercial nuclear plants in the United States.
The Advanced Fuel Cycle Initiative is aimed at "developing proliferation resistant fuel cycle technologies to reduce the volume and toxicity of commercial spent nuclear fuel and maximize energy from nuclear fuel," Director of the DOE Office of Science Dr. Raymond Orbach told the House Science Committee in February.
In 2003 the Los Alamos National Laboratory Systems Engineering and Integration Group produced an analysis of the Advanced Fuel Cycle Initiative that outlines exactly how it is intended to work.
"The Advanced Fuel Cycle Initiative baseline scenario now is: burning uranium oxide (UOX) in a light-water reactor, the spent UOX is then processed with the Pu [plutonium] recycled into a MOX burning light-water reactor and the minor actinides saved for burning in a fast spectrum burner, and, once fast spectrum burners are now deployed, the separated minor actinides and spent MOX are recycled in a fast spectrum burner until completely burned," the Los Alamos technical group explained.
The Los Alamos group said its analysis "is and will be used to advise DOE on optimal transmutation strategies that feed into the Secretary of Energy's recommendation to Congress in 2007 as what to do about stockpiled civilian nuclear waste."
The Los Alamos team analyzed the effects of introducing multiple MOX recycles into a transmuting fuel cycle and found "the benefit of mixed oxide (MOX) recycling saturates at one recycle."
A MOX fuel assembly. Thirty nuclear facilities throughout the world use MOX fuel, which is composed of 95 percent uranium oxide and five percent plutonium oxide. Low enriched fuel normally used in U.S. commercial power plants contains only uranium oxide. (Photo courtesy Greenpeace France) Environmentalists have opposed the MOX fuel program for years. President of the Nuclear Control Institute Paul Leventhal objected when the Bush administration first announced its interest in transmutation in its National Energy Policy of May 2001.
"The Bush energy plan endorses consideration of conventional reprocessing for waste management, which also separates plutonium for use as fuel in reactors. It also presses for pyroprocessing and accelerator transmutation of plutonium and other long-lived radioactive products in nuclear reactor spent fuel. Both approaches to reprocessing are uneconomic and dangerous," Leventhal said at the time.
Leventhal warned of the "enormous cost projected for establishing a pyroprocessing and transmutation system." The Department of Energy estimated in 1999 that this program would cost $280 billion and take 100 years to complete, he said.
Transmutation is "highly problematical and does not eliminate the need for a final waste repository," said Leventhal.
The Nuclear Control Institute (NCI) warned as early as 1999 that transmutation of spent nuclear fuel is no guarantee against proliferation of weapons-useable plutonium.
"Accelerator transmutation proponents claim that their process is 'proliferation-resistant' because the spent fuel is processed using "electrorefining," which does not separate plutonium from other actinides and a few rare-earth fission products," the NCI said in a letter5 distributed to the Senate and key members of the Clinton administration on July 19, 1999. "However, numerous reviews have demonstrated that this process can be easily modified to produce purified, weapons-usable material."
Paul Leventhal is now president emeritus of the Nuclear Control Institute. (Photo courtesy NCI) "Even if the plutonium is not purified, the residual fission product contamination is minor and would not provide an effective barrier to diversion or theft," NCI cautions. "Finally, the minor actinides themselves are now understood to be weapons-usable materials, so their presence will not reduce the attractiveness of the electrorefining product."
Still, the Bush administration is moving steadily towards the next generation of nuclear reactors. Generation IV refers to the development and demonstration of next generation nuclear energy systems that could be deployed commercially by 2030.
The DOE says these technologies "offer advantages in the areas of economics, safety and reliability, sustainability."
The French PHENIX fast spectrum test reactor is expected to play an important role in the development of the Generation IV international program.
The United States is a member of the Generation IV International Forum that now includes 10 other nations - Argentina, Brazil, Canada, the European Union, France, Japan, the Republic of Korea, the Republic of South Africa, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. The Forum members are currently negotiating international legal agreements to enable advanced nuclear research to be conducted on a multilateral basis.
The Forum is organized into interest groups associated with each of the six selected Generation IV systems. Selected in 2002, the six technologies are defined briefly by the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory, which Secretary Abraham established in 2002 as the center for the DOE's Generation IV nuclear research.
- Gas-Cooled Fast Reactor (GFR) features a fast-neutron-spectrum, helium-cooled reactor and closed fuel cycle
- Very-High-Temperature Reactor (VHTR) a graphite-moderated, helium-cooled reactor with a once-through uranium fuel cycle
- Supercritical-Water-Cooled Reactor (SCWR) a high-temperature, high-pressure water-cooled reactor that operates above the thermodynamic critical point of water
- Sodium-Cooled Fast Reactor (SFR) features a fast-spectrum, sodium-cooled reactor and closed fuel cycle for efficient management of actinides and conversion of fertile uranium. MOX fuel is one of two fuel options that exist for this type of reactor. The other is a mixed uranium-plutonium-zirconium metal alloy.
- Lead-Cooled Fast Reactor (LFR) features a fast-soectrum lead of lead/bismuth eutectic liquid metal-cooled reactor and a closed fuel cycle for efficient conversion of fertile uranium and management of actinides
- Molten Salt Reactor (MSR) produces fission power in a circulating molten salt fuel mixture with an epithermal-spectrum reactor and a full actinide recycle fuel cycle
Generation IV reactors will include energy conversion systems that produce hydrogen, desalinated water and process heat, William D. Magwood, IV, director of the DOE's Office of Nuclear Energy, Science and Technology, told a House subcommittee in March.
Find out more about Generation IV nuclear systems online at: http://energy.inel.gov/gen-iv/
View a DOE projection for disposal of spent fuel generated under an assumed expansion of nuclear power in the United States online at: http://www.ne.doe.gov/pdf/AFCICompRpt2003.pdf
Learn more about MOX fuel at: http://www.cogema-inc.com/FAQs/MOX_fuel.htm
----
Hungary restarts troubled nuclear reactor
Wednesday, August 25, 2004
By Associated Press
http://www.enn.com/news/2004-08-25/s_26698.asp
BUDAPEST, Hungary - Hungary's only nuclear power plant has restarted a reactor shut down since April 2003 due to an accident, officials said Tuesday.
The No. 2 reactor at the plant at Paks, 120 kilometers (70 miles) south of Budapest, has been running at 5 percent capacity since it was restarted Thursday, plant spokesman Istvan Mittler said.
The output of the reactor will slowly be increased and tested before it is reconnected to the national power grid, Mittler said.
The Hungarian Atomic Energy Authority, the country's nuclear watchdog, gave the plant permission last month to restart the reactor for a test period of four months. Greenpeace and other environmentalist groups protested, saying that the risks involved in restarting the reactor had not been fully investigated.
The April 11, 2003, accident led to small amounts of radioactive gas being released into the atmosphere after uranium fuel rods overheated and warped due to a failed cooling system. The damaged rods had to be sealed in the deep-water tank next to the reactor and have remained stranded there since.
An operation to recover the rods will probably take place in early 2005, plant officials say.
The nuclear watchdog ruled that no operation to recover the rods may take place while the reactor is operating.
The plant's other three reactors were operating normally. Paks provides around 40 percent of Hungary's electrical energy.
-------- iran
Iran Expects to Be Acquitted in Next UN Nuclear Report
Wed Aug 25, 2004
(Reuters)
By Parisa Hafezi and Louis Charbonneau
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20040825/wl_nm/nuclear_iran_dc_2
TEHRAN/VIENNA - Iran said on Wednesday it has cleared up all major outstanding ambiguities over its nuclear program to reassure the world it was not trying to make an atomic bomb, but diplomats at the U.N. disagreed.
Washington has accused Iran of secretly developing a nuclear weapons program under cover of a civilian atomic energy program. Iran says its ambitions are limited to the peaceful generation of electricity.
A senior Iranian official said the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the U.N. nuclear watchdog, would give Iran's nuclear program a clean bill of health in its next report, due to be circulated in the coming days among the members of the IAEA's board of governors.
"The new report is a clear sign of our progress in solving technical ambiguities with the agency," state media quoted Hossein Mousavian, secretary of the foreign policy committee of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, as saying.
Some Western and non-aligned diplomats in Vienna disagreed, saying the report would be inconclusive and would neither confirm nor reject the view that Iran has a covert military nuclear program.
"I expect that there will not be any new negative news about Iran and the IAEA," a Western diplomat on the IAEA's 35-member board of governors told Reuters. "There will be some questions answered but a few new questions may be raised. And there are still some old, unresolved negative issues."
The IAEA is still probing the origin of traces of enriched uranium found at Iranian sites and the purpose of its interest in advanced P2 centrifuges, which can produce bomb-grade uranium twice as quickly as its less advanced P1 centrifuges.
Iran says the traces of enriched uranium were caused by contamination from components bought on the black market. Tehran also says its work on P2 centrifuges, which can be used to make bomb-grade fuel, has not gone further than preliminary stages.
IRAN INSISTS ON RIGHT TO ENRICH URANIUM
Several Western diplomats said that while the IAEA investigation of Iran's nuclear program was proceeding relatively smoothly, with inspectors getting access to sites in the country, there were serious concerns about Iran's refusal to fully suspend its uranium enrichment program.
He said the report would probably mention this problem.
"The real problems are on the political side," said a Western diplomat familiar with the initiative of France, Britain and Germany, which are trying to persuade Tehran to abandon uranium enrichment in exchange for a promise of access to peaceful nuclear and other technology.
One diplomat said that a round of talks with the three in Paris last month was a "total failure" as it ended with Iran insisting on its sovereign right to enrich uranium.
Tehran promised not to enrich any uranium for the time being but said it would continue making, assembling and testing centrifuges used in the enrichment process -- despite having agreed to suspend all enrichment-related activities.
The Europeans warned Iran that normal trade relations with the EU would not be possible if Iran maintained the capacity to develop weapons-grade uranium and plutonium, the diplomat said.
Washington is pushing the IAEA to report Iran to the U.N. Security Council, which can impose economic sanctions. Vienna diplomats said that while a report to the Security Council could not be ruled out, it was unlikely to happen in September, when the IAEA board meets to discuss Iran's nuclear program.
Hosseini renewed Iran's call for its nuclear case to be removed from the U.N. nuclear watchdog's agenda afterwards, something which Vienna diplomats said was highly unlikely.
-------- japan
5th Worker Dies From Japan Nuke Accident
August 25, 2004
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Japan-Nuclear-Accident.html
TOKYO (AP) -- A worker injured in Japan's deadliest nuclear-plant accident earlier this month has died, raising the death toll to five, an official said Wednesday.
Masaru Kameiwa, 30, had been severely burned in the Aug. 9 accident, which occurred when a corroded cooling pipe -- carrying boiling water and superheated steam -- burst at a plant in Mihama, about 200 miles west of Tokyo.
Kameiwa died on Wednesday at a hospital in Fukui, northern Japan, said Fukui prefectural government spokesman Katsunori Kondo.
Four workers at the plant were killed nearly instantly, and seven others were injured. No radiation was released.
Kondo said one of the injured workers had been released from the hospital after recovering, but five others, including three with serious injuries, were still receiving treatment.
The accident deepened concerns about the safety of Japan's 52 nuclear plants, which supply about a third of the country's electricity. Two workers died in a radiation leak at a fuel reprocessing plant in northeast of Tokyo in 1999.
The Mihama plant's operator, Kansai Electric Power Co., has admitted that a ruptured part of the pipe had not been inspected since 1996. It is being investigated on suspicion of negligence leading to death.
-------- korea
Nuclear Reactor Project in NK Likely to Be Suspended Again
Aug. 25, 2004
Yonhap,
http://www.minjok.com/english/index.php3?code=25212
A U.S.-led international consortium is seeking to suspend for one more year the construction of a multi-billion dollar nuclear reactor project in North Korea, a South Korean official said Wednesday.
The Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization announced in December a one-year suspension of two power-generating nuclear reactors under construction in North Korea under a 1994 deal.
The decision was part of efforts by the United States and its allies to pressure the North's communist regime to make concessions on its nuclear weapons program.
Despite multilateral efforts to resolve the dispute, no significant progress has since been made. Furthermore, Pyongyang has recently voiced skepticism about the need for further talks on the issue.
"The project is linked with North Korea's nuclear issue," said South Korean Unification Minister Chung Dong-young in testimony to the National Assembly's committee handling unification, diplomacy and trade.
Chung said South Korea and other KEDO executive board member countries are discussing whether to extend the one-year suspension. The other KEDO executive members include the United States, Japan and the European Union.
Chang Sun-sup, the South Korean envoy in charge of the project, said KEDO officials have already sounded out the opinions of all executive member countries about suspending the project further.
The US$4.6 billion reactor project is a key part of the 1994 deal, under which North Korea agreed to freeze and eventually dismantle its plutonium-based nuclear weapons program.
The deal unraveled in 2002 when U.S. officials said North Korea had admitted having another secret nuclear weapons program using enriched uranium. The North later denied the allegation.
When it was halted, the reactor project progressed about 30 percent. The project, originally scheduled to be completed by 2004, has been delayed for funding and other problems.
KEDO's latest move is certain to anger North Korea which is in deep conflict with the United States over its nuclear program.
The North accuses the United States of scheming a preemptive military attack on it behind the smokescreen of dialogue.
The CIA believes that the communist country has already developed one or two crude atomic bombs and has enough weapons-grade plutonium to make several more.
----
N. Korea Continues Criticism of Bush
Comments Seen in U.S. as Effort to Disrupt Talks on Pyongyang's Nuclear Program
By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, August 25, 2004; Page A14
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A30014-2004Aug24.html
For the second straight day, North Korea yesterday hurled unusually personal criticism at President Bush, calling him a "fascist tyrant" and "human trash." The official statements strongly suggested the communist nation is seeking to disrupt further talks on its nuclear programs before the U.S. presidential election, some U.S. officials said.
Senior-level talks are planned for next month, but North Korea has balked at holding working-level talks this month that would pave the way for another six-nation negotiating round. It told the Chinese it has substantive problems with holding such talks now.
North Korea "can no longer pin any hope on the six-party talks, and there is a question as to whether there is any need for it to negotiate with the U.S. anymore," North Korea's official KCNA news agency said.
On Monday, in a statement attributed to Pyongyang's foreign ministry, North Korea likened Bush to Adolf Hilter and said recent comments by Bush on the campaign trail made it "quite impossible" to attend any talks and "deprived [North Korea] of any elementary justification to sit at the negotiating table with the U.S."
North Korea said yesterday that further talks are pointless and pointedly said it would "bolster up its war deterrent'' -- code for its nuclear arsenal -- "both in quality and quantity in order to beat back any aggressor at a single blow." U.S. intelligence analysts believe that North Korea has in the past year significantly increased its stockpile of nuclear material for weapons.
North Korea's ire was raised when Bush, campaigning last week in Wisconsin, called North Korean leader Kim Jong Il a "tyrant" when he alluded to the administration's effort to enlist other countries to restrain North Korea's nuclear ambitions. "I felt it was important to bring other countries into the mix, like China and Japan and South Korea and Russia, so there's now five countries saying to the tyrant in North Korea, 'Disarm, disarm,' " Bush said at a campaign event.
Publicly, administration officials have dismissed North Korea's statements as typical bluster by the reclusive state in advance of negotiations. "I wouldn't make the connection, certainly, between these comments and the talks," State Department spokesman J. Adam Ereli said yesterday. "I would simply reiterate what we said yesterday, that obviously we take issue with those statements. We do not believe they're appropriate to diplomatic discourse."
But some administration officials believe Pyongyang is seeking to scuttle the talks in order to deprive Bush of any political advantage from movement on the Korean issue. Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kerry has criticized Bush for not negotiating directly with North Korea, a long-sought goal of North Koreans in more than a year of talks.
"They were looking for an excuse, and Bush calling Kim a 'tyrant' is a ready-made excuse," an administration official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity. He noted that the language in the statements was unusually pointed and personal and appeared designed to give Kerry an opportunity to say the Bush administration had mishandled the negotiations.
"Had Bush [had] even an iota of elementary reason, morality and ability to judge reality as a human being, he would have not dared defile the political system of his dialogue partner so malignantly," the KCNA statement said.
"Bush is, in fact, a thrice-cursed fascist tyrant and man-killer as he revived the fascist war doctrine which had been judged by humankind long ago and is now bringing dark clouds of a new Cold War to hang over our planet and indiscriminately massacring innocent civilians after igniting the Afghan and Iraqi wars," the statement said. It added: "It is the greatest tragedy for the U.S. that Bush, a political idiot and human trash, still remains in the presidential office of the world's only 'superpower,' styling himself "an emperor of the world.'"
-------- latinamerica
Brazil police seize black market uranium ore
Wednesday, August 25, 2004
By Reese Ewing,
Reuters
http://www.enn.com/news/2004-08-25/s_26688.asp
SAO PAULO, Brazil - Police have seized a load of uranium and thorium ore taken from a secret mine in the jungle in northern Brazil and destined for sale in the black market, an official said Tuesday.
Based on a lead from an informant, federal police seized 1,320 pounds of ore containing the radioactive metals in a pickup truck about 75 miles from Macapa, capital of Amapa state, near the mouth of the Amazon River.
Police said they believed it was Brazil's first such case.
The Brazilian Nuclear Industries (INB) group, which produces nuclear fuel for atomic power plants, said the natural ore could not be used to make a nuclear bomb and the confiscated quantity did not inspire fear.
"Judging by the quantity mentioned in reports and because it is ore, the material hardly has any commercial value," INB said. Police said they believed the shipment's owner had told the prospective buyer it had been refined to metal.
"We got a fax from the laboratory in Rio de Janeiro yesterday saying the cargo had significant levels of uranium and thorium," officer Luiz Carlos said, adding that the truck was seized last month.
Samples were sent to another lab in Minas Gerais, which is expected to report on the concentration of the radioactive material, Carlos said.
Police said that based on confessions from some of those involved, they estimated that the owner of the cargo was expecting to get over 1 million reais (US$330,000) for the ore.
"Neither 600 kg nor 6,000 kg of uranium and/or thorium ore is hazardous for human health," the INB said. Uranium has to be extracted from ore and highly enriched to make a bomb.
Pure uranium would have various applications in guidance devices and shielding material. Thorium is expected to be used as a nuclear reactor fuel in the future but is not widely used today. It is used in portable lamps and various metal alloys.
The investigation was continuing. A man fled from the truck, carrying the illegal material when police stopped it.
"The location of the mine is still unknown. We believe it is in the jungle in the Serra de Navio region," Carlos said. "This is the first case that we've run across in the state, and I believe in Brazil," he said.
Brazil has the world's sixth-biggest reserve of uranium. It is considered government property and is strictly regulated.
Natural uranium is sufficiently radioactive to expose a photographic plate in an hour or so. Much of the Earth's internal heat is considered attributable to the presence of uranium and thorium.
Uranium on the Earth's surface, not as rare as once thought, is now considered more plentiful than mercury or silver.
Additional reporting by Andrei Khalip
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
Analysis: Nuclear power gaining popularity
Wednesday, August 25, 2004
By ANDREA R. MIHAILESCU,
UPI Correspondent
http://www.menafn.com/qn_news_story.asp?StoryId=CqsWoWeidBNvJBgvHCI1WB3DLCI1HBMfSExm
WASHINGTON, Aug. 25 (UPI) -- Nuclear power has become increasingly popular worldwide, particularly in the developing world, as a source of energy consumption, yet accidents involving radiation leaks continue in some of the world's safest nuclear plants. Amid rising oil prices, developing countries have little alternative but to depend on nuclear power.
Developing countries are increasing their nuclear power usage. Armenia has one working reactor; Bulgaria has two; Ukraine three, and Romania one. One nuclear power plant is under construction in Iran and three more are planned. A total of 27 nuclear power plants are under construction in developing countries.
Within the next several decades, energy consumption will at least double or triple in developing countries with growing populations and economies, according to Turkey's Hurriyet.
Building nuclear power plants is expensive, but their operational costs are relatively low. It is not difficult to obtain nuclear fuels such as uranium or thorium. Nuclear power plants also produce virtually no carbon emissions.
These power plants currently generate 16 percent of the electricity the world consumes, and currently account for 78 percent of electricity generation in France, about half of Belgium and Sweden's electricity, 28 percent of Germany's electricity, 20 percent in the United States, and 17 percent in Russia.
But even as nuclear power becomes increasingly popular worldwide, some developed countries are considering shutting down their plants amid plant malfunctions. Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, and Sweden have decided to gradually phase out their nuclear power plants.
The oldest operating powerplant in Spain, the Jose Cabrera power station in Almonacid de Zorita, will be shut down on April 30, 2006. In 1994, more than 170 cracks were detected in the cover of the reactor vessel; the cracks were only repaired in 1997. Dismantling the station is expected to start in 2008 and completed in 2014 at a projected cost of $165 million, according to Spain's National Radioactive Waste Company.
Sweden's Nuclear Power Inspectorate intends to impose stricter safety measures on the country's nuclear power plants, which generate about half of the country's electricity, to bring the country into line with IAEA and UN standards, according to the Svenska Dagbladet. Renovation work will total $809 million. Citizens voted in 1980 to phase out nuclear power by 2010, but the deadline was scrapped in 1997 because the country had not worked out how to replace lost generating capacity.
Nuclear power plants have seen massive leaks throughout the decades in some of the world's safest plants as well as the world's worst, and increased safety measures by the IAEA and the UN nuclear watch dog have not helped prevent such leaks. The third-safest power plant in Russia, the Volgodonsk facility in the Rostov region, had to be stopped twice within the past nine months due to emergencies in November 2003 and January 2004.
Even Japan's Mihama plutonium-thermal plant, considered the world's safest power plant, saw four workers killed when steam leaked from a turbine reactor on August 9.
Japan's Asahi Shimbun reported the accident as the worst ever in Japan's nuclear powerplants: "Trust was lost and the accident will have a great impact on future nuclear power development." And as nuclear powerplants get older and older, problems like pipe corrosion and equipment malfunction may increase.
Following the Mihama accident, Greenpeace Russia has expressed concerns over conditions at Russian nuclear plants. "Japan's nuclear power plants are among the best in the world," Greenpeace said in a press release on Aug. 10. But in 2003, Japan failed to disclose the critical state of several of its reactors, which led to an immediate halt in operations at several nuclear plants.
Greenpeace reported that major disasters in Russia's nuclear plants were similar to the accident in Japan. "There will be accidents as long as the nuclear power industry exists, and there could be a new Chernobyl at any moment," Russian Greenpeace head Ivan Blokov told Interfax on Aug. 8.
Russia has a history of accidents. Three people were killed in an accident at the Leningrad nuclear powerplant on February 6, 1974. The facility was the venue for another disaster in autumn 1975, which involved a radiation leak that continued for more than a month. Fourteen people were killed in an accident at the Balakovo nuclear plant on June 27, 1985.
A radiation leak also happened on U.S. soil when the 1979 Three Mile Island reactor leaked radioactive material.
Despite such malfunctions, developing countries continue to construct nuclear plants. A newly-built reactor in Ukraine, launched at the Khmelnytskyy nuclear power plant, went offline due to massive overheating on August 13. Ukraine has had several radiation leaks throughout the decade, according to Washington-based Nuclear Threat Initiative reports.
Equipment problems have also developed in two China-based power plants which Russia helped China build. Russian Federal Atomic Energy Agency Head Alexander Rumyantsev said that glitches arose in one reactor's equipment but hopes to eliminate those glitches within the next two months. Regarding another reactor close to Beijing, Rumyantsev told Interfax on Aug. 12, "Some parts of the equipment, however, have started to malfunction, but we know how to fix them."
Slovenia's only nuclear power plant shut down automatically on August 10 as a safety precaution after a mistake occurred in the system that regulates the amount of nuclear reaction taking place in the reactor. According to a statement from the Nuclear Power Plant Krsko, the control rods that regulate the amount of fission lost power after their power source broke down on the evening of Aug. 9.
Another issue to consider is that nuclear technology can be used to make weapons as well as electricity. China and Pakistan signed a contract to supply a reactor pressure vessel for the second phase of the Chashma Nuclear Power Station in Pakistan. China Nuclear Energy Industry Corporation Deputy General Manager Huang Guojun said Pakistan had pledged that technology would be used solely for peaceful purposes with no transferal to a third parties. It is difficult to ignore the fact that nuclear technology has benefits in addition to its primary function of electricity generation.
With no oil or gas of its own, Turkey has been debating the issue of construction of nuclear power plants in the country. But even if Turkey decides not to construct nuclear plants of its own, the country will be affected by any accidents that may occur in nearby countries -- just as in the case of the 1986 Chernobyl accident.
Earthquake-prone countries such as Armenia may see disastrous radiation leaks to one of its units if an earthquake occurs. One of Armenia's power plant units has been shut down for repairs and nuclear fuel loading in late July, according to plant General Director Garik Markosian.
Proper disposal of nuclear waste, meanwhile, is a growing problem in developing and developed countries. In short, nuclear power plants may be environmentally friendly and cheaper to operate generating a cheaper source of energy consumption -- but with the risks the plants pose, no one wants to live near one.
"Until about 2 billion years ago, it was impossible to have any life on Earth. That is, there was so much radiation on Earth you couldn't have any life -- fish or anything. Gradually, about 2 billion years ago, the amount of radiation on this planet reduced and made it possible for some form of life to begin. It started in the seas, I understand from what I've read. And that amount of radiation has been gradually decreasing because all radiation has a half-life, which means ultimately there will be no radiation. Now, when we go back to using nuclear power, we are creating something that nature tried to destroy to make life possible," said Admiral Hyman Rickover, known as the father of the U.S. nuclear navy.
----
Naval Reactors Director Bowman Named President-Elect at Nuclear Energy Institute
Aug. 25, 2004
PRNewswire
SOURCE Nuclear Energy Institute Web Site: http://www.nei.org
http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=104&STORY=/www/story/08-25-2004/0002238288&EDATE=
WASHINGTON -- Admiral Frank L. "Skip" Bowman has been named president and chief executive officer-elect at the Nuclear Energy Institute, the organization announced today.
Bowman will begin at NEI on Jan. 1, 2005, working with NEI President and CEO Joe Colvin during a transition period, after which Bowman will begin serving as President and Chief Executive Officer. Bowman is Director of Naval Nuclear Propulsion, Naval Sea Systems Command, and will retire from the Navy at the end of the year. He also is deputy administrator - Naval Reactors in the National Nuclear Security Administration at the Department of Energy. Bowman is the third successor to Admiral Hyman G. Rickover.
In these dual positions, Bowman is responsible for 105 reactors aboard 83 warships and four training sites. He also oversees two Department of Energy laboratories in Pittsburgh and Schenectady, N.Y., that employ approximately 6,000 scientists. Bowman also supervises the 25,000 Naval officers and enlisted personnel who operate the Naval reactors program safely and reliably. U.S. Naval nuclear ships have safely traveled more than 130 million miles, equivalent to more than 5,000 times around the earth.
"Admiral Bowman's strong leadership qualities, political experience and knowledge of nuclear technology make him an excellent choice to lead NEI and the industry at a time when there is great opportunity for both our current plants and the potential for new plant deployment," said George Hairston, chairman of the NEI Board of Directors and president and chief executive officer at Southern Nuclear Operating Company. "He has demonstrated exemplary leadership of the U.S. Navy's nuclear fleet -- maintaining a world-class safety and operational record for more than 100 reactors on U.S. Navy ships around the world.
"Joe Colvin has provided superb leadership to our industry as NEI's CEO. He has helped the industry create the opportunities that are before us now. Further, his expertise and vision have developed NEI into the policy leader for our industry," Hairston continued. "The nuclear industry is grateful for Joe's significant contributions."
"Admiral Bowman brings to the industry the policy and technical expertise that is imperative as we look to expand the significant role of nuclear energy to our nation's energy security, environmental protection and economic growth," Hairston said.
"Skip has overseen the design, development, maintenance and operation of reactors onboard 40 percent of the Navy's major combatant fleet, and he has demonstrated leadership that has earned him international recognition," said Colvin, NEI's president and CEO since 1996. "He is well respected by members of Congress with whom he has worked during his Navy career and by commissioners at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC)."
In his role directing the joint U.S. Navy and DOE program, Bowman has worked closely with Congress and the Executive Branch on policy issues in addition to maintaining an impeccable efficiency and safety record among the U.S. Navy's nuclear fleet. Bowman also meets with the NRC on issues related to naval nuclear propulsion.
"America is at a crossroads in determining our energy future, and what our quality of life will be in the decades ahead," Bowman said. "This is a critical time for our nation and for the nuclear energy industry. Nuclear energy plays and will continue to play an important role in our nation's energy future. We must take the necessary steps to maintain the high levels of safe and reliable operations at our current plants and ensure that these plants as well as new reactors are part of a diverse energy supply for our high-tech, electricity-driven economy. NEI plays an important role in leading the industry in taking those steps. I am proud to have been selected and look forward to the role I will play in that."
Prior to these assignments, Bowman served as Chief of Naval Personnel from 1994 to 1996, as Director of Political-Military Affairs on the Joint Staff from 1992 to 1994, and as deputy director of operations on the Joint Staff from 1991 to 1992. Bowman has served on active duty for 38 years.
The Nuclear Energy Institute is the nuclear energy industry's policy organization. This news release and additional information about nuclear energy are available on NEI's Internet site at http://www.nei.org
Contact NEI's media relations staff at 202-739-8000 during business hours or 703-644-8805 after hours and weekends.
-------- maryland
Nuclear plant's owner says it's completely safe
By Lorraine Mirabella
Baltimore Sun Staff
August 25, 2004
http://www.baltimoresun.com/business/bal-bz.calvert25aug25,1,6756051.story?coll=bal-business-headlines
Constellation Energy's two-reactor plant at Calvert Cliffs is set on a cliff overlooking the Chesapeake Bay, taking up about a fifth of a 2,100-acre former tobacco plantation that is now mostly a wildlife habitat for eagles, ospreys and deer. Its Unit 1 has been producing power since 1975, Unit 2 since 1977. Some 1,000 workers keep the plant humming.
The plant's two nuclear reactors are housed in a solid concrete containment building in concrete structures that are designed to contain any heat or pressure or radioactive materials "in the unlikely event of a nuclear event," said Barbara Wagner, a spokeswoman for the plant.
"It could withstand a catastrophe, like a plane crash or a 350-mile wind or a tornado or steam explosion out of one of the generators without any release of radioactive material," she said during a recent tour of the plant.
That's a statement some nuclear critics challenge, saying safety testing has not been adequate.
Calvert Cliff's reactors are pressurized water reactors, meaning the water inside the reactor is kept under pressure to keep it from boiling.
A second, separate water loop creates non-radioactive steam that spins a turbine, making electricity.
The plant takes in 2.5 million gallons of water per minute from the Chesapeake Bay in a third loop to cool and condense the steam, allowing it to be reused. The separate system loops ensure that water inside the reactor never comes into contact with the steam system or the cooling system.
George Vanderheyden, vice president of Calvert Cliffs, pointed out the military precision of the plant's operation and the redundancies built into the plant's safety systems, such as the 350 gallons of distilled water in three large tanks, a backup for the reactor coolant system, and another concrete tank with an additional 350 gallons of water, as a back up. [Uh, I think the reporter left out several zeros. :-) - http://www.nucleartourist.com/us/calvert.htm - JH]
"We are completely self-sufficient should anything go wrong," Vanderheyden said. "We have backups for our backups. As I meet people, they want to know is it safe? We try to get the public involved, and take away the mystery."
That has become more difficult to do since Sept. 11, he acknowledged. Calvert Cliffs no longer offers group tours through its plant because of security concerns.
The nation's nuclear plants have spent $1 billion to improve security since the terrorist attacks, increasing the security force from 5,000 to 8,000 guards, said Michael J. Wallace, president of Constellation Generating Group.
-------- nevada
Nuclear industry appeals Yucca ruling
By STEVE TETREAULT STEPHENS WASHINGTON BUREAU
Wednesday, August 25, 2004
LAS VEGAS REVIEW JOURNAL
http://www.reviewjournal.com/lvrj_home/2004/Aug-25-Wed-2004/news/24614916.html
WASHINGTON -- Attorneys for the Nuclear Energy Institute asked a federal appeals court to reconsider a July ruling against a key part of the Yucca Mountain Project, saying judges made mistakes in applying the law.
The advocacy arm of the nuclear power industry urged a review by the full court before judges formalize a decision that has roiled plans for a nuclear waste repository.
The bid to persuade the court to reopen the Yucca Mountain case is a long shot.
"We can go whole years without that happening," said Mark Langer, clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, where the NEI appeal was filed late Monday.
Langer said motions to reconsider a case, or to have it reviewed by all the judges in the circuit, usually are limited to "extraordinary circumstances."
"There would have to be some extraordinarily egregious error or conflict with prior precedent before the court," Langer said.
He did not comment specifically on the Yucca case, which was decided unanimously by a three-judge panel.
Government attorneys declined to file an appeal. An Energy Department spokesman said federal agencies will devise a new radiation health rule for the Yucca repository after the judges, in one of their major decisions, threw out a 10,000-year protection standard as inadequate.
In their appeal, NEI lawyers said the court's ruling on the radiation issue was inconsistent with earlier decisions that give federal agencies authority to write regulations.
The judges ruled the Environmental Protection Agency disregarded a National Academy of Sciences study that recommended repository radiation safeguards be proved effective for hundreds of thousands of years, rather than the 10,000 years set by the EPA.
But NEI said the judges made a mistake to subordinate EPA's authority to a private organization like the academy. And since the national academy was created by Congress, NEI attorneys said, the July ruling upset the separation of powers between the legislative branch and the executive branch.
-------- pennsylvania
NRC gives former nuclear plant a clean bill of health
JOE MANDAK
Wed, Aug. 25, 2004
Associated Press
http://www.centredaily.com/mld/centredaily/news/politics/9495156.htm
PITTSBURGH - The Nuclear Regulatory Commission says a former Babcock & Wilcox nuclear plant site has been cleaned up enough to be released for "unrestricted use."
The site in Parks Township, Armstrong County, was one of several properties - all about 35 miles northeast of Pittsburgh - that spawned class-action litigation and accusations that radioactive contamination contributed to cancer cases in Kiskiminetas River Valley.
"Radioactive material on this site has been cleaned up to meet our strict criteria, and the site is now safe for other uses," the NRC said of the former plutonium plant site. The site had radioactive material on it from 1960 through 1996, according to the NRC.
NRC officials said Wednesday that the cleanup continues at a shallow waste dump nearby. Another nuclear plant site, in neighboring Apollo, was declared safe for unrestricted use in 1997.
"We consider this a significant achievement for BWXT and the community of Parks Township," said Richard W. Loving, director of administration for BWX Technologies Inc., which held the NRC license for the site. The company needed the license as long as the NRC determined that contamination remained.
But environmental activist Patricia Ameno said the NRC designation doesn't matter because contamination from the hillside waste site can still "migrate" down to the former plant site through groundwater and other means.
"Newton's law is very applicable there. What goes uphill will go down - and that waste site is still uphill," Ameno said.
BWX officials declined to comment Wednesday on Ameno's claims of ongoing contamination in the area.
In 1994, Ameno spearheaded a class-action federal lawsuit on behalf of hundreds of people with wrongful death, personal injury or property damage claims based on the alleged radioactive contamination of air, water or land. Four years later, eight test plaintiffs (Ameno was not among them) won $36.7 million from Atlantic Richfield Co. and B&W, which operated the plants after Atlantic Richfield sold them in 1971.
During the trial, a doctor said 351 of Apollo's 1,895 residents, or nearly one-in-five, had been diagnosed with some form of cancer.
Company attorneys maintained radioactive emissions had been filtered out and that even if residents had been exposed, radiation levels were too low to cause cancer or other illnesses.
The verdict was never paid because a judge ordered a retrial after determining that she had wrongly allowed some evidence in the case. The retrial was delayed when B&W filed bankruptcy largely because of unrelated asbestos litigation the company faced.
Ameno's attorney, Fred Baron of Dallas, said the nuclear claims have been tentatively settled. Baron wouldn't comment on the size of the settlement, but said a U.S. bankruptcy judge in New Orleans is expected to approve it Oct. 1 along with the rest of the company's bankruptcy plan.
John Ameno Jr., the activist's brother, is also borough council president in Apollo, where officials are moving cautiously forward with a plan to reuse the other plant site declared safe by the NRC seven years ago. John Ameno said plans are to build a parking lot there.
Despite the NRC designation, "the Babcock & Wilcox people themselves have said they don't think there should be any digging there below three feet," John Ameno said.
"We figured, rather than go through all the question marks, let's find out how we can use (the site)," Ameno said. "With a parking lot, there's nobody there 24-7, there's nobody there living on the property - that just makes more sense to us."
-------- washington
State's only commercial nuclear power plant back in service
By SHANNON DININNY
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Wednesday, August 25, 2004
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/187776_nuclear25.html
YAKIMA -- Washington state's only commercial nuclear reactor went back into service at 100 percent power yesterday, several weeks after it had to be shut down when an electronic device failed.
The Columbia Generating Station was shut down July 30 after a faulty electronic device caused a steam valve to close, which led to a pressure increase in the reactor. Crews have repaired the device and performed maintenance on steam valves and other systems.
The plant was reconnected to the Northwest power grid at about 8:15 p.m. Sunday and began a gradual ascent to full power. It was at 100 percent power at 7:30 a.m. yesterday, Energy Northwest, the company that operates the plant, said in a news release.
Columbia Generating Station is a boiling water reactor that produces 1,150 megawatts of electricity, which is sold to the Bonneville Power Administration for the Northwest electricity grid.
BPA officials had calculated that the shutdown was costing $1 million a day.
The shutdown at Columbia Generating Station occurred after an electronic device failed and closed one of the reactor's four steam-flow valves. The valves channel nuclear-heated steam to the turbines driving the generator.
The valve closure caused an increase in pressure inside the reactor, and when the reactor attempted to automatically shut down, a panel indicated that not all of the 185 control rods had been fully inserted. The control rods are inserted into the reactor during a shutdown.
The control-room crew then executed a manual shutdown as a precaution. A review later showed that the automatic shutdown was successful.
The problems triggered an alert in which state agencies prepared to respond if needed to help Benton and Franklin counties.
State emergency officials said there was no release of radiation and no danger to the public.
Formerly known as the Washington Public Power Supply System No. 2 reactor, Columbia Generating Station is the only one of five reactors started in the late 1970s to be completed before construction was halted in 1982-83.
The reactor is on land leased from the U.S. Department of Energy within the boundaries of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, but is a separate entity.
The reactor's next scheduled shutdown is May for a refueling outage. The plant is shut down every two years to replace fuel inside the reactor.
----
Workers and officials celebrate removal of 3 million gallons of waste from Hanford nuclear reservation
Wednesday, August 25, 2004
By Shannon Dininny,
Associated Press
http://www.enn.com/news/2004-08-25/s_26701.asp
RICHLAND, Washington - Workers at the Hanford nuclear reservation celebrated the removal of millions of gallons of liquid radioactive waste from old, leak-prone tanks this week.
State and federal officials called the achievement a major milestone in the decades-long cleanup of the contaminated site.
For 40 years, Hanford made plutonium for the nation's nuclear weapons arsenal. Now, work centers on a $50 billion to $60 billion cleanup for a scheduled finish in 2035. Much of the cleanup involves retrieving and treating 53 million gallons of highly radioactive waste from World War II and Cold War-era plutonium production. The liquid, sludge and saltcake sit in 177 aging underground tanks.
Most critical was the liquid waste in 149 tanks that had a single-wall construction, making them more susceptible to leaks as they aged. An estimated 67 of the tanks leaked radioactive brew into the soil, contaminating the aquifer and threatening the Columbia River less than 10 miles away.
Five years ago, the state complained about the slow pace of the tank cleanup. The state and the federal Energy Department then agreed to a court-enforced timetable; more than 3 million gallons of liquid waste was pumped out of the tanks and transferred to newer, safer doubled-walled tanks.
The deadline for transferring the waste was Sept. 30, 2004.
"We knew they were literally a threat to the Columbia River, which I consider the lifeblood of the Pacific Northwest," state Attorney General Christine Gregoire said at a ceremony Monday.
The focus now shifts to removing the solid waste from tanks. The Energy Department is required to have all the wastes removed from the single-walled tanks by 2018.
The tank waste will be turned into glass logs, in a process called vitrification, for long-term disposal.
-------- us nuc waste
Nuclear Waste: Not in My Backyard (5 Letters)
August 25, 2004
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/25/opinion/l25yucca.html
To the Editor:
Re "Roadblock at Yucca Mountain" (editorial, Aug. 23):
Out here in the heartland, I am skeptical about your argument that Congress should pass new legislation to enable the Yucca Mountain project to proceed. Trust Congress and the Environmental Protection Agency rather than the National Academy of Sciences to set standards of safety for the disposal of nuclear waste? Not me. Especially not when Congress seems to have abandoned the Superfund for cleanup of other toxic waste.
In Missouri, we know that the Yucca Mountain plan will send shipments of nuclear waste along our train tracks and highways constantly, making us vulnerable to accidents as well as acts of terrorism. It is not only the citizens of Nevada who are opposed to the Yucca Mountain storage plan. Every American who lives along the routes over which these spent fuel rods and other nuclear wastes are to be shipped will be at risk.
Why do we continue to produce more and more nuclear waste when we do not know how to deal with it? Why must Nevada receive the dangerous materials generated in other locations?
Why must my family here in Missouri be exposed to radioactive materials generated by energy and defense companies seeking profit but refusing to accept the responsibility to solve the problems of safe disposal of their waste?
Dorothy M. Doyle St. Louis, Aug. 23, 2004
•To the Editor:
Your Aug. 23 editorial "Roadblock at Yucca Mountain" is on target. Nuclear waste continues to pile up at scores of facilities around the country as environmentalist groups oppose Yucca yet propose no alternative.
Pandering politicians join in, naturally including all of Nevada's, and also Senators John Kerry and John Edwards.
Thomas Letchfield Palo Alto, Calif., Aug. 23, 2004
•To the Editor:
The Yucca Mountain project is designed to be safe for 10,000 years, but is succeeding in doing this a limiting requirement? Let us assume that the present design will really be effective for only 1,000 years. It seems reasonable to me that if we come back to the project after 200 years and upgrade it with the technology available at that time, that would be a satisfactory safety valve. A check after 400 years might also be prudent.
William Cohen Metairie, La., Aug. 23, 2004
•To the Editor:
It is as a Nevadan and as an American citizen that I protest the cavalier disregard for the safety of the population that you display in your editorial advocating the shipment of nuclear waste to Yucca Mountain. You seem to have decided that the ends justify the means.
If you are unconcerned about whether radiation would affect the population in 10,000 years, you might consider how New York would react to a nuclear accident in its midst while waste is transported to the "safe haven" of Nevada.
Michael Green Las Vegas, Aug. 23, 2004
----
Kerry pandering to nuclear paranoia
By Jonah Goldberg
Sun, Aug. 15, 2004
Philadelphia Inquirer
http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/news/special_packages/sunday_review/9401910.htm?1c
It was H.L. Mencken who said of Truman's 1948 campaign: "If there had been any formidable body of cannibals in the country, Harry Truman would have promised to provide them with free missionaries fattened at the taxpayer's expense."
As John Kerry continues to talk tough on foreign policy, his promise to block the Yucca Mountain Project shows that he's running as a Truman Democrat on domestic policy, too.
Yucca Mountain, Nev., is the intended resting place of roughly 77,000 metric tons of deadly nuclear waste, which is currently strewn across the country like socks and beer cans in a frat house. The goal is to put the stuff in a single, safe location. Nevadans like the idea, except for the part that involves keeping it in their state.
In 2000, President Bush promised them he wouldn't support the Yucca Mountain Project unless science said it was safe. Kerry says Bush broke that promise when the president OKd Yucca in 2002 - even though Kerry himself has voted in favor of procedural measures that advanced the project. Kerry responds that his only "substantive vote" in favor of the Yucca Mountain repository was in 1987, and it simply authorized further study of the most studied parcel of land in the known universe.
"We were presuming at that point in time, though, that they were going to do a safe analysis," Kerry told Nevada journalists in the last week. "My opposition has been on the basis of the analysis that has come back."
Now, I've been to Yucca Mountain and interviewed the scientists there and read quite a few of the studies. And, frankly, I have no idea what Kerry is talking about. Yucca Mountain is indisputably the safest conceivable installation for nuclear waste in America - and, quite probably, on the planet. If terrorists wanted to, say, crash a 747 into Yucca Mountain, they'd pretty much have to get past the Nellis Air Force base, where the Air Force practices blowing things up. It's also the home of the Air Warfare Center and the Air Force Weapons School. Yucca Mountain also abuts the highly secure Nevada Test Site, where we've blown up a kajillion atomic bombs.
Oh, and I should add that, even if the terrorist-seized plane got through and smacked the repository head-on, it wouldn't even rattle the canisters under thousands of feet of Yucca Mountain rock. In fact, a direct nuclear strike would mean next to nothing in terms of safety.
But, hey, even in the hugely unlikely scenario - and I really mean hugely unlikely - that some nuclear material did get out, it would still be in the middle of a godforsaken desert. Even what little groundwater there is there - on the edge of Death Valley - is self-contained.
Anyway, I could go on, but the science on this issue is so settled that no one really disputes it. That's one reason why we've heard so much hyperbole in recent years about how dangerous it would be to transport the waste to Yucca Mountain.
The fear-mongering over these so-called mobile Chernobyls is bogus, too. The containers can withstand virtually any imaginable attack. In tests, they even drop the things from way up high onto steel spikes and nothing happens. There have been more than 3,000 nuclear waste transports since 1964 without a single release.
Besides, if the fear is that terrorists can get their hands on this material, why is it preferable to keep the ingredients for dirty bombs at countless unguarded, disparate sites around the country? Even if transport is risky, isn't leaving this junk scattered across the country riskier? Kerry has criticized the administration for not acting fast enough to collect and secure nuclear materials in the former Soviet Union; why does he want to prolong the process here at home?
Now, you might have heard that a recent court ruling dealt Yucca supporters and the Bush administration a setback. The issue here is whether or not Yucca Mountain can be guaranteed to be safe to the "public" - residing in the facility's immediate vicinity - for only the next 10,000 years or for the next 300,000 years. Yucca opponents say 10,000 years is too short. Some perspective: Humans switched from hunter-gatherers 6,000 to 8,000 years ago. If we come up with better science in the next, say, 300 years, we can simply go into Yucca Mountain and pull the junk out. Or, if the creators of Star Trek are right, we can beam it out.
John Kerry likes to say that the future doesn't belong to fear. OK, but why make America less safe today out for fear that in 10,000 years the desert near Death Valley might be slightly more dangerous than a chest X-ray? Jonah Goldberg is a nationally syndicated columnist. Contact him at JonahsColumn@aol.com.
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
U.S.: American Had Delusions of Grandeur
August 25, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Afghan-American-Vigilante.html
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) -- An American on trial for torturing Afghans in a private jail had deluded himself into thinking he was a one-man al-Qaida hunting machine, but there is no evidence to back up his claim that he had links to the U.S. military, a U.S. military spokesman said Wednesday.
Jonathan ``Jack'' Idema and two other Americans are on trial on charges they poured boiling water and committed other acts of terrorism on about 12 Afghan men they held at a private home in the capital. They face up to 20 years in jail if convicted.
The military has acknowledged it accepted one detainee from Idema, but released the man after two months after it realized he was not the senior Taliban fighter Idema had claimed.
Idema said in court that he first called the Pentagon and told them about the prisoner, then was met by a contingent of U.S. soldiers from Bagram Air Base. He says Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's office knew about his activity, as did senior Afghan officials.
Spokesman Maj. Scott Nelson said the military is looking into Idema's claim that he contacted the Pentagon, but hinted that any link between the American and the military was entirely in his head.
``He was operating by himself here with the delusion that he was here to do great things for the world,'' Nelson said.
Many observers have been troubled by the lack of clarity surrounding the military's acceptance of the suspect, and the fact it took two months for them to figure out the man was innocent and release him.
Idema, a former soldier who has been imprisoned for fraud and once sued Steven Spielberg for allegedly stealing his life story, also duped NATO forces into helping him on several raids in the capital. He has also worked extensively with several Western TV stations.
``He's been able to fool a lot of people. He's obviously played some tricks on a lot of folks,'' Nelson said.
Meanwhile, the U.S. military said Wednesday that it had launched a new offensive along with Afghan security forces to clear areas of eastern Afghanistan of rockets and other weapons ahead of landmark presidential elections slated for October.
Nelson had no details on the size or scope of the operation, which began Saturday.
Also Wednesday, NATO peacekeepers announced that they and Afghan intelligence agents had arrested nine people after finding explosives and a large stash of drugs at two homes in the south of the capital.
The arrests were made Monday in the Chahar Asiab district of the capital Kabul, said Lt. Cdr. Ken Mackillop, a spokesman for the peacekeepers.
-------- africa
Sudan Govt. Agrees to Bigger AU Force in Darfur
August 25, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-sudan-darfur.html
ABUJA (Reuters) - Sudan's government agreed in a breakthrough at peace talks on Wednesday to allow more African Union troops to enter the Darfur region to confine rebel fighters to their bases, a possible precursor to disarmament.
Sudan's top government negotiator made the announcement at the talks in Nigeria, which had earlier been threatened with failure by the rebels' refusal to discuss being moved back to base by Sudanese government forces.
``They may need more forces, besides protection of their monitors, to help cantonment and protection of the rebels and we agree about that,'' said government negotiator Majzoub al-Khalifa Ahmed, who is also Agriculture Minister.
He said the exact number of troops would be decided later.
Sudan has already agreed to 300 AU troops in Darfur with a mandate to protect AU monitors of a widely disregarded cease-fire with rebels, but had previously rejected an AU disarmament role.
The proposal by AU chairman and Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo was to send some 2,000 AU troops to garrison rebels, while Khartoum disarmed the pro-government Janjaweed militia.
The United Nations says the Darfur conflict has created the world's worst humanitarian crisis, with more than a million people driven from their homes and up to 50,000 killed.
Khalifa said disarming the Janjaweed had already begun.
Khartoum is under pressure from an Aug. 30 deadline set by the U.N. Security Council to show progress in protecting civilians and disarming the Janjaweed or face sanctions.
``One thing that would be a real disaster is for the international community to feel absolutely dissatisfied with the handling of events by the government of Sudan to the extent that they will have to unleash something more than what we are trying to manage,'' Obasanjo said.
U.N. Sudan envoy Jan Pronk said the world body was not entirely happy about the government's implementation of its commitments in Darfur so far.
``We met together yesterday in New York in a closed informal session and we said with regards to...implementation in Darfur itself, our assessment is mixed,'' he said at a news conference in Khartoum.
Analysts were positive about the latest government move at the peace talks.
``It is certainly a major step forward and it will contribute to the easing of pressure from the Security Council,'' said Alex Vines, head of the Africa program at London's Royal Institute of International Affairs.
CONFLICT
Darfur rebels began an armed revolt against the government in February 2003 after years of conflict between Arab nomads and African farmers over scarce resources in the arid region.
They want a greater role for Darfur minorities in government which they say is dominated by Arab Sudanese from the north.
Obasanjo said he pushed for the AU to keep rebels in their bases because he doubted Khartoum could do so without bloodshed.
Rebel negotiators did not say if they would accept the plan.
``We decided to leave this issue as observed. When we come to this point later on in the agenda, we will clarify it,'' said Ahmed Mohammed Tugod, a negotiator for the rebel Justice and Equality Movement.
But he joined human rights groups in calling for an even wider mandate for AU troops: ``We accept AU forces to protect civilians and guarantee security.''
Khalifa repeated Khartoum's position that only the government was permitted to protect civilians.
Having spent the first three days of talks in the Nigerian capital setting an agenda, the two sides adjourned until Thursday at 10 a.m. (0900 GMT) to begin the talks proper.
The first item on the agenda is access for humanitarian aid for Darfur refugees. Rights groups have accused Khartoum of restricting food and medical supplies to the refugees housed in several makeshift camps in the vast desert region, although international monitors say access is improving.
The issue of disarmament and confining rebels to base will be addressed after that, and this will be followed by talks on political and socio-economic matters including development.
-------- asia
Japan Plans to Launch Spy Satellites
August 25, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/science/AP-Japan-Spy-Satellite.html
TOKYO (AP) -- A Japanese government panel has approved plans to send two spy satellites into Earth's orbit beginning next year, a media report said Wednesday.
If confirmed, the missions would be the first since late 2003 for Japan's ailing space program, which has suffered a slew of launch and mission failures.
The government has earmarked 69.9 billion yen (US$635 million) for the project in 2005, when Japan's space agency would send the first probe, designed to snap high-resolution pictures of objects on the ground such as buildings, public broadcaster NHK TV said.
The second probe, which would use radar to analyze topography, would go up in 2006, NHK said, citing a Cabinet Office official.
A Cabinet Office spokesman refused to comment on the report.
The government had planned to put a total of eight spy satellites into orbit through 2006 to keep watch on North Korea, Japan's No. 1 security concern. It now has two spy satellites orbiting the planet.
The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, or JAXA, has suspended several missions since an H-2A rocket carrying two Japanese spy satellites was destroyed by mission controllers after it veered off course last November.
The H2-A was meant to be a cheaper and more reliable replacement for its predecessor, and a key to Tokyo's hopes for advancing a commercial launch business.
An investigation into the cause of the accident has depleted JAXA's 67 billion yen (US$609 million) budget for this year.
Critics say sending spy satellites into space goes against a long-standing policy of conducting only nonmilitary space missions.
-------- britain
Britain to Deploy Warplanes to Afghanistan
August 25, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Britain-Afghanistan.html
LONDON (AP) -- Six British Harrier jump-jets will be deployed in Afghanistan to assist coalition forces ahead of the country's election this fall, officials said Wednesday.
The Royal Air Force's GR7 jets will be based in the former Taliban stronghold of Kandahar, in southern Afghanistan, defense chiefs said in a statement.
It will be the first time that Britain has deployed combat aircraft in Afghanistan, despite its heavy involvement in the U.S.-led coalition that toppled Taliban.
The decision to send the jump jets, famous for their vertical takeoffs and landings, comes as Afghanistan faces a tense period in the run-up to October's election.
The Harriers are expected to spend nine months in Kandahar, providing close air support and reconnaissance for coalition troops.
Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon said their deployment underlined Britain's commitment to the NATO mission in Afghanistan.
``The Royal Air Force crews will provide a highly capable and credible force which will contribute to improving the security environment in the region,'' he said.
Initially, 315 army and air force soldiers will be sent to Afghanistan along with the warplane, but that deployment will later be reduced to 230, officials said.
The first group of British soldiers will be sent to Afghanistan on Thursday, including engineers who will prepare Kandahar airfield for the Harriers, officials said.
The soldiers also will prepare for the arrival of the main British deployment, which is to be operational by the end of September ahead of Afghanistan's national election on Oct. 9.
-------- business
Auditor Criticizes Iraq Contract
Oversight Halliburton Unit Failed to Justify Expenses, Memo Says
By Robert O'Harrow Jr.
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, August 25, 2004; Page E01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A30086-2004Aug24.html
A Defense Department auditor last week criticized Army managers responsible for overseeing a giant logistical contract with Halliburton Co., saying in a memo they have not been firm enough in seeking justification for $1.8 billion in expenses for work in Iraq and Kuwait.
The Aug. 16 memo, made public yesterday, said Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root Inc. has "not provided this basic supporting data" while the auditors had identified "significant unsupported costs" totaling about $1.8 billion -- 42 percent -- of $4.3 billion in bills reviewed by the Defense Contract Audit Agency.
The author, an audit official in Texas, urged officials at the Army Field Support Command, who oversee the logistical contract, to penalize the company by withholding 15 percent in payments until the billing disputes are resolved. "It is clear to us KBR will not provide an adequate proposal until there is a consequence," the memo said.
Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.), one of the company's leading critics in Congress, released the memo yesterday. In an accompanying letter to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, Waxman cited earlier audits, saying the memo raises new questions about "whether Halliburton will continue to receive special treatment from the Defense Department."
"These government audits have found widespread, systemic problems with almost every aspect of Halliburton's work in Iraq, from cost estimation and billing systems to cost control and subcontract management," Waxman wrote. "The Defense Department has not responded appropriately to these findings."
Halliburton spokeswoman Wendy Hall said the company is being targeted for political reasons. She said it is using the same cost estimation procedures it has used successfully for years. She said the contract audit agency that wrote the memo "is advisory only and has no authority to determine the adequacy of our systems."
"This is all part of the normal audit process -- a process which is typically carried out in a much less public fashion," Hall wrote in an e-mail. "However, the environment in which we find ourselves today has brought an unprecedented amount of attention to these matters, and the facts have taken a backseat to opinions and agendas."
The memo was written last week as the Army waffled over whether to give Halliburton more time to offer documentation supporting bills they have issued for supplying food, housing and other troop services.
On Aug. 16, one day after a regulatory deadline to impose sanctions, Halliburton said the Pentagon had agreed they would get more time. On Tuesday, the company said an Army official had said they would in fact withhold payments. Then, after the company threatened to sue, the Army did a turnabout and asked Halliburton for information about the impact of any withholding, a document the company provided on Thursday evening.
Yesterday, Army officials issued a brief statement, saying they likely would make a decision about whether to withhold payments within two weeks.
The dispute is the latest trouble facing the company. Several government auditors have accused the company of overcharging for some services. Democratic lawmakers have made Halliburton a campaign issue, suggesting the company has been given special treatment because Dick Cheney served as Halliburton's chief executive before his election as vice president.
In the memo, the auditor said KBR's lack of information will continue to "result in significant delays in issuing our audit reports, significant unsupported costs" and other shortcomings that hinder "the Government's ability to negotiate contracts in a timely manner."
The memo said "KBR personnel have informed us they intend to provide additional supporting data during negotiations. We believe this approach is unacceptable."
--------
Firms Chosen to Build Anti - Missile Defense
August 25, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/business/AP-Airlines-Missiles.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Teams led by BAE Systems and Northrup Grumman were chosen Wednesday to build and test prototypes for anti-missile systems to defend U.S. commercial planes against shoulder-fired rockets.
The Homeland Security Department said the companies will each get $45 million over the next 18 months. It's the second phase of the agency's effort to determine whether affordable, effective anti-missile systems can be deployed on commercial planes.
Last January, BAE, Northrup and United Airlines were chosen from among 24 companies that sought $2 million contracts to develop plans for using anti-missile technology and to analyze the economic, manufacturing and maintenance issues for placing such systems on civilian aircraft.
All three came up with plans that use lasers to redirect heat-seeking rockets away from aircraft engines. United's plan was not considered as advanced, so it was dropped.
``We have been impressed with the progress made by these teams over the past six months,'' Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge said. ``Taking aggressive action to understand how technology can address this potential threat is a high priority for us, and today we take the next significant step in developing systems that could protect commercial aircraft from enemies that would do us harm.''
Military aircraft and planes that carry heads of state, such as Air Force One, already deploy anti-missile systems. The systems, though, are not reliable enough for commercial aviation, require a great deal of maintenance and can go off spontaneously while a plane is on the ground, creating a safety hazard.
The two companies will have to overcome those problems in a cost-effective way and obtain approval for the devices from the Federal Aviation Administration, said Parney Albright, assistant secretary for Homeland Security.
``There's a lot of challenges ahead,'' Albright said.
Israel announced in July that it had successfully tested a system for commercial planes that uses computerized radar to launch flares that divert the missiles.
Albright, though, said that Israel's airline, El Al, only has about 30 planes that fly out of a single airport.
That, he said, allows Israel to deploy a round-the-clock ``on-call pit crew at Ben-Gurion Airport'' to maintain the systems -- something not feasible in the United States, which has about 6,800 commercial airplanes flying out of hundreds of airports.
Outfitting every commercial airliner with anti-missile systems would cost billions of dollars. Airlines are reluctant to shoulder such a cost, which the Air Transport Association estimates could be between $50 billion and $100 billion over 20 years. The group represents major airlines.
Concerns about terrorists using lightweight rocket launchers to take down commercial airliners were raised in November 2002 when terrorists fired two SA-7 missiles that narrowly missed an Israeli passenger jet after it took off from Mombasa, Kenya. U.S. officials concluded al-Qaida probably was behind the attack, which coincided with a bomb blast at a nearby hotel.
Hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of Soviet-style SA-7s -- heat-seeking rockets that can hit low-flying aircraft within a range of three miles -- are said to be available on the weapons market worldwide.
California Sen. Barbara Boxer is among congressional Democrats who have said the Bush administration is moving too slowly to develop an anti-missile system that would address an existing threat.
On the Net:
Homeland Security Department: http://www.dhs.gov
--------
US Awards Airliner Antimissile Contracts
August 25, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/business/business-security-airlines-missiles.html
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Northrop Grumman Corp. (NOC.N) and BAE Systems PLC (BA.L) were tapped by the Bush administration on Wednesday to develop competing systems to protect U.S. commercial aircraft from shoulder-fired missiles, a potential multibillion-dollar market.
Each received a roughly $45-million contract to develop and test a prototype in the next 18 months, the Department of Homeland Security said. UAL Corp.'s (UALAQ.OB) United Airlines, one of the three companies picked in January to take part in the project's first phase, was eliminated from the competition.
The government is exploring the cost and effectiveness of adapting existing laser-based jammer technology from military to commercial aviation use.
After the prototypes are tested, the Department of Homeland Security is to tell Congress and the administration which it considers the most viable solution for defending against shoulder-fired missiles, known as Man-Portable Air Defense Systems, or MANPADS.
For now, there is ``no credible, specific intelligence information about planned MANPADS attacks against U.S. commercial aircraft,'' Penrose Albright, Homeland Security's assistant secretary for science and technology, told reporters.
The current competition will not necessarily lead to a U.S. decision to acquire such anti-missile technology, Albright said, citing the possibility that costs could be prohibitive.
Estimates put the maintenance and logistics cost at as much as $10 billion a year, a burden that the U.S. commercial air carrier industry cannot bear, the Department of Homeland Security said in a fact sheet in January.
``Airlines are going to come back and say we can't afford to put this kit in our planes,'' said Chris Yates, safety and security editor of Jane's Transport, the authoritative review. He said it remained unclear whether the government would judge the MANPADS threat great enough to pick up the tab itself.
But Jack Pledger, Northrop's director of business development for infrared countermeasures, said Northrop's proposal was based on a system that could be retrofitted for less than $1 million per aircraft based on any ``reasonably sized'' installation program.''
This sum, including spares, training and technical data, would be on the ``same order or a little bit less than'' the high-end entertainment systems featuring individual video monitors on many wide-bodied long-haul aircraft, he said.
Last year, the State Department estimated that more than 40 aircraft had been struck over the years by MANPADS. Such shoulder-launched missiles have caused at least 24 crashes and more than 600 deaths worldwide, the department said.
So far, only one attack had occurred outside a conflict zone, and none in the United States.
Since the 1950s, 20 countries have developed or produced at least 30 different types of shoulder-fired missiles, with up to 500,000 to 750,000 of them ``believed to be in the worldwide inventory today,'' congressional investigators said in a report earlier this year.
The GAO said the missiles' relatively low cost -- from less than $1,000 to $100,000 each -- made them attractive to terrorists for use against commercial aircraft.
-------- iraq
Iraqi Troops Join U.S. Najaf Patrols
Defense Minister Warns Militia Again;
2 in Cabinet Survive Blasts Near Baghdad
By Karl Vick and Naseer Nouri
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, August 25, 2004; Page A10
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A28040-2004Aug24?language=printer
NAJAF, Iraq, Aug. 24 -- Iraqi soldiers backed by U.S. forces began patrolling the streets of Najaf on Tuesday, establishing their presence as part of interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi's pledge that the new Iraqi army would take the lead in defeating militiamen loyal to a rebellious Shiite cleric.
U.S. and Iraqi forces battled fighters loyal to the cleric, Moqtada Sadr, and Iraqi National Guardsmen advanced within several hundred yards of the holy city's Imam Ali shrine. Iraq's interim defense minister, Hazim Shalan, issued a new ultimatum to Sadr and his Mahdi Army militia, warning that the militiamen had "hours to surrender." Shalan had issued similar ultimatums in the past week, but this time his warnings were played over loudspeakers in the area of combat.
In Fallujah, meanwhile, U.S. forces launched an airstrike on an arms cache controlled by foreign insurgents, officials reported. "Based on multiple sources of intelligence, the attack targeted and destroyed a position occupied by numerous foreign terrorists, as well as a weapons cache," according to a U.S. Army statement.
Near Baghdad two Iraqi cabinet ministers survived separate bomb attacks that killed five bodyguards. A car bomb exploded in the southern neighborhood of Qadisiya as the environment minister, Mushkat Mumin, was passing by, officials said. Police said four of his bodyguards were killed, in addition to a suicide bomber, and two people were wounded. Education Minister Sami Mudhaffar survived an attack on his way to work, in the western Baghdad district of Khadra. The blast killed one of Mudhaffar's bodyguards and wounded two others, police said.
An Italian journalist, Enzo Baldoni, who had been taken hostage, was shown in a video on al-Jazeera satellite television on Tuesday. The group that took responsibility for the kidnapping called itself the Islamic Army in Iraq. A spokesman for Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi said in Rome that the country would not agree to a demand that 3,000 Italian troops be pulled out of Iraq within 48 hours.
"We are committed to obtaining the freedom of Mr. Baldoni, who is in Iraq for private work as a journalist and therefore absolutely not connected to our government," Berlusconi's office said in a statement.
Strong explosions rang through Najaf late in the day and U.S. warplanes were heard flying overhead for the third night in a row. Mortar and gunfire echoed in the deserted, battered streets of the Najaf's Old City as units of the Army's 1st Cavalry Division's 7th Regiment pressed toward the road that surrounds the maze of streets and alleys surrounding the shrine.
Overnight, one battalion broke through the road that circles the area of the shrine, covering its advance with tank fire.
"It's tightening the noose, and everybody's doing it," said Maj. Tim Karcher of the 7th Cavalry Regiment, who expressed surprise at the low level of militia resistance to the previous night's attack . "If they don't watch themselves, we'll be in on them in a heartbeat."
"We've closed down to within striking distance," said Lt. Col. Jim Rainey, a military spokesman.
The arrival of Iraqi troops was symbolic in part, but U.S. commanders welcomed the battalion -- several hundred troops -- which they said would help in the labor-intensive business of urban warfare.
Officials said the Iraqi troops would be searching for militia members who might be holed up in houses that have already been checked in the U.S. advance toward the shrine. The Iraqi forces were also expected to help Najaf residents return to their homes mostly in the southwest corner of the Old City, now well behind the front lines of the battle.
"We're giving them a little experience and, by the way, letting them bring normalcy to their people," Karcher said.
Iraqi officers described their operations as having a more prominent role than was described by local U.S. commanders.
"We are not supporting the U.S. Army, we are here to evacuate the shrine of the outlaws," said Lt. Haider Hussein, a platoon commander of an Iraqi army anti-riot battalion operating in the area, as is an Iraqi commando battalion training for a possible final assault on the mosque.
"The U.S. Army is supporting us," Hussein said, "because we don't have new weapons to use in this battle."
The current fight for Najaf began Aug. 5, when Sadr's militia ambushed a column of the U.S. Marine force occupying the area. The Mahdi Army, named for a messianic Shiite figure, wields automatic weapons, rocket-propelled grenades and mortars, including devastating 120mm shells.
But the U.S. forces include tanks, infantry fighting armor, 155 mm howitzers, mortars, thermal imaging, radar and digital communications. The ground forces use the communications to call in missile and bomb strikes from a variety of aerial gunships, including the pair of AH-64 Apache attack helicopters that appeared to be flying directly down a Najaf street Tuesday after unleashing two Hellfire missiles.
The streets of the city, usually teeming with pilgrims coming to the shrine to fulfill a lifelong dream, were mostly empty, littered with chunks of concrete and broken glass. Armored Humvees raced along the roads at high speeds to avoid the constant danger of fire, but after 12 days of steady combat, the troops displayed a battle-hardened air of indifference.
"That guy's getting on my nerves," said Spec. Kris Clinkscales of San Antonio, not even looking up when an enemy machine gunner opened up on the wall beside him from the courtyard just across the street.
Clinkscales, one of scores of snipers summoned to the city, where firing precision is crucial, was taking a break from manning a chink in the wall of an unfinished hotel's top story. He had a commanding view of a blackened complex of modern buildings that the 7th Cavalry Regiment had assaulted the night before, just inside the perimeter of the road that rings the shrine.
Off to the right stood the gold dome of the shrine. Commanders and members of the infantry said they understood the importance of keeping it intact.
"You can imagine in America if someone were attacking through Arlington Cemetery for the mall, the amount of consternation," Rainey said.
--------
Iraq's Leading Shiite Cleric Looks to Broker Deal With Rebels
August 25, 2004
By DEXTER FILKINS and ALEX BERENSON
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/25/international/middleeast/25CND-IRAQ.html?hp
NAJAF, Iraq, Aug. 25 - Iraq's most powerful Shiite cleric returned to the country today from a hospital stay in London, calling for a mass demonstration here to end three weeks of fighting between American forces and Shiite insurgents for control of this holy city.
Grand Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani, who commands the loyalty of millions of Shiite Muslims, came across the border in convoy from Kuwait and spent the night in the southern city of Basra.
His aides said he planned to drive to Najaf at dawn Thursday and lead a march to the shrine of Imam Ali, the Shiite holy site that has been commandeered by fighters loyal to the rebel cleric Moktada al-Sadr.
The announcement by the 73-year-old grand ayatollah set the stage for a dramatic showdown in Najaf, which has been ravaged by relentless urban combat and bombardment from the air.
The area of the shrine was pounded again today by American jets and attack helicopters, which rocketed and bombed Mahdi Army fighters as close as 30 yards from the sacred shrine. By late today, the Mahdi Army seemed to be on the brink of collapse, with a few hundred diehards falling back into the area immediately surrounding the shrine.
With the Mahdi Army suffering another day of bombardment, the announcement by Grand Ayatollah Sistani suggested that the cleric was seizing the moment, gambling that his return could disperse what appeared to be an increasingly confused and demoralized band of insurgents.
"His eminence has plans to enter the city," said Hamed Al-Khaffaf, an aide to the grand ayatollah. "He calls on everyone who wishes to join him to do so, in an effort to end the siege of Najaf."
A Sistani representative in London, Al-Sayyid Murtadha al-Kashmiri, said the ayatollah would head to Najaf on Thursday "to stop the bloodshed," The Associated Press reported.
Throughout Mr. Sadr's insurrections, dating to March, Ayatollah Sistani has remained noncommittal, which many Iraqis say reflects both his contempt for Mr. Sadr as a religious upstart and an acknowledgment that he has a widespread following that may have to be factored in to any future political arrangements.
Last week, Mr. Sadr said he would hand over the keys of the holy shrine, which is now tightly surrounded by American troops, to representatives of the ayatollah, but the handover never took place.
Now both the military and political climates have taken a decisive turn.
Although the Americans had been doing almost all the fighting here, the interim Iraqi government has said repeatedly that only Iraqi forces will be allowed to attack the shrine.
In an overnight assault, marines attacked a building in the inner ring of Najaf's Old City, less than 400 yards west of the shrine. The assault was the first time that American forces had tried to take and hold ground inside the inner ring, instead of simply attacking and leaving.
Iraqi soldiers took a tentative step into the battle on Tuesday, beginning mop-up operations in the Judaada neighborhood south of the shrine, which had already been cleared of insurgents by American soldiers.
Among the Iraqis deployed were soldiers from the 36th National Guard Battalion, an 800-man unit drawn from the best militia fighters among the major Iraqi political parties. It is regarded as the toughest and most cohesive in revamped armed forces, and many of its fighters have significant combat experience.
Meanwhile, Al Jazeera television reported today that militants had kidnapped two relatives of Iraq's defense minister, Hazim al-Shalaan, and demanded that American forces leave Najaf.
It showed footage of the two men kneeling in front of masked militants, but no audio could be heard, Reuters said. Al Jazeera said the group calling itself the Brigades of God's Anger demanded that Iraqi police free Ali Smeisim, an aide to Mr. Sadr.
--------
Smell of burnt flesh, blood smeared on streets of Najaf's Old city
NAJAF, Iraq (AFP)
Aug 25, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040825143955.70hap5ri.html
The smell of burnt flesh filled the air and blood smeared the deserted streets of Najaf's Old City on Wednesday after heavy US air strikes on Shiite militia positions around Iraq's revered Imam Ali shrine. From early Wednesday, heavy US artillery fire followed fighter plane missile attacks, devastating neighbourhoods in the historic heart of the central city.
As the US campaign lessened in the hot afternoon sun, frightened residents barricaded themselves indoors, determined to bear the brunt of the crippling summer heat rather than wander the empty streets.
Those who did venture out, or peep through the broken windows or blasted door frames, could barely disguise their fear.
"It was the heaviest attack in many days especially the first during daytime," said Ali Jasim, a 36-year-old civil servant holed up in one house.
"Not only did airplanes drop missiles, but Apache helicopters fired at suspected militiamen in our area and tanks crawled all over the place firing at whatever they saw. All the three at the same time."
One young man who was standing outside his house shot by soldiers from the helicopter, he said.
"You can see his blood all over that corner in the mud," Jasim said pointing.
Shiite militia holed up in the neighbourhood fought against the American and Iraqi soldiers.
"The militia has a lot of snipers around. They shot at a lot of Iraqi soliders who have been moving around in the area since Tuesday," he said.
Hundreds of heavily-armed Iraqi national guardsmen and US marines had fanned out across the Old City around the shrine late Tuesday.
But the Iraqi security troops were invisible in the afternoon. Some residents thought they would return later for another overnight assault.
Instead, US tanks crawled through the streets and Humvees were stationed at various intersections. Thick black smoke rose from a nearby residential block.
"The worst thing is that all entries to the city were blocked. Many of us who have families and had gone out early in the morning were worried as they could not get back to their homes," said Sayed Haider al-Yasiri.
Guiding an AFP correspondent to a nearby street corner, Yasiri pointed out an unexploded bomb lying outside a shuttered shop.
"Look at this and see what has happened out here. Imagine if a child picks it up," he said, dressed in a white robe and chewing on a mouthful of tobacco.
Scared residents of the Old City, who have born the brunt of the battle since fighting first flared three weeks ago, were Wednesday helpless and angry with the US military.
"We want to get rid of the militia, but not in this way. Such heavy pounding would destroy whatever is left of our homes," said Mohammed, a taxi driver.
"Why can't there be a peaceful solution to this whole issue?"
The mute spectators to the fight are dozens of those broken lamposts, hanging electric wires, spent cartridges and glass splinters, gaping holes and the fear etched on people's faces.
"It is still OK to walk closely by the side of the walls in some of the blocks of the city, but please do not go to Medina Street if you love yourself," said one young man, where rapid firing continued as US planes hovered overhead.
"There could be fresh assault at night also. Please go back before the roads are blocked again," the young man said.
-------- russia / chechnya
2 Russian Jets Crash Within Minutes
At Least 88 Are Killed; Terrorism Suspected
By Peter Baker and Susan B. Glasser
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, August 25, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A29410-2004Aug24.html
MOSCOW, Aug. 25 -- Two passenger jets that took off from a Moscow airport crashed within minutes of each other in different parts of Russia late Tuesday night with a total of at least 88 people on board, authorities said. No survivors were reported.
The two planes left Moscow's Domodedovo Airport barely a half-hour apart, heading to separate destinations, and then disappeared from radar almost simultaneously about 11 p.m., authorities said. Rescue squads reached the scene of one crash in the Tula region, about 100 miles south of Moscow, early Wednesday morning and hours later found the fiery wreckage of the second plane near the southern city of Rostov-on-Don, about 600 miles south of Moscow.
Officials made no immediate statements about the possible causes of the twin crashes but the timing raised suspicions of a terrorist attack. Witnesses in Tula reported seeing an explosion before the plane there plunged out of the sky, while the other plane activated a signal reporting it had been hijacked, according to the Interfax news agency.
President Vladimir Putin, who is vacationing at the Black Sea resort of Sochi, where the other plane was heading, was quickly informed of the developments and ordered the Federal Security Service, the domestic successor to the KGB, to investigate the incident, the Kremlin said. Security was quickly tightened at Russian airports.
"There's shock," Ilya Novokhatskiy, an official at Sibir airlines, said by telephone as he tried to gather information on the crash of its plane near Rostov-on-Don. "But we have to keep working." He said it was too early to say if terrorists were behind the crashes. "This just happened. We can't give versions of this. This will be for the official committee to assess."
The crashes took place four days before an election in the separatist region of Chechnya to choose a successor to Akhmad Kadyrov, the Kremlin-allied president of the Russian republic who was assassinated in May. The approaching vote has already been marked by renewed fighting in the Chechen capital of Grozny and elsewhere in the region.
Terrorists have targeted Russia repeatedly in the last two years, killing more than 500 people in Moscow and in the southern part of the country. Chechen guerrillas have claimed responsibility for many of the suicide bombings and other attacks, but they have never destroyed civilian passenger planes.
"There's still a chance this is an appalling airplane maintenance problem, but it seems more likely this is a terrorist act, given the prevailing conditions in the region," said Fiona Hill, a Russia scholar at the Brookings Institution in Washington. "The whole of the North Caucasus is in considerable disarray."
Russian government officials have sought repeatedly in recent years to link Chechen separatist guerrillas with international terrorist groups such as al Qaeda. But Hill said the possible airplane-based attack was not necessarily an indication of such cooperation.
"There's a situation where you have a demonstration effect -- what works in one place people adapt in another," she said. The fact that Putin is currently on vacation in Sochi would be "very symbolic, obviously," she added.
Aslan Maskhadov, the Chechen separatist leader, vowed in June to escalate attacks against Russians. "We're planning a change in our tactics," he said at the time. "From now on, we'll be launching big attacks."
Maskhadov seemed to foreshadow the use of airplanes in an e-mail sent to the Reuters news agency last month. "If Chechens possessed warplanes or rockets, then airstrikes on Russian cities would also be legitimate," he wrote.
Flight 1303, a Tupolev Tu-134 operated by Volga-Aviaexpress airline, took off from Domodedovo about 10 p.m. heading for the southern city of Volgograd, known as Stalingrad from 1925 until 1961, according to Russian news reports. It disappeared at 10:56 p.m. with 34 passengers and eight crew members aboard, including the head of the airline. Authorities found the scattered remains of the plane around the village of Buchalki in the Tula region.
Flight 1047, a Tupolev Tu-154 operated by Sibir, left Moscow about 9:30 p.m. heading for Sochi, then vanished from radar at 11 p.m., according to the airline. Sibir reported on its Web site that 38 passengers and eight crew members were aboard. About four hours after the crash, rescue personnel found the flaming debris of the plane about 82 miles north of Rostov-on-Don.
Authorities and activists had anticipated a major terrorist attack leading up to the election Sunday, which the regional interior minister, Alu Alkhanov, is expected to win with the support of the Kremlin. Putin has tried to propel Alkhanov into office in a campaign critics consider a farce. Government officials kicked Alkhanov's main rival off the ballot on the grounds that his passport misstated the proper name of his place of birth; and Putin made a rare trip to Chechnya on Sunday to lay a wreath at the grave of Kadyrov, the former Chechen president, alongside Alkhanov.
Alkhanov promised last week to forestall any pre-election attacks. Last weekend, though, Chechen guerrillas launched coordinated attacks in Grozny that killed at least 30 people. The fighting continued through Monday night with the Russian military reporting that troops had killed 12 rebels.
In an interview Tuesday before the plane crashes, Tatyana Lokshina of the Moscow Helsinki Group, a human rights organization, said the fighting in Grozny last weekend might be "some kind of prelude to some bigger event that would take place" on or before the election.
Terrorist attacks in the last year have focused on what are known as soft targets, such as the Moscow subway and a rock concert. Security for domestic flights at Russian airports has often been criticized as lax.
-------- us
Just Deserters?
Soldiers are singing 'O Canada.' Is it the beginning of a Vietnam-like trend?
by Vince Beiser
L.A. Weekly
http://www.laweekly.com/ink/04/40/news-beiser.php
On the night of January 2, 2004, Jeremy Hinzman, a paratrooper with the United States Army's storied 82nd Airborne Division, loaded his wife, their 1-year-old son and some clothes into his Chevy Prizm, drove out the gates of his base in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and fled the country. The family barreled north for 17 hours and crossed into Canada the next day, posing as tourists.
"Once we were across the border, it was a load off my mind," says Hinzman. "Though I knew it would be the beginning of a whole new chapter."
That day, Hinzman left his life in America behind, perhaps for good. He had become a deserter from the U.S. military - a crime punishable by prison, or even death.
Just a couple of weeks before he bolted, Hinzman had learned that his unit was to be shipped off to Iraq. He'd already spent eight dispiriting months in Afghanistan - and more important, he had become convinced that Operation Iraqi Freedom was an unjustified attack aimed more at gaining control of foreign oil fields than defending the United States.
"This is a criminal war, and I'm not going to be part of it," says Hinzman, 24, a rail-thin native of South Dakota with close-cropped hair and a purposeful expression on his angular face. "My wife and I wrestled with what to do - go the martyr route and go to prison, or leave the country. Prison could have meant a long sentence, and I've already spent enough time away from my family." So the Hinzmans now live in a basement apartment in central Toronto, surviving off their savings and waiting for the Canadian government to decide what to do with them.
It may be premature at this point to call Iraq America's new Vietnam, but it's also getting harder to ignore the symptoms of that ill-fated conflict that are presenting themselves anew. One of the least noticed is the growing numbers of GIs who are either refusing to fight or who are having increasing doubts about doing so. Some are acting out of principle, others perhaps out of fear, many undoubtedly out of a combination of both. But they seem to agree with Hinzman on one thing: The war the Bush administration started in Iraq is not worth dying for.
At least three other American soldiers besides Hinzman have fled to Canada to avoid being sent to Iraq. A handful of others have been jailed for refusing to go; just this August, police in Rhode Island nabbed an Army recruit who ran off his base when he learned that he would be sent to Iraq as soon as his basic training was complete. There are certainly more who are quietly looking for a way out. According to the Army's own statistics, the number of soldiers applying for conscientious-objector status is running double its prewar levels. Hinzman's lawyer, Jeffry House, says about 60 GIs have contacted him about the prospects of finding refuge in Canada as deserters. And the GI Rights Hotline, a volunteer network that counsels soldiers considering leaving the military, is currently logging nearly 3,000 calls a month, almost twice the number that were coming in before the war.
"It's been crazy," says Hotline spokesman Bill Galvin. Calls are pouring in both from reservists who are afraid they'll be called up and torn away from their families and jobs, and from active-duty servicemen and women. "We hear from a lot of people who have already served in Afghanistan or Iraq, saying they'll go to jail before they'll go back," says Galvin.
Theoretically, deserters in wartime can be punished with execution. But in practice, that hasn't happened since World War II. A long stretch in a military prison, however, is a real possibility. Camilo Mejia found that out the hard way.
Mejia, who emigrated from Nicaragua with his mother to Florida in 1994, joined the Army a year later at the age of 19. A Burger King cashier at the time, he was enticed - like many recruits - by the military's offer to help pay for college. After his initial three-year stint, he stayed on with the Florida National Guard while he went to school. He was just finishing up a degree in psychology and Spanish in the spring of 2003 when his unit was ordered to Iraq.
For six months, Mejia led a squad in the volatile Sunni Triangle town of Ramadi, surviving roadside bombs, firefights and ambushes. But he also saw civilians - including children - killed by U.S. fire, and prisoners being cruelly abused, even before news of Abu Ghraib hit the headlines. In October, he was allowed home on a two-week furlough - and refused to go back. Instead, he began speaking out to the press, declaring his conscience would not let him return to fight what he called an "oil-driven war."
"I cannot say that I [went to war] to help the Iraqi people. I cannot say that it was to make America and the world safer. I cannot say that it was for democracy. I cannot say that it was to prevent terrorism. I could not find a single good reason for having been there and having shot at people and having been shot at," Mejia told 60 Minutes late last year. Shortly thereafter, he turned himself in.
At his desertion trial in May, he was unrepentant. "Putting my weapon down, I chose to reassert myself as a human being," he declared. Unimpressed, the tribunal stripped him of his rank and sentenced him to one year behind bars in an Army brig in Oklahoma. His case has drawn the support of Vietnam-era luminaries including Daniel Ellsberg, and Amnesty International has declared him a prisoner of conscience.
From his cell, Mejia has applied to be reclassified as a conscientious objector, which the military defines as someone whose beliefs don't allow him or her to kill other human beings and is therefore excused from duty. It may seem odd that anyone choosing to join today's volunteer armed forces would have such beliefs, or would be able to get a discharge because of them. But even the Pentagon recognizes that people change, especially under the stress of combat. It's one thing to think you're prepared to kill when you're just pretending to do it in video games or training exercises; it's another when, like Mejia, you're confronted with real human beings blasted into gory shreds as a result of your actions.
David Sanders had never even heard of conscientious objection until he had already run off his Navy base in Florida and wound up in Canada. A skittish, doe-eyed, acne-ravaged 20-year-old, Sanders enlisted to get money for college - something he couldn't afford as a high school dropout working at a pizza parlor in Bullhead City, Arizona. "I'm not a violent guy. I hate guns. I've never been in a fight in my life," he says. When word came early this year that his unit was to be sent to Iraq, he simply walked off the base and got on a bus to Toronto. He'd never been out of the country before and knew no one in Canada's biggest city, but had heard it was a nice place. He wound up on the streets, too frightened of being deported to tell anyone what he was doing there until he contacted House this summer after reading about Hinzman's case in a local newspaper. "I don't want to kill innocent people, and I believe that's what I'd be doing if I'd stayed," he says, his leg vibrating nervously as we talk in a tiny office in the homeless shelter where he's been staying.
Some Iraq War deserters, however, would have no problem killing and risking their lives for their country - they just don't believe that this war has anything to do with keeping America safe. Daniel Felushko, 23, who drove off his California Marine Corps base bound for Canada just before the Iraq War started, looks like the kind of Marine you see in the movies: a solidly built, wide-bodied guy with buzz-cut blond hair and a sunny farm boy's demeanor. Nursing a beer in downtown Toronto, he's wearing blue jeans and a T-shirt that says, "It's All Good."
Felushko says he decided to run as soon as word came down that his unit would be sent to Iraq. "If it had been Afghanistan, I would have gone, because there was a direct relationship with 9/11, between the Taliban and terror," he says. "But beyond Saddam and Bush's grudge, there's no reason for us to go to Iraq. If I'm going to give my life, that's not a good enough reason."
Brandon Hughey, a 19-year-old Texan who deserted from the Army earlier this year and is now being sheltered by a Quaker couple in the town of St. Catharines, Ontario, has a similar take. "If enemy troops were landing on our shores, I'd pick up a rifle and defend home and family," he says. "But this was an act of aggression, not defense."
The number of Iraq War deserters is so far relatively small - certainly compared to the Vietnam War, when tens of thousands headed for Canada to duck the draft. Some 1,076 grunts deserted the Army in the first three months of this year - a rate only slightly higher than that in 2002, before the war began. Army soldiers make up the vast majority of all American military personnel in Iraq, with Marines constituting most of the rest.
"AWOL [going absent without leave] and desertion are self-centered acts that not only affect the soldier but also in a time of war may put other soldiers' lives at risk," says Army spokesperson Major Shawn Jirik. But, he adds, the brass isn't concerned about current desertion levels. "The overwhelming majority of our soldiers are serving their country admirably," she says. "We're looking at relatively minute numbers of deserters, less than 1 percent of the total. I can't imagine it's going to increase dramatically. I think if people were going to walk, they would have done so already. "
But as the daily drip of U.S. casualties continues unabated, it certainly seems possible that more soldiers will get the urge to walk, if not run. In a survey of soldiers serving in Iraq released by the Army itself last March, more than half of those questioned said their own morale was low or very low, and nearly three-quarters said the same of their unit's morale. A poll last year by Stars and Stripes, the semiofficial armed-forces newspaper, reported that 31 percent of responding soldiers in Iraq thought the war there was of little or no value. Considering also that many of those currently serving in Iraq are being kept there on extended tours of duty, it's likely some of them may decide to go AWOL once they're finally allowed back stateside.
Meanwhile, the first waves of Iraq War veterans have begun returning home - and some of them are deeply disillusioned. Early this summer, Michael Hoffman, a 25-year-old former Marine, founded Iraq Veterans Against the War - a group of some two dozen service members whose name speaks for itself. "We were given three reasons for this war: weapons of mass destruction, Saddam's support of terror and Iraqi democracy," says Hoffman, who fought with an artillery unit in the initial invasion. "All three have fallen through. Eventually you start to put two and two together, and you realize that you're there for oil and companies like Halliburton. People are starting to figure it out. There will inevitably be more deserters. We're set on the same course as Vietnam if this continues."
Hoffman himself is still in the Individual Ready Reserve, meaning he could be called back to duty. What will he do if that happens? "I have my own free will" is all he's willing to say. His caution is understandable: The Marine Corps announced in July that it has opened an investigation of Lance Corporal Abdul Henderson, the Marine reservist who appears in Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 declaring that he won't go to Iraq if his unit is called up. The Army is already having enough trouble keeping its ranks filled. In August, it announced plans to put hundreds of new recruiters to work around the country, and jacked up the cash bonuses offered to those they sign up, in an effort to boost enlistment for the increasingly unattractive job of soldiering.
Outspoken deserters like Hinzman and Mejia have become heroes to the anti-war movement, but they have plenty of critics, to put it mildly. Fox News' Bill O'Reilly has several times threatened to launch a boycott of Canadian goods if Ottawa doesn't send the deserters back to face trial. Hinzman keeps a collection of some of the most lurid hate mail he has received via his Web site. Sample sentiment, sent in by former Marine Corporal Mike Chappina: "If you're ever in New York, please let me know, so I can punch a fuckin' screwdriver through your eyes, you pile of garbage."
A constant theme of the abuse, of course, is the charge of cowardice. Admittedly, it's a little tough to picture Hinzman as a rough-and-ready paratrooper. Deeply earnest and given to grad-schoolish digressions on political and social theory, he's wearing green corduroys, sandals and a blue track jacket as he sips a smoothie at a sidewalk café.
But he bridles at the accusation of cowardice. "It's not a matter of fear, though of course there's some," he says. He never saw combat in Afghanistan - he spent his tour doing kitchen work on a base near Kandahar - but, he says, "I've jumped out of planes, done all kinds of wazoo stuff. If my unit called me tomorrow and said, 'Come to Iraq, you can do nonviolent stuff, carry supplies, be a human shield,' I'd do it in a minute. I'd have problems supporting the war, but I'd do it, as long as I'm not shooting people."
Hinzman, Sanders and Hughey have all applied for refugee status to enable them to stay in Canada. (Felushko is a dual citizen of the U.S. and Canada, and so can stay in the Great White North without trouble; he just can't go back to the U.S.) Under Canadian immigration law, that requires proving that they have a "well-founded fear of persecution" if they are sent back to the their home country. Jeffry House, who is representing all three - and who was himself a Vietnam-era draft dodger - is arguing that the legal punishment they would face for deserting amounts to persecution for their political beliefs. Even he admits it's a long shot. "There's a lot of resistance to the idea that anyone can be a refugee from the United States," he says. But the legal proceedings could drag on for years, and since desertion is not an extraditable offense, his clients are safe for some time.
Their choice, however, does mean they are cut off from family and friends in the U.S. for many years to come. "I won't be able to go to my grandmother's funeral when she dies, or to my sister's wedding," says Hinzman. "That's the hardest consequence of all this." He wishes his former comrades in the 82nd Airborne well, he says, and wouldn't preach to them to follow his example. "It's a very personal decision," he says. "But if I'm going to commit to killing people, there had better be a good reason. Not for the right of someone to drive an SUV with cheap gas."
----
Senior Officers May Be Charged
Role of Army Intelligence in Abu Ghraib Abuse Investigated
By Daniel Williams
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, August 25, 2004; Page A13
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A30095-2004Aug24.html
MANNHEIM, Germany, Aug. 24 -- Military prosecutors are nearing a decision on whether to charge two senior U.S. Army intelligence officers for their roles in the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal, a military court here was told Tuesday. Any such charges would be the first brought against officers and members of interrogation units at the prison outside Baghdad.
Maj. Michael R. Holly, a military prosecutor, identified the two officers as Lt. Col. Steven Jordan, formerly in charge of interrogations at Abu Ghraib, and his superior, Col. Thomas Pappas. Holly indicated that the Army was waiting for a report on military intelligence activities at the prison before deciding.
"We are still trying to identify the culpability of Jordan and Pappas," Holly told the presiding judge, Col. James L. Pohl, at a pre-trial hearing Tuesday for Staff Sgt. Javal Davis. "They are being investigated."
Davis is charged with cruelty and maltreatment, dereliction of duty and other crimes at the prison.
So far, indictments in the abuse scandal have been limited to seven low-ranking members of the 372nd Military Police Company, which provided guards for the prison's cellblocks. Two days of hearings at a military post here for four of the accused touched repeatedly on the question of whether the soldiers acted on their own or whether military intelligence officers and superiors encouraged or ordered them to soften up prisoners.
During Tuesday's hearing, Davis's attorney, Paul W. Bergrin, asked the judge to grant the two intelligence officers immunity so that they could testify at Davis's trial. He asserted that the officers' testimony was needed to determine whether his client acted under orders. "The young MPs received orders to gather and gain as much intelligence as possible" on the grounds it "would save lives," Bergrin told reporters after the hearing.
Holly argued against immunity, on the grounds that prosecutors might decide to charge the two officers.
Pohl gave the prosecutors until Sept. 10 to explain why the pair should not be given immunity. It was the second time in the two days of hearings that Pohl told Army prosecutors to speed up investigations or risk favorable rulings for the defense.
Bergrin also asked that he be allowed to interview Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and Stephen A. Cambone, undersecretary of defense for intelligence, on grounds that the "highest levels of government" authorized the activities at Abu Ghraib.
The abuse stemmed from interrogation procedures used on detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Bergrin said, citing methods such as stripping inmates naked, interrogating them for long periods, hooding them and using dogs to intimidate them. "These are approved techniques," Bergrin told reporters. "What happened in this case is not merely coincidence."
Pohl turned down Bergrin's request, saying the attorney had not linked Rumsfeld to activities at Abu Ghraib. Bergrin also argued that Army investigators used improper methods to get information from his client.
On Tuesday, Pohl also conducted a pre-trial hearing for Staff Sgt. Ivan L. Frederick, accused of sexually humiliating and beating prisoners. He has decided to plead guilty to some of the charges.
After Tuesday's hearing, Frederick's lawyer, Gary Myers, said that a deal had been negotiated with prosecutors, but he declined to discuss its terms or say which charges would stand and which would be withdrawn.
During the hearing, Myers asked that the trials of the MPs be moved from Baghdad, where they were scheduled to be held, to a safer venue. Civilian witnesses would refuse to go to Iraq for safety reasons, he said, adding that the decision to hold the trials in Baghdad was an effort to please the Iraqi people. Pohl rejected the motion on the grounds that if he moved the trials once, he might have to do it again if witnesses refused to travel to the new location.
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Intelligence Personnel Are Implicated
Army Inquiry on Abuse Is Separate From Review By Schlesinger Panel
By R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, August 25, 2004; Page A13
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A30072-2004Aug24.html
An internal Army investigation has implicated 35 military intelligence personnel and civilian contractors in at least 44 instances of abuse of Iraqi prisoners, a far greater number of personnel than were shown in the searing photos of abuse that have become public so far, government officials said yesterday.
The report by Maj. Gen. George R. Fay and Lt. Gen. Anthony R. Jones, to be released today, states that of this group, 27 committed apparent chargeable offenses, while eight others did not report abuse they knew about or witnessed.
The investigation also implicates 13 military police in the incidents of abuse, noting that seven of the police committed the abuse -- sometimes at the direction of intelligence personnel -- and six others did not report the abuse, including two U.S. military doctors in Iraq, the officials said.
In addition, U.S. military intelligence officials conspired to hide at least eight Iraqis detained by U.S. forces from delegations of the International Committee of the Red Cross, amounting to one of the clearest violations of the Geneva Conventions uncovered so far by investigations of detainee abuse, the officials said.
The report states that the number of "ghost detainees" kept hidden from the ICRC was probably more than eight, a practice it said clearly violated Defense Department rules. It called for further investigation of the circumstances by the Defense Department inspector general's office , the officials said.
International law grants all detainees held by an occupying power the right to confer with visiting officials of the Red Cross, but Defense Department officials have acknowledged deliberately hiding some detainees during the visits, to keep them in sustained isolation as a means of breaking their resistance to interrogation and to keep their capture secret.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has told reporters that one detainee was kept hidden on his instructions, following a request by the CIA. Staff Sgt. Christopher Ward, a member of the 372nd Military Police Company deployed at the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, testified this week at a military trial in North Carolina that he was ordered to hide prisoners during at least three ICRC visits last fall and winter.
The Fay-Jones report -- like the independent panel's report released yesterday -- singles out the top U.S. commander in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, and his deputy, Maj. Gen. Walter Wojdakowski, for not ensuring that their senior staff adequately monitored detention operations, the officials said. But it also concludes that military intelligence officials shared "a major part of the culpability" for the abuse, according to a passage quoted by the independent panel.
Only a handful of these officials -- one source described the number as five -- have been shown in the photos of detainee abuse that have been circulated in public.
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Inquiry Faults Intelligence Unit for Abuses at Iraqi Prison
August 25, 2004
By THOMAS CRAMPTON
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/25/politics/25CND-ABUS.html?hp
WASHINGTON, Aug. 25 - An internal Army investigation made public today confirmed that American military intelligence officers were directly involved in the abuse of Iraqi prisoners at the Abu Ghraib facility outside Baghdad.
The report, which implicates 35 military intelligence personnel and civilian contractors in at least 44 cases of prisoner abuse, shows a far greater participation by military intelligence than had ever been made public before.
``We discovered serious misconduct and a loss of moral values, said Gen. Paul Kern, who led a presentation of the report at the Pentagon. ``This was clearly a deviation from everything we have taught our people about how to behave.''
General Kern described rival groups of military personnel competing to see whose growling, unmuzzled dog could prompt teenage Iraqis to urinate or lose control of their bowel movements faster.
The investigation gave a detailed look into the activities of the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade at Abu Ghraib and mirrored an earlier report on 800th Military Police Brigade responsible for the prison. Members of the military police brigade cited in the earlier report had asserted that some instances of prisoner abuse took place under direct instruction of members of military intelligence. That accusation was supported by today's report of the investigation led by Maj. Gen. George Fay and Lt. Gen. Anthony Jones.
The Fay report comes a day after an independent panel headed by former Defense Secretary James M. Schlesinger attributed prisoner abuses to a string of failures reaching up the chain of command to the Pentagon.
The Schlesinger report declared major failures had taken place on the part of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and his aides in not anticipating and responding swiftly to the insurgency in Iraq that created vast numbers of new prisoners. Nonetheless, the Schlesinger panel members, including former defense secretaries from Republican and Democratic administrations, all said that Mr. Rumsfeld should not resign.
In light of both reports, however, Senator John Kerry, the Democratic presidential nominee, called today for Mr. Rumsfeld's immediate resignation.
``What is missing from all these reports is accountability from the senior civilian leaders in the Pentagon and in the White House,'' Mr. Kerry said in a statement. ``By failing to take corrective actions once all of this became apparent, Secretary Rumsfeld did not demonstrate the leadership required from a secretary of defense.''
The Fay report stated that 27 military intelligence personnel and civilian contractors were directly involved in detainee abuse that will lead to criminal investigations, while 8 others witnessed but did not report what they had seen.
``Torture is a subjective term,'' General Fay said at the press conference. ``It is a harsh word and unfortunately there were some cases where it was appropriate.''
In addition, five senior officers not necessarily involved directly in the abuse, including Lt. Col Thomas M. Pappas, who commanded the military intelligence brigade, have been referred for investigation, General Kern said.
Cases involving civilian contractors have been referred for investigation by the Department of Justice. The investigation identified three new cases of military police officers who are accused of committing abuses and one accused of failing to report an abuse that was witnessed. There were seven military police members who were previously charged.
The report also added a category of those who failed to report abuse, stating that two medical personnel had failed to report cases they witnessed.
Addressing the issue of so-called Ghost Detainees held in Abu Ghraib without any official record of their presence, the Fay report called for further investigation.
In such cases, the report said, members of the military should ``never be put in a position that potentially puts them at risk for noncompliance with the Geneva Convention or Laws of Land Warfare.''
As for cases of violent or sexual abuses that occurred outside scheduled interrogations, the report said none were focused on detainees held for intelligence purposes. ``Unclear rules on interrogation techniques contributed to the problems,'' the report said.
``Confusion about what interrogation techniques were authorized resulted from the proliferation of guidance and information from other theaters of operation,'' the report said. ``This confusion contributed to the occurrence of some of the nonviolent and nonsexual abuses.''
Abuses at Abu Ghraib did not arise out of one cause, the Fay report concluded, attributing the problems to a range of issues, from individual misconduct to leadership failure.
``There is no single, simple explanation for why this abuse at Abu Ghraib happened,'' the report continued. ``The primary causes are misconduct - ranging from inhumane to sadistic - by a small group of morally corrupt soldiers and civilians.''
``Neither Department of Defense nor Army doctrine caused any abuses,'' the report concluded. ``Abuses would not have occurred had doctrine been followed and mission training conducted.''
The report defined abuse as any treatment of detainees that violated American criminal law or international law, or treatment that was inhumane or coercive without lawful justification.
The abuses in the prison fell within two categories, the report said: intentional violent or sexual abuse and abusive actions taken base on misinterpretation or confusion regarding law or policy.
``While senior level officers did not commit the abuse at Abu Ghraib, they did bear responsibility for lack of oversight of the facility,'' the report said, also blaming them for failing to report abuses to the International Committee of the Red Cross.
In producing their report, Fay investigators said 28 staff members examined more than 9,000 documents and conducted more than 170 interviews and eight investigative trips to Iraq.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- courts / tribunals
First War-Crimes Case Opens at Guantánamo Base
August 25, 2004
By NEIL A. LEWIS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/25/national/25gitmo.html
GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba, Aug. 24 - An Army colonel called to order the first United States military tribunal proceedings since the end of World War II here on Tuesday, opening the case against a 34-year-old Yemeni who is accused of conspiring to commit acts of terrorism.
The Yemeni, Salim Ahmed Hamdan, thus became the first of the more than 800 people who have been imprisoned at a high-security detention center at the naval base here to appear in court to answer charges of war crimes. He could be sentenced to life in prison.
Mr. Hamdan, 34, has admitted that he was a driver for Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan, but has denied the military's charges that he was involved in any way with Al Qaeda or terrorism. The trial of Mr. Hamdan is one of four that will formally begin this week with preliminary hearings on motions by lawyers for the defendants, all of whom are charged with some version of conspiracy to commit terrorism.
While the immediate focus of the proceedings is the guilt or innocence of the four men, all those involved are keenly aware that the events in the courtroom here are part of a wider drama involving the standing and reputation of the United States for evenhanded justice.
The facility at Guantánamo, which now houses about 585 prisoners, has been widely viewed by foreign governments and human rights organizations as a symbol of Washington's willingness to flout international law. While many inmates have been released, most of those here have been held for more than two years without any charges being filed.
Mr. Hamdan entered a courtroom that was fashioned from an old dental clinic, escorted by two security officers, and grinned widely when he caught sight of his military lawyer, Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift.
Clad in traditional Yemeni attire of a flowing white robe called a jilbab over which he wore a suit coat and a patterned white shawl, Mr. Hamdan spoke briefly in Arabic in response to questions from the presiding officer of the panel, Col. Peter E. Brownback III. Mr. Hamdan said, according to the translation provided, that he understood his right to a lawyer and was satisfied with Commander Swift's representation but thought he should have a second lawyer, something Commander Swift told the court he had requested many times.
Much of the morning was taken up with Commander Swift's efforts to portray Colonel Brownback as incapable of serving impartially because of extensive contacts with senior Pentagon officials who helped set up the military tribunals. Colonel Brownback, who came out of retirement to serve on a tribunal, seemed annoyed at Commander Swift's request that he step aside and said he would forward it to the Pentagon. By the end of the day Commander Swift had challenged the suitability of four other panel members.
Commander Swift said that Colonel Brownback should be disqualified because he said at a July 15 meeting with some lawyers that he did not believe Guantánamo detainees had any rights to a speedy trial. Colonel Brownback sharply denied making the remark.
But hours later at the conclusion of the day's proceedings, Commander Swift stunned Colonel Brownback when he said he had just learned that an audiotape of the meeting existed and he would like to include it in his request that Colonel Brownback be disqualified. Colonel Brownback covered his face with his hands for several moments and then agreed to have the tape recording included.
On Wednesday, the tribunal is scheduled to begin considering the case of David Hicks, a 29-year-old Australian drifter and convert to Islam who was apprehended at the end of the Afghanistan war and charged with being a soldier for the Taliban. Mr. Hicks is the only one of the four to face charges besides the conspiracy count: attempted murder and aiding the enemy.
The tribunal will begin the cases of Ali Hamza Ahmad Sulayman al Bahlul of Yemen on Thursday and Ibrahim Ahmed Mahmoud al Qosi of Sudan on Friday. The actual trials with testimony may not begin for months.
Military officials have sought to emphasize the rights granted to tribunal defendants, like the presumption of innocence, and seem baffled by complaints and news reports that emphasize the features of the proceedings that fall short of the standards of American justice.
The trials are being observed by officials from various organizations, including the American Civil Liberties Union, the American Bar Association, Human Rights Watch, Human Rights First and Amnesty International. Anthony Romero, the executive director of the civil rights union, told reporters the shortcomings in the system far canceled out the rights provided.
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Bin Laden Aide Is Charged at First Tribunal
Defense Lawyer Calls Process Unfair
By Scott Higham
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, August 25, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A28241-2004Aug24?language=printer
GUANTANAMO BAY, Cuba, Aug. 24 -- The United States military formally opened its first trial of an accused al Qaeda collaborator Tuesday, alleging that the former personal chauffeur for Osama bin Laden helped him ferry weapons and flee after the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in East Africa and the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
As the first military tribunals since the end of World War II got underway, the Pentagon-appointed defense lawyer for Salim Ahmed Hamdan attacked the process as unfair and assailed the presiding officer, calling him unqualified to serve. In a rare move, the attorney, Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift, asked Army Col. Peter E. Brownback III to step down from the case.
Swift also questioned whether several other members of what the Pentagon calls "military commissions" could serve as independent jurors, and requested that they be disqualified as well. They include an officer who served in intelligence operations in the Middle East, another who sent detainees from Afghanistan to Guantanamo Bay, a third who commanded a Marine who perished in the World Trade Center attack and a fourth who said he could not say with certainty what the Geneva Conventions are.
Hamdan, 34, was escorted into a makeshift courtroom at the U.S. Navy base here wearing a flowing white shawl, a traditional Yemeni jilbab scarf wrapped around his head and a white, black and tan checkered sports coat that was two sizes too big. Hamdan removed the jilbab from his head, rested it upon his shoulders and broke into a broad smile when he spotted Swift standing at the defense table.
Hamdan has been in Guantanamo for nearly three years, the last eight months in an isolation camp. He seemed slightly overwhelmed as he scanned the rows of seats filled with military officers, reporters, human rights advocates and others. He turned to the spectators, giving them a quick nod and a smile before turning back to face the members of the military commission who have been assigned to hear the charges against him. If convicted of conspiring to commit war crimes, Hamdan faces life in prison.
"Are you prepared to go forward?" Brownback asked.
"I agree," Hamdan said through an interpreter.
Hamdan's appearance marked the first time that military commissions have been used by the United States since World War II. Two months after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, President Bush ordered that suspected terrorists and Taliban fighters captured in Afghanistan and elsewhere be tried before the commissions.
Initial hearings for the first four suspects facing trial are being held this week at the Guantanamo Bay base, where 585 suspected al Qaeda and Taliban fighters are detained. Eleven other detainees have been designated for trials before the commissions. They are awaiting formal charges and hearing dates.
A hearing is scheduled Wednesday for David Hicks, 29, an Australian kangaroo skinner who converted to Islam and allegedly joined al Qaeda after watching the attacks of Sept. 11. His father, Terry Hicks, 58, landed at Guantanamo Bay Tuesday after a 30-hour flight to see his son for the first time in years.
David Hicks has been detained here for nearly three years, and his father said he was not sure what to say when he sees him in the courtroom. "At this point, it hasn't hit home yet," Terry Hicks said.
Administration officials say the trials will be fair, but military lawyers and human rights and civil liberties groups call them relics. They say that the rules and procedures stand in sharp contrast to military courts-martial and internationally accepted laws of war, and that they carry the potential of diminishing the perception of the U.S. justice system around the world.
In commission hearings, defense lawyers and prosecutors are permitted to question the qualifications of panelists under a voir dire process similar to the ones used in military courts-martial and civilian courts. Because the commission members serve as jurors, prosecutors and defense lawyers can probe whether the panelists have potential conflicts or biases that could influence their decision making during the trial and deliberations.
After his occasionally testy questioning of Brownback, Swift asked the presiding officer to disqualify himself. Swift said Brownback let his law license lapse, would exert improper influence over other commission members because he was a military lawyer and judge for 27 years, had multiple contacts with the military officer supervising the commissions, and had formed an opinion on whether suspected terrorists and Taliban fighters should have the right to speedy trials.
"We challenge the presiding officer," Swift said, adding that he discovered a tape of a conversation in which Brownback reportedly stated his opinion about detainees' rights to a speedy trial.
The disclosure of the tape appeared to take Brownback by surprise. Still, he said he would forward Swift's challenge and the tape to John D. Altenburg Jr., a retired Army major general who serves as the supervisor of the commissions and will decide whether to dismiss Brownback.
Brownback declined to halt the proceedings while a decision is pending. "I will not hold the proceedings in abeyance," he said.
Swift and the military prosecutor, Navy Cmdr. Scott M. Lang, later began to question the remaining members of the commission: four panelists and one alternate, all military officers. Swift ultimately asked five of the six commissioners, including Brownback, to step down.
Swift questioned Air Force Lt. Col. Timothy Toomey, an intelligence officer who was involved in operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, and Marine Col. R. Thomas Bright, who supervised an operation that sent suspected terrorists and Taliban fighters to Guantanamo Bay. Each said he could be fair-minded during the proceedings.
Swift also questioned Marine Col. Jack K. Sparks Jr., who said he had lost one of his reservists in the attack on the World Trade Center. The Marine reservist was a firefighter, and the commission member attended his funeral and visited Ground Zero a few weeks after the attack.
"Were you angry?" Swift asked.
"I would imagine that everyone who saw it was angry," Sparks responded.
Swift concluded the questioning by turning to Army Lt. Col. Curt S. Cooper. At one point, he asked Cooper if he knew what the Geneva Conventions were.
"Not specifically, no, sir," Cooper responded, prompting Swift to call him unqualified to serve and to ask for his removal as well.
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Journalist Testifies in CIA Case
Contempt Charges Against Time Reporter Are Dropped
By Carol D. Leonnig
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, August 25, 2004; Page A02
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A28286-2004Aug24.html
A federal judge yesterday canceled a contempt-of-court order against Time magazine and one of its reporters, Matthew Cooper, after Cooper was interviewed by Justice Department prosecutors investigating who leaked the identity of a covert CIA operative to journalists.
Officials at Time said Cooper, who had been threatened with jail time for refusing to respond to a grand jury subpoena, gave a deposition Monday about his conversations with a single anonymous source -- I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, chief of staff for Vice President Cheney -- after Libby waived Cooper's responsibility to keep their conversations on the topic confidential. Time officials said Libby was the only source of Cooper's that special counsel prosecutors asked about.
Cooper is at least the third journalist to answer questions under pressure from prosecutors about private conversations with Libby in July 2003. The inquiry seeks to determine whether any senior administration official knowingly revealed the identity of undercover CIA operative Valerie Plame to syndicated columnist Robert D. Novak and other journalists. It can be a felony to do so intentionally.
"Matt would have gone to jail if Libby didn't waive his right to confidentiality . . . and we would have fought all the way to the Supreme Court," said Time Managing Editor Jim Kelly. "Matt has been absolutely steadfast in his desire to protect anonymous sources."
U.S. District Chief Judge Thomas F. Hogan on Aug. 6 found Cooper and Time in contempt of court. Cooper faced as long as 18 months in jail, and the magazine could have been fined $1,000 a day, until he answered Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald's questions. Time appealed but acknowledged it had little hope of persuading a higher court to put reporters' confidentiality agreements above the interests of a criminal investigation.
The inquiry was sparked by a July 14, 2003, column by Novak that first named Plame. The column questioned the findings of Plame's husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, whom the CIA sent to Niger in 2002 to investigate claims that Iraq had tried to buy uranium in the African nation for its weapons-of-mass-destruction program.
At the time, Wilson was a prominent critic of Bush administration statements on Iraq's efforts on such weapons and their use in the buildup to war. He suggested that his wife's identity was leaked in retaliation but has since backed off that claim.
Novak wrote that two administration officials said Wilson was recommended for the CIA mission by his wife, offered it as an explanation for his selection and raised doubt about his expertise.
Novak and his attorney James Hamilton have refused to say whether the columnist has been subpoenaed to testify before the grand jury, and declined again yesterday.
Subpoenas were recently issued to Walter Pincus of The Washington Post, who wrote in October 2003 that White House officials had talked to a Post reporter about Plame, and Judith Miller of the New York Times. The Post filed a motion to quash Pincus's subpoena Friday, arguing that the First Amendment gives reporters a privilege to protect confidential sources. A hearing is expected in September.
Two Newsday reporters were asked by Fitzgerald to answer questions this spring, and threatened with subpoenas, but they declined to talk. They said yesterday that they have not been contacted again.
Cooper's reluctant decision to cooperate with prosecutors has shed more light on the unusual year-long investigation but left many questions unanswered. So far, Fitzgerald has focused enormous investigative energy poring through the records of Cheney's top aide and interviewing journalists who spoke with him.
NBC Washington correspondent Tim Russert and Post reporter Glenn Kessler gave interviews to Fitzgerald under similar circumstances earlier this summer, also with waivers from Libby. Both journalists said they did not have to identify confidential sources and they told Fitzgerald that Libby did not reveal Plame's name to them.
Lawyers and journalists involved in the case say Fitzgerald is going through a methodical process of elimination for all contacts between reporters and senior administration officials last summer, and is waiting until the end to question Novak.
"To go about finding out who Novak's sources are by going after half the journalists in town seems pretty indirect, and a little weird," said Lucy A. Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. "I think it's absolutely clear these reporters don't have information that goes to the heart of who the leaker is. "
-------- homeland security / national intelligence
Senate Names Intelligence Panel
Frist, Daschle Appoint 22 to Work on 9/11 Recommendations
By Helen Dewar
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, August 25, 2004; Page A02
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A30003-2004Aug24.html
Congress took its first official step toward reorganization of its intelligence and homeland security operations yesterday as Senate leaders tapped 22 of the chamber's most powerful members to undertake the highly sensitive task of shaking up the established order on Capitol Hill.
Aides to Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) and Minority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.) said the leaders hope to have recommendations dealing with reforms proposed by the Sept. 11 commission ready for action before Congress adjourns in early October.
"Ensuring that the Senate is as effective as possible when dealing with the threat of terrorism is a principal concern," Frist said in joining with Daschle to announce appointment of the bipartisan "working group." Daschle said he regards congressional reform as "vital to the success of the entire package" proposed by the commission.
Within hours after the commission released its report late last month, Frist and Daschle said the Senate would move swiftly to address both executive and legislative reorganization. Hearings began immediately on the executive branch, but there was no movement until yesterday to create a mechanism for congressional reform.
The House has not acted on streamlining operations, but John Feehery, spokesman for Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), said the leadership will work through the Rules and Government Reform committees to produce a plan for adoption along with executive branch changes before adjournment.
In a related move, Hastert plans to name a new chairman of the House intelligence committee today to succeed Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.), who stepped down as chairman after being chosen by President Bush to head the CIA.
In its report, the Sept. 11 commission described congressional oversight of intelligence and counterterrorism operations as "dysfunctional" and said major changes are needed to ensure success of its other proposals, including creation of a powerful new national intelligence director.
Among other things, the commission proposed creating a joint House-Senate intelligence committee or vastly strengthening the existing committees for each chamber, including empowering them to appropriate funds as well as set policy. It proposed abandonment of term limits for committee members and said the intelligence budget should be made public. It also proposed creation of permanent committees on homeland security.
In another major recommendation, the commission called for an expedited process for nominating and confirming national security appointees that would have all of them confirmed or rejected within 30 days of a presidential inauguration.
But some of the proposals would eat into the jurisdiction of existing committees and their chairmen, raising the specter of a serious turf war. In apparent hope of heading off such a struggle, Frist and Daschle appointed senior members of affected committees and subcommittees to the working group, along with the second-ranking Senate leaders, Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.).
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'Half of govt secrets shouldn't be secret'
August 25, 2004
By Shaun Waterman
UPI Homeland and National Security Editor
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20040824-061857-6856r.htm
Washington, DC, Aug. 24 (UPI) -- The official in charge of information security at the Pentagon and the government's secrecy watchdog told lawmakers Tuesday that at least half of the information the U.S. government classifies every year should not be kept secret.
Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Counter Intelligence and Security Carol Haave testified before a House panel about the problem of over-classification by government agencies. She was joined by the administration's secrecy watchdog, Bill Leonard, head of the Information Security Oversight Office.
Rep. Chris Shays, R-Conn., the panel chairman, called the system for safeguarding the nation's secrets "incomprehensibly complex" and "so bloated it often does not distinguish between the critically important and the comically irrelevant."
The panel heard examples of information that was classified by one agency, then released by another; information that was redacted from one part of a document by an agency, but published in another part of the same document; and information that an agency insisted should be classified until it was pointed out it was available on the agency's own Web site.
The hearing was one of an unprecedented summer recess series held to consider the recommendations of the Sept. 11 Commission, formally known as the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States.
The commission found that "current security requirements nurture over-classification" that was a barrier to the information sharing between agencies and with local law enforcement that they decreed vital to the fight against terrorism.
Although no commission members testified Tuesday, the body's Chairman Tom Kean, the former GOP Governor of New Jersey, has said that one of the great surprises of the unprecedented access he and his fellow commissioners were given to highly classified government documents was finding out how much of it he already knew from reading the newspapers.
Shays said there was broad agreement that many of the 14 million pieces of information the government classified last year did not need to be secret, but that estimates of how bad the problem was varied wildly.
"Some estimate 10 percent of current secrets should never have been classified. Others put the extent of over-classification as high as 90 percent," he said, and asked the witnesses for their estimate.
"How about if I say 50-50," Haave responded, after initially demurring to answer. She said that while there was over-classification it generally was not done maliciously, but because "people have a tendency to err on the side of caution."
Leonard said that there were two kinds of over-classification, and both were growing.
He said that the worst kind was classification of information that was "ineligible to be classified" under President Bush's executive order governing secrecy, introduced in March 2003. That order says that information can lawfully be classified only if its "unauthorized disclosure ... reasonably could be expected to result in damage to the national security."
He said that there was a disturbing increase in the number of classification decisions in "clear, blatant violation of the order."
But even where information met the criteria for classification, he said, which made the decision "a matter of judgment," more than half of it classified "really should not be classified in terms of what we lose -- the price we pay for classification outweighs any perception, any advantage we perceive we gain."
The problem, said Bill Crowell, a former deputy director of the National Security Agency who has served on a number of commissions inquiring into classification and secrecy, was that the system dated from the Cold War.
"The current system assumes that it is possible to determine in advance who needs to know particular information, and that the risks associated with disclosure are greater than the potential benefits of wider information sharing," he said.
As a result, there were significant incentives to protect information, but none to share it.
(Please send comments to nationaldesk@upi.com.)
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Trading Privacy for Convenience
'Registered Travelers' Give Up Personal Information for Shorter Airport Lines
By Sara Kehaulani Goo
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, August 25, 2004; Page E01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A30178-2004Aug24?language=printer
Steve Daniels leaned forward for a machine to take a photo of his eye, then placed his right index finger on a small digital scanner. Instantly, a large black and white image of his fingerprint appeared on a screen. The image wiggled slightly as Daniels moved his finger.
"Wow!" he said.
Within seconds, Daniels, a computer consultant whose company is based in Annapolis, joined 125 other local travelers who signed up yesterday to become "registered travelers" at Reagan National Airport. The test project, which aims to give frequent fliers a quicker pass through security checkpoints, is already underway at four other airports. It relies on the latest biometric technologies to verify a passenger's identity with increased precision. Digital fingerprint scans and photographs are already used to identify foreigners traveling on a visa, and U.S. officials plan to encode a facial recognition technology into passports.
"It was fun -- it was also a little weird," said Mark Senak, an Arlington resident who signed up for the program yesterday and said he had never had his iris scanned. "I travel so much that anything that can lessen the hassle is worth it."
The Transportation Security Administration and select airlines are cooperating on the program, which will last 90 days at airports in Washington, Boston, Los Angeles, Houston and Minneapolis. The aim at National is to sign up members of Congress and frequent fliers and speed them through a special security lane equipped with scanners. More than 7,000 passengers across the country have signed up so far, and the TSA said hundreds of passengers use the designated security lanes each day.
But the success of the pilot project since its launch in July has been uneven. The Northwest Airlines Corp. program in Minneapolis proved so popular that it exceeded its target enrollment, an airline spokesman said. Northwest had offered 1,000 frequent-flier miles to invited passengers who signed up.
UAL Corp.'s United Airlines, however, did not offer free miles and had less success in Los Angeles when it launched its program last month. When passengers only trickled in to the sign-up counters, the TSA extended the enrollment period an extra week. "It wasn't really enticing for people to battle L.A. traffic to sign up" at the airport, said United spokesman Jeff Green. He said enrollment has improved, but "it's so new, I don't think we can gauge the response at this point."
A steady stream of passengers handpicked by AMR Corp.'s American Airlines showed up yesterday at a sectioned-off area of National Airport's baggage claim to submit to the scans, present two forms of government identification and fill out a form that will be used to perform a criminal background check. The form requested a place of birth, birth date, address, e-mail address, home phone number, cell phone number, eye color, U.S. citizenship status, height and residences over the past five years. Eligible passengers will be able to use the new security checkpoint lane after Labor Day.
No members of Congress had signed up yet but 312 passengers had registered so far over the two days of the program at National, a TSA contractor said.
The program offers the first wide application of iris-scanning technology, which had previously been used only for government employees with access to classified sites or for employees with access to nuclear facilities, said Paul Mirenda, director of field operations for LG Electronics Inc., one of the TSA's contractors that makes the scanners. The technology takes a close-up photograph of the iris, which has more unique characteristics than a fingerprint, and applies digital codes to the photograph to store it as a bar code. The photograph and fingerprint are then stored in a file along with other information about the passenger.
"As far as biometrics go, the iris scan is the most sophisticated measure," TSA spokesman Darrin Kayser said. "These technologies provide us a high level of assurance that you are who you say you are."
But some security experts worry that terrorists could apply to become a registered traveler and score an easier pass through security checkpoints. "Registered traveler is simply putting hijackers on airplanes faster," said Billie Vincent, a former Federal Aviation Administration official. "If you look at 9/11 hijackers, some of them would have qualified as frequent fliers. All they had to do is run a few tests and find out what the parameters were and get people registered."
The TSA said the program is just one of many security layers. Registered travelers will still have to pass through a metal detector and have their luggage inspected. The benefit, TSA said, is a shorter, dedicated line that will amount to a more predictable wait time for security check-in. Registered travelers will also be exempt from random pat-down screening after they step through the checkpoint.
Selected passengers who fly at least once a week from National Airport received an e-mail from American notifying them of their eligibility for the program. After Labor Day, registered travelers will present a boarding pass to an agent at the special security lane, then place an index finger on the kiosk's scanner and look into a high-tech camera to provide an iris scan. Within seconds, the machine matches the information with its database and displays a photo and name on a screen, if the passenger is approved to proceed through checkpoint. If the traveler is not approved, a red screen pops up advising: "Wait for assistance."
Travelers who signed up for the program yesterday said they were impressed with the technology and were eager to be afforded special privileges at the checkpoint. None of the enrollees said they had a problem with providing the government with their personal information.
Indeed, several travelers ticked off a number of cities they had visited in the past week and said they were tired of the unpredictable security lines.
At some airports, like National, there is hardly a line at all. But the lines at others, such as Dulles International and those in Seattle and Dallas, eat up valuable business time.
"I was hoping this might be expanded to BWI and Dulles -- they have worse lines," said Jim Rowan, an investment banker from Chevy Chase.
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Vast Force Is Deployed for Security at Convention
August 25, 2004
By DAVID JOHNSTON and WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/25/politics/campaign/25threat.html?pagewanted=all&position=
The New York Police Department and the largest armada of land, air and maritime forces ever assembled to provide security at a national political gathering are being deployed in New York for the Republican convention, according to federal, state and local officials. They said yesterday that they were planning an intentionally huge response to intelligence that Al Qaeda hoped to carry out an attack to disrupt this year's elections.
The country's terror alert level, which was raised early this month, will remain at orange status, or high alert, throughout the Republican National Convention and probably well beyond, according to several senior intelligence officials. They said they were increasingly concerned about an attack, even though there was no specific intelligence indicating a strike during the convention, which begins Monday.
"Have we collected intelligence that there is going to be a hit in the financial district during the Republican National Convention?" said Pasquale J. D'Amuro, the assistant director in charge of the New York office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. "No. But intelligence we have collected indicates that Al Qaeda still desires to attack both domestically and abroad. They want to kill Americans."
With the alert level ratcheted up, even in the absence of a specific threat, thousands of Republicans arriving in New York are likely to be subjected to a new round of potentially confusing public warnings about the risk of attack alongside soothing official exhortations to enjoy the party, which will take place inside a security envelope surrounding Madison Square Garden.
"Attacking Madison Square Garden would be like pulling a bank job at Fort Knox," a senior counterterrorism official said, referring to the security measures being put into place this week. "It will be the hardest target in the world."
Officials from the National Security Council quietly visited New York last week for briefings with the local authorities. Today, Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge will inspect arrangements for the convention.
The backbone of security is being provided by the 37,000-member New York Police Department, which has a budget larger than all but 19 of the world's standing armies. To prevent an attack, the department will flood the streets with officers and employ high and low technology, from seven surveillance helicopters to plainclothes detectives traveling the subways and eyeballing other riders.
Up to 10,000 officers, many reassigned from narcotics and other duties, will be part of an enormous show of force around Madison Square Garden. That display will include special heavily armed "Hercules" antiterror squads, snipers and phalanxes of officers set up around the arena to search buses and trucks before they enter the area. In addition to the helicopters, several of which can feed close-up video surveillance images to mobile command centers on the ground, 26 launches will patrol waterways, and officers will use 181 bomb-sniffing dogs, many of them borrowed from other law enforcement agencies.
"We can cover all the bases with 37,000 police officers," Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said yesterday. "As big as the R.N.C. deployment is, we have a reserve on top of that. New York would be a poor choice for the malicious-minded to try anything, especially now."
Mr. Kelly has said that virtually the entire department will be mobilized next week, when in addition to the convention, the department will police the United States Open tennis tournament, and baseball games at Yankee Stadium in the Bronx and Shea Stadium in Queens.
Not counting the costs incurred by federal agencies, security in New York is estimated at about $60 million, out of a convention budget of about $166 million, as concerns have broadened to cover not only the week of the convention, but also the weeks before and after it. Police are girding for protests, including a planned march on Sunday, which organizers have predicted will attract as many as 250,000 people, and more spontaneous demonstrations.
The Secret Service is coordinating security arrangements, but more than two dozen federal, state and local agencies will contribute personnel and equipment. Those agencies include the Long Island Rail Road, the Postal Service and the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or Norad, which will help monitor the airspace over New York.
The Department of Homeland Security will contribute bicycle and motorcycle officers, helicopters crews, explosives-detecting dog teams, undercover agents, mobile communications experts, hazardous materials teams, intelligence analysts and Coast Guard teams trained in boarding suspicious watercraft. The federal government's costs will run in the millions, most of it from money allocated for special events.
Five officials who had been briefed on the latest intelligence analysis discussed the overall threat level as Republicans prepared to arrive in New York and as intelligence analysts searching for clues to Al Qaeda's intentions pored over computer materials seized during recent arrests in Britain and Pakistan. American officials have said since early July that they have received intelligence suggesting that Al Qaeda hoped to carry out an attack to disrupt the elections.
The officials said that an investigation of eight men charged with terrorism-related offenses in Britain had provided a clearer picture of the surveillance operations at five American financial institutions. The authorities now believe the surveillance was carried out by Issa al-Hindi. They said he traveled to the United States along with two confederates, Nadeem Tarmohammed and Quaisar Shaffi, who were arrested on Aug. 3 by the British authorities. Investigators have concluded that they stayed in Manhattan hotels during the surveillance.
The American authorities are compiling timelines that show Mr. Hindi traveled to the United States in 2000 and 2001 at the same time as Mr. Tarmohammed and Mr. Shaffi. The authorities are continuing to investigate whether other people helped the reconnaissance missions. They could include Adnan G. el-Shukrijumah, an associate of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the chief architect of the Sept. 11 attacks who was captured last year and is being held in an undisclosed location.
Mr. Kelly said that F.B.I. agents, police detectives and other investigators on the Joint Terrorist Task Force were working to learn where Mr. Hindi was, whom he was with and what he was doing during his time in New York City.
"Obviously what al-Hindi did in the U.S. and who he did it with is of concern," Mr. Kelly said. "So there is this examination of his whereabouts and his contacts in this county. That's ongoing."
Among the thousands of computer discs and other materials seized during the British arrests are bank account records, telephone numbers and credit cards that appear to have been used in the United States. That suggests that the surveillance group may have closer ties to the United States than was previously understood. So far, links to people in the United States are not clearly understood, but no one in the United States has been arrested, the officials said.
Investigators appear to be divided on the overall purpose of the surveillance group, which conducted detailed vulnerability studies of financial institutions in New York, New Jersey and Washington. There is little information in the voluminous cache of documents to suggest that the group had gone beyond the surveillance missions to starting preparations to carry out a plot, according to some officials.
But others investigators believe that impression may change. They said Mr. Hindi appeared to have spent time in the spring updating the three- and four-year-old surveillance reports on the financial institutions, possibly preparing to launch a plot against them. In addition, the officials said, there have been recent reports that Mr. Hindi may have studied improvised explosives in the spring in Pakistan.
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New Jersey Asks U.S. to Help Pay Its Costs for Convention Security
August 25, 2004
By JASON GEORGE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/25/nyregion/25jersey.html
NEWARK, Aug. 24 - The federal government should help pay for New Jersey's increased costs of maintaining security during the Republican National Convention, the state's attorney general said at a news conference here on Tuesday.
New York City is receiving $50 million in federal funds to provide security during the convention, which is being held at Madison Square Garden from Monday through Thursday next week. But New Jersey officials say that terrorism threats, and the costs they bring, do not end at the banks of the Hudson River.
"The sad truth is that New Jersey did not get a dime," said the attorney general, Peter C. Harvey. "It's an outrage."
Mr. Harvey said he did not know how much overtime would be needed to conduct extra security sweeps and searches of bridges, tunnels and roads leading into New York, but he plans to keep a record of expenses to give to the federal government, he said.
When the terrorism threat level has been raised to orange in the past, extra law enforcement costs at state and local levels in New Jersey have ranged from $250,000 to $300,000 a day, officials said.
A spokeswoman for Gov. James E. McGreevey said that the governor would send a letter to Tom Ridge, the Homeland Security secretary, seeking a meeting to discuss the need for more federal money for the state.
"We want to apprise them of the preparations and plans we have made for security," said the spokeswoman, Kathy Ellis. "New Jersey has considerable burden and responsibility in securing the convention site."
A spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security said that Mr. Ridge would welcome the letter.
"If they feel they are doing things, that's the appropriate way to do it," he said.
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Ridge, in New York, Declares 'We Are Prepared'
August 25, 2004
By CHRISTINE HAUSER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/25/nyregion/25CND-PROT.html
Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge today inspected arrangements for the Republican National Convention that starts in New York City next week, meeting at police headquarters with officials and reviewing security measures.
"We are prepared," Mr. Ridge told reporters outside police headquarters in downtown Manhattan.
"The eyes of the world will be on us," Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said later at a news conference with Mr. Ridge and Gov. George E. Pataki.
Mr. Ridge, according to The Associated Press, inspected mobile command centers that will be deployed by security officials during the convention, which begins on Monday at Madison Square Garden.
Earlier in the day, Mr. Ridge rang the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange, one of five financial buildings named this month as potential targets of Al Qaeda attackers.
The country's terror alert level, which was raised earlier this month when officials said the five buildings were under surveillance, will remain at orange status, or high alert, throughout the Republican National Convention.
New York City has been under that alert status since the Sept. 11 attacks.
Based on what officials know today, Mr. Ridge said, there was no reason to expect a change.
"We are comfortable where the threat level is nationally," Mr. Ridge said, "and we are comfortable keeping it limited to the financial services sector in New York City presently, and we review the intelligence 24 hours a day, seven days a week."
Officials wanted to make sure that the city continues to "thrive and operate" while at the same time providing an adequate level of security, he said.
The New York Police Department and the largest armada of land, air and maritime forces ever assembled to provide security at a national political gathering are being deployed in New York for the Republican convention, federal, state and local officials said today.
The backbone of security is being provided by the 37,000-member New York Police Department. Other measures include surveillance helicopters and plainclothes detectives.
Security in New York is estimated at about $60 million, out of a convention budget of about $166 million.
Mr. Bloomberg said the convention would be a "very good economic thing for this city" with an impact to be felt beyond next week.
The police are bracing for protests, including a planned march on Sunday in which organizers expect as many as 250,000 people.
A State Supreme Court judge was expected to rule today on a ban on protesters using the Great Lawn in Central Park on Sunday for that rally, the largest planned for the convention.
Leslie Cagan, national coordinator for United for Peace and Justice, which sued to try to force the city to grant a permit to rally in the park, told a State Supreme Court judge in Manhattan on Tuesday that if the antiwar coalition was not allowed on the grass of the Great Lawn, "then we simply can't have the rally."
Ms. Cagan said later that the group still planned to march up Seventh Avenue past the convention site at Madison Square Garden.
A federal judge in Manhattan refused earlier this week to force the city to allow a rally on Saturday on the Great Lawn, after the Bloomberg administration and protest organizers failed to reach a compromise. In denying the request, by the National Council of Arab Americans and the Answer Coalition, the judge cited security issues and the potential for damage among the reasons.
Many protesters say they intend to go to the park, permit or not, and officials are making plans to police them.
Mr. Bloomberg said there was no evidence that anyone was staying away from New York because of security concerns. He said authorities wanted people to come and speak their minds, but that some might "get a little bit over the top."
Speaking before the state court judge made a ruling on the rally ban, Mr. Bloomberg said: "We'll comply with the law, whatever it is, and we expect everybody to comply with the law."
Asked if he thought people might be frustrated with the extra security measures, Mr. Bloomberg said: "I think New Yorkers look forward to having extra security in this day and age."
-------- police
In run-up to Republican convention: 24-hour surveillance of protest organizers
World Socialist Web Site
By Jamie Chapman
25 August 2004
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/aug2004/prot-a25.shtml
The New York City Police Department (NYPD) has dispatched hundreds of cops around the country to put some 56 people under 24-hour surveillance in advance of the Republican National Convention (RNC). The convention, to be held at Madison Square Garden in Manhattan, opens Monday, August 30.
According to a report issued by WABC News in New York City, the subjects of this spying operation have been identified as "primary anarchists" by the NYPD. They are each being watched by teams of five detectives plus one supervisor, according to the television news report.
The surveillance teams are being sent as far away as California, North Carolina, Washington DC and Boston. Their assignment is to tail the targeted protest organizers and follow them on their trips to New York.
Another group of 20 police officers have been masquerading as anarchist protesters as part of a deep undercover operation. They "have been meeting with, traveling with, and secretly reporting on the activists' plans" for nearly two years, WABC reported.
The WABC News account of this massive spying operation has not been reported in the New York or national press, and has been similarly suppressed by the broadcast media.
Along with the recent FBI visits, in which members of the Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) have harassed dozens of individuals, the NYPD surveillance marks a chilling escalation in state attacks on the rights of free speech and assembly. Anyone labeled a troublemaker by the NYPD will now have police files that trace their every movement. No doubt the NYPD has coordinated its lists with the FBI and other government agencies such as the Homeland Security Department, which maintains "no fly" lists.
This mounting of a nationwide surveillance operation by a city police department is virtually unprecedented. Even in the 1950s, when the infamous Red Squads were set up in every major metropolis to spy on socialists and communists, the reach of these agencies seldom extended beyond their own city limits.
In addition to its surveillance of those planning to come to New York to protest the RNC, the NYPD showed off to reporters last week some of the latest hardware it has developed to use against protesters. Devices include an Italian-made helicopter with a "night sun" floodlight, small handsaws that can cut through chains linking protesters, and a new 45-pound mega-megaphone that can be heard by demonstrators several blocks away.
Known as a "long range acoustic device," the megaphone also can emit a piercing sound-like a smoke detector, only much louder-designed to break up crowds. Such devices were sent to Iraq for use by troops earlier this year.
While NYPD Commissioner Raymond Kelly assured reporters that the shrieking feature would not be used against RNC protesters, it is safe to assume that such crowd control devices-after being tested against the Iraqis and others-will eventually be used against demonstrators in the US as well.
NYPD officials also demonstrated other ways they would handle civil disobedience expected at the RNC. Police assigned to play the role of protesters were swarmed by cops-on foot, in police cars, on motorcycles and on bicycles-and the "protesters" were herded away.
Every bus carrying convention delegates will have a city policeman aboard, to ensure that no protesters interfere with the buses serving the 4,853 delegates and alternates as they go back and forth between Madison Square Garden and their midtown Manhattan hotels.
In all, the NYPD expects to maintain 10,000 cops 24 hours a day in the Madison Square Garden area. The entire city police force of some 36,000 is being placed on shifts of 12 hours or more for the convention.
Helmeted paramilitary police armed with assault rifles have already been deployed in nearby Pennsylvania Station and subways, along with National Guard troops, NYPD canine units and regular beat cops. Other police have mounted stepped-up street patrols. A week before the convention even begins, the repressive atmosphere in the area is overwhelming.
Meanwhile, city officials have still not reached agreement with organizers of protests set for the weekend preceding the opening of the RNC. The New York City Parks Department has denied permits for major rallies in Central Park on the pretext that they would endanger the grass. The same department has previously issued permits for concerts with turnouts approaching the size of the expected protests.
The anti-war coalition, United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ), has repeatedly applied for permits to hold a rally in Central Park following a march by an anticipated 250,000 people that will flow past Madison Square Garden. Denying the permits, the city has attempted to relegate the rally to West Street, a long, narrow stretch of highway alongside the Hudson River.
On Monday, a federal judge denied an appeal by the National Council of Arab Americans and the ANSWER Coalition, which had applied for a permit for a much smaller demonstration in Central Park on Saturday, August 28.
Arguments in the court case dealing with what is expected to be a much larger demonstration organized by the UFPJ for August 29 were heard in state court on Tuesday, with a decision expected Thursday. The group has argued that the city's position violates the Constitution "by discriminating on the basis of content in allowing cultural but not political events."
UFPJ organizers have said that if the court does not rule in their favor, they will call off the rally that is scheduled to follow the march. This would leave a mass of humanity surging up 20 blocks from Manhattan's Union Square with no set destination once they passed the site of the convention. Both the march's organizers and the police anticipate that many protesters will form smaller groups and move on to the park.
By denying a permit for Central Park, the city administration of Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the NYPD are inviting the kind of chaos and disruption they claim they are trying to prevent.
There have been suggestions that the Bush camp would welcome a scenario in which there were clashes between police and protesters. The Republicans would then brand the demonstrators as "terrorist sympathizers," while linking them to Kerry and the Democrats.
Given the acknowledged infiltration of protest groups by New York City police, the danger of violent confrontations sparked by agents provocateurs is very real.
--------
Large force will protect convention
David Johnston and William K. Rashbaum
Wednesday, August 25, 2004
The New York Times
http://www.iht.com/bin/print.php?file=535704.html
NEW YORK The New York Police Department and the largest armada of land, air and maritime forces ever assembled to provide security at a national political gathering are being deployed in New York for the Republican convention, according to federal, state and local officials.
They said Tuesday that they were planning an intentionally massive response to intelligence that Al Qaeda hoped to carry out an attack to disrupt this year's elections. The country's terror alert level, which was raised early this month, will remain at orange, or high alert, status throughout the Republican National Convention and probably well beyond, according to several senior intelligence officials. They said they were increasingly concerned about an attack, even though there was no specific intelligence indicating a strike during convention week, which begins Monday.
"Have we collected intelligence that there is going to be a hit in the financial district during the Republican National Convention?" said Pasquale D'Amuro, the assistant director in charge of the New York office of the FBI. "No. But intelligence we have collected indicates that Al Qaeda still desires to attack both domestically and abroad. They want to kill Americans."
With the alert level elevated, even in the absence of a specific threat, thousands of Republicans arriving in New York are likely to be subjected to a new round of potentially confusing public warnings about the risk of attack alongside soothing official exhortations to enjoy the party, which will take place inside a security envelope surrounding Madison Square Garden.
The backbone of security is being provided by the 37,000-member New York Police Department, which has a budget larger than all but 19 of the world's standing armies. To prevent an attack, the department will flood the streets with officers and employ high and low technology, from seven surveillance helicopters to plainclothes detectives traveling the subways and eyeballing other riders. Up to 10,000 officers, many reassigned from narcotics and other duties, will be part of a massive show of force around Madison Square Garden.
That display will include special heavily armed "Hercules" antiterror squads, snipers and phalanxes of officers set up around the arena to search buses and trucks before they enter the area. In addition to the helicopters, several of which can feed close-up video surveillance images to mobile command centers on the ground, 26 launches will patrol waterways, and officers will use 181 bomb-sniffing dogs, many of them borrowed from other law enforcement agencies.
Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly has said that virtually the entire department will be mobilized next week, when in addition to the convention, the department will police the U.S. Open tennis tournament, and baseball games at Yankee Stadium in the Bronx and Shea Stadium in Queens. Not counting the costs incurred by federal agencies, security in New York is expected at about $60 million, out of a convention budget of about $166 million, as concerns have broadened to cover not only the week of the convention, but also the weeks before and after it. Police are girding for protests, including a planned march on Sunday, which organizers have predicted will attract as many as 250,000 people, and more spontaneous demonstrations.
Five officials who had been briefed on the latest intelligence analysis discussed the overall threat level as Republicans prepared to arrive in New York and as intelligence analysts searching for clues to Al Qaeda's intentions pored over computer materials seized during recent arrests in Britain and Pakistan. U.S. officials have said since early July that they have received intelligence suggesting that Al Qaeda hoped to carry out an attack to disrupt the elections. The officials said that an investigation of eight men charged with terrorism-related offenses in Britain had provided a clearer picture of the surveillance operations at five American financial institutions. The authorities now believe the surveillance was carried out by Issa al-Hindi. They said he traveled to the United States along with two confederates, Nadeem Tarmohammed and Quaisar Shaffi, who were arrested on Aug. 3 by the British authorities.
----
FBI Recovers 6 Stolen Laptops in Seattle
August 25, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-BRF-Stolen-Laptops.html
SEATTLE (AP) -- Six laptop computers containing sensitive airport security information that were stolen last month have been recovered, the FBI said.
The laptops, taken from a motel storage room near Seattle-Tacoma Airport after being used to train airport screeners, contained information that screeners said could be used by terrorists to evade detection.
But officials of the training contractor, Lockheed Martin, denied that the information in the laptops could compromise national security. Each laptop and all the screener training files were password-protected, officials said.
The person who had obtained the computers and contacted authorities said he realized they had been stolen after reading newspaper reports, FBI agent Roberta Burroughs said. The person is not believed to be involved in the theft, she said.
She gave no further details, including where the computers were found or whether information on the hard drives had been downloaded. No arrests have been reported.
-------- prisons / prisoners
Bail Set for 2 Leaders of N.Y. Mosque
Associated Press
Wednesday, August 25, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A30006-2004Aug24.html
ALBANY, N.Y., Aug. 24 -- A federal magistrate reversed course and set bail Tuesday for two mosque leaders caught in an FBI anti-terrorism sting, saying the case against the men is not as strong as it once looked.
David R. Homer set bail at $250,000 each for Yassin Muhiddin Aref and Mohammed Mosharref Hossain on charges of promoting terrorism.
Earlier this month, Homer refused to set bail, saying the men were a threat to the community and might flee. But he reconsidered after prosecutors acknowledged an apparent misinterpretation in a crucial document.
The indictment said a notebook found in a terrorist camp in Iraq last summer included an Arabic entry referring to Aref as "commander." But FBI translators later said the phrase in Kurdish meant "brother."
"Evidence in this case appears less strong than it did," the magistrate said Tuesday.
U.S. Attorney Glenn Suddaby has said that regardless of the translation, the case against the men stands.
Aref, 34, and Hossain, 49, were caught in an FBI sting built around a fictitious assassination plot against a Pakistani diplomat. An FBI informant told the suspects he was an arms dealer and asked Hossain to launder money from the sale of a shoulder-fired missile that would be used to kill the diplomat in New York City, prosecutors said.
The men could get 70 years in prison if convicted.
Aref, an Iraqi Kurd, is the imam of an Albany mosque. Hossain, who is from Bangladesh, is a co-founder of the mosque.
-------- torture
General says U.S. forces tortured Iraqis
WASHINGTON (Reuters)
By Will Dunham
25 August, 2004
http://www.reuters.co.uk/newsPackageArticle.jhtml?type=worldNews&storyID=571604
- An Army general has acknowledged for the first time that U.S. forces tortured Iraqis at the Abu Ghraib jail and his report said a colonel who headed the military intelligence unit at the prison could face criminal charges.
"It's a harsh word, and in some instances, unfortunately, I think it was appropriate here. There were a few instances where torture was being used," Army Major General George Fay told a Pentagon briefing on Wednesday on his investigation with Lt. Gen. Anthony Jones into the role of military intelligence personnel in the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, on the outskirts of Baghdad.
Pentagon leaders and Bush administration officials had previously steered clear of describing the physical abuse and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners as torture. Fay did not specify the actions he considered torture.
The investigators referred Col. Thomas Pappas, commander of the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade at Abu Ghraib, to Army authorities for possible disciplinary action, which could prompt criminal charges.
Four other Army officers, another 29 military intelligence soldiers, four military police soldiers and two medical personnel were also referred by investigators for possible charges. In addition, the names of six private contractors were sent to the Justice Department for possible legal action.
To date, only seven military police reservists who served at Abu Ghraib have been charged.
Photographs that surfaced in April showed U.S. soldiers posing, smiling and giving the thumbs-up sign as naked, male Iraqi prisoners were stacked in a pyramid or positioned to simulate sex acts with one another.
A prisoner in one photo was directed to stand on a box with his head hooded, and wires attached to his hands, and was told that if he fell off the box he would be electrocuted.
The 143-page Fay-Jones report describes an incident in which U.S. soldiers held a contest to scare teen-age detainees with guard dogs "in order to see who could make the detainees urinate and defecate first."
WIDESPREAD MISCONDUCT
The report depicts the involvement of U.S. military intelligence officers and civilian contractors working with them in the abuse at Abu Ghraib, a former torture center under toppled President Saddam Hussein, as much greater than had been previously disclosed.
Earlier investigations have found a deeply antagonistic relationship between the military police, led by Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, and military intelligence soldiers, led by Pappas, at Abu Ghraib, where numerous prisoners were subjected to physical abuse and sexual humiliation.
The report said Pappas improperly authorized the use of guard dogs during interrogations, failed to take aggressive action against soldiers who violated U.S. rules and the Geneva Conventions, showed poor judgment and failed to put in place a system to detect and prevent abuses.
Lt. Col. Stephen Jordan, Maj. David Price, Maj. Michael Thompson and Capt. Carolyn Wood also could face criminal charges. Jordan directed the Abu Ghraib interrogation debriefing center. The report cited him for dereliction of duty during a chaotic night of prisoner abuse in November 2003.
The report described "misconduct ranging from inhumane to sadistic by a small group of morally corrupt soldiers and civilians," a lack of discipline by Pappas' military intelligence unit and "a failure or lack of leadership" by the military leadership in Iraq, then headed by Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez.
The report said 23 U.S. military intelligence soldiers, as well as four contractors working with them, were directly involved in 44 instances of prisoner abuse. These Americans either directly abused prisoners or "requested, encouraged, condoned or solicited military police personnel to abuse detainees," or violated rules on interrogations, it said.
The report also found U.S. forces improperly hid at least eight detainees from observers of the International Committee of the Red Cross, and investigators asked the Pentagon inspector general's office and the CIA to look further into the issue of so-called ghost detainees.
The report came a day after a high-level panel headed by former Defense Secretary James Schlesinger found that top civilian and military officials at the Pentagon bore indirect responsibility for the abuse.
-------- POLITICS
-------- budget
Bioterror money remains unspent
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
By Jim McElhatton
August 25, 2004
http://www.washtimes.com/metro/20040824-115339-2155r.htm
The District lags behind other cities and states in spending millions of dollars in funds awarded by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to shore up the city's response to bioterrorism, a recent federal audit has found.
The CDC has given $12.7 million to the District of Columbia Department of Health for bioterrorism preparedness since 1999, yet more than $8 million of the allotment remains unspent, federal officials said.
By comparison, Virginia spent all but $4.2 million of its $24 million allotment, and Maryland spent its entire $18.6 million award.
A CDC spokesman yesterday said the District would not lose the federal funds for failing to spend the money.
Paula A. Steib, spokeswoman for the D.C.-based Association of State and Territorial Health Officials, said that the District isn't the only jurisdiction having problems spending its bioterrorism money.
"States, because of budget constraints, have had hiring freezes and other kinds of cuts and that may have made a difference in how fast they could spend bioterrorism dollars," she said.
The report released Friday by the Office of Inspector General for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services found that among 13 states and four cities reviewed nationwide, only D.C. and Massachusetts have failed to spend at least half of their federal bioterrorism money.
The CDC has general guidelines about how cities and states can spend the money, including rules that call for funds to train public-health officials, hire epidemiologists and expand laboratories to detect "bioterror agents" such as anthrax, smallpox and the plague.
D.C. health officials yesterday blamed the slow pace of spending on management turnover within the city's health department and a nationwide shortage of qualified chemists, microbiologists and epidemiologists.
"There have been a lot of staff changeovers," said Dr. Thomas Calhoun, interim senior deputy director for Emergency Health and Medical Services in the city's health department.
Mayor Anthony A. Williams recently named Dr. Gregg Pane as the city's new health department director, which is the city's third top health administrator since 2001.
Dr. Calhoun said the city also has had a hard time hiring chemists, microbiologists, epidemiologists and other health specialists to staff the bioterrorism initiative.
"We needed to get out and hire the specialized people ... who just aren't out there right now," Dr. Calhoun said. "That's one of the major reasons we didn't spend those funds."
Sherry Adams, assistant senior deputy director for Emergency Health and Medical Services, said the city is still trying to fill between 10 and 15 of the specialized health-professional positions.
The federal report also criticized the city's monitoring of CDC grant money.
"Because of high management turnover in the District, we were unable to determine whether its staff was aware of accounting and reporting requirements," the report stated.
D.C. officials said they're aware of the CDC's accounting requirements and recently have started meeting with federal officials to discuss plans to spend the remaining $8 million.
So far, Dr. Calhoun said the city's health department has spent bioterrorism funds to expand its lab and upgrade prescription-drug stockpiles. He said city health officials also have held training sessions with private physicians and clinics to discuss how to respond to an attack involving a weapon of mass destruction.
Meanwhile, Dr. Jeffrey Elting, medical director for bioterrorism response for the D.C. Hospital Association, said yesterday that city hospitals have received about $8 million for terrorism response initiatives from the U.S. Department of Defense.
Some of that money has been used by city hospitals to train staff, install decontamination units, buy protection equipment and stockpile medication, he said.
Hospitals could surely use more of the funds because "most of them are teetering on break-even at the end of the year, at best," Dr. Elting said.
"We've made major strides, but we have a long way to go," Dr. Elting said.
-------- investigations
Top Pentagon Leaders Faulted in Prison Abuse
Oversight by Rumsfeld and Others Inadequate, Panel Says
By Bradley Graham and Josh White
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, August 25, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A28862-2004Aug24.html
An independent panel faulted the Pentagon's top civilian and military leadership yesterday for failing to exercise adequate oversight and allowing conditions that led to the abuse of detainees in Iraq.
The four-member panel headed by former defense secretary James R. Schlesinger found that actions by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld contributed to confusion over what techniques were permissible for interrogating prisoners in Iraq.
It also concluded that the Joint Chiefs of Staff and senior commanders in the Persian Gulf region first underestimated the need for detention-facility personnel in devising a postwar plan for Iraq and then neglected to move fast enough to provide such troops once the demand became apparent last year.
The findings marked the first time an official investigation -- one ordered by Rumsfeld in May -- sought to pin a share of responsibility on the Pentagon's upper reaches for a prison abuse scandal that has undercut U.S. operations in Iraq and eroded U.S. moral standing around the world.
But panel members -- including two former secretaries of defense, a retired four-star general and a former Republican member of Congress -- declined at a Pentagon news conference to call for the resignation of Rumsfeld or senior commanders such as Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Schlesinger said Rumsfeld's resignation "would be a boon to all of America's enemies and, consequently, I think that it would be a misfortune if it were to take place." He said that while Myers and other high-ranking officers made mistakes, the errors were not sufficient to warrant their resignations.
The panel commended the Pentagon for taking recent steps to prevent new cases of abuse. But Schlesinger warned that "one consequence" of the publicity and punishments associated with the scandal has been "a chilling effect on interrogation operations." He did not provide specifics.
Releasing a 92-page report, the panel said it did not find any U.S. "policy of abuse" or "approved procedures" that permitted the torture or inhumane treatment of detainees. But the panel contradicted administration claims that the scandal was largely the result of the actions of a few individuals at the Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad. That case emerged in April with the publication of photographs showing naked, hooded Iraqi prisoners being sexually humiliated and threatened with dogs.
"The abuses were not just the failure of some individuals to follow known standards, and they are more than the failure of a few leaders to enforce proper discipline," the report said. "There is both institutional and personal responsibility at higher levels."
Underscoring the broad scope of mistreatment, the panel said 300 abuse cases have come under investigation -- a number about three times greater than previous U.S. military statements.
Of 155 completed investigations, the report added, 66 have resulted in determinations of abuse -- 55 of them in Iraq, three in Afghanistan and eight at the U.S. detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. "Dozens of non-judicial punishments have already been awarded," the report said without detailing them.
Rumsfeld, who was briefed on the findings yesterday morning, issued a brief statement saying the panel had provided "important information and recommendations that will be of assistance in our ongoing efforts to improve detention operations." White House press secretary Scott McClellan, with President Bush in Crawford, Tex., had no immediate comment on the report.
Democrats on Capitol Hill blasted the administration and the Pentagon for the leadership failures outlined in the report. House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) said the report makes clear that responsibility for the abuse falls not just on a few low-ranking military personnel. Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) appealed for another independent investigation, saying the Schlesinger panel lacked sufficient authority to investigate senior administration officials.
But Sen. John W. Warner (R-Va.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, called the report "very thorough and professional." He said his committee, which has held several hearings on the scandal, would examine the need for further investigations when hearings resume in September.
So far, seven reservists with the 372nd Military Police Company have been the only ones charged with crimes arising from the Abu Ghraib events. Two have pleaded guilty to charges of abuse, and five others are facing preliminary criminal proceedings in the United States and in Germany.
Their attorneys have said the abuse arose from the directions of military intelligence personnel who were looking to "soften up" detainees for interrogation purposes. The lawyers have said the military guards were encouraged to use harsh tactics and were congratulated for their apparent successes.
An Army investigation focused on the role of military intelligence, headed by Maj. Gen. George R. Fay and Lt. Gen. Anthony R. Jones and due for release today will recommend that more than two dozen military intelligence personnel and civilian contractors be referred for further disciplinary action, government officials said.
Schlesinger disputed the claim that the abuse at Abu Ghraib was part of an intelligence-gathering operation. He said the mistreatment reflected "freelance activities on the part of the night shift," describing the situation as "a kind of 'Animal House' " -- a reference to a 1978 movie about riotous behavior at a fraternity house.
Anthony Vieira, a civilian defense attorney for one of the accused -- Pfc. Lynndie R. England -- said the panel's report vastly understates the involvement of senior military leadership and is yet another fallback position. Vieira said military intelligence personnel created a buffer between the official chain of command and the military guards who were involved in the abuse by having civilian contractors pass on questionable orders and directions to the low-ranking soldiers.
"That's the game that's being played here," he said.
Schlesinger drew a distinction between what he called direct and indirect responsibility.
"There was direct responsibility for those activities on the part of the commanders on the scene up to the brigade level, because they did not adequately supervise what was going on at Abu Ghraib," he said. "There was indirect responsibility at higher levels, in that the weaknesses at Abu Ghraib were well-known and that corrective action could have been taken and should have been taken."
In discussing Rumsfeld's role, the report said changes he made between December 2002 and April 2003 in interrogation techniques for terrorism suspects at Guantanamo Bay "migrated to Afghanistan and Iraq where they were neither limited nor safeguarded." The report said Rumsfeld might have avoided the policy confusion if he had a wider range of legal opinions and a more robust internal debate over detainee policies and operations in 2002, before the war started.
But panel members said senior military commanders bore a greater share of responsibility than Rumsfeld for what went wrong. They were portrayed as poorly prepared for the insurgency that followed the invasion and did not anticipate the need to manage a large prison population.
At one point, the report noted, there were 495 detention personnel in Iraq, compared with an authorized level of 1,400. The ratio of military police to detainees at Abu Ghraib was as high as 1 to about 75, the report said, compared with a ratio of 1 to 1 at Guantanamo Bay.
While the Pentagon's Joint Staff and U.S. Central Command were chided for not shifting resources fast enough to bolster detention operations, the panel is most critical of the top officers in Iraq. It said the senior U.S. commander in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, and his deputy, Maj. Gen. Walter Wojdakowski, should have appealed to higher headquarters for additional assets and taken stronger action last fall to strengthen leadership at Abu Ghraib when they became aware of command problems there. It also faulted them for "a series of tangled command relationships" that fostered confusion.
It was not in the panel's charter to recommend disciplinary action. But the group, which reviewed an advance copy of the Jones-Fay report due today, said it concurred with the finding there that Sanchez and Wojdakowski "failed to ensure proper staff oversight of detention and interrogation operations."
Its strongest criticism of commanders was leveled at two brigade leaders -- Army Brig. Gen. Janis L. Karpinski, who headed the 800th Military Police Brigade, and Col. Thomas M. Pappas, who led the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade. The panel said it "expects disciplinary action may be forthcoming" against the two.
"The aberrant behavior on the night shift in Cell Block 1 at Abu Ghraib would have been avoided with proper training, leadership and oversight," the panel concluded.
Schlesinger commended the Pentagon for providing "total cooperation." But the CIA was not as forthcoming. In its report, the panel said it was denied "full access to information" about CIA involvement in detention operations and cited this as an area that "needs further investigation."
Offering 14 recommendations, the panel endorsed calls by previous investigations to clarify U.S. rules on treatment of detainees, interrogation techniques, and collaboration between military police and intelligence personnel at detention facilities. It also urged an increase in the number of U.S. military detention specialists and in military police and military intelligence forces.
--------
Analysis Rumsfeld's War Plan Shares the Blame
By Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, August 25, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A30099-2004Aug24.html
Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's leadership of the Pentagon has been weighed by a jury of his peers and found somewhat wanting.
A report by a blue-ribbon panel he appointed to review the military establishment's role in creating and handling detainee abuse problems at Abu Ghraib prison said that the Iraq war plan he played a key role in shaping helped create the conditions that led to the scandal.
In addition, the four-member panel, which was led by one former defense secretary, James R. Schlesinger, and included another, Harold Brown, found that Rumsfeld's slow response when the Iraqi insurgency flared last summer worsened the situation.
But the report does not appear to threaten Rumsfeld's position as defense secretary, especially because all four panel members emphatically rejected the idea of calling for his resignation yesterday at a Pentagon news conference to release their conclusions.
The panel's findings do, however, provide new support for two central criticisms of the Rumsfeld team's approach in Iraq last year: that the invasion plan called for too few troops, half as many as were used in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, and that the Pentagon failed to plan smartly for occupying the country after the United States defeated the Iraqi military.
Before the war, the Army chief of staff, Gen. Eric K. Shinseki, said publicly that he thought the invasion plan lacked sufficient manpower, and he was slapped down by the Pentagon's civilian leadership for saying so. After Baghdad fell, Rumsfeld dismissed reports of widespread looting and chaos as "untidy" signs of newfound freedom that were exaggerated by the media. And some State Department officials complained that their attempts to plan for postwar Iraq were largely disregarded by the Pentagon.
The concerns about troop strength expressed by retired generals during the war provoked angry denunciations by Rumsfeld and Gen. Richard B. Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In April 2003, Rumsfeld, for example, commented that, "people were saying that the plan was terrible, and . . . there weren't enough people, and . . . there were going to be, you know, tens of thousands of casualties, and it was going to take forever."
Now a version of that criticism has been made by a panel appointed by Rumsfeld himself. One of the major factors leading to the detainee abuse, Brown said yesterday, was "the expectation by the Defense Department leadership, along with most of the rest of the administration, that following the collapse of the Iraqi regime through coalition military operations, there would be a stable successor regime that would soon emerge in Iraq."
As Schlesinger, the panel's chairman, tartly put it, the leaders of the military establishment "did look at history books. Unfortunately, it was the wrong history." He said they tended to focus on the refugee problems that followed the 1991 war, rather, he implied, than on other conflicts in which internal turmoil has followed an invasion.
Strikingly, given that Rumsfeld has made agility, adaptability and speed his bywords in pushing the military to transform itself, the panel also faulted the Pentagon's leadership for a flat-footed response to the outbreak of the anti-U.S. insurgency in Iraq last summer.
"Any defense establishment should adapt quickly to new conditions as they arise," Schlesinger said. "And in this case, we were slow, at least in the judgment of the members of this panel, to adapt accordingly after the insurgency started in the summer of 2003."
He added, "There was a failure to reallocate resources once it was seen that there were severe problems at Abu Ghraib."
In delivering its mixed verdict, the Schlesinger panel endorsed Rumsfeld's handling of the scandal once it broke. "If there's something to be commended on this whole operation, it's the way the secretary of defense has approached the investigations," said retired Air Force Gen. Charles A. Horner, the third member of the panel.
"I think that overall, Secretary Rumsfeld has handled this extremely well," Brown added. "If the head of a department had to resign every time anyone down below did something wrong, it would be a very empty Cabinet table."
Indeed, although some members of Congress criticized Rumsfeld yesterday, there were no calls for him to step down. The harshest statement came from Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), who said, "Secretary Rumsfeld and other civilian leaders in the Pentagon bear significant responsibility for the fundamental failures that led to the torture and other abuse at Abu Ghraib. At a minimum, there was gross negligence at the highest levels in the Pentagon."
The report showed Rumsfeld's top uniformed brass did not help him out much in rapidly pivoting from the peacekeeping they expected to be conducting to fighting the guerrilla war that confronted them.
The panel repeatedly faulted the judgments and actions of the entire chain of senior generals involved: Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, who for most of the time was the top U.S. commander on the ground in Iraq; his two bosses, Army Gen. Tommy R. Franks, who stepped down as chief of the U.S. Central Command last summer as the insurgency was breaking out, and Franks's successor, Army Gen. John P. Abizaid; and Myers, the nation's top military officer.
"It would have been better had greater supervision been exercised . . . [and] there is failure at the senior levels of the Pentagon to exercise that supervision," Schlesinger said. "I think that more of that falls upon the . . . uniformed military than on the Office of the Secretary of Defense."
The report struck a tone of dismay in analyzing the sluggish response of the military bureaucracy to events in Iraq last summer and fall. It noted, for example, that a personnel plan for Sanchez's headquarters "was not finally approved until December 2003, six months into the insurgency." The result, the report concludes, was that Sanchez and his undermanned staff were overwhelmed and unable to take needed actions. In addition, the report blamed Sanchez for setting up a confused chain of command that made it difficult to determine the responsibilities of certain commanders.
The pervasive lack of troops, especially those with specialized skills, had a cascading effect that helped lead to the abuse, the report said. As the insurgency took off, frontline Army units, lacking interpreters, took to rounding up "any and all suspicious-looking persons -- all too often including women and children," it said. This indiscriminate approach resulted in a "flood" of detainees at Abu Ghraib that inundated demoralized and fatigued interrogators, it continued.
When asked whether anyone should resign over those findings, the panel members tended to sidestep the question, saying they were more interested in preventing the abuse from recurring than in fixing blame. But Brown made it clear that he expects some officers to suffer the consequences of their missteps. "At various levels, there was some dereliction of duty," he said. "At other levels, there were mistakes."
The bottom line, Brown said, is that, "A lot of careers are going to be ruined over this."
Researcher Lucy Shackelford contributed to this report.
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ABU GHRAIB REPORT
Abuse Panel Says Rules on Inmates Need Overhaul
August 25, 2004
By ERIC SCHMITT
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/25/politics/25abuse.html?pagewanted=all&position=
Attributing abuses of prisoners in Iraq to a string of failures that led all the way up the chain of command to the Pentagon, an independent panel called Tuesday for a sweeping overhaul of how the American military handles and interrogates prisoners in the global campaign against terrorism.
In its recommendations, the panel called for more and better trained military police and intelligence specialists. It urged that all prisoners be treated in ''a way consistent with U.S. jurisprudence and military doctrine and with U.S. interpretation of the Geneva Conventions.''
While the panel said the nation's approach to international humanitarian law ''must be adapted to the realities of the nature of conflict in the 21st century,'' it also said all military personnel engaged in detainee operations must be trained to equip them with a ''sharp moral compass.''
The panel's report, released at a news conference at the Pentagon, was the first official finding in several military reviews conducted so far that assigns any responsibility, even indirectly, for the misconduct at the Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad to Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the top commanders in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East.
''The abuses were not just the failure of some individuals to follow known standards, and they are more than the failure of a few leaders to enforce proper discipline,'' the panel concluded in its 93-page report. ''There is both institutional and personal responsibility at higher levels.''
James R. Schlesinger, the panel's chairman, warned that the ''chilling effect'' of the Abu Ghraib abuses might undermine attempts to obtain better intelligence through interrogations.
''One consequence of the publicity that has been associated with the activities at Abu Ghraib and the punishments that prospectively will be handed out is that it has had a chilling effect on interrogation operations,'' Mr. Schlesinger said. ''It is essential in the war on terror that we have adequate intelligence and that we have effective interrogation.''
The report may satisfy, at least partly, critics who have complained that only those of relatively low rank have been blamed for what happened at the prison in Iraq.
It found that top commanders and staff officers in Iraq had not adequately supervised commanders at the prison. Up the chain of command to Washington, other officers and officials did not recognize that guards at the prison were overwhelmed by their task as an insurgency took hold and the prison population swelled, it said. By last October, 90 guards were assigned to oversee more than 7,000 prisoners
Problems at the prison ''were well known,'' said Mr. Schlesinger, a former defense secretary, and he said corrective actions ''could have been taken and should have been taken.''
Interrogation techniques that Mr. Rumsfeld approved for limited use at the military detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, ''migrated to Afghanistan and Iraq, where they were neither limited nor safeguarded,'' the report said. As early as 2003, interrogation techniques employed by Special Operations forces in Afghanistan went beyond standard military doctrine, it disclosed.
When Mr. Schlesinger was asked if Mr. Rumsfeld or other high-ranking officials should resign, he said the secretary's ''resignation would be a boon for all of America's enemies.''
Mr. Rumsfeld, who is on vacation this week and was briefed by video-teleconference on the report before the news conference, issued a statement that praised the panel's work but did not address the inquiry's criticisms.
''The Defense Department has an obligation to evaluate what happened and to make appropriate changes,'' he said.
The prisoner abuses photographed at the Abu Ghraib facility were unauthorized ''acts of brutality and purposeless sadism'' that served no intelligence-gathering purpose, the report found. ''They were freelance activities on the part of the night shift at Abu Ghraib,'' Mr. Schlesinger said.
But there were other abuses, as well, including some that took place during interrogations. The panel said that there were about 300 reported incidents of mistreatment, and 66 confirmed abuses so far. Of those, 8 occurred at Guantánamo, 3 in Afghanistan and 55 in Iraq, it found. About one-third were related to the interrogations of prisoners.
In a preview of conclusions from yet another report that is due to be issued at the Pentagon, that one examining the role of military intelligence personnel at the prison, the Schlesinger panel concurred in its finding that the interrogators shared a ''major part of the culpability'' for the abuses.
The panel found that military commanders and staff officers in the field and in Washington bore more responsibility than the Pentagon's civilian leaders for not preventing the abuses, which prompted outrage at home and abroad when the photographs were disclosed in April.
The panel, for instance, faulted Gen. Richard B. Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Gen. John P. Abizaid, the top military commander in the Middle East, for failing to order new plans to deal with the increasingly effective Iraqi insurgency that caught American commanders off guard last summer.
The report also said that although General Myers was aware of the existence of photographs of abuses as early as January, when the misconduct was first reported and the military immediately began an investigation, ''the impact of the photos was not appreciated'' and the images were not sent promptly to top officials in Washington.
Among those the panel criticized by name for the problems at Abu Ghraib was the commanding general in Iraq at the time, Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez.
''We believe Lt. Gen. Sanchez should have taken stronger action in November when he realized the extent of the leadership problems at Abu Ghraib,'' the report said, criticizing him for not exerting stronger control immediately over the military police commander there, Brig. Gen. Janis L. Karpinski, whose leadership was faulted.
The report added that General Sanchez's deputy, Maj. Gen. Walter Wojdakowski, and the headquarters staff in Baghdad ''should have seen that urgent demands were placed to higher headquarters'' for more troops at the understaffed prison.
The Schlesinger panel also said it agreed with new findings by an Army investigation, opened by Maj. Gen. George R. Fay, that ''military intelligence personnel share responsibility for the abuses at Abu Ghraib with the military police soldiers'' who were cited in an earlier investigation, headed by Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba. The Army report is expected to be released as early as Wednesday.
Some of the 44 abuse allegations investigated by General Fay, the Schlesinger panel said, involved military intelligence personnel directing the actions of military police guards. The panel said it did not have access to enough information to assess whether officers of the Central Intelligence Agency played any role in the abuses at Abu Ghraib or elsewhere in Iraq and Afghanistan. It called for further investigation of that question.
The report concludes that ''augmented'' interrogation techniques for Guantánamo Bay -- which included the use of dogs, stripping detainees naked, and subjecting them to painful stress positions -- migrated to Afghanistan and Iraq, and it finds that those techniques went beyond what was permitted by the Army's traditional interrogation guidelines.
It also confirms that after a visit to Iraq by Gen. Geoffrey Miller, General Sanchez approved such techniques, including specifically the use of dogs, to aid interrogations. Yet the panel does not state that any of those techniques were inherently abusive or unlawful and does not hold the officials and general officers who approved them responsible for abuses.
Asked about the panel's contention that it did not have ''full access to information involving the role of the Central Intelligence Agency in detention operations,'' the chief C.I.A. spokesman, Mark Mansfield, said, ''We fully support thorough investigations into allegations of abuse in Iraq.''
Mr. Mansfield said that the C.I.A.'s inspector general ''has ongoing investigations into the agency's involvement in detention and interrogation activities in Iraq,'' but that to date it had found no indication that C.I.A. personnel had been involved in abuses photographed at Abu Ghraib.
Human rights advocates were quick to criticize the report.
''The report talks about management failures when it should be talking about policy failures,'' said Reed Brody, special counsel with Human Rights Watch. ''The report seems to go out of its way not to find any relationship between Secretary Rumsfeld's approval of interrogation techniques designed to inflict pain and humiliation and the widespread mistreatment and torture of detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo.''
The report was prepared by a four-member panel led by Mr. Schlesinger, who was defense secretary under Presidents Nixon and Ford, and that included Harold Brown, President Carter's defense secretary; Tillie K. Fowler, a former Republican congresswoman from Florida and the chairwoman of an investigation last year into sexual misconduct at the United States Air Force Academy; and Gen. Charles A. Horner, a retired Air Force officer, who led the air campaign in the Persian Gulf war in 1991. All of the panel members sit on the Defense Policy Board, an advisory panel to Mr. Rumsfeld.
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EXCERPTS
Findings on Abu Ghraib Prison:
Sadism, 'Deviant Behavior' and a Failure of Leadership
August 25, 2004
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/25/politics/25atext.html?pagewanted=all
WASHINGTON, Aug. 24 - Following are excerpts from the executive summary of the final report of the Independent Panel to Review Department of Defense Detention Operations, which was released Tuesday. The full text is online at nytimes.com /international.
OVERVIEW
The events of October through December 2003 on the night shift of Tier 1 at Abu Ghraib prison were acts of brutality and purposeless sadism. We now know these abuses occurred at the hands of both military police and military intelligence personnel. The pictured abuses, unacceptable even in wartime, were not part of authorized interrogations nor were they even directed at intelligence targets. They represent deviant behavior and a failure of military leadership and discipline. However, we do know that some of the egregious abuses at Abu Ghraib which were not photographed did occur during interrogation sessions and that abuses during interrogation sessions occurred elsewhere.
In light of what happened at Abu Ghraib, a series of comprehensive investigations has been conducted by various components of the Department of Defense. Since the beginning of hostilities in Afghanistan and Iraq, U.S. military and security operations have apprehended about 50,000 individuals. From this number, about 300 allegations of abuse in Afghanistan, Iraq or Guantánamo have arisen. As of mid-August 2004, 155 investigations into the allegations have been completed, resulting in 66 substantiated cases. Approximately one-third of these cases occurred at the point of capture or tactical collection point, frequently under uncertain, dangerous and violent circumstances.
Abuses of varying severity occurred at differing locations under differing circumstances and context. They were widespread and, though inflicted on only a small percentage of those detained, they were serious both in number and in effect. No approved procedures called for or allowed the kinds of abuse that in fact occurred. There is no evidence of a policy of abuse promulgated by senior officials or military authorities. Still, the abuses were not just the failure of some individuals to follow known standards, and they are more than the failure of a few leaders to enforce proper discipline. There is both institutional and personal responsibility at higher levels.
DETENTION AND INTERROGATION OPERATIONS
In Iraq, there was not only a failure to plan for a major insurgency, but also to quickly and adequately adapt to the insurgency that followed after major combat operations. The October 2002 Centcom war plan presupposed that relatively benign stability and security operations would precede a handover to Iraq's authorities.
Although the removal of Saddam Hussein was initially welcomed by the bulk of the population, the occupation became increasingly resented. Detention facilities soon held Iraqi and foreign terrorists as well as a mix of enemy prisoners of war, other security detainees, criminals and undoubtedly some accused as a result of factional rivalries.
Of the 17 detention facilities in Iraq, the largest, Abu Ghraib, housed up to 7,000 detainees in October 2003, with a guard force of only about 90 personnel from the 800th Military Police Brigade. Abu Ghraib was seriously overcrowded, under-resourced, and under continual attack. Five U.S. soldiers died as a result of mortar attacks on Abu Ghraib. In July 2003, Abu Ghraib was mortared 25 times.
ABUSES
The aberrant behavior on the night shift in Cell Block 1 at Abu Ghraib would have been avoided with proper training, leadership and oversight. Though acts of abuse occurred at a number of locations, those in Cell Block 1 have a unique nature fostered by the predilections of the noncommissioned officers in charge.
Concerning the abuses at Abu Ghraib, the impact was magnified by the fact the shocking photographs were aired throughout the world in April 2004. Although Centcom had publicly addressed the abuses in a press release in January 2004, the photographs remained within the official criminal investigative process. Consequently, the highest levels of command and leadership in the Department of Defense were not adequately informed nor prepared to respond to the Congress and the American public when copies were released by the press.
POLICY AND COMMAND RESPONSIBILITIES
We concur with the Jones/Fay investigation's conclusion that military intelligence personnel share responsibility for the abuses at Abu Ghraib with the military police soldiers cited in the Taguba investigation. The Jones/Fay investigation found 44 alleged instances of abuse, some which were also considered by the Taguba report. A number of these cases involved M.I. [Military Intelligence] personnel directing the actions of M.P. personnel. Yet it should be noted that of the 66 closed cases of detainee abuse in Guantánamo, Afghanistan and Iraq cited by the Naval Inspector General, only one-third were interrogation related.
The panel concurs with the findings of the Taguba and Jones investigations that serious leadership problems in the 800th M.P. Brigade and 205th M.I. Brigade, to include the 320th M.P. Battalion commander and the director of the Joint Debriefing and Interrogation Center (J.D.I.C.), allowed the abuses at Abu Ghraib. The panel endorses the disciplinary actions taken as a result of the Taguba investigation. The panel anticipates that the chain of command will take additional disciplinary action as a result of the referrals of the Jones/Fay investigation.
We believe Lt. Gen. [Ricardo] Sanchez should have taken stronger action in November when he realized the extent of the leadership problems at Abu Ghraib. His attempt to mentor Brig. Gen. [Janis] Karpinski, though well-intended, was insufficient in a combat zone in the midst of a serious and growing insurgency. Although Lt. Gen. Sanchez had more urgent tasks than dealing personally with command and resource deficiencies at Abu Ghraib, Maj. Gen. [Walter] Wojdakowski and the staff should have seen that urgent demands were placed to higher headquarters for additional assets. We concur with the Jones findings that Lt. Gen. Sanchez and Maj. Gen. Wojdakowski failed to ensure proper staff oversight of detention and interrogation.
Once it became clear in the summer of 2003 that there was a major insurgency growing in Iraq, with the potential for capturing a large number of enemy combatants, senior leaders should have moved to meet the need for additional military police forces. Certainly by October and November, when the fighting reached a new peak, commanders and staff from C.J.T.F.-7 [Combined Joint Task Force 7] all the way to Centcom to the Joint Chiefs of Staff should have known about and reacted to the serious limitations of the battalion of the 800th Military Police Brigade at Abu Ghraib. Centcom and the J.C.S. should have at least considered adding forces to the detention/interrogation operation mission. It is the judgment of this panel that in the future, considering the sensitivity of this kind of mission, the O.S.D. should assure itself that serious limitations in detention/interrogation missions do not occur.
In addition to the already cited leadership problems in the 800th M.P. Brigade, there were a series of tangled command relationships. These ranged from an unclear military intelligence chain of command, to the Tactical Control (Talon) relationship of the 800th with C.J.T.F.-7, which the brigade commander apparently did not adequately understand, and the confusing and unusual assignment of M.I. and M.P. responsibilities at Abu Ghraib. The failure to react appropriately to the October 2003 I.C.R.C. [International Committee of the Red Cross] report, following its two visits to Abu Ghraib, is indicative of the weakness of the leadership at Abu Ghraib.
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Bush-Cheney Lawyer Advised Anti-Kerry Vets
By Dana Milbank and Thomas B. Edsall
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, August 25, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A29821-2004Aug24.html
CRAWFORD, Tex., Aug. 24 -- A top lawyer in President Bush's reelection campaign acknowledged Tuesday that he has been advising the veterans group seeking to discredit Democratic presidential nominee John F. Kerry's military record, an admission the Kerry campaign said is evidence the president's campaign is orchestrating a "smear" by the private group.
Benjamin L. Ginsberg, the chief outside counsel to the Bush campaign who also has advised Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, said: "I've done some work for them. . . . The law lets lawyers do that . . . and does not include lawyers among the coordinated political activities" that are prohibited by federal election law.
He said two prominent Democratic lawyers are doing the same thing. He said Robert Bauer, the top legal counsel for the Kerry campaign, also is the attorney for an independent group, America Coming Together, that has been mobilizing voters in support of Kerry. In addition, Ginsberg said, Joseph Sandler is a lawyer for both the Democratic National Committee and for the independent group MoveOn.org, which has run advertisements attacking Bush.
Other election lawyers agreed that the fact that Ginsberg, who also was active in Bush's 2000 campaign, has been giving legal advice to Swift Boat Veterans for Truth does not violate campaign finance law prohibiting collusion between campaigns and independent groups. But Ginsberg's dual roles complicate the Bush campaign's effort to rebut as "frivolous" Kerry's complaint that it is behind the Swift boat ads.
Asked about the Ginsberg matter Tuesday night, Bush campaign spokesman Steve Schmidt said: "There has been no coordination at any time between Bush-Cheney '04 and any 527 organization."
The veterans group's advertisements casting doubt on Kerry's Vietnam War decorations have turned the senator's earning of a Silver Star, a Bronze Star and three Purple Hearts during four months of duty in Vietnam into a dominant election issue this month. The Kerry campaign has filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission charging illegal coordination between the Bush campaign and the group, known as a 527.
The 527s are nonprofit political groups named for a section of the tax code that covers them. They may raise and spend unlimited amounts of unregulated, or "soft," money from individuals, businesses and unions to run issue ads in federal elections. But the law prohibits 527 groups from coordinating their activities with individual political campaigns or political parties.
Bush on Monday said he was opposed to all advertising by 527 groups -- most of which has favored Kerry -- but would not specifically condemn the Swift boat veterans' advertisements.
In a letter Monday to the Federal Election Commission, Tom Josefiak, general counsel to the Bush-Cheney campaign, said Kerry's complaint is "frivolous" and "baselessly alleging illegal coordination" between the two groups. Josefiak said the "complaint should be promptly dismissed." The campaign also contacted stations that might air a Kerry ad alleging a smear to warn of possible libel.
The Kerry campaign jumped on Ginsberg's admission Tuesday night. "If the Bush campaign truly disapproved of this smear, their top lawyer wouldn't be involved with the Swift boat veterans group,'' said Kerry campaign spokesman Chad Clanton.
Ginsberg said that a group of "decorated Vietnam War veterans came to me and said, 'We have an important point to get out in the debate under the First Amendment, the American right of free expression. . . . Help us,' they said, and I did."
His remarks were first reported by the Associated Press. He said he did not participate in strategy planning or in the development of messages, and did not discuss Bush campaign activities with the Swift boat veterans, or vice versa.
On Saturday, the Bush campaign dismissed from its veterans steering committee a volunteer and Vietnam veteran, retired Col. Kenneth Cordier, who appeared in a Swift boat veterans ad. The campaign said Cordier had not previously disclosed his participation with the Swift boat group.
Democrats also said their allegation of collusion was supported by a flier at a Bush-Cheney office in Florida promoting a Swift boat event, and by close relationships in the past between backers of the veterans group and Bush aides such as political adviser Karl Rove.
Don Simon, an election-law expert with the campaign finance watchdog group Democracy 21, said Ginsberg's dual role "is not per se coordination" between the Bush campaign and the veterans group. That would occur only if Ginsberg has been transferring information between the two -- a question that likely would not be resolved before the election even if the FEC chooses to investigate the matter. But, Simon said that "as a matter of common sense, it certainly raises questions."
Larry Noble, who runs the Center for Responsive Politics watchdog group, said the Ginsberg situation is not by itself improper, but "when you're looking at common lawyers, it adds another level to it."
Edsall reported from Washington.
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Bush Campaign's Top Outside Lawyer Advised Veterans Group
August 25, 2004
New York Times
By JIM RUTENBERG and KATE ZERNIKE
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/25/politics/campaign/25swift.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
The Bush campaign's top outside lawyer said Tuesday that he had given legal advice to the group of veterans attacking Senator John Kerry's Vietnam War record and antiwar activism in a book, television commercials and countless appearances on cable news programs.
The lawyer, Benjamin L. Ginsberg, said that the group, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, called him last month to ask for his help and that he agreed. Mr. Ginsberg said that he had yet to work out payment details with the group and that he might consider doing the work pro bono.
Mr. Ginsberg, the chief outside counsel to the Bush-Cheney re-election effort, agreed to an interview after several telephone calls to him and the campaign's asking that he explain his role. He said that he was helping the group comply with campaign finance rules and that his work was entirely separate from his work for the president. President Bush has called for an end to advertising by all groups like that of the Swift boat veterans, called 527's for the section of the tax code that created them.
The campaign of Senator John Kerry shares a lawyer, Robert Bauer, with America Coming Together, a liberal group that is organizing a huge multimillion-dollar get-out-the-vote drive that is far more ambitious than the Swift boat group's activities. Mr. Ginsberg said his role was no different from Mr. Bauer's.
Mr. Bush's campaign aides have repeatedly said they have no connection to the group, almost all of whose challenges to Mr. Kerry and his war record have been contradicted by official war records and even some of its members' own past statements.
Scott Stanzel, a Bush spokesman, said, "There has been no coordination at any time between Bush-Cheney '04 and any 527."
Mr. Ginsberg, a prominent elections lawyer, was a senior lawyer for the Bush organization in the Florida recount after the 2000 election and was once general counsel to the Republican National Committee. He said he had no involvement in the message or strategy of the Swift boat group and said he had no reason to believe that Mr. Bush knew of his involvement.
"The truth is there are very few lawyers who work in this area,'' Mr. Ginsberg said. "It's sort of natural that people do come to the few of us for the work. What happened was a month or so ago some decorated Vietnam vets came to me and said: 'We have an important point of view to enter into the debate. There's a new law that's complicated, and we want help complying with the law.' "
He added, "I have given them some legal compliance advice."
Mr. Kerry has gone on the offensive over the group's activities, saying it is "a front" for Mr. Bush's campaign and repeatedly calling on the president to repudiate an advertisement from the group attacking his record. Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican who is also a decorated war veteran, has also called on Mr. Bush to repudiate the spots.
The 527 groups are allowed to raise and spend unlimited amounts of money as long as they do not coordinate their activities with federal campaigns or political parties. Campaign finance rules do not prohibit lawyers from working for both outside groups and campaigns because they are not considered strategists.
Mr. Bush has declined to take on the group directly but repeated this week that he believed that all outside groups should stop advertising.
Mr. Ginsberg had been at the forefront of pressing the legal case against Democratic 527's, which have spent more than $60 million on advertisements against Mr. Bush.
In complaints against the groups, Republican lawyers have noted that Harold M. Ickes, who has helped raise money for and organize America Coming Together and the Media Fund, both 527 groups, is also on the executive committee of the Democratic National Committee.
The chairman of the Democratic convention, Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico, has been an adviser to another 527 group, the New Democrat Network. And Jim Jordan, a spokesman for the Media Fund, was Mr. Kerry's campaign manager until he resigned in November.
Mr. Ginsberg said he decided to help Republican groups after the Federal Election Commission declined to imposed strict rules on the 527 groups in May.
"At that point,'' he said, "I was more than happy to help all Republican groups comply with the law so that there wasn't unilateral disarmament."
An occasional collaborator with Mr. Ginsberg, Chris LaCivita, is also working for the group, advising on media strategy. Mr. LaCivita was political director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee in 2002 and now works for the DCI Group, a Washington political strategy firm whose partners include Charles Francis, a longtime friend of President Bush from Texas and Tom Synhorst, an adviser to the Bush campaign in 2000, who was an architect of the campaign's effort in the Iowa caucuses.
Mr. LaCivita said yesterday that he worked as a private contractor for DCI and Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and that there was no coordination between the firm and the group.
"Obviously, I don't work for the Bush campaign," he said.
Mr. LaCivita described his role as providing advice on the news media and placing advertisements. Asked to describe how close his involvement was or how Mr. Ginsberg was involved, Mr. LaCivita referred calls to a spokesman for Swift Boat Veterans, which declined to comment.
Mr. LaCivita and Mr. Ginsberg have also been involved with Progress for America, a group that calls itself the leading organization pushing a conservative agenda. Mr. Ginsberg did not say how frequently he consulted with the group.
This is the second time in recent days that an individual associated with Mr. Bush's campaign has acknowledged working with Swift Boat Veterans. On Sunday, the campaign confirmed an accusation first made by Mr. Kerry's campaign that Kenneth Cordier, a retired colonel who appears in the second of two commercials by the group, had been a member of the Bush campaign's veterans' advisory committee. The campaign said that it had not known that Mr. Cordier, a volunteer, was going to be in the spot and that he had resigned as a result of it.
Mr. Kerry's campaign filed a complaint last week with the Federal Election Commission about collaboration between Mr. Bush's campaign and the Swift Boat Veterans, activities that would violate the laws for the 527's.
Swift Boat Veterans portrays itself as an organic group opposed to Mr. Kerry. Yesterday, the chairman of the Federal Election Commission defended the group's right to advertise. But it has gradually acknowledged ties to people close to the Republican Party and Mr. Bush's campaign.
"It's another piece of evidence of the ties between the Bush campaign and this group," Chad Clanton, a spokesman for Mr. Kerry, said. Asked about his campaign's use of shared lawyers, Mr. Clanton said, "If the Bush campaign truly disapproved of this smear, their top lawyer wouldn't be involved.''
On Monday, the veterans' group acknowledged that a longtime Republican operative, Susan Arceneaux, was working for it and had taken out the post office box listed as the group's address. The group described Ms. Arceneaux's role, also, as "compliance."
Records also list Ms. Arceneaux as treasurer of the Majority Leader's Fund, a political action committee affiliated with the former House majority leader, Dick Armey of Texas, which like the Swift Boat Veterans received significant financing from Bob Perry, a Texan who has long supported Mr. Bush.
Mr. Perry has given $200,000 to Swift Boat Veterans. He is listed as co-host on an invitation to a fund-raiser next week at the Tavern on the Green in Manhattan. The invitation list includes President Bush's chief political strategist, Karl Rove, The Dallas Morning News reported yesterday. Mr. Rove has acknowledged through a spokesman to being friends with Mr. Perry.
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Olympics Chiefs Want Bush Campaign to Back Off
August 25, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/politics/politics-olympics-bush.html
ATHENS (Reuters) - Olympic officials are seething at a campaign ad for President Bush which, they say, hijacks the Olympic brand.
``We are following what is happening and hope this campaign will stop,'' said Gerhard Heiberg, head of the International Olympic Committee's Marketing Commission.
``We own the rights to the Olympic name and nobody asked us,'' he said while attending the Athens Olympics.
The television advertisement does not feature the five Olympic rings -- one of the world's most recognizable images -- but an announcer tells viewers that at ``this Olympics there will be two more free nations,'' referring to the U.S.-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq under Bush's presidency.
It is the U.S. Olympic Committee's responsibility to protect the Olympic brand in the United States and Heiberg said they were taking steps to do so.
``The USOC took immediate action,'' he said, without elaborating. ``The USOC is dealing with this matter.''
But while Heiberg was diplomatic, other IOC members were blunt.
``This is quite amazing,'' one member said on condition of anonymity. ``The arrogance is unbelievable. To use the Olympic name like this, without permission... it's just incredible.''
Another said: ``That anyone should do this is just astonishing.''
BRITISH PROTEST
The U.S. Republican Party's use of the Olympic brand is not the only politicization of the Olympics to concern Heiberg.
Tuesday a British political party -- the Euroskeptic UK Independence Party -- unfurled a banner outside London's city hall with ``Paris 2012 Candidate City'' written above the Olympic rings.
A spokesman for the party said it wanted Paris to win the race to stage the 2012 Games because it feared the cost to Londoners would be too great.
Heiberg said of the incident: ``We are politically neutral -- we have to be otherwise we are in grave difficulties.''
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Anti-Kerry book selling swiftly in D.C. area
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
By Tim Lemke
August 25, 2004
http://www.washtimes.com/business/20040825-121939-7816r.htm
A new book questioning the service of Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry as a boat captain in the Vietnam War is a swift seller.
Bookstores in the Washington area report that demand for "Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Captains Speak Out Against John Kerry" has been so strong that they are sold out of the book or are scrambling to order new shipments to keep copies on shelves.
"I can tell you it's selling very briskly and usually sells out as soon as we receive it," said Julie Wiggins, manager of the Borders Books & Music store in White Flint mall in North Bethesda. Ms. Wiggins said she could not release exact sales figures, but said the store has received at least three shipments of the book since its Aug. 11 release.
"Unfit for Command" is the top seller on Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com and is ranked third among nonfiction books this week on the New York Times' best-seller list.
The book by John E. O'Neill and Jerome R. Corsi features interviews with Vietnam veterans who question the accuracy of Mr. Kerry's recollection of his time as a Swift Boat captain. They say Mr. Kerry did not deserve the three Purple Hearts that he was awarded as a result of being injured in the war and are critical of Mr. Kerry's post-war comments charging atrocities by American soldiers.
The book has been a hot topic on cable news networks and talk radio because its accusations coincide with television advertisements produced by a group called "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth," of which Mr. O'Neill is a member. The ads - and others sponsored by groups critical of President Bush - have triggered debate over the influence of "527" advocacy groups, which are not officially affiliated with any candidates or bound to campaign-finance rules.
Barnes & Noble announced Monday that it had sold out of its original order of "Unfit for Command" nationwide, but is expecting new shipments this week. The book's publisher, Regnery Publishing Inc., cut Barnes & Noble's original order in half, the bookseller said.
Regnery, based in Washington, is one of the nation's largest publishers of books featuring conservative authors and commentators, including Patrick Buchanan, David Horowitz and Ann Coulter. It has printed 325,000 copies of "Unfit for Command" and plans to have 550,000 copies on order or in print by next week, spokeswoman Kelley Keeler said.
"The demand has been huge, tremendous," she said.
The Books A Million store in Dupont Circle received a shipment of about 100 books last week and already is waiting on another.
In Annapolis, the Hard Bean Coffee and Booksellers store immediately sold the first three copies it received last week and is waiting on a second shipment of 20 books, which it also expects to sell out.
"I've probably had 20 people ask me personally in the last week if we had it," said store manager Mary Flickner. "Those probably would have been sales."
But sales of the book are not brisk everywhere. At Politics and Prose Bookstore and Coffeehouse on Connecticut Avenue NW, shop managers said they have yet to sell any of the 39 books in the store. Ten people have requested the book but have not picked up their copies, and a shipment of 10 more is on the way, manager Shane Cagney said.
-------- us politics
The Curse of Dick Cheney
The veep's career has been marred by one disaster after another
By T.D. ALLMAN,
August 25, 2004
Rolling Stone Magazine
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story?id=6450422&pageid=rs.Home&pageregion=single7
Should George W. Bush win this election, it will give him the distinction of being the first occupant of the White House to have survived naming Dick Cheney to a post in his administration. The Cheney jinx first manifested itself at the presidential level back in 1969, when Richard Nixon appointed him to his first job in the executive branch. It surfaced again in 1975, when Gerald Ford made Cheney his chief of staff and then -- with Cheney's help -- lost the 1976 election. George H.W. Bush, having named Cheney secretary of defense, was defeated for re-election in 1992. The ever-canny Ronald Reagan was the only Republican president since Eisenhower who managed to serve two full terms. He is also the only one not to have appointed Dick Cheney to office.
This pattern of misplaced confidence in Cheney, followed by disastrous results, runs throughout his life -- from his days as a dropout at Yale to the geopolitical chaos he has helped create in Baghdad. Once you get to know his history, the cycle becomes clear: First, Cheney impresses someone rich or powerful, who causes unearned wealth and power to be conferred on him. Then, when things go wrong, he blames others and moves on to a new situation even more advantageous to himself.
"Cheney's manner and authority of voice far outstrip his true abilities," says Chas Freeman, who served under Bush's father as ambassador to Saudi Arabia. "It was clear from the start that Bush required adult supervision -- but it turns out Cheney has even worse instincts. He does not understand that when you act recklessly, your mistakes will come back and bite you on the ass."
Cheney's record of mistakes begins in 1959, when Tom Stroock, a Republican politician-businessman in Casper, Wyoming, got Cheney, then a senior at Natrona County High School, a scholarship to Yale. "Dick was the all-American boy, in the top ten percent of his class," Stroock says. "He seemed a natural." But instead of triumphing, Cheney failed. "He spent his time partying with guys who loved football but weren't varsity quality," recalls Stephen Billings, an Episcopalian minister who roomed with him during Cheney's freshman (and only full) year at Yale. "His idea was, you didn't need to master the material," says his other roommate, Jacob Plotkin. "He passed one psych course without attending class or studying, and he was proud of that. But there are some things you can't bluff, and Dick reached a point where you couldn't recover."
Cheney might have been flunking in the classroom, but he excelled at making connections. "Dick always had this very calm way of talking," recalls Plotkin, now a retired math professor at Michigan State University. "His thoughtful manner impressed people." Forty years before the son of a U.S. president picked Cheney to be his running mate, the son of a Massachusetts governor picked him to be his sophomore-year roommate. Mark Furcolo, whose father, Foster, had been elected governor as a Democrat, invited Cheney to Cape Cod for a visit. "Dick came back enraptured," Plotkin says. "He was fascinated by the official state cars and planes. The trappings of it got him."
It could have been the start of a brilliant career -- in the Massachusetts of the 1960s, it would not have been too great a leap from the Furcolos to the Kennedys. Instead, after only one term as a Yale sophomore, Cheney dropped out. "Dick never had the experience of learning from his mistakes," says Tom Fake, a Natrona classmate who also won a Yale scholarship. But he learned something perhaps more important to this future success. "He found a path that got him into powerful positions" is how Plotkin puts it.
After leaving Yale, Cheney had one of his few experiences working in the private sector, on a telephone-company repair crew. He showed no interest, one way or another, in the Vietnam War -- until a Texas president, nearly forty years before George W. Bush, turned a remote foreign struggle into a catastrophic, unwinnable war. Thanks to Lyndon Johnson's escalation of Vietnam, lounging around was suddenly no longer an option. Cheney snapped into action. First he enrolled in Casper Community College; then he went to the University of Wyoming. That kept him out of the draft until August 7th, 1964, when Congress initiated massive conscription in the armed forces. Three weeks later, Cheney married Lynne Vincent, his high school girlfriend, earning him another deferment. Then, on October 26th, 1965, the Selective Service announced that childless married men no longer would be exempted from having to fight for their country. Nine months and two days later, the first of Cheney's two daughters, Elizabeth, was born. All told, between 1963 and 1966, Cheney received five deferments.
In January 1967, when he was enrolled at the University of Wisconsin, Cheney passed his twenty-sixth birthday, making him safe from the draft -- and making it safe for him to abandon work on a doctoral degree. He had taken to hanging out with local politicians and acted as an unpaid assistant to Wisconsin's moderate Republican governor, Warren Knowles. In 1968, he used Knowles to get a progressive Wisconsin Republican congressman named William Steiger to let him work as an intern in his office in Washington.
For the first time, Cheney went to live in a city with a population of more than 200,000 people. What happened next occurred with amazing ease and speed. Having used Knowles as a steppingstone to Steiger, Cheney used Steiger as a steppingstone to a Nixon appointee named Donald Rumsfeld, then head of the Office of Economic Opportunity. "What I saw was a young fellow, intelligent, purposeful, laid-back," Rumsfeld later remembered, when asked why he'd hired Cheney. His greatest utility, then and later, was that he lapped up work that higher-ranking officials were happy to see disappear from their plates. "He would take a problem, worry it through and move things to a conclusion," Rumsfeld recalled.
In 1973, while Nixon was self-destructing, Cheney, then thirty-two, got a job at the investment firm of Bradley, Woods and Company. "Dick needed to make some money," Bruce Bradley explained. "He and Lynne and their girls lived in a modest house, and he drove a used Volkswagen Beetle." Both Bradley and Cheney were Republicans, but they differed on Watergate. Bradley recognized that Nixon had violated fundamental American values; Cheney saw Watergate as a power struggle. They even debated each other, in a forum arranged for Bradley's clients.
"He claimed it was just a political ploy by the president's enemies," says Bradley. "Cheney saw politics as a game where you never stop pushing. He said the presidency was like one of those giant medicine balls. If you get ahold of it, what you do is, you keep pushing that ball and you never let the other team push back."
Nixon's resignation opened the way for Cheney's first truly astonishing inside move up. When Gerald Ford succeeded to the presidency, he needed experienced loyalists by his side who were untainted by the Nixon scandal, so he named Rumsfeld his chief of staff. Rumsfeld brought Cheney right along with him into the Oval Office.
The period between August 1974 and November 1976, when Ford lost the election to Jimmy Carter, is essential to understanding George W. Bush's disastrous misjudgments -- and Dick Cheney's role in them. In both cases, Cheney and Rumsfeld played the key role in turning opportunity into chaos. Ford, like Bush later, hadn't been elected president. As he entered office, he was overshadowed by a secretary of state (Kissinger then, Powell later) who was considered incontestably his better. Ford was caught as flat-footed by the fall of Saigon in April 1975 as Bush was by the September 2001 attacks. A better president, with more astute advisers, might have arranged a more orderly ending to the long and divisive war. But instead of heeding the country's desire for honesty and reconciliation, Rumsfeld and Cheney convinced Ford that the way to turn himself into a real president was to stir up crises in international relations while lurching to the right in domestic politics.
Having turned Ford into their instrument, Rumsfeld and Cheney staged a palace coup. They pushed Ford to fire Defense Secretary James Schlesinger, tell Vice President Nelson Rockefeller to look for another job and remove Henry Kissinger from his post as national security adviser. Rumsfeld was named secretary of defense, and Cheney became chief of staff to the president. The Yale dropout and draft dodger was, at the age of thirty-four, the second-most-powerful man in the White House.
As the 1976 election approached, Rumsfeld and Cheney used the immense powers they had arrogated to themselves to persuade Ford to scuttle the Salt II treaty on nuclear-arms control. The move helped Ford turn back Reagan's challenge for the party's nomination -- but at the cost of ceding the heart of the GOP to the New Right. Then, in the presidential election, Jimmy Carter defeated Ford by 2 million votes.
In his first test-drive at the wheels of power, Cheney had played a central role in the undoing of a president. Wrote right-wing columnist Robert Novak, "White House Chief of Staff Richard Cheney . . . is blamed by Ford insiders for a succession of campaign blunders." Those in the old elitist wing of the party thought the decision to dump Rockefeller was both stupid and wrong: "I think Ford lost the election because of it," one of Kissinger's former aides says now. Ford agreed, calling it "the biggest political mistake of my life."
Back in Wyoming, Cheney used his connections to skim along to yet another success. "Some fellows from Casper called me," recalls former Sen. Alan Simpson, "told me they had found this amazing young man and were going to promote him for Con-gress. They gave a big to-do for him. I went to take a look. It was the first time I set eyes on Dick Cheney. You could tell right away he was a smart cookie." In the 1978 election, Cheney became Wyoming's sole member of the House.
"The top people had decided it would be Dick, so that basically settled it," recalls John Perry Barlow, a fourth-generation Wyomingite who campaigned for Cheney. "Dick had been chief of staff to a president. That made everyone assume he knew what he was doing."
In an overwhelmingly Republican state, Cheney now had a safe seat in Congress for as long as he wanted. On Capitol Hill, he combined a moderate demeanor with a radical agenda. People who find Cheney's extremism as vice president surprising have not looked at his congressional voting record. In 1986, he was one of only twenty-one members of the House to oppose the Safe Drinking Water Act. He fought efforts to clean up hazardous waste and backed tax breaks for energy corporations. He repeatedly voted against funding for the Veterans Administration. He opposed extending the Civil Rights Act. He opposed the release of Nelson Mandela from jail in South Africa. He even voted for cop-killer bullets.
"I don't believe he is an ideologue," says former Sen. Tim Wirth of Colorado. "But he is the most partisan politician I've ever met." Many weekends, while Congress was in session, Wirth and Cheney would take the same flight to Chicago, where they'd change planes for Colorado and Wyoming. "I spent a lot of time waiting for planes with Dick Cheney," Wirth, a Democrat, says. "He never talked about ideology. He talked about how the Republicans were going to take over the House of Representatives." Wirth adds, "It seemed impossible, but that's exactly what happened."
Cheney knew precisely who should lead the GOP takeover. "Dick and Lynne had their eyes on the speakership," says Professor Fred Holborn of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. "He and Lynne wrote a book on the speakership." As the subtitle of Kings of the Hill indicates, it is about how "powerful men changed the course of American history" through control of the House.
Cheney's strategy for gaining power was the same one he and Rumsfeld had foisted on Ford: making sure no one in the Republican Party outflanked him to the right. This was a deeply divisive approach, because it involved pandering to racial and religious extremists and using complex matters of national security as flag-waving wedge issues. "Dick's votes against civil rights and the environment were parts of complex deals aimed at enhancing his own power," says Barlow, his former supporter.
In 1988, Cheney was named House minority whip, the second-ranking post in his party's hierarchy. Had he stayed in the House, it is possible that he would have become speaker. But the following year, another powerful person decided to confer great nonelective power on Cheney. When President George H.W. Bush named him to head the Defense Department, the Senate unanimously confirmed the choice. Not a single senator seems to have considered it anomalous that control of the strongest armed forces on earth was being conferred on a person who had gone to notable lengths to avoid service in those same armed forces.
Appointed to another powerful position, Cheney promptly went about screwing it up. He pushed to turn many military duties over to private companies and began moving "defense intellectuals" with no military experience into key posts at the Pentagon. Most notable among them was Paul Wolfowitz, who later masterminded much of the disastrous strategy that George W. Bush has pursued in Iraq. In 1992, as undersecretary of defense, Wolfowitz turned out a forty-page report titled "Defense Planning Guidance," arguing that historic allies should be demoted to the status of U.S. satellites, and that the modernization of India and China should be treated as a threat, as should the democratization of Russia. "We must maintain the mechanisms for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role," the report declared. It was nothing less than a blueprint for worldwide domination, and Cheney loved it. He maneuvered to have the president adopt it as doctrine, but the elder Bush, recognizing that the proposals were not only foolish but dangerous, immediately rejected them.
By the end of the first Bush administration, others had come to the conclusion that Cheney and his followers were dangerous. "They were referred to collectively as the crazies," recalls Ray McGovern, a CIA professional who interpreted intelligence for presidents going back to Kennedy. Around the same time, McGovern remembers, Secretary of State James Baker and National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft counseled the elder President Bush, "Keep these guys at arm's length."
In November 1992, when George H.W. Bush lost to Bill Clinton, Cheney had his second president shot out from under him. He knocked around Washington at various neoconservative think tanks for two years, and the old pattern repeated itself: Powerful benefactors once again gave Cheney a big break. As Dan Briody recounts in his book The Halliburton Agenda, Cheney was on a fishing trip in New Brunswick, Canada, with a group of high-powered corporate CEOs. "The men were discussing the ongoing search for a CEO at Halliburton," Briody reports. "Cheney was asleep back at the lodge and, in his absence, the men decided that Cheney would be the man for the job, despite the fact that he had never worked in the oil business."
Halliburton was Cheney's first real chance to get rich; he grabbed it with both hands. His principal action was his acquisition of a subsidiary called Dresser Industries. Dresser struck lucrative deals with Saddam Hussein; Halliburton did business with Muammar el-Qaddafi and the ayatollahs of Iran. By the time Cheney left in 2000, Halliburton's stock was near an all-time high of fifty-four dollars a share. Then it turned out that Dresser had saddled Halliburton with asbestos lawsuits that could cost the company millions, and the stock plummeted to barely ten dollars a share. Even with the bounce Halliburton stock has received from the war, an investor who put $100,000 into the company just before Cheney became vice president would have less than $60,000 today. Cheney, meanwhile, continues to receive $150,000 a year in deferred compensation from Halliburton, even though he is supposed to divest himself of all conflicts of interest. The company has been awarded $8 billion in contracts by the Bush-Cheney administration for its work in Iraq.
It could be argued that the vice presidency was the first job Cheney got entirely on his own -- by appointing himself to it. Bush initially asked Cheney only to advise him on whom to choose. After assuring Bush that he himself had no ambition to be vice president, Cheney then arranged it so that all options narrowed down to him.
Since Cheney lived in Texas at the time, choosing him led Bush into a situation that, if the words of our Founding Fathers still have any meaning, is unconstitutional. The Constitution forbids a state's electors from voting for candidates for president and vice president who are both "an inhabitant of the same state as themselves." Yet by voting for Bush and Cheney, electors in Texas did precisely that. Cheney lived in Texas, had a Texas driver's license and filed his federal income tax using a Texas address. He had also voted in Texas, not in Wyoming, a state where he had not lived full-time for decades.
As vice president, Cheney has been the decisive force pushing America into war. In the inner councils of the administration, it was he who emasculated Colin Powell, cut the State Department out of effective policymaking, foisted fake reports on the intelligence agencies and supplanted the National Security Council. It was also Cheney who placed appointees personally loyal to him, including Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, in charge of the Pentagon and speckled the warmaking bureaucracy with desk officers culled from neoconservative Washington think tanks -- ideologues with no military experience.
"They were like cancer cells," says retired Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, who worked on the Defense Department's Near East and South Asia desk during the buildup to the Iraq war. "They didn't care about the truth. They had an agenda. I'd never seen anything like it. They deformed everything."
Even within the State Department, officials of Cheney's choosing -- not Powell's -- controlled the key positions when it came to maneuvering the United States into the Iraq war. "Even when there was a show of Defense listening to State, it was just one Cheney operative talking to another," says Greg Thielmann, a former member of the State Department Intelligence Agency. "We were simply bypassed from the start."
Over at Defense, competent intelligence professionals were purged in order to ease the way to war. Douglas Feith, brought in under Rumsfeld to serve as undersecretary of defense for policy, applied an ideological test to his staff: He didn't want competence; he wanted fervor. Col. Pat Lang, a Middle East expert who served under five presidents, Republican and Democratic, in key posts in military intelligence, recalls being considered for a job at the Pentagon. During the job interview, Feith scanned Lang's impressive resume. "I see you speak Arabic," Feith said. When Lang nodded, Feith said, "Too bad," and dismissed him.
Cheney suffered his biggest failure in March 2002, when he visited nine Arab and Muslim countries six months after the 9/11 attacks. The vice president anticipated a triumphal tour of the region as, one by one, he enlisted the countries he visited in the cause of "taking out" Saddam Hussein. In the end, not a single country Cheney visited provided troops for the Bush-Cheney war -- including staunch American allies in Jordan and Turkey -- and almost all refused to let their territory be used for the attack.
Once again, however, Cheney did not let reality dissuade him from his course. As the disaster has unfolded in Iraq, he has continued to insist against all evidence that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction, that the dictator was aiding Al Qaeda, that nothing the Bush administration has done was a mistake. Those who have known him over the years remain astounded by what they describe as his almost autistic indifference to the thoughts and feelings of others. "He has the least interest in human beings of anyone I have ever met," says John Perry Barlow, his former supporter. Cheney's freshman-year roommate, Steve Billings, agrees: "If I could ask Dick one question, I'd ask him how he could be so unempathetic."
It's a question Cheney is unlikely ever to answer. Throughout the years, he has sealed himself off from the possibility of such inquiries. The most famous example is his draft evasion during the Vietnam War. He has never candidly discussed his feelings about the war, the traumatic, formative event for American males of his age. Only once, in fact, has he even answered a question as to why he avoided serving.
"I had other priorities," was all he has ever said.
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Bush Campaign's Top Outside Lawyer Resigns
August 25, 2004
New York Times
By JIM RUTENBERG and KATE ZERNIKE
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/25/politics/campaign/25CND-SWIF.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
The Bush campaign's top outside lawyer, who said on Tuesday that he had given legal advice to the group of veterans attacking Senator John Kerry's Vietnam War record, said today that he was resigning from the campaign because his activities were becoming a "distraction" to Mr. Bush' re-election efforts.
The lawyer, Benjamin L. Ginsberg, said that the group, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, called him last month to ask for his help and that he had agreed. The group has criticized Mr. Kerry's war record and his antiwar activism in a book, television commercials and appearances on various news programs, especially on cable.
"I cannot begin to express my sadness that my legal representations have become a distraction from the critical issues at hand in this election," Mr. Ginsberg told the president in a letter distributed today by the Bush-Cheney campaign. "I feel I cannot let that continue, so I have decided to resign as national counsel to your campaign to ensure that the giving of legal advice to decorated military veterans, which was entirely within the boundaries of the law, doesn't distract from the real issues upon which you and the country should be focusing."
The Kerry-Edwards campaign manager, Mary Beth Cahill, said today that Mr. Ginsberg's resignation "confirms the extent of those connections."
"Now we know why George Bush refuses to specifically condemn these false ads," she said. "People deeply involved in his own campaign are behind them, from paying for them, to appearing in them, to providing legal advice, to coordinating a negative strategy to divert the public away from issues like jobs, health care and the mess in Iraq, the real concerns of the American people."
And in another sign of how the fierce debate about Mr. Kerry's Vietnam record has continued to dominate both campaigns, Mr. Kerry today dispatched two fellow Vietnam veterans - former Senator Max Cleland, Democrat of Georgia, and Jim Rassman, a former Kerry comrade in Vietnam - to Mr. Bush's ranch in Crawford, Tex., to urge him to condemn the television advertisements challenging Senator Kerry's military record.
Mr. Ginsberg, the chief outside counsel to the Bush-Cheney re-election effort, agreed to an interview on Tuesday after several telephone calls to him and the campaign asking that he explain his role. He said that he was helping the group comply with campaign finance rules and that his work was entirely separate from his work for the president's campaign. President Bush has called for an end to advertising by all groups like that of the Swift boat veterans, called 527's for the section of the tax code that created them.
Mr. Ginsberg said in the interview that he had yet to work out payment details with the group and that he might consider doing the work pro bono.
In his letter to the president today, Mr. Ginsberg said his work with the Swift boat group was conducted "in a manner that is fully appropriate and legal and, in fact, is quite similar to the relationships between my counterparts at the D.N.C. and the Kerry campaign and Democrat 527's such as MoveOn.org, the Media Fund and Americans Coming Together."
Mr. Ginsberg said his role was no different from that of Robert Bauer, a lawyer the Kerry campaign shares with America Coming Together, a liberal group that is organizing a huge multimillion-dollar get-out-the-vote drive that is far more ambitious than the Swift boat group's activities.
In an interview on CNN this afternoon, Mr. Ginsberg said that working for both the Bush campaign and the Swift Boat group had been "totally within the bounds of the law."
But he said he quit his campaign duties not because he believed he was doing something wrong, but because publicity about his double role was detracting from Mr. Bush's message.
"Sadly, especially from my perspective, when a lawyer gets in the way of that, it's time to get out of the way," he said.
The Bush campaign had nothing else to say on the matter today, but on Tuesday, Scott Stanzel, a Bush spokesman, said, "There has been no coordination at any time between Bush-Cheney '04 and any 527."
Mr. Bush's campaign aides have repeatedly said they have no connection to the swift boat group, whose challenges to Mr. Kerry and his war record have been largely contradicted by official war records and even some of its members' own past statements.
Mr. Ginsberg, a prominent elections lawyer, was a senior lawyer for the Bush organization in the Florida recount after the 2000 election and was once general counsel to the Republican National Committee. He said he had no involvement in the message or strategy of the Swift boat group and said he had no reason to believe that Mr. Bush knew of his involvement.
"The truth is there are very few lawyers who work in this area," Mr. Ginsberg said in the Tuesday interview. "It's sort of natural that people do come to the few of us for the work. What happened was a month or so ago some decorated Vietnam vets came to me and said: `We have an important point of view to enter into the debate. There's a new law that's complicated, and we want help complying with the law.' "
He added, "I have given them some legal compliance advice."
Mr. Kerry has gone on the offensive over the group's activities, saying it is "a front" for Mr. Bush's campaign and repeatedly calling on the president to repudiate an advertisement from the group attacking his record. Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican who is also a decorated war veteran, has also called on Mr. Bush to repudiate the spots.
The 527 groups are allowed to raise and spend unlimited amounts of money as long as they do not coordinate their activities with federal campaigns or political parties. Campaign finance rules do not prohibit lawyers from working for both outside groups and campaigns because they are not considered strategists.
Mr. Bush has declined to take on the group directly but repeated this week that he believed that all outside groups should stop advertising.
Mr. Ginsberg had been at the forefront of pressing the legal case against Democratic 527's, which have spent more than $60 million on advertisements against Mr. Bush.
In complaints against the groups, Republican lawyers have noted that Harold M. Ickes, who has helped raise money for and organize America Coming Together and the Media Fund, both 527 groups, is also on the executive committee of the Democratic National Committee.
The chairman of the Democratic convention, Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico, has been an adviser to another 527 group, the New Democrat Network. And Jim Jordan, a spokesman for the Media Fund, was Mr. Kerry's campaign manager until he resigned in November.
Mr. Ginsberg said he decided to help Republican groups after the Federal Election Commission declined to imposed strict rules on the 527 groups in May.
"At that point," he said, "I was more than happy to help all Republican groups comply with the law so that there wasn't unilateral disarmament."
An occasional collaborator with Mr. Ginsberg, Chris LaCivita, is also working for the group, advising on media strategy. Mr. LaCivita was political director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee in 2002 and now works for the DCI Group, a Washington political strategy firm whose partners include Charles Francis, a longtime friend of President Bush from Texas and Tom Synhorst, an adviser to the Bush campaign in 2000, who was an architect of the campaign's effort in the Iowa caucuses.
Mr. LaCivita said on Tuesday that he worked as a private contractor for DCI and Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and that there was no coordination between the firm and the group.
"Obviously, I don't work for the Bush campaign," he said.
Mr. LaCivita described his role as providing advice on the news media and placing advertisements. Asked to describe how close his involvement was or how Mr. Ginsberg was involved, Mr. LaCivita referred calls to a spokesman for Swift Boat Veterans, which declined to comment.
Mr. LaCivita and Mr. Ginsberg have also been involved with Progress for America, a group that calls itself the leading organization pushing a conservative agenda. Mr. Ginsberg did not say how frequently he consulted with the group.
This is the second time in recent days that an individual associated with Mr. Bush's campaign has acknowledged working with Swift Boat Veterans. On Sunday, the campaign confirmed an accusation first made by Mr. Kerry's campaign that Kenneth Cordier, a retired colonel who appears in the second of two commercials by the group, had been a member of the Bush campaign's veterans' advisory committee. The campaign said that it had not known that Mr. Cordier, a volunteer, was going to be in the spot and that he had resigned as a result of it.
Mr. Kerry's campaign filed a complaint last week with the Federal Election Commission about collaboration between Mr. Bush's campaign and the Swift Boat Veterans, activities that would violate the laws for the 527's.
Swift Boat Veterans portrays itself as an organic group opposed to Mr. Kerry. On Tuesday, the chairman of the Federal Election Commission defended the group's right to advertise. But it has gradually acknowledged ties to people close to the Republican Party and Mr. Bush's campaign.
"It's another piece of evidence of the ties between the Bush campaign and this group," Chad Clanton, a spokesman for Mr. Kerry, said. Asked about his campaign's use of shared lawyers, Mr. Clanton said, "If the Bush campaign truly disapproved of this smear, their top lawyer wouldn't be involved."
On Monday, the veterans' group acknowledged that a longtime Republican operative, Susan Arceneaux, was working for it and had taken out the post office box listed as the group's address. The group described Ms. Arceneaux's role, also, as "compliance."
Records also list Ms. Arceneaux as treasurer of the Majority Leader's Fund, a political action committee affiliated with the former House majority leader, Dick Armey of Texas, which like the Swift Boat Veterans received significant financing from Bob Perry, a Texan who has long supported Mr. Bush.
Mr. Perry has given $200,000 to Swift Boat Veterans. He is listed as co-host on an invitation to a fund-raiser next week at the Tavern on the Green in Manhattan. The invitation list includes President Bush's chief political strategist, Karl Rove, The Dallas Morning News reported on Tuesday. Mr. Rove has acknowledged through a spokesman to being friends with Mr. Perry.
Maria Newman contributed reporting from New York for this article.
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-------- environment
E.P.A. Says Mercury Taints Fish Across U.S.
August 25, 2004
By MICHAEL JANOFSKY
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/25/politics/25fish.html
WASHINGTON, Aug. 24 - The head of the Environmental Protection Agency said on Tuesday that fish in virtually all of the nation's lakes and rivers were contaminated with mercury, a highly toxic metal that poses health risks for pregnant women and young children.
Michael O. Leavitt, the E.P.A. administrator, drew his conclusion from the agency's latest annual survey of fish advisories, which showed that 48 states - all but Wyoming and Alaska - issued warnings about mercury last year. That compared with 44 states in 1993, when the surveys were first conducted.
The latest survey also shows that 19 states, including New York, have now put all their lakes and rivers under a statewide advisory for fish consumption. But Mr. Leavitt said that the widespread presence of mercury reflected a surge in monitoring - not an increase in emissions - as part of growing state efforts to warn local anglers about the fish they are catching. Last year, states issued 3,094 advisories for toxic substances, compared with 1,233 in 1993.
"Mercury is everywhere," Mr. Leavitt said at a news conference in his office. "The more waters we monitor, the more we find mercury. Monitoring is up and will continue to go up. But emissions are down and will continue to go down."
The latest survey represents monitoring from 35 percent of the nation's lakes, more than 100,000 of them; 24 percent of total river miles, nearly 850,000 miles; 75 percent of coastal waters; and all of the Great Lakes.
The E.P.A. also provided a chart showing the level of mercury emission from human causes fell 45 percent in 1999 from 1990. The agency said that was the most recent data it had available. Mr. Leavitt promised to issue the nation's first regulations for mercury emissions "within a few months." The plan, with a deadline of March 15, 2005, has gained industry support because of the likelihood it will include a ''cap-and-trade program" that lets companies buy and sell credits that give them a pollution allowance, which would save them in cleanup costs.
"Even in light of new monitoring data," said Scott Segal, director of the Electric Reliability Coordinating Council, an industry group, "a well-designed cap-and-trade program remains the most appropriate response to dealing with mercury emissions from power plants."
But environmentalists, as well as President Bush's Democratic opponent, Senator John Kerry, have attacked the Bush administration's proposed standards as weak and unnecessarily drawn out. The administration has proposed reducing emissions 29 percent by 2010 and 69 percent by 2018.
Emily Figdor, a policy analyst for Clear the Air, a coalition of environmental groups, said, "The technology is available now to reduce emissions by 90 percent by 2008, as the Clean Air Act requires, but there is no indication that the administration is considering a stronger proposal."
Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club, accused the administration of "dragging its feet" by endorsing a weak plan.
A spokesman for Mr. Kerry accused the Bush administration of proposing standards that industry lobbyists helped write, a criticism the E.P.A. has denied, and said Mr. Kerry, as president, would support sharper reductions in a shorter period of time.
"With George Bush in the White House, you better think twice before you eat the fish you catch," said the spokesman, Phil Singer. "While the Bush administration has opted for a lobbyist-written approach to mercury emissions, John Kerry will go further faster and be more effective in ridding our lakes and rivers of poisons that threaten pregnant women and children.
Despite evidence that fish caught almost anywhere in the country is contaminated with mercury, Mr. Leavitt repeatedly urged reporters to consider the increasing number of advisories in the larger context of more aggressive actions by states in monitoring and by the administration in moving toward new regulations.
Pointing out that the Clinton administration waited until its final days to propose mercury emission regulations, which were later challenged in court, he said Mr. Bush deserved credit for proposing regulations and providing technical assistance to other countries working to reduce mercury emissions.
It remains unclear what would happen to the Bush proposal if Mr. Kerry were to win in November.
"That's an eventuality," Mr. Leavitt said, "that I have not considered."
--------
American Anglers Face Record Number of Mercury Warnings
August 25, 2004
By J.R. Pegg
WASHINGTON, DC, (ENS)
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/aug2004/2004-08-25-10.asp
More than a third of the nation's lakes and nearly a quarter of its rivers are under fish consumption advisories because of contamination from mercury, PCBs, dioxin and other industrial pollutants, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced Tuesday.
According to the agency's annual report, fish consumption advisories increased nine percent in 2003 from the previous year, with most of the new advisories due to mercury contamination.
Forty-five states now have advisories for mercury, and 21 of these have statewide advisories for mercury contamination in every freshwater lake and river.
Mercury can cause permanent neurological and developmental damage and is of particular concern to children and women of childbearing age.
EPA Administrator Mike Leavitt downplayed the record number of advisories, which he said is due to increased monitoring and fish sampling, rather than increased pollution.
U.S. mercury emissions have declined by almost 50 percent since 1990, thanks to massive reductions in two major sources of mercury - medical and municipal waste incinerators.
"More and more of our waters are being tested, and that is protective for children and pregnant women," Leavitt said. "Emissions are down, and emissions will continue to go down as the Bush administration takes the first ever steps to regulate mercury from coal fired power plants."
The nation's 1,100 coal fired power plants emit some 48 tons of mercury each year, accounting for about 40 percent of the nation's mercury pollution.
The Bush administration has proposed using a cap and trade program to cut these emissions some 70 percent by 2018, but the plan has been the target of criticism from state pollution control officers, scientists, environmentalists and public health advocates.
Opponents of the Bush plan say it is far too lax and want the EPA to proceed with a rule that adopts "maximum achievable control technology" standard under the Clean Air Act. They say these technologies are available and could reduce mercury emissions by some 90 percent by 2008.
Industry groups and the administration say such technologies are too expensive and not commercially viable, and they dispute the idea that power plants are responsible for mercury found in fish.
Mercury is also a naturally occurring metal and mercury pollution is clearly a global problem.
Industrial emissions of mercury add to the existing pool, which is continuously mobilized, deposited on land and water, and remobilized.
"There is no mercury control technology that exists today that can achieve the reduction levels proposed in the mercury rule, let alone the 90 percent reductions advocated by some activists," said Scott Segal, director of the Electric Reliability Coordinating Council.
Critics are not convinced and believe the increase in fish consumption advisories adds to the evidence that more stringent regulation of mercury emissions from the nation's largest unregulated industrial sector is warranted.
"The widespread mercury pollution problem threatens the health of millions of Americans," said John Walke, director of NRDC's Clean Air Program. "These alarming advisories underscore the need for aggressive control of mercury polluters, such as power plants, but the Bush administration's air pollution policies have been dangerously weak."
The report released Tuesday found 48 states, the District of Columbia and American Samoa issued a record total of 3,094 fish consumption advisories in 2003 - an increase of 280 from the previous year.
But the actual number of polluted water bodies may be much higher as neither Alaska nor Wyoming issue advisories and the figures in the EPA's summary do not include the Great Lakes. The agency notes that 100 percent of the Great Lakes and their connecting waters are under fish consumption advisories.
In addition, 16 states have issued fish advisories for all of their coastal waters. The EPA report details that 75 percent of the U.S. coastline, bar Alaska, is under fish consumption advisories.
A large part of the increase detailed in the report occurred because Montana and Washington issued statewide advisories for all their lakes and rivers in 2003 and Hawaii issued a statewide advisory for its entire coastline.
The EPA says it is difficult to draw national conclusions because the advisories differ from state to state.
The advisories range from complete bans on fishing to limits on individual species or sizes of fish and are for a broad range of fish, including bass, yellow perch, lake trout, walleye, pike as well as some salt water species such as tuna and swordfish.
Consumers could be forgiven for feeling confused about the health risks from mercury in freshwater and saltwater fish.
In March the EPA and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration released joint consumer guidance for fish consumption, advising women who may become pregnant, pregnant women, nursing mothers, and young children to avoid some types of fish and eat fish and shellfish that are lower in mercury.
Federal officials said the guidance aims to balance the desire to encourage consumption of fish, which has ample health benefits, with the concerns over mercury contamination.
The guidance called on individuals check local advisories about the safety of fish caught in local lakes, rivers and coastal areas - if advice is not available, federal official say women can eat up to six ounces per week of fish from local waters, but should not consume any other fish during that week.
Environmentalists say the guidance is too lax and vague to protect the public's health, and have sued to force the agencies to revise it.
For example, the advisory states that children should eat less than 12 ounces of fish a week, but does not specify how much less.
In addition, the advisory does not provide a comprehensive list of fish species known to have a high or low risk of mercury content
A report released earlier this month by environmental groups analyzed recent EPA tests of fish caught in 260 U.S. lakes and found every sample had at least low levels of mercury.
Some 55 percent of samples contained mercury levels that exceed the EPA's safe limit for women of childbearing age, and 76 percent exceeded the safe limit for children under age three.
The EPA says as many as one in six U.S. women of childbearing age already has levels of unsafe levels of mercury in her body, putting an estimated 630,000 newborns at risk each year from the adverse effects of the toxic metal.
The EPA's summary of state fish consumption advisories can be found here.
-------- health
Blueberry Compound Fights Cholesterol, Study Finds
REUTERS USA:
August 26, 2004
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/26776/story.htm
WASHINGTON - A compound used by blueberries and grapes to fight off fungal infections could help lower cholesterol, U.S. researchers reported.
The compound, called pterostilbene, also helps regulate blood sugar and might help fight type-2 diabetes, the researchers told a meeting of the American Chemical Society in Philadelphia.
The finding adds to a growing list of reasons to eat colorful fruit, especially blueberries, which are rich in compounds known as antioxidants. These molecules battle cell and DNA damage involved in cancer, heart disease, diabetes and perhaps also brain degeneration.
"We are excited to learn that blueberries, which are already known to be rich in healthy compounds, may also be a potent weapon in the battle against obesity and heart disease, which are leading killers in the U.S.," Agnes Rimando of the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Oxford, Mississippi, said in a statement.
Rimando's team had previously found pterostilbene in grapes. It is similar to a better-known antioxidant in grapes - resveratrol.
They studied pterostilbene in rat liver cells, soaking them in four compounds found in blueberries including pterostilbene and resveratrol. Pterostilbene was the best at activating the PPAR-alpha receptor, a protein involved in lowering cholesterol and other blood fats.
In fact, they told the meeting, pterostilbene worked as well as the commercial drug ciprofibrate - but it worked more accurately. It was so specific that it could have fewer side-effects than the drug, they said.
It is impossible to know yet if simply eating blueberries will lower cholesterol, Rimando said. But a range of health expert groups, including the federal government, advise eating as many as 10 servings of fruits and vegetables a day and blueberries are highly recommended.
Pterostilbene and resveratrol are related chemicals belonging to a group of compounds called phytoalexins. Plants produce them in response to stresses such as fungal infection and ultraviolet light.
Pterostilbene may also be a promising compound to develop into a natural-based fungicide, Rimando said.
-------- imf / world bank / wto (economics)
Fixing economy vital to Yemen
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
By Peter Willems
August 25, 2004
http://www.washingtontimes.com/functions/print.php?StoryID=20040824-103700-5323r
SAN'A, Yemen -- Despite government successes in the war on terror, many say Yemen still must reduce its grinding poverty and revive the economy or it will remain one of the region's most fertile recruiting grounds for al Qaeda and other radical Islamist groups.
Renewed fighting this week in northern Yemen with followers of radical Muslim cleric Hussein Badr Eddin al-Houti provided a grim reminder of the country's challenges, despite the capture of hundreds of terror suspects and key al Qaeda operatives in the past three years.
The government has started to clamp down on religious schools where radical Islam is thought to be taught, but critics worry that more fundamental problems are not being addressed.
Abdullah al-Faqih, a professor of political science at San'a University, said if the government does not act soon to reform the economy, "Yemen will undergo periods of instability, conflict and lawlessness."
"It will be a breeding ground for extremism and terrorism. It will serve as a destabilizing force in the region," he said.
Underscoring the Bush administration's concern about cultivating Yemeni cooperation in the global terrorism war, a U.S. military delegation arrived in Yemen this week for talks on security and military cooperation and combating terror, Agence France-Presse reported, citing local official sources and the U.S. Embassy.
The delegation is being headed by Brig. Gen. Samuel Helland, commander of the joint forces in the Horn of Africa.
The official weekly September 26 reported that the delegation will meet Yemeni officials in the ministries of interior and defense for security and military talks.
Anti-U.S. sentiment is high in Yemen, as in many countries in the region, because of the presence of U.S. troops in Iraq and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Economic conditions in Yemen have gone from bad to worse in recent years. Economic growth is not keeping up with the rise in population. The population growth rate is estimated to be as high as 3.6 percent annually, while the economic growth rate fell below 3.6 percent last year and might not exceed 3.3 percent in 2004.
Forty-two percent of the Yemenis live in poverty, and it is estimated that as many as 40 percent of the Yemenis are out of work. Earlier this year, the Arab League reported that Yemen remains the poorest country in the Middle East, with average income per capita at $508 a year.
The government has plans to reform the economy, based on a poverty-reduction blueprint put together in 2002. But progress has been slow.
"The government of Yemen has not acted on the reform measures recommended by the World Bank in the last year-and-a-half to two years," said Robert Hindle, the global bank's country manager for Yemen.
"We are recommending that the government come back on the reform path across the board. It's the only way to be able to improve the lives of people in Yemen," he said.
Government officials argue that part of the reluctance in pushing through painful economic reforms has been that it is focused on national security and the war on terror.
"First, we have to sustain our security level, because there is no development or peace without security," said Minister of Planning and International Cooperation Ahmed Sofan, who also serves as deputy prime minister. "If we measure priorities on action plans of the government, security comes first."
Others argue that those profiting from the current system are resisting change.
"Political groups and influential people try to satisfy their vested interests," said Ali Abdul Rahman al-Bahr, former oil minister and chairman of the Housing Credit Bank in Yemen. "They are trying to impose their own interests and are putting down their own conditions before anything happens."
Yahya al-Mutawakel, an adviser in the Planning Ministry, cited reducing subsidies on diesel fuel as an example of the difficulty of reform in the face of special interests.
Up to $600 million a year in subsidies have kept the price of diesel fuel 75 percent lower than costs in neighboring countries. If the money were redirected to more useful purposes, those profiting from smuggling fuel across the borders would be hurt.
"Lifting the subsidies on diesel fuel is a major element for reform because it has been a misuse of funds," Mr. al-Mutawakel said. "The reaction against price increases is not just among the people. It is also those with vested interests who will get hurt when subsidies are reduced."
The World Bank argues that strong oil revenues coming from high world prices should embolden the government to implement key reform, but others say that the soaring oil royalties have given the government more time to evaluate the situation before taking action.
"World oil prices and oil revenue in Yemen have been favorable," Mr. al-Mutawakel said. "This could be used in two ways: Speed up economic reform or use more time to take steps more wisely."
Currently, Yemen produces about 450,000 barrels of oil a day. More than 30 percent of Yemen's gross domestic product depends on oil, and 85 percent of the government's budget comes from oil royalties.
But the good times will not last long: Oil revenue has stabilized in the past few years, and according to the World Bank, oil reserves are now drying up and revenue is dropping considerably this year.
Mr. Hindle said as oil royalties continue to decline, the government's ability to prop up the economy will be called increasingly into question, perhaps leading to a major downturn.
Another concern is that a partial overhaul of the economy would not be enough. The reform blueprint calls for an increasing role for Yemen's private sector, leading in turn to more local and foreign investment to boost economic growth and generate more jobs.
But the government has made little progress in reforming the judicial system, considered critical to attracting new investment dollars and reassuring foreign investors.
"It's hard to picture people investing in Yemen when there is no legal protection for doing business here," said one Yemeni businessman. "The first thing that needs to be done is to create a real judicial system and laws that are enforced."
Many here think the longer the delay, the more recruits that the terrorists will find.
"Poverty breeds terrorism," Mr. Hindle said. "It's important for the Yemeni government to tackle the poverty issue to help prevent the emergence of extremism. If the government acts now, it will be able to improve the lives of the Yemeni people. But the longer it waits, the more difficult it will become."
-------- ACTIVISTS
Police Tear Gas, Arrest Protesters in Bangladesh
General Strike Called After Weekend Attack
Associated Press
Wednesday, August 25, 2004; Page A14
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A30096-2004Aug24.html
DHAKA, Bangladesh. Aug. 24 -- Baton-wielding riot police fired tear gas and rounded up dozens of demonstrators in Bangladesh on Tuesday during a general strike called to protest a weekend grenade attack that killed 20 people and wounded hundreds at an opposition political rally.
The violence broke out after police tried to block hundreds of protesters from taking to the streets, witnesses said. Demonstrators waved clenched fists and shouted, "Down with the government!"
At least 25 people were injured in the clashes in the capital, Dhaka, and police took about 50 protesters into custody, the witnesses said. Streets in the city of 10 million were empty of most vehicles except rickshaws.
Similar clashes, injuring about 100 people, erupted on the eve of the dawn-to-dusk strike, called by the main opposition Awami League party and backed by several leftist parties, the United News of Bangladesh news agency reported.
The protest shut down shops and schools and disrupted traffic across the country.
Opposition activists threw stones and bricks at public buses in downtown Dhaka, injuring at least three passengers, the news agency said. Train services on several routes were halted as strike supporters barricaded tracks or attacked station employees.
No one has claimed responsibility for the grenade attack, which took place Saturday while opposition leader Sheikh Hasina was speaking outside her Awami League headquarters . But Hasina, who was unharmed, has blamed Prime Minister Khaleda Zia's administration. The government has denied involvement.
Fearing renewed violence during the two-day strike that began Tuesday, officials deployed more than 5,000 police and paramilitary troops in the capital.
--------
New York Judge Rules City Can Ban Protesters From Park
August 25, 2004
By CHRISTINE HAUSER and CARLA BARANAUCKAS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/25/nyregion/25CND-RULI.html?hp
A State Supreme Court judge in Manhattan ruled today that New York City can ban protesters from using the Great Lawn in Central Park on Sunday for a rally, the largest that has been planned to coincide with the Republican National Convention, which begins on Monday.
Justice Jacqueline W. Silbermann wrote in her ruling that the protesters' group, United for Peace and Justice, was "guilty of inexcusable and inequitable delay" in bringing its case against the city.
The group sued to try to force the city to grant a permit to rally in the park after months of negotiation failed to produce an agreement on where the demonstration could be held.
"The Parks Department appropriately applied content-neutral regulations while leaving plaintiff with a reasonable alternate site suitable with ample means of communication," the judge wrote. "Moreover, by seeking to invoke this court's equity jurisdiction mere days before the convention, plaintiff foreclosed an opportunity for the city to formulate an appropriate plan to ensure the safety of the public and to protect the city's parkland from what likely would be irreparable damage."
The national coordinator for United for Peace and Justice, Leslie Cagan, told the court on Tuesday that if the antiwar coalition was not allowed on the grass of the Great Lawn, "then we simply can't have the rally."
Ms. Cagan said later that the group still planned to march up Seventh Avenue past the convention site at Madison Square Garden.
In her ruling, Justice Silbermann took note of a similar case in which a federal judge in Manhattan this week refused to force the city to allow a large rally on Saturday on the Great Lawn, after the Bloomberg administration and protest organizers failed to reach a compromise. In denying the request, by the National Council of Arab Americans and the Answer Coalition, the federal judge cited security issues and the potential for damage among the reasons.
Justice Silbermann said that while the federal ruling "was not controlling" her decision, she noted that many of the same issues before her court had been "raised and considered" by the federal judge in his ruling.
Despite the two unfavorable rulings, many protesters say they still intend to go to the park, permit or not, and officials are making plans to police them.
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said that the authorities wanted people to come to New York and speak their minds, but that some might "get a little bit over the top."
Speaking before Justice Silbermann's ruling, Mr. Bloomberg said, "We'll comply with the law, whatever it is, and we expect everybody to comply with the law."
Asked if he thought people might be frustrated with the extra security measures, Mr. Bloomberg said, "I think New Yorkers look forward to having extra security in this day and age."
In rejecting the protesters' arguments, Justice Silbermann wrote that "plaintiff cannot clearly demonstrate a constitutional violation" by the city in denying the permit.
"Defendants do not dispute that that plaintiff has a right under the State Constitution to engage in political speech," the judge said. "However, that privilege does not guarantee the right to communicate ones views at ail times and places or in any manner that may be desired."
And citing what she said were unacceptable delays by the coalition in bringing its case to court, the judge wrote that "plaintiff simply cannot be heard to bring a constitutional challenge to a march-and-rally plan it publicly and voluntarily agreed to on July 21, 2004 - more than one month ago."
"Indeed," she continued, "even after plaintiff reneged on that agreement on Aug. 1O, 2004, it waited an additional week to bring suit, unnecessarily prejudicing defendants."
Citing other court decisions, Justice Silbermann also said that "nothing in the Constitution commands that dissemination of all forms of speech at all times on all kinds of property are absolutely protected under the First Amendment, without regard for the nature of the activity, the property or the disruption that might be engendered by unregulated expressive activity in certain circumstances."
"Accordingly, speech may be regulated by reasonable time, place and manner restrictions," the judge wrote.
She added that in her judgment the Parks Department had met the law's requirements for setting "content neutral" regulations for parkland to be used for free-speech gatherings.
"There is no credible evidence," she concluded, "that the denial of plaintiff's permit application for a rally in Central Park was based on content or viewpoint."
--------
Group Will Rally in Park or Not at All, Leader Says
August 25, 2004
By DIANE CARDWELL
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/25/nyregion/25protests.html
The lead organizer of the largest rally planned for the Republican National Convention said yesterday that the rally would not be held if a judge upheld a ban on protesters using the Great Lawn in Central Park on Sunday.
Leslie Cagan, national coordinator for United for Peace and Justice, which sued to try to force the city to grant a permit to rally in the park, told a State Supreme Court judge in Manhattan that if the antiwar coalition was not allowed on the grass of the Great Lawn, "then we simply can't have the rally."
Ms. Cagan said later that the group still planned to march up Seventh Avenue past the convention site at Madison Square Garden. But her testimony, at a hearing before Justice Jacqueline W. Silbermann, made it seem unlikely that the group would be able to rally afterward, as has been planned for more than a year. The rally would be held one day before the start of the convention.
Although Justice Silbermann is not set to issue her ruling until today, lawyers for the antiwar coalition expressed little confidence that they would win the case. A day before, a federal judge upheld a similar ban against a group seeking to use the Great Lawn for a rally on Saturday.
"I think it's going to be difficult to prevail," said Jeffrey Fogel, legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights and the lead lawyer in the suit over the planned Sunday protest. Not only was he not optimistic that the judge would rule in the group's favor, but even if she did, he said, the city would have the right to an automatic stay of the ruling, leaving matters unsettled at least until Friday.
"It just doesn't get better," he said. As a result, with just four days left, it is unclear where the protesters, who organizers say could number 250,000, will try to go. At a news conference outside the court, Ms. Cagan said that the group was not ruling out any options, including leading its march up to the park. But given how adamant she and other organizers have been about not starting a clash with police, that seems unlikely.
"We don't think it will fall into chaos," she said, adding that their members "are coming to this demonstration committed to peace."
But many protesters say that they intend to go the park, permit or not, and officials are making plans to police them. At the same time, police officials have not yet made final arrangements with the protest organizers or issued a permit for a march. "This is a package deal - you come in with everything on the table," said Paul J. Browne, a department spokesman.
That deal, which the protest group abandoned, was for a march route that ended with a rally on the West Side Highway. "Regardless of what the court ruling is, if they want to proceed with a march and/or rally they have to receive a permit from the Police Department," Mr. Browne said. "But we really don't know what the parameters are going to be until there's a court ruling."
And in court, city officials argued, it is simply too late to work out the logistics of putting what could be hundreds of thousands of protesters in or around the park, especially after the group backed out of the deal for the highway, where organizers now insist they will not go.
As the voices of United for Peace supporters chanting "Whose park? Our park" wafted up from the street to the courtroom, Elizabeth Smith, chief of marketing and corporate sponsorship for the Parks Department, called it a "virtual impossibility" to plan for that many people in the park within the next four days. By contrast, she testified, it took 10 to 12 days to prepare for a Dave Matthews Band concert that drew 85,000.
However the judge rules, lawyers for the group say they hope to keep the issues of free speech and the stewardship of public parks alive. In court, they argued that in denying permits for protests on the Great Lawn and North Meadow, the Parks Department, along with the Central Park Conservancy, its private partner, were unfairly applying rules that had never been made public.
"Now that the people know that the city has been using their secret policy to deprive the use of the park of its historical purposes," Mr. Fogel told reporters, "perhaps the people will rise up against the Parks Department, against the conservancy, and say to them precisely what we say: It's our park."
---------
NY Court Says Anti - Bush Protesters Can't Use Park
August 25, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/politics/politics-convention-protest.html
NEW YORK (Reuters) - A judge on Wednesday denied anti-Bush protesters permission to rally in Central Park on the eve of the Republican National Convention, leaving open the question of where possibly hundreds of thousands of demonstrators will go after a march through midtown Manhattan.
The decision by New York Supreme Court Justice Jacqueline Silbermann is the latest in a running legal battle between the protest group and the city. She sided with city officials, who say they fear the grass on the park's Great Lawn would be damaged and security could not be ensured for the huge crowd.
The lawn was restored seven years ago at a cost of $18 million.
``We fully recognize the vital importance of First Amendment rights,'' said Jonathan Pines, lead attorney for the city, in a statement following the ruling. ``However, when dealing with an event of this magnitude, the city must balance all relevant factors, including the availability of other demonstration areas and the potential damage to Central Park.''
Leslie Cagan, national coordinator for organizers United for Peace and Justice, said they would abide by the ruling and not rally in the park but would stage a rally nonetheless after the march, which is estimated to draw 250,000 demonstrators.
``We will not end at Madison Square Garden,'' said Cagan. ``We are planning to have a rally some place else. We are talking about a location some distance away from the Garden.''
The protest group had argued that their constitutional rights of free speech were being violated. The group is a coalition of organizations opposed to the U.S. war in Iraq and Bush administration policies.
They noted that the city has given permission to huge events in Central Park such as the Metropolitan Opera and a concert by the Dave Matthews Band sponsored by AOL last year.
``We believe the court is wrong and we believe this is actually a violation of our constitutional rights to assemble,'' Cagan said after the decision was announced.
Leveling criticism at Republican Mayor Michael Bloomberg, she added: ``A Republican mayor hosting a Republican convention has done everything designed to undermine the demonstration against policies of a Republican administration.''
The group has a permit to march under the banner ``The World Says No To The Bush Agenda'' on Sunday past Madison Square Garden.
Republicans are holding their convention in the famed arena Aug. 30 to Sept. 2 under strict security amid a series of government warnings of a possible terrorist attack to nominate President Bush for a second term in the race against Democratic nominee Sen. John Kerry.
In a separate case on Monday, a federal judge declined to order the city to issue a permit for a joint civil rights rally in Central Park on Saturday by another anti-war group and an Arab-American organization.
---------
GOP Delegates Meet With Anti - Bush Signs
August 25, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-GOP-Convention-Protest-Signs.html
NEW YORK (AP) -- In case their discontent isn't already clear, protesters are spelling it out. ``Stop Bush Now'' signs and other anti-GOP messages are appearing throughout the city well before delegates arrive for the Republican National Convention, which begins Monday.
Bright blue tarps, painted with glaring yellow letters, are going up on dozens of rooftops in Brooklyn, under the flight paths into busy New York airports. Thousands of delegates and convention guests peering down at the city might see messages like ``No more years'' and ``Re-defeat Bush.''
``We just hope that they'll look down and ask themselves, 'Why, why do they feel so strongly? Why is it that New York feels this way?''' said Genevieve Christy, who has painted more than 80 banners since thinking of the idea a few weeks ago.
The movement is so popular in her neighborhood that Christy, a 57-year-old consultant, is putting orders on a waiting list. She even brought supplies with her on vacation so she could keep working.
The banners and signs, Christy said, are a form of safe, silent protest that many New Yorkers prefer over the dozens of rallies planned throughout the week of the convention.
Five blocks from convention headquarters at Madison Square Garden, where President Bush is to be nominated Sept. 2, a 25-by-75-foot banner screams ``Save America. Defeat Bush.''
The sign hangs from the offices of the Unite Here union, which represents 440,000 workers from various industries, including hospitality, gaming and textiles.
It's not just the views from above that are being used. For months, protest groups have been slapping stickers and posters on subway platforms, train cars, traffic signs, park benches, light poles and anywhere else they can find space.
GOP convention spokesman Leonardo Alcivar did not return calls for comment.
One group, called the No RNC Poster Project, has printed tens of thousands of posters to distribute throughout the city. Other groups have created Web sites advocating their poster movements.
``Let no Republican look anywhere in this city without seeing our message,'' says one site, promoting an image of a black ``W'' inside a red circle with a slash through it. ``Let's make the entire city our canvas and let the RNC know that they've grossly miscalculated their choice of venue.''
Thomas Gallagher, a 35-year-old graphic artist, printed 3,000 fire-engine-red posters with white letters that proclaim, ``World Says No to Bush.'' Hundreds have gone up in parts of Brooklyn and Queens and throughout Manhattan.
``The Republicans have made a huge mistake in coming here, so the idea of the signs was to get these up all over the place so you create a buzz ... that New York is not with them and does not support this candidate at all,'' Gallagher said.
Norman Isaacs, who owns a record store on Cooper Square in the East Village, was eager to send that message to Republicans who might wander by.
``Hopefully,'' Isaacs said, ``they'll get the impression that not all of America is with them.''
On the Net:
Republican National Convention: http://www.2000nycgop.org
---------
Greenpeace protests Ford's plans to destroy Norwegian-built electric cars
Wednesday, August 25, 2004
By Doug Mellgren,
Associated Press
http://www.enn.com/news/2004-08-25/s_26697.asp
OSLO, Norway - Greenpeace activists scaled the walls of Ford carmaker's Norwegian headquarters Tuesday to protest plans to destroy hundreds of pollution-free cars.
In late-2002, Ford Motor Co. pulled out of the Norwegian company Think Nordic, which builds electric cars, and announced it would stop selling electric vehicles in the United States.
The 14 activists climbed onto the roof of the building and hung its walls with banners reading "Ford: Don't Crush Think" to protest plans to destroy up to 400 used Think cars in the United States and Britain.
The action follows a similar protest Monday in San Francisco, California, Greenpeace said.
Ford had leased the Norwegian-built cars to customers for up to three years, as a test fleet in the United States, said Niel Golightly, Ford's vice president for communications in Europe. He said by telephone that it was never the intention for them to be used longer, because Ford only had permission from U.S. federal authorities to test them in the United States for three years.
"We don't understand them proceeding with plans to destroy them when there are waiting lists of people interested in buying them," said Greenpeace protest leader Truls Gulowsen. He said the activists were demanding a meeting with senior Ford executives.
Greenpeace suspects Ford of wanting to eliminate competition to its traditional vehicles powered by fossil fuels, Gulowsen said.
However, Golightly said the carmaker, based in Dearborn, Michigan, is actively seeking to find other technologies for cleaner-running cars and trucks, including hydrogen fuel cells and the gas-electric hybrid vehicles. He said Ford and most of the industry has concluded that battery-powered vehicles are not the answer.
Golightly said a number of small companies had offered to buy the vehicles but that Ford concluded the cost of shipping them to Europe, converting the vehicles to national standards, and refurbishing them would be too high.
One of the companies, Oslo-based El-Bil Norge, had made such an offer, which company spokesman Hans Kvistle said Ford did not even appear to have considered. The company builds battery vehicles and sells used ones.
The Think Nordic company was taken over by Kamkorp Microelectronics in 2002. About 1,000 of the vehicles have been built.
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Protest Warriors fuel rage on left
August 25, 2004
By Steve Miller
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20040824-115347-4386r.htm
NEW YORK - First there is the name-calling. The conservative, sign-waving Protest Warriors are "fascists," "reactionaries," "saboteurs" and "Nazis," according to their left-wing foes who have encountered them at demonstrations.
Then there are the self-proclaimed "anarchists," whose computer hacking resulted this week in the dissemination of the names, addresses and phone numbers of two Protest Warrior leaders as well as the e-mail addresses of many of the group's 8,000 members.
And, of course, there are the infiltrators, who obtained inside information and posted online the address of the Protest Warriors' temporary headquarters four blocks from Madison Square Garden, where the Republican National Convention begins Monday.
"The leftists have this idea that now, with us around, there is another underdog," said Kfir Alfia, the 30-year-old co-founder of the Protest Warriors, which got its start last year as a response to liberal protest groups. "So they try to portray us as threatening them, they put out all sorts of crazy things about us. But they are deluding themselves and their members."
The Protest Warriors will have its headquarters for convention week in a spacious loft donated by a fellow member. The conservative group has lawyers on retainer in case its members are arrested during demonstrations - a contrast to left-wing groups' reliance on the gratis assistance of a legal collective.
"We must project an image that we are heavily funded," said Mr. Alfia. "But it is totally grass roots."
This week, members of Protest Warriors' New York chapter picked up 3-by-4-foot protest signs from a copy shop - huge, laminated posters that have become the group's signature, complete with the wry wisecracks that give them away as counterdemonstrators among the horde of rabble-rousers descending on the city for the Republican convention.
Only the best wisecracking slogans make the cut. One member turned in 52, to have four accepted.
Among the latest batch of signs is one with an Orwellian allusion: "Four legs good, two legs bad, brought to you by the Earth Liberation Front." Another includes a photo of a black man at a Jim Crow-era drinking fountain and mocks liberal opposition to school choice: "Black children belong in black schools, say no to vouchers."
Each of the signs, 300 in all, features the group's Internet address (www.protestwarrior.com) at the bottom, lest onlookers get confused as to the source of the message.
"We have to make these signs instantly recognizable because there are so many more of them than us," said Tom Paladino, 27, an advertising professional who heads the New York chapter of the Protest Warriors.
"We do have a sense of humor about what we do, and we're not going to change the world," Mr. Paladino said. "But if we can change some minds and get someone to see that there are two sides to these issues, great."
The Warriors will join the marches and walk side by side with their ideological opposites, and will record videos of the responses - which in the past have ranged from rage to hilarity.
"I've been looking for a group like this my whole life," said Michael Austin, a cigar-chomping 41-year-old actor who joined the group after seeing some of the members in action at a March 20 peace rally in New York. "I've marched in pro-choice rallies and gay pride parades, but this is truly the anti-establishment. We get called names. They really dislike us [and] have no room for dissent."
The protest underground is buzzing with suggestions of how leftists can deal with the Protest Warriors.
"Yeah, they are really afraid of us," said Bryan McCarthy, 30, an Irish immigrant who joined Protest Warriors earlier this year. "But, I mean, these groups like United for Peace and Justice have become the Starbucks of the protesting world, these huge conglomerates. The people fold up their laptops, grab their lattes and get out on the street."
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Too late for park protest, N.Y. says
August 25, 2004
By Steve Miller
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20040824-115346-5102r.htm
NEW YORK - It's impossible to prepare to accommodate a march with an estimated quarter of a million protesters in Central Park on Sunday, a city attorney said yesterday after a court hearing on the matter.
Attorney Jonathan Pines told reporters after the 21/2-hour hearing that the clock had expired on the Central Park rally.
"This is purely logistical," Mr. Pines said outside the courthouse downtown. "The city has historically honored the rights of protesters. This is not about civil rights; this is too much, too late."
Attorneys for United for Peace and Justice and the city met before State Supreme Court Justice Jacqueline Silbermann, who is considering whether the expected 250,000 people will be allowed to hold a post-march rally in the park.
The group and its adherents are planning to march against President Bush on the eve of the Republican National Convention, which begins Monday at Madison Square Garden.
United for Peace and Justice, whose permit was refused in April, last week sued the city in hopes of holding a rally at three locations in Central Park. The group wants to disperse the crowd of protesters to the Great Lawn, the East Meadow and the North Meadow sections of the park.
The judge said she hopes to hand down a ruling today.
The reality, though, is that "there will be hundreds of thousands of people marching past Madison Square Garden," said Christopher Dunn, associate legal director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, which is representing the group with the Center for Constitutional Rights.
"The question is, 'Where are they going to go?' "
The city argued that the demonstration would damage the lawn. A parks department employee testified that the department used "unwritten" criteria when considering permits to rally in the park.
When asked why all the conditions for a permit are not written as guidelines for applicants, Elizabeth Smith, who handles large permit requests for the department, simply said, "I don't know."
United for Peace and Justice has a permit to march from Seventh Avenue and 14th Street up to Madison Square Garden at 33rd Street.
During the hearing, protesters stood on Foley Square across from the courthouse and made noise that could be heard in the third-floor courtroom.
If the judge rules against the protesters, there will be no rally, said Leslie Cagan, national coordinator for United for Peace and Justice.
"We are marching past Madison Square Garden, as agreed to by the city," Miss Cagan said. "We do not believe that this will disintegrate into chaos and violence. But we hope the city will be as peaceful as the protesters."
The group filed its application in June 2003 for a permit to rally on the 55-acre Great Lawn from 1 to 6 p.m.
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Clock in New York's Times Square Counts War Cost
Reuters
By Mark McSherry
Aug 25, 2004
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20040825/us_nm/campaign_billboard_dc_3
NEW YORK (Reuters) - A giant clock ticking the cost of the war in Iraq lit up in Times Square on Wednesday, making its debut by flashing $134.5 billion.
The amount on the clock will grow at a rate of $177 million a day, $7.4 million an hour and $122,820 per minute, said the advocacy group Project Billboard which put it up.
Project Billboard is supported by the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank headed by John Podesta who served as chief of staff under former President Bill Clinton.
The clock was unveiled just days before Republicans gather in New York for their national convention.
As intended, it caught the eye of many passersby in the busy intersection.
"Just think of the things you could do with that money," said tour guide Farah Perez. "No way am I voting for Bush."
The message may not reach everyone, however, as the clock sits above a much larger billboard of a woman wearing nothing but a pair of sneakers.
"First I saw the other billboard, but then I saw the cost of the Iraq war and the number took my breath away," said passerby Greg Boris. "Then I went back to looking at the other billboard.
"That money should be spent here in the United States," he added.
The new clock sits just a couple of blocks away from a spot where an earlier clock used to flash the growing size of the U.S. national debt.
This clock is part of a legal settlement reached between Project Billboard and Clear Channel Communications after the advocacy group sued the media giant for breaking a contract over the posting of an antiwar billboard in Times Square during this month's convention.
Clear Channel settled the case by agreeing to give Project Billboard two Times Square locations instead of one. In return, the group dropped its plan for a bomb graphic that Clear Channel said it found distasteful.
The advocacy group's other billboard displays a large peace dove and the words "Democracy Is Best Taught By Example, Not By War."
Both billboards are scheduled to run for four months, said a spokesman for Project Billboard
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Slavery-protest march stirs opposition
ASSOCIATED PRESS
By Gretchen Parker
August 25, 2004
http://www.washtimes.com/metro/20040824-115337-3558r.htm
ANNAPOLIS - An international march making its way to the United States via this old slave trading harbor has touched off an increasingly public, emotional back-and-forth between a black history foundation and a white supremacy group.
A "slavery reconciliation walk" on Sept. 29 will start at City Dock, where slave Kunta Kinte was brought into the United States and where a memorial stands in honor of him. Kunta Kinte's story was made famous by descendant Alex Haley's Pulitzer Prize-winning book "Roots" and a subsequent television miniseries.
The unusual demonstration will include white marchers wearing chains and yokes while being escorted by black people, and everyone will wear T-shirts with a message of apology.
The Lifeline Expedition is a dramatic event meant to shock observers into talking and thinking about slavery, organizers say.
But more than a month before the demonstration starts a 10-city U.S. tour, it is attracting attention - from the neo-Nazi National Alliance, based in Hillsboro, W.Va.
Calling the demonstration "racist street theater," the alliance placed 1,500 fliers, wrapped in plastic bags weighted with small rocks, outside homes all over Annapolis last weekend.
The fliers, titled "Say No to White Guilt!" urged residents to speak out against Lifeline's march, which "has been shaming and humiliating White people" since it began in Europe four years ago.
Taxpayers should protest, the fliers urge, the city's decision not to charge the group the $2,000 that it will cost for police services and roadblocks.
On Monday, the president of the Kunta Kinte-Alex Haley Foundation held a press conference at City Dock to denounce the "hate mail."
"They're trying to take something about healing and transform it into something negative, and our community won't stand for it," said Leonard Blackshear, whose group is a sponsor of the event.
Backed by community leaders, Mr. Blackshear stood just feet away from the memorial to Kunta Kinte and Mr. Haley as he talked with reporters.
"National Alliance propaganda is not wanted here," he said.
Instead of lying low and ignoring the fliers, leaders are speaking out to spread the message that the community is united in support of the march, said Michael Keller, chairman of the city's Human Relations Commission.
"The only way to counter this group is to challenge them and let them know they're not welcome here," Mr. Keller said after the press conference. "If they're greeted with silence, they take that as a sign there is quiet support."
Shaun Walker, second-in-command of the National Alliance, counters that the march will do nothing to promote healing. Rather, it takes slavery and "rubs it in the faces of white people and says they're guilty of something," he said Monday from the group's headquarters in Hillsboro.
"There's no need to have white people in chains and white liberals volunteering for this nonsense," he said.
The alliance has printed 10,000 fliers and will continue to hand them out, mostly in the Annapolis area, until the day of the march, Mr. Walker said. His group hasn't decided whether it will attend the demonstration, he said.
The reconciliation walk also plans to tour the streets of Baltimore, Boston, New York, Richmond and Charleston, S.C., as well as several other cities.
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