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NUCLEAR
Nuclear power: time for a rethink?
Nuclear no-tell
German suspected of aiding Libya with nuclear arms
Pentagon Brass Suppresses Truth About Toxic Weapons
USFJ commander defends U.S. response to, probe of helo crash
India: PFBR site ready for construction
Iran Ready to Provide Nuke 'Guarantees'
Iran Says U.S. Lacks Options on Its Atomic Program
MILITARY
U.S., Afghan Soldiers Arrest 10 Suspects
Sudan Rules Out Talk of African Troops
Sudan Not Curbing Militias, Diplomats Say
U.N. Team Says Sudanese Still Face Attacks
Zimbabwe 'tortured coup suspects'
Najaf Militiamen Surrender Shrine
At the Ready to Answer Sadr's Call
New Wave of Violence in Iraq Kills Five
U.S. Warplanes, Tanks Bombard Fallujah
After the Siege, a City of Ruins, Its Dead Rotting
U.S., Shiites Fight in Baghdad; 5 Killed
It's peace but the dead are everywhere
Palestinians on Fast in Israeli Jails Struggle for Attention
Musharraf Ally Sworn in As Pakistan PM
Explosive Suggests Terrorists Downed Plane, Russia Says
Russia Reports Evidence of Terror Attack
Explosives found in second Russian jet wreck
FBI probes DOD office
Report: Suspect has ties to Wolfowitz, Feith
Pentagon rocked by Israeli spy case
Israel Denies Spying Allegations
Bush signs intelligence orders
FBI Probe Targets Pentagon
Bush Gives CIA Director More Power
Bush Order Extends C.I.A. Director's Reach
Pentagon Official Suspected of Giving U.S. Secrets to Israel
Israel at Center of Spying Probe
FBI probes DOD office
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Judge Delays Hearing on N.Va. Detainee
Terror Suspect Charged in Cuba
Yemenis sentenced over bombing
Mayor Cites Rise in Security Costs
Government Warns of New Targets
Waking Up to Security That Never Sleeps
New York Secures Tunnels, Bridges for RNC
Bosnian Refugee Accused of Lying For Immigration
Suicide bombs and rebel attacks as disillusioned Chechnya votes
Al Qaeda operations inexpensive: Report Most cost less than $50,000
Rumsfeld corrects himself on abuse
POLITICS
Controversy's no stranger to AIPAC, Washington's Jewish juggernaut
Bush acknowledges Iraq mistakes
China Frees Pioneering Journalist
Bush Says Kerry 'More Heroic' for Going to Vietnam
From Vietnam to Iraq: Pretext and precedent
Row breaks out on Kissinger's 'advice' to military junta
OTHER
New jawbone is grown for cancer patient
ACTIVISTS
NYC police arrest bike protesters
Police hurl teargas at anti-Powell marchers
Protesters at Heart of Debate on Security vs. Civil Rights
100 Cyclists Are Arrested as Thousands Ride in Protest
250 Arrested in Bicycling Protest
Protest in Athens Against Powell Visit Turns Violent
Bangladeshi Police Beat Demonstrators
A snapshot of some of the groups protesting at GOP convention
-------- NUCLEAR
Nuclear power: time for a rethink?
It was once the ultimate green taboo. Now, as the drawbacks of fossil fuels become more apparent, is it time to learn to love atomic energy? Two experts present the arguments
28 August 2004
UK Independent
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/environment/story.jsp?story=555917
No, thanks - Zac Goldsmith Editor of 'The Ecologist'
There is finally a consensus on the gravity of the threat we face from climate change, and most people agree that something urgently needs to be done to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. But given the depth of our dependence, that's no small task. And so in panic, a number of high-profile commentators are calling for the widespread adoption of nuclear power. Greens, they say, have to choose between climate change and their old enemy - nuclear power.
But it's a manufactured choice, peddled by an industry in the final spasm of a struggle to survive. Fundamentally, nuclear power is a problem, not a solution. And it's a problem on virtually every level.
Take the issue of security. About a week before the 11 September 2001 atrocity, the director of the French nuclear installation giant, Cogema, was asked about the risks of an airborne attack on a French power plant. He answered that there was no risk, because "it is forbidden to fly over it at low altitude." As far as I know, it's also illegal to fly planes into New York buildings.
Shortly after the attacks, the International Atomic Energy Agency warned that an attack on a nuclear plant is "far more likely" following 11 September. "If the terrorist is willing to die," the director general, Mohamed ElBaradei, said, "that changes the security equation drastically." British Energy echoed those calls, and pleaded with the Government to take protective measures. British Nuclear Fuels meanwhile described the prospect of a fuel-laden commercial jet colliding with a nuclear plant as "unthinkable".
It's worth thinking about it, for an attack on Sellafield in Cumbria would be 100 times more disastrous than the Chernobyl accident and would likely cause more than 2 million people to die of cancer.
But with or without terrorists, the lives of countless British people dangle in the hands of the technocrats each and every day. And as we know, technocrats make mistakes. Last year, for instance, Sellafield came close to disaster when explosive gases were allowed to build up in tanks that store highly-radioactive nuclear waste. Amazingly, the BNFL staff on duty ignored warning alarms for nearly three hours. Even without potential disasters, routine radioactive emissions ensure cancer clusters around virtually every installation. Sellafield, for instance, boasts a cancer cluster 10 times the national average.
Two years ago, Vice-President Dick Cheney lamented that the US government hadn't approved a single application for a new nuclear power plant for 20 years. What he didn't say was that there had been no application. Nuclear power is a bad investment. Without massive government involvement and incalculable public subsidies, it simply wouldn't exist. According to The Economist, OECD governments poured $159bn (£89bn) into nuclear research between 1974 and 1998. BNFL, meanwhile, has admitted it faces a bill of £34bn to clean up waste, and it expects that waste to increase by a minimum of 500 per cent over the next decade.
On every level, nuclear is an unattractive option, unless you happen to belong to al-Qa'ida and want to close down an economy overnight. So for the industry to be granted a life-extension requires belief that it is the only solution to an even bigger problem - climate change.
But even there, nuclear power is a false hope. The instinctively pro-nuclear Mr Blair was told last year by his own energy advisors that nuclear is a "red herring". "You can achieve a low-carbon economy without nuclear," they told him.
And, they might have added, such a goal can be realised without smothering Britain in wind turbines. For one thing, such a scenario assumes demand will always be as high, if not higher than it is now. But demand need not grow. According to a recent US study, investing $5.2bn in energy conservation in the federal government's 500,000 buildings would lead to savings of more than $1bn each year, indefinitely - an enormous return by any standard. It's quite clear that with investments in energy conservation, energy consumption would shrink dramatically without the need for sacrifice of any sort.
Such a scenario also assumes that wind is the only renewable alternative. Currently, it does seem to be the most effective. The Cabinet Office's Performance and Innovation Unit has said that offshore wind alone has the potential to provide 10 times more electricity than is currently used. But equally, whole villages in Britain's West Country are on the verge of being powered by environmentally benign small hydro projects. Biomass is emerging as the answer for others. Solar power is becoming cheaper by the year, and more efficient.
All these alternatives exist, and with modest investment will continue to improve. What's more, they carry none of the security and health risks associated with nuclear power. Nor will the taxpayer be forced to cough up limitless resources to keep them going.
One way or another, the government needs to expand its pitiful renewable energy programme and implement a massive programme of energy conservation. And it needs to do so in a democratic manner. If it fails, we face the frightening prospect of a renewed nuclear programme, or almost as bad, dependence for nearly four fifths of our energy on gas imports from such countries as Algeria and Iran. In such a scenario, the opportunities for disruptive terrorism would prove too tempting by far, and Britain would find itself teetering permanently on the edge of blackout ... or total contamination.
Zac Goldsmith is editor of 'The Ecologist' magazine, www.theecologist.org
Yes, please - James Lovelock Creator of the 'Gaia' theory
Ispent my childhood in the English countryside over 70 years ago where we lived a simple life without telephones or electricity. Horses were still a normal source of power and we hardly imagined radio and television.
One thing I remember well was how superstitious we all were. Men and women who in other ways were intelligent, fearfully avoided places said to be haunted. They would suffer inconvenience rather than travel on Fridays that were the 13th day of the month.
Their irrational fears fed on ignorance and were quite common. I cannot help thinking that they persist, but now these fears are about the products of science. This is particularly true of nuclear power plants that seem to stir the dread that in the past was felt about a moonlit graveyard thought to be infested with werewolves and vampires.
The fear of nuclear energy is understandable through its association in the mind with the horrors of nuclear warfare, but it is unjustified; nuclear power plants are not bombs. They are, in fact, built solidly enough to withstand even a direct hit by a plane in a terrorist attack, according to industry experts.
What at first was a proper concern for safety has become a near-pathological anxiety. Much of the blame for this goes to the news media, the television and film industries, and fiction writers. All these have used the fear of things nuclear as a reliable prop to sell their wares. They, and the political disinformers who sought to discredit the nuclear industry as potential enemies, have been so successful at frightening the public that it is now impossible in many nations to propose a new nuclear power plant.
No source of power is entirely safe, even windmills are not free of fatal accidents, but compared to nuclear power, the dangers of continuing to burn fossil fuels (oil, gas, coal) as our main energy source are far greater and they threaten not just individuals but civilisation itself. Much of the First World behaves like an addicted smoker: we are so used to burning fossil fuels for our needs that we ignore their long-term risks.
Polluting the air with carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases has no immediate consequences, but continued pollution leads to climate changes whose effects are only apparent when it is almost too late for a cure. Carbon dioxide poisons the environment just as salt can poison us. No harm comes from a modest intake, but a daily diet with too much salt can cause a lethal quantity to accumulate in the body.
Although nothing we do will destroy life on Earth, we could change the environment to a point where civilisation is threatened. Sometime in this or the next century we may see this happen because of climate change and a rise in the level of the sea. If we go on burning fossil fuel at the present rate it is probable that all of the cities of the world now at sea level will be flooded.
Try to imagine the social consequences of hundreds of millions of homeless refugees seeking dry land on which to live. In the turmoil, they may look back and wonder how humans could have been so foolish as to bring so much misery upon themselves by the thoughtless burning of carbon fuels. They may then reflect regretfully that they could have avoided their miseries by the safe use of nuclear energy.
Nuclear power, although potentially harmful to people, is a negligible danger to the planet. Natural ecosystems can stand levels of continuous radiation that would be intolerable in a city. The land around Chernobyl was evacuated because its high radiation intensity made it unsafe for people, but this radioactive land is now rich in wildlife, much more so than neighbouring areas.
Even scientists seem to forget our planet's radioactive history. When a star ends as a supernova, the nuclear explosive material, which includes uranium and plutonium, together with large amounts of iron and other burnt-out elements, scatters in space, as does the dust cloud of a hydrogen bomb test.
Perhaps the strangest thing about the Earth is that it formed from lumps of fall-out from a star-sized nuclear bomb. This is why, even today, the Earth's crust has enough uranium left to reconstitute the original event on a minute scale.
There is no other credible explanation for the great quantity of unstable elements still present. The most primitive and old-fashioned Geiger counter will indicate that we stand on the fall-out of a vast ancient nuclear explosion. Within our bodies, half a million atoms, rendered unstable in that event, still erupt every minute, releasing a tiny fraction of the energy stored from that fierce fire of long ago.
Life began nearly four billion years ago under conditions of radioactivity far more intense than those that trouble the minds of certain present-day environmentalists. Moreover, the air had neither oxygen nor ozone so that the fierce unfiltered ultra-violet radiation of the sun irradiated the surface of the Earth. We need to keep in mind the thought that these fierce energies flooded the very womb of life.
At least in the short term, alternative sources of energy remain wildly uneconomical. A recent report by the Royal Academy of Engineering showed that the nuclear option was the second cheapest means of generating electricity, at 2.3p per kilowatt hour, after gas at 2.2p (gas prices have since shot up), while wind power costs more than 5p per kWH.
I hope that it is not too late for the world to emulate France and make nuclear power our principal source of energy. At present we have no other viable alternative.
'Environmentalists For Nuclear Energy' by Bruno Comby, with a preface by James Lovelock (TNR Editions) is available from www.ecolo.org
-------- accidents and safety
Nuclear no-tell
Saturday, August 28, 2004
Toledo Blade
http://www.toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20040828/OPINION02/408280304
THE Nuclear Regulatory Commission is the wrong government agency to insist on more secrecy in its proceedings. After all of the NRC lapses revealed in the aftermath of the scary Davis-Besse debacle, the federal agency entrusted with ensuring the safe operation and maintenance of the nation's nuclear power reactors needs more openness and scrutiny, not less.
But apparently the NRC's brush with a nuclear meltdown at the Oak Harbor facility taught it nothing about the pressing need for public accountability from government regulators of nuclear power plants. The agency just announced a new policy to withhold not only information about how they plan to beef up security at the plants, but how the plants subsequently comply with the NRC directives.
As neighbors of Davis-Besse, northwest Ohio residents don't necessarily clamor for a detailed blueprint of anti-terrorist measures and security training at the plant. But a community that came close to a potential nuclear disaster two years ago certainly wants to know about general security steps being employed on their behalf at Davis-Besse and how well those security efforts are being enforced.
In other words, the public absolutely has a vested interest in knowing what the NRC is up to and what its follow-up inspections show in terms of industry-wide compliance with raised security standards. Until its decision to keep security lapses and enforcement actions taken against plant operators a secret, the NRC used to give regular public updates about the problems its inspectors found at the country's 103 nuclear power reactors.
The information was invaluable not only in keeping citizens informed, but in keeping the federal regulators and the industry they oversee accountable for their actions - or lack of them. Davis-Besse is a glaring example of what can go wrong when official scrutiny is lax or nonexistent and the public is none the wiser. The grave failures of inspection and enforcement documented at that facility all but depleted public confidence in the NRC's ability to fulfil its responsibilities.
And now, using the broad excuse that "sensitive information might be misused by those who wish us harm," NRC Chairman Nils Diaz says the government will no longer reveal security gaps found at nuclear power plants, or disclose offending plant locations, or explain what corrective actions are initiated to improve conditions.
Longtime critics of the nuclear industry complain the NRC never came close to striking a balance between the public's right to know and protecting classified security strategies from potential terrorists. Democratic Congressman Ed Markey of Massachusetts said the NRC's blanket secrecy policy will "further deepen public skepticism of the commission's performance and calls into question whether the commission is doing what it must do to keep nuclear reactors safe from terrorist attacks."
Skeptics already believe a quid pro quo exists between federal regulators and the formidable energy sector, with its aggressive lobbyists and its substantial generosity to the campaigns of political allies.
But it's not the industry that needs protection from plotting terrorists, it's the public, and citizens deserve to know what the government wants to keep secret about the vulnerability of nuclear power plants to disaster.
-------- business
German suspected of aiding Libya with nuclear arms
BERLIN (AFP)
Aug 28, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040828111055.8yt9zmx0.html
A German man suspected of trying to help Libya develop nuclear weapons probably had links with a key middle man in the international nuclear black market, the weekly Der Spiegel reported in its latest edition to be released Monday.
The man, identified as 65-year-old Gerhard W., was released on bail Thursday after appearing in court, according to a statement from the prosecutor's office in Karlsruhe, southwest Germany.
The suspect and a suspected accomplice living in Switzerland are believed to have played a role in an international ring that tried to procure materials for making atomic weapons in 2001.
Der Spiegel said Gerhard W. had turned over a list of contacts to Sri Lankan businessman Buhary Syed Abu Tahir, who was described by US authorities earlier this year as the "chief financial officer and money launderer" for Pakistan's disgraced scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan.
Khan, a one-time national hero credited with making Pakistan a nuclear power, has admitted selling nuclear secrets abroad but was pardoned by Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf.
Tahir was arrested in Malaysia in May on suspicion of involvement in the illicit nuclear network run by Khan.
The weekly said the German suspect had put Tahir in touch with a South African company that manufactures parts for centrifuges used for enriching uranium.
It added that German authorities planned to question Tahir to determine the exact role of the German suspect.
Der Spiegel said Libya had sought Tahir's help to develop its nuclear program.
German prosecutors say Gerhard W. worked as a mediator in obtaining an order for a South African company to make and supply aluminium tubing to be used in a uranium enrichment plant.
They added that he was paid a million euros (1.2 million dollars) for his services.
The court suspects that the tubing was made but never delivered.
Swiss authorities are reported to have searched the home of his alleged accomplice, Gotthard L., 61, for whom an arrest warrant has been issued.
Libya announced late last year that it was abandoning attempts to develop nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, a surprise that came after months of secret negotiations between Tripoli, London and Washington.
-------- depleted uranium
Pentagon Brass Suppresses Truth About Toxic Weapons
Poisonous Uranium Munitions Threaten World
By Christopher Bollyn
American Free Press,
August 28, 2004
http://www.americanfreepress.net/html/pentagon_brass.html
The use of weapons containing uranium violates existing laws and customs of war and "constitutes a war crime or crime against humanity," according to a leading U.S. expert on humanitarian law.
Karen Parker, a San Francisco-based expert in armed conflict law, told American Free Press that the use of radioactive uranium weapons violates the Hague and Geneva Conventions as well as the Conventional Weapons Convention of 1980.
Although no treaty specifically bans DU weapons, they are illegal "de facto and de jure," Parker said. However, a class action lawsuit by victims of DU weapons will probably be required for a court to ban their use, she said.
'ILLEGAL FOR ALL COUNTRIES'
"A weapon made illegal only because there is a specific treaty banning it is only illegal for countries that ratify such a treaty," Parker wrote in a paper, "The Illegality of DU Weaponry," presented at the International Uranium Weapons Conference in Hamburg, Germany last October. However, "a weapon that is illegal by operation of existing law is illegal for all countries."
Parker, a delegate to the UN Commission on Human Rights since 1982, provides legal advice to the UN on DU weapons and other matters of humanitarian law.
"DU weaponry cannot possibly be legal in light of existing law," Parker said.
"In evaluating whether a particular weapon is legal or illegal when there is not a specific treaty, the whole of humanitarian law must be consulted," Parker wrote.
According to humanitarian law, the illegality of DU weapons is based on four criteria:
The first is the "territorial" test. Weapons may only be used in the legal field of battle. Weapons may not have an adverse effect off the legal field of battle.
The second is the "temporal" test, meaning that weapons may only be used for the duration of an armed conflict. A weapon that continues to act after the war violates this criterion.
The territorial and temporal criteria are meant to prevent weapons from being "indiscriminate" in their effect.
The third rule is that a weapon cannot be unduly inhumane. The Hague Convention of 1907 prohibits "poison or poisoned weapons." Because DU weapons are radioactive and chemically toxic, as the military knows, they fit the definition of poisonous weapons banned under the Hague Convention.
WHAT THE MILITARY KNOWS
The Defense Department is well aware of the toxic effects of DU. In an official presentation by U.S. Army Reserve Col. J. Edgar Wakayama at Fort Belvoir, Va. on Aug. 20, 2002, the dangers of exposure to DU were clearly spelled out:
"Inhalation exposure has a major effect on the lungs and thoracic lymph nodes," Wakayama read from a slide. "The alpha particle taken inside the body in large doses is hazardous, producing cell damage and cancer. Lung cancer is well documented," he noted.
"Urine samples containing uranium are mutagenic [capable of producing mutation]" and "the cultured human stem bone cell line with DU also transformed the cells to become carcinogenic," Wakayama read.
DU deposited in the bone causes DNA damage because of the effects of the alpha particles, Wakayama stressed. One gram of DU emits 12,000 high-energy alpha particles per second.
The fourth rule for weapons, the "environmental" test, says that weapons cannot have an unduly negative effect on the natural environment.
Wakayama advised, "Heavily contaminated soil should be removed if the area is to be populated with civilians."
Wakayama described the dangers to children playing in contaminated soil and the leaching of DU into local water and food supplies.
DU FAILS ALL LEGAL CRITERIA
DU weaponry fails all four tests, Parker says. Because it cannot be contained to the battlefield, it fails the territorial test. Airborne DU particles are carried far from the battlefield affecting distant civilian populations and neighboring countries.
Because the uranium dispersed on the ground and in the air cannot be "turned off" when the war is over, DU fails the temporal test.
"The airborne particles have a half-life of billions of years and have the potential to keep killing . . . long after the war is over," Parker wrote.
"The status of DU as nuclear, radiological, poison or conventional does not change its illegality. When the weapons test is applied to DU weaponry, it fails," she concluded.
DU weapons fail the humaneness test because of how they kill, Parker says, "by cancer, kidney disease etc, long after the hostilities are over.
"DU is inhumane because it can cause birth defects such as cranial facial anomalies, missing limbs, grossly deformed and non-viable infants and the like, thus affecting children . . . born after the war is over," Parker said.
"The teratogenic [interfering with normal embryonic development] nature of DU weapons and the possible burdening of the gene pool of future generations raise the possibility that the use of DU weaponry is genocide," she wrote. "Willfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health" of civilians constitutes a grave breach of the fourth Geneva Convention, and this is "exactly what DU weapons do."
Finally, because DU weapons cannot be used without unduly damaging the natural environment, they fail the fourth rule for weapons, the environmental test.
"No available technology can significantly change the chemical and radiological toxicity of DU," the Army Environmental Policy Institute reported to Congress in 1994. "These are intrinsic properties of uranium."
"Regarding environmental damages, users of these weapons are obligated to carry out an effective cleanup," Parker wrote. "The cost of legal claims and environmental cleanup for the gulf wars alone could be staggering."
"Use of DU weaponry necessarily violates the 'grave breach' provision of the Geneva Conventions, and hence its use constitutes a war crime or crime against humanity," Parker concluded.
Questions regarding the legality of DU weapons were sent in writing to the Pentagon's appointed spokesman on DU matters, James Turner.
Turner told AFP that he was "not qualified" to answer such questions.
By press time the Pentagon had not responded to repeated requests for information.
----
USFJ commander defends U.S. response to, probe of helo crash
By Juliana Gittler,
Stars and Stripes Pacific edition,
Saturday, August 28, 2004
http://www.estripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=23216&archive=true
TOKYO - U.S. Forces Japan commander Lt. Gen. Thomas C. Waskow told media Thursday that the United States did everything it should in the investigation of a recent helicopter crash and reiterated the importance of strong security cooperation between the United States and Japan.
Much of Waskow's speech at the Japan National Press Club focused on the Aug. 13 crash on Okinawa of a U.S. Marine Corps CH-53D Sea Stallion helicopter that clipped a university building during an emergency landing.
Okinawan officials have criticized U.S. forces for excluding them from the investigation and closing off the crash site; media reports on the island also speculated several coverups by U.S. personnel.
Waskow said U.S. forces did what they were supposed to when they sealed the crash site, to safeguard the safety of civilians nearby and the overall investigation.
"Our response was conducted precisely within the confines of the agreements we have with the government of Japan and our own internal military guidance," he said. "Despite some press reporting to the contrary, I would like to assure you that the U.S. has cooperated totally with local authorities throughout the entire process."
After an accident, the military conducts an immediate safety inspection to determine a cause, he said, followed by a detailed investigation into all other possible factors.
On Okinawa, Marine Corps leaders determined the crash was caused by a faulty part, and they briefly grounded all helicopters. After the investigation determined the defect was restricted to the individual aircraft, other helicopters resumed flights.
Sea Stallions were grounded until the Department of Defense deployed some of them to Iraq; the rest remain grounded until the investigation is complete.
Waskow said investigators will give Japan a full report on the accident after the investigation closes. The detailed investigation should take about 30 days.
The general said he hoped to dispel some rumors surrounding the crash. He categorically denied reports that the helicopter was carrying depleted uranium or that any substance, including oil-tainted soil, was thrown into the sea.
Waskow, who heads a command of 58,000 servicemembers in Japan, also discussed the transformation of the U.S. military. He said as the United States transforms its force posture, some change is likely in Japan. But changes will require approval by both nations and will support the best interests of both.
Waskow said leaders of both nations have been discussing changes for a year and a half.
"Taken together in all its strength and vitality, the Japan- U.S. security relationship is the centerpiece of our security architecture in the Pacific-Asia region," he said. "The U.S. is in no way changing its commitment to the defense of Japan or any of our friends and allies around the world."
-------- india / pakistan
India: PFBR site ready for construction
A dream come true for DAE
NT Bureau, India News Today Kalpakkam,
Aug 28, 2004:
http://newstodaynet.com/28aug/rf8.htm
If the launch of the construction phase of the Prototype Fast Breeder Reactor (PFBR) here will be a realisation of a dream by the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE), it will be happening amidst widespread resentment among villagers around Kalapakkam that locals have been overlooked for employment in the building site of the Rs 3492 crore project that will generate 500 MWe nuclear power when it goes critical in 2010.
While Prabhat Kumar, Project Director of Bhartiya Nabhikiya Vidyut Nigam Limited (BHAVINI), the new company set up by the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) for the construction of the reactor, denied that locals have not been given jobs at the construction site, where excavation has been going on for some time, posters have appeared on public walls in Thirukazhukundram, Pudupattinam and other villages that 2000 persons from other States have been brought in for work.
Addressing media persons from Chennai, Kumar said that the allegations were not true and that locals have been employed in a big way in the project site. He said there will be job opportunities for around 7,000 persons on temporary basis during the construction of the project and that only 520 employees will be required through the construction, commissioning, operation and maintenance of the reactor.
Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh was expected to inaugurate the work on the PFBR with a pour of concrete, besides taking part in the commemorative function to mark the golden jubilee of DAE, which was born on 3 August, 1954, inside the Kalpakkam premises.
At the momentous occasion of the DAE crossing one more milestone in its chequered history through the PFBR, a vision document of the department, will be released. Apart from making some introspection on the functioning of DAE all these five decades, the department having 1500 young scientists and engineers on its rolls had prepared the vision document that has among others a strategy for power generation in future and on new power, said Baldev Raj, director of Indira Gandhi Centre for Atomic Research (IGCAR), which successfully developed the technology indigenously for the PFBR.
PFBR will mark the DAE's proper entry into the second stage of India's nuclear programme. In fact, the commissioning of the Fast Breeder Test Reactor (FBTR) in Kalpakkam marked the beginning of the second stage. In the three-stage programme, envisaged by Homi Bhabha, the first stage started with the thermal Pressurised Heavy Water Reactors that used natural uranium as fuel.
In the fast breeders, plutonium, generated in the thermal reactors, will be used as fuel. Since the fast breeders will produce more plutonium than they consume for generating power and help fuel more such reactors, it will subsequently lead to the utilisation of thorium, which is available more abundantly in the country, in the third stage.
-------- iran
Iran Ready to Provide Nuke 'Guarantees'
By ALI AKBAR DAREINI
Associated Press Writer
Aug 28, 2004
http://ap.washingtontimes.com/dynamic/stories/I/IRAN_NUCLEAR?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
TEHRAN, Iran (AP) -- Iran is ready to provide "guarantees" it won't seek nuclear weapons, President Mohammad Khatami said Saturday, urging the United Nations' nuclear watchdog agency to close its investigation into the country's program when it meets next month.
The United States, which says Iran is trying to develop weapons, is pushing the International Atomic Energy Agency to refer Tehran to the U.N. Security Council, which could impose sanctions. The IAEA has already sharply criticised Iran for not coming clean about its nuclear program, and European countries have increasingly expressed concern.
But Khatami urged the agency to resist U.S. pressure, saying any concerns over a program Iran insists aims only to produce energy can be cleared up.
"I hope we will go one step forward, away from political pressures, when the agency meets in September. Iran has taken steps toward building greater confidence and many of the problems that existed has been removed," Khatami told a press conference in Tehran.
"We are ready to do everything necessary to give guarantees that we won't seek nuclear weapons," Khatami said. "As Muslims, we can't use nuclear weapons. One who can't use nuclear weapons won't produce them."
He did not elaborate on the kinds of guarantees his country was willing to give. Iran has allowed international inspections of its nuclear facilities and military sites.
Tehran has made such an offer before, but this is the first time the government has said so publicly it would provide guarantees to ease international concerns about its controversial nuclear program.
Earlier this month, Iran confirmed it had resumed building nuclear centrifuges, which can be used to enrich uranium for use as fuel for electrical generation or for weapons. "It's our right to have the nuclear fuel cycle - (our) intention is to produce fuel for reactors generating electricity. We don't want anything beyond this. It's our legitimate right and no country can prevent us from achieving it," Khatami told reporters.
"If we really look at Iran's nuclear dossier fairly, Iran's dossier deserves to be closed," he said.
But European countries have increasingly expressed concern over Iran's nuclear ambitions.
French President Jacques Chirac had sharp words for the leadership of Iran on Friday. "Iran must understand that it must create the conditions for gaining the trust of the international community, especially in terms of living up to its commitment to suspend enrichment," he said at a gathering French diplomats.
Khatami also said the United States it needs Iranian help with Iraq and Afghanistan, both of which share borders with Iran.
"Today, the U.S. knows itself that it can't succeed in Iraq and Afghanistan without an Iranian presence," he said.
The United States and some voices within the Iraqi government accuse Iran, which follows the Shia branch of Islam like the majority of Iraqis, of meddling in Iraqi affairs.
Khatami praised the most senior Shiite cleric in Iraq, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, saying he and not the United States supports democracy in Iraq.
"Today, the Shiite leader Ayatollah Sistani defends democracy in Iraq and those (U.S.) who came to Iraq as defenders of democracy are suppressing the people," he said.
Al-Sistani brokered a peace deal on Friday to end three weeks of bloody fighting in the holy Shiite city Najaf between U.S. troops and the militia of a radical cleric, Muqtada al-Sadr.
----
Iran Says U.S. Lacks Options on Its Atomic Program
Reuters
Saturday, August 28, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A41140-2004Aug28.html
TEHRAN (Reuters) - Washington has hit a dead-end over Iran's nuclear dossier, lacking enough proof to demand U.N. sanctions and too bogged down in Iraq for a military strike, President Mohammad Khatami said Saturday.
Washington is pushing the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to report Iran to the sanction-imposing U.N. Security Council, accusing Tehran of a clandestine weapons program.
"I assure you that the Americans have no evidence to prove their claims," Khatami told reporters at a news conference.
Iran says its nuclear program is peaceful and is intended to meet booming domestic demand for electricity.
Khatami added any U.S. attack on Iran would be "suicidal."
"The Americans have to deal first with their problems in Iraq before taking military action against Iran," the reformist president said.
"I believe the Americans are still rational enough not to repeat their mistakes," he added, referring to the attack on Iraq.
Iranian officials have said that Tehran's case will not be sent to the U.N. Security Council at next month's IAEA board of governors meeting in Vienna.
The IAEA's new Iran report is due to be circulated to the board of governors in the coming days.
Khatami called for the board of governors to take Iran's dossier off the agenda but suggested he was being optimistic.
"I doubt that Iran's case is going to be closed at the next IAEA meeting," he told the reporters.
Diplomats in Vienna reckoned the report would be inconclusive and would neither confirm nor reject the view that Iran has a secret military nuclear program.
The IAEA is probing the origin of traces of enriched uranium found at some Iranian sites and Iran's interest in advanced P2 centrifuges, which can be used to make bomb-grade uranium twice as fast as its less advanced P1 centrifuges.
Iran says the traces of enriched uranium were caused by contamination from devices bought on the black market. It also says its work on P2 centrifuges, has not advanced beyond the preliminary stages.
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
U.S., Afghan Soldiers Arrest 10 Suspects
By STEPHEN GRAHAM
The Associated Press
Saturday, August 28, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A41473-2004Aug28?language=printer
KABUL, Afghanistan - U.S. and Afghan troops detained 22 suspected Taliban fighters during a major search operation after a gunbattle in a southern Afghan mountain range, officials said Saturday.
Also, a renegade warlord was taken into custody weeks after a clash with a powerful rival in the west of the country.
Afghan authorities are struggling to improve security for October elections.
No Afghan or American soldiers were reported injured in fighting which broke out Friday and was continuing Saturday in southern Zabul province.
"This operation was launched to improve security for the people of Zabul province," Gov. Khial Mohammed told The Associated Press.
U.S. military spokesman Maj. Scott Nelson confirmed the operations in Zabul and neighboring Ghazni province, and said 22 Taliban suspects had been detained.
"We did have a major operation there," he said. It was not clear how many American and Afghan soldiers were taking part.
Further east, suspected Taliban fired on a convoy of trucks bringing supplies to a U.S. military base in Khost province, killing a driver and injuring his assistant, said Nashin Uddin, an aide to the local Afghan National Army commander.
The attack occurred on Friday as the convoy made its way to Camp Salerno, a major U.S. base close to the Pakistani border.
Some 18,000 American-led troops are in Afghanistan to hunt down al-Qaida and Taliban fighters, and to help ensure security for landmark presidential elections scheduled for Oct. 9.
The Taliban have vowed to disrupt the elections, and have launched frequent attacks on coalition soldiers, election workers and Afghan voters.
The vote is also threatened by factional violence and the risk of intimidation by regional militia leaders.
The arrested warlord, Amanullah, a Pashtun who goes by only one name, was brought to Kabul on Friday from the western province of Herat, said Jawed Ludin, a spokesman for President Hamid Karzai. Ludin said Amanullah agreed to the transfer, but officials speaking on condition of anonymity said he had little choice and was essentially being kept under arrest.
"He does not have the freedom to go back. He is in custody," said a senior Afghan official.
Dozens were killed in fighting which broke out earlier this month between Amanullah's fighters and those of Herat Gov. Ismail Khan, an ethnic Tajik strongman whose autocratic rule has alienated minorities and even some of his own commanders.
Ludin would not comment on speculation that Khan might be removed from power, but said the action against Amanullah was one in a series of steps that will unfold in the coming days.
"What happened to Amanullah was part of a wider plan to take all necessary measures to secure long-term stability in the region," Ludin said.
A Western diplomat said Khan was being pressed by the government to accept a senior post in Kabul - opening the way for the west of the country to be disarmed and cleansed of unpopular faction leaders.
"There is an opportunity to change the equation in that region," said the diplomat, who asked not to be identified. "For him (Khan), the time for something else has come."
The fighting alarmed Kabul and the United Nations and underscored the need to improve security ahead of the presidential vote. U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan has called for an urgent increase in international forces in Afghanistan before polling day.
The men reached a truce only after the U.S. military sent warplanes to the region to make clear that further fighting was not acceptable.
Karzai also sent hundreds of troops from the Afghan National Army to an air base in Herat to help calm the fighting.
Associated Press writers Noor Khan in Kandahar and Paul Haven in Kabul contributed to this report.
-------- africa
Sudan Rules Out Talk of African Troops
By DANIEL BALINT-KURTI
The Associated Press
Saturday, August 28, 2004; 1:07 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A41584-2004Aug28?language=printer
AL-FASHER, Sudan - Security has improved in camps in Sudan's violence-torn Darfur region, but displaced villagers still face attacks and abuse when they leave their camps, a U.N. team said Saturday as it completed a mission that could determine whether Sudan is hit with international sanctions.
Darfur rebels, meanwhile, said government forces and Arab militiamen continue to bomb and torch villages and kill civilians - with attacks on six villages in the past three days, including one that killed 64 people. The rebels said they would hold a 24-hour boycott of peace talks with the Sudanese government to protest.
More than 1 million black African villagers have been driven from their homes by the militiamen known as the Janjaweed, who are allegedly backed by the government, and many of the villagers are in 147 camps scattered across Darfur, a region the size of France.
An estimated 30,000 have been killed in the violence, which began in February 2003, when African rebel groups began an anti-government campaign. The latest attacks reported by the rebel negotiators could not be independently confirmed.
The United Nations has given Sudan until Aug. 30 to start acting to stop the militiamen or else face possible sanctions. Khartoum has said it is trying to restore security and denies any links to the Janjaweed.
Erick De Mul, who headed one of three U.N. fact finding teams that have spent three days in the Darfur region, refused to say Saturday whether he expected the United Nations to move to impose sanctions.
De Mul, the U.N. deputy humanitarian coordinator, said he saw improvements in the camps.
"Access to the IDPs (internally displaced people) is good and the government is cooperating. The safety, in broad terms, inside the camps is OK," he told told reporters after a final meeting with Sudanese officials in al-Fasher, the capital of North Darfur.
"Outside the camps, it is still a problem. We are still hearing of attacks and abuses when people venture outside, despite the government's effort of bringing in security forces," he said.
Sudan's minister of humanitarian affairs, Ibrahim Hamid, who attended the meeting in al-Fasher, said he was "very satisfied with the results we have seen."
He said it was normal many displaced people were too afraid to leave their camps and return to their villages. "A war-affected population will need some time to feel secure," he said.
The Sudanese government says it has arrested an unspecified number of militiamen and sentenced some to death.
But Human Rights Watch, a U.S.-based advocacy group, accused the government of letting the militias maintain at least 16 bases in the region - including five apparently shared with the military.
"Throughout the time Khartoum was supposedly reining in the Janjaweed, these camps have been operating in plain sight," Peter Takirambudde, executive director of the group's Africa division, said Friday.
De Mul and the two other teams will prepare a report by Aug. 31, and the Security Council is expected to meet Sept. 2 to discuss what steps to take next.
African rebels took up arms against Khartoum after long-simmering disagreements over land rights and other issues. The Sudanese government is accused of backing the Janjaweed's campaign of violence in order to stamp out the rebellion.
At negotiations under way in Abuja, Nigeria, Darfur rebel groups said they would not participate in talks Sunday. "While the negotiations are underway in Abuja, the government of Sudan troops and their Janajaweed militia have violated (an April) cease fire," the groups said in a statement.
"A number of villages have been bombarded by helicopter gunships and Antonov aircraft while others have been attacked and torched over the last three days," the statement said. They said they would return to talks on Monday.
The most recent attack took place Saturday at Klikel Abdousalaam village, where Sudan soldiers and the Janjaweed burned homes, killing two people, the insurgents said. In the deadliest attack, 64 civilians were killed and 156 wounded in the village of Yassin on Thursday, they said.
Sudanese government negotiators said they couldn't confirm or deny the attacks and decried the rebel walkout. "It's very sorrowful," delegation spokesman Ibrahim Mohamed said of the boycott. "We are here to negotiate and stop such painfulness."
Earlier Saturday, Sudan's government ruled out any discussion at the Abuja talks of an African Union proposal to send up to 2,000 peacekeepers into the Darfur region.
The African Union has 150 troops in Darfur and is sending 150 more to protect observers who have been monitoring a ceasefire that was called in April but has not been abided by. The troops have no mandate to impose security, but the 53-member union has offered to send 2,000 troops to put a stop to violence.
Sudan has all but ruled out such a force, and Sudanese Minister of State for Humanitarian Affairs Mohammed Yusuf said Saturday the proposal was "not an issue which could be discussed" at Abuja.
----
Sudan Not Curbing Militias, Diplomats Say
Sanctions for Failing to Meet Darfur Deadline Unlikely, U.N. Officials Indicate
By Colum Lynch
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, August 28, 2004; Page A22
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A40340-2004Aug27.html
UNITED NATIONS, Aug. 27 -- Sudan has not reined in Arab militias responsible for killing tens of thousands of black African civilians and displacing more than a million others in Darfur, casting doubts on its ability to meet a U.N. Security Council demand that it do so by Tuesday, according to senior U.N. diplomats and Human Rights Watch.
But the 15-nation council appears unlikely to impose threatened sanctions on Sudan, according to council diplomats who cited U.N. claims that Khartoum has cooperated with its efforts to address the humanitarian crisis. "I think there is a growing recognition that sanctions are not likely to be a productive approach," said Pakistan's U.N. ambassador, Munir Akram.
The Bush administration insists that sanctions remain an option but acknowledged that its immediate priority is to rally council support for an African Union proposal to bolster a small observer mission with thousands of additional African peacekeepers. The Nigerian-sponsored initiative is the subject of peace talks between Sudan and Darfurian rebels in Abuja, Nigeria. "If the government resists that, then, in my view, the United States will have no choice but to support sanctions," U.S. Ambassador John C. Danforth told the Associated Press this week.
The top U.N. envoy in Sudan, Jan Pronk of the Netherlands, said he would withhold judgment on Sudan's compliance with the resolution until he concludes a three-day tour of Darfur on Saturday and reports to the council next week.
Pronk attended a ceremony where hundreds of members of a uniformed, government-backed paramilitary group, known as the Popular Defense Forces, handed over their weapons.
The gesture comes after Tuliameni Kalomah, the United Nations' assistant secretary general for political affairs, told the council Tuesday that while Sudan had improved access for humanitarian aid workers, it had done "practically nothing" to stop the militias, according to a council ambassador who attended the closed-door briefing. The ambassador declined to speak publicly, citing the confidential nature of the discussions.
Kalomah credited Sudan with pledging to deploy thousands of additional police in Darfur and to begin establishing safe areas there by the end of the month, according to another diplomat who also attended the meeting. But Kalomah said the United Nations continues to receive reports that the militias are active in West and North Darfur, citing complaints by displaced civilians that they are attacked when they venture outside their camps, according to another diplomat. Kalomah said, according to the diplomat, that the Sudanese government has not provided the United Nations with a list of names and the size of militias, as it had promised.
"It's not a clear-cut picture," said another senior U.N. official, who said Sudan had probably done just enough to undercut the case for sanctions. "Are they cooperating? Yes, some ministers are really cooperating. Are they sabotaging us? Yes, others are really sabotaging us."
The latest crisis in Darfur began in February 2003, when two Darfurian rebel groups, the Sudanese Liberation Army and the Justice and Equality Movement, took up arms against the government, citing discrimination against the region's black African tribes. U.S. officials maintain that Sudan organized local Arab militias, known as Janjaweed, and supported them as they attacked hundred of villages, killing thousands and forcing more than a million from their homes.
Last month, the Security Council adopted a resolution demanding that Sudan "disarm the Janjaweed and apprehend and bring to justice Janjaweed leaders" responsible for atrocities. It called on U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan to brief the council in 30 days and warned that it would consider "further action," including economic and diplomatic sanctions, if Sudan failed to comply.
Human Rights Watch asserted Friday that Sudan is permitting the militia to operate at least 16 military camps with "total impunity." "These militia continue to operate; they continue to base themselves out of camps in government-controlled territory; they continue to operate with government troops in attacks on civilians," said Leslie Lefko, a researcher at Human Rights Watch.
The international relief community -- which has seen the number of its workers in Sudan increase from 170 to more than 500 in recent months -- has stepped up its efforts to tackle the unfolding humanitarian crisis.
----
U.N. Team Says Sudanese Still Face Attacks
By DANIEL BALINT-KURTI
The Associated Press
Saturday, August 28, 2004; 6:36 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A42332-2004Aug28?language=printer
AL-FASHER, Sudan - Security has improved in camps in Sudan's violence-torn Darfur region, but displaced villagers still face attacks and abuse when they leave their camps, a U.N. team said Saturday as it completed a mission that could determine whether Sudan is hit with international sanctions.
Darfur rebels, meanwhile, said government forces and Arab militiamen continue to bomb and torch villages and kill civilians - with attacks on six villages in the past three days, including one that killed 64 people. The rebels said they would hold a 24-hour boycott of peace talks with the Sudanese government to protest.
More than 1 million black African villagers have been driven from their homes by the militiamen known as the Janjaweed, who are allegedly backed by the government, and many of the villagers are in 147 camps scattered across Darfur, a region the size of France.
An estimated 30,000 have been killed in the violence, which began in February 2003, when African rebel groups began an anti-government campaign. The latest attacks reported by the rebel negotiators could not be independently confirmed.
The United Nations has given Sudan until Aug. 30 to start acting to stop the militiamen or else face possible sanctions. Khartoum has said it is trying to restore security and denies any links to the Janjaweed.
Erick De Mul, who headed one of three U.N. fact finding teams that have spent three days in the Darfur region, refused to say Saturday whether he expected the United Nations to move to impose sanctions.
De Mul, the U.N. deputy humanitarian coordinator, said he saw improvements in the camps.
"Access to the IDPs (internally displaced people) is good and the government is cooperating. The safety, in broad terms, inside the camps is OK," he told told reporters after a final meeting with Sudanese officials in al-Fasher, the capital of North Darfur.
"Outside the camps, it is still a problem. We are still hearing of attacks and abuses when people venture outside, despite the government's effort of bringing in security forces," he said.
Sudan's minister of humanitarian affairs, Ibrahim Hamid, who attended the meeting in al-Fasher, said he was "very satisfied with the results we have seen."
He said it was normal many displaced people were too afraid to leave their camps and return to their villages. "A war-affected population will need some time to feel secure," he said.
The Sudanese government says it has arrested an unspecified number of militiamen and sentenced some to death.
But Human Rights Watch, a U.S.-based advocacy group, accused the government of letting the militias maintain at least 16 bases in the region - including five apparently shared with the military.
"Throughout the time Khartoum was supposedly reining in the Janjaweed, these camps have been operating in plain sight," Peter Takirambudde, executive director of the group's Africa division, said Friday.
De Mul and the two other teams will prepare a report by Aug. 31, and the Security Council is expected to meet Sept. 2 to discuss what steps to take next.
African rebels took up arms against Khartoum after long-simmering disagreements over land rights and other issues. The Sudanese government is accused of backing the Janjaweed's campaign of violence in order to stamp out the rebellion.
At negotiations under way in Abuja, Nigeria, Darfur rebel groups said they would not participate in talks Sunday. "While the negotiations are underway in Abuja, the government of Sudan troops and their Janajaweed militia have violated (an April) cease fire," the groups said in a statement.
"A number of villages have been bombarded by helicopter gunships and Antonov aircraft while others have been attacked and torched over the last three days," the statement said. They said they would return to talks on Monday.
The most recent attack took place Saturday at Klikel Abdousalaam village, where Sudan soldiers and the Janjaweed burned homes, killing two people, the insurgents said. In the deadliest attack, 64 civilians were killed and 156 wounded in the village of Yassin on Thursday, they said.
Sudanese government negotiators said they couldn't confirm or deny the attacks and decried the rebel walkout. "It's very sorrowful," delegation spokesman Ibrahim Mohamed said of the boycott. "We are here to negotiate and stop such painfulness."
Earlier Saturday, Sudan's government ruled out any discussion at the Abuja talks of an African Union proposal to send up to 2,000 peacekeepers into the Darfur region.
The African Union has 150 troops in Darfur and is sending 150 more to protect observers who have been monitoring a ceasefire that was called in April but has not been abided by. The troops have no mandate to impose security, but the 53-member union has offered to send 2,000 troops to put a stop to violence.
Sudan has all but ruled out such a force, and Sudanese Minister of State for Humanitarian Affairs Mohammed Yusuf said Saturday the proposal was "not an issue which could be discussed" at Abuja.
--------
Zimbabwe 'tortured coup suspects'
BBC
28 August, 2004
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/3609036.stm
Two South African men released from a Zimbabwe prison after being cleared of charges of plotting a coup say they were stripped and beaten in jail.
Harry Carlse and Lourens Horn were among 67 men imprisoned in March for an alleged coup plot in Equatorial Guinea.
Zimbabwean authorities said in April they would probe jail torture claims.
Equatorial Guinea says it is pursuing those it says were behind the coup attempt - including Mark Thatcher, son of former British PM Margaret Thatcher.
The Zimbabwe trial ended on Friday, with former British paratrooper Simon Mann found guilty of trying to buy weapons.
The remainder of the men were cleared of the more serious weapons charges but pleaded guilty to aviation and immigration violations.
All those found guilty will be sentenced on 10 September.
Mr Carlse and Mr Horn are now back in South Africa, where they say they expect to face new charges under the country's anti-mercenary laws, Reuters news agency reports.
House arrest
Equatorial Guinea has meanwhile said it is seeking an international arrest warrant for those it accuses of being the key figures in the coup attempt - including Simon Mann and Mark Thatcher.
But the country's Deputy Prime Minister, Ricardo Mangue Obama Nfube, denied it had asked for the extradition of Sir Mark from South Africa.
Mark Thatcher is currently under house arrest in South Africa after being accused of helping to finance the coup plot.
A lawyer acting for Equatorial Guinea's government had earlier said a request had been made for his extradition.
Shock threat
The South African coup suspects have alleged they were tortured by their captors in Zimbabwe, along with their co-accused.
"I was stripped naked and beaten with a stick," said Mr Carlse. "I slept in leg irons for a week and a half."
He said he had lost a large amount of weight because of conditions inside the prison, where malnutrition and disease were rife.
The men said they were frequently denied adequate food and water and survived on a diet of porridge and cabbage.
"There was physical torture as well as mental torture," said Mr Horn. "They said if we refused to make a statement they would give us electric shocks."
-------- iraq
Najaf Militiamen Surrender Shrine
Truce Holds as Pilgrims Enter Holy City
By Karl Vick and Naseer Nouri
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, August 28, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A39964-2004Aug27?language=printer
NAJAF, Iraq, Aug. 27 -- Militiamen loyal to Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr surrendered the sacred shrine of Imam Ali on Friday and then surrendered weapons as well, bringing a largely peaceful end to a ferocious three-week battle with U.S. forces that challenged the authority of Iraq's interim government by holding hostage one of the country's most hallowed places.
"Drop your weapons and leave Najaf and Kufa," a voice on loudspeakers began instructing fighters mid-morning, reading a statement from Sadr. "You have done a great job."
A spokesman for Sadr said fighters were withdrawing, but that their militia was not being disbanded.
Obeying terms of a peace agreement that were essentially dictated by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the senior Shiite cleric in Iraq who swept into the holy city Thursday afternoon to negotiate the truce, the tattered fighters of Sadr's Mahdi Army militia stacked weapons at Sadr's office.
The young men later disappeared into the crowd of jubilant worshippers that Sistani had sent marching past the ruins that defined the front line with U.S. forces and through gates of the shrine's blue-and-green tiled walls. The arrangement allowed Sistani to regain control of the shrine and the militiamen to depart discretely.
Within an hour, U.S. tanks and other armored vehicles roared to life and began to fall back from positions surrounding three sides of the mosque. Iraqi commandos, soldiers and police scrambled to take the Americans' place, asserting control in a city center redolent of death.
Many of the decaying bodies were those of militiamen killed at their firing positions in buildings shattered by overwhelming U.S. firepower. In rubble-strewn streets suddenly safe for civilians, residents led ambulances to recover the casualties where they fell.
Iraqi police followed one overpowering stench to a building they said had served as an illegal religious court for Sadr's organization. People as far away as Baghdad who were accused of drinking beer or other activities deemed un-Islamic were said to have been bundled into car trunks and taken to Najaf for trial. Civil authorities had tried to close the court, which at one point indicted a local civil law judge, according to local attorneys.
Authorities said most of the bodies found when police broke down the door Friday afternoon were police officers and members of the Iraqi National Guard. Sadr followers were said to have targeted, tortured and mutilated the victims over a period of months, deeming them American collaborators.
"We had information about this court," said Lt. Col. Mohammed Dayakh Mohammed, chief of the Najaf police's homicide division. He said between 20 and 25 bodies were recovered, including those of a child of 12 or 13 and an elderly woman.
According to the Associated Press, an official at the court said the bodies were those of people killed during the fighting with U.S. forces.
Adel Hadi Hasan, the uncle of Najaf's police chief, was one of seven prisoners found alive. Weak, dirty and unshaven, he said he was held for 20 days after being abducted by three Mahdi Army fighters who shot at his car.
"They wanted to do a deal with the chief of police," Hasan said. "There was one who was really mean. He tortured me."
The whereabouts of Sadr, a junior cleric and scion of an esteemed religious family, remained unknown Friday. But under the terms of the peace agreement, Iraq's government agreed not to arrest him, either for directing the militia or on charges he was behind the April 2003 murder of a fellow cleric.
Several U.S. field commanders said they expected to fight the Mahdi Army again, perhaps in the northeast Baghdad slum called Sadr City, the home of many of the militiamen and the scene of sometimes-intense fighting this month. Iraqi police and U.S. forces set up roadblocks around Najaf and Kufa, which adjoins the holy city to the east, to check departing vehicles for arms.
Under the peace deal, only forces of the interim government can operate and possess weapons; the Mahdi Army and foreign forces are to leave. But for now, the U.S. military will remain to monitor compliance, according to a spokesman for the 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit.
In Kufa, which has been a Sadr stronghold, there was no sign of the militia on the streets during the day Friday. But in the early evening, an Iraqi police patrol was attacked with a rocket-propelled grenade, killing one officer and wounding five, according to Najaf police.
"Their low-level fighters are easily replaced," a Marine officer said. "Hopefully what we did was damage their stockpiles and damage their leadership. What's most important is, hopefully, this damages Sadr politically."
Sistani issued a statement thanking the thousands who answered his summons to march to the shrine. Grand Ayatollah Kadim Haeri, who formerly supported Sadr, issued a religious edict commending Sistani's intervention. "Chaos is forbidden," Haeri declared.
Anger at the Americans and the interim government was easy to find among civilians who stepped gingerly into the streets Friday to inspect horrendous damage in sections of the city of 600,000. Millions of Muslims worldwide know Najaf from pilgrimages to the Imam Ali shrine and the seminaries that long made the city the world's leading center of study for Shiites.
"We blame Ayad Allawi and the government for this damage," said Jasim Aziz, 31, referring to the Iraqi interim prime minister. Aziz had traveled from Balad, 140 miles to the north, to visit the shrine. "They could have waited until Sistani arrived and solved the problems without destroying the city and killing all the civilians and the Iraqis."
"They asked the Americans to destroy the city," said Hussein Mailu, 55, referring to government leaders. "If they did not ask them, they wouldn't do it. Is this the democracy of Allawi? Saddam was so bad but he didn't do this thing," he said, referring to former president Saddam Hussein. "It was beautiful, but not any more."
The day appeared to boost the spirits of the interim government's forces.
Iraqi police drove around the city celebrating by firing into the air from blue-and-white squad cars.
Four battalions of Iraqi security forces received tea and water from residents as they arrived in the city center with the handful of American advisers who had trained them.
"People received us clapping, and by the will of God we will replace the U.S. Army," said Sgt. Sabah Muhsin Sarhan of the 2nd Battalion of the Iraqi Intervention Force, the name for the anti-insurgency force in the new army. "Our job is to protect our country, and we don't want the foreigners. We don't want the Jews to control us."
Spirits among Sadr's followers appeared relatively high as well. In Baghdad, an aide claimed the Mahdi Army withdrawal as a victory because U.S. forces never entered the shrine -- something U.S. commanders had publicly vowed not to do under any circumstances. Iraqi commandos had been training for any final assault.
"Young men should learn from Moqtada Sadr and follow him as a leader," Raed Kadhimi, a sheik, said in a sermon at the capital's largest Shiite mosque. "I want to tell those who don't know what happened in Najaf that we destroyed many tanks and killed many U.S. soldiers. We are very happy because we won."
That sentiment was shared by a mother who found her son outside the Najaf shrine.
"You are a hero," declared the woman, who gave her name as Um Hussein. "You were fighting for the Imam Ali and for the sayyid and for Najaf." Sayyid, a reference to Sadr, is an honorific reserved for descendants of the prophet Muhammad.
"I am so happy you are still alive."
A few steps away, Zamil Ubeid, 61, wept and cried out for the son whose name he had just found on a list of militiamen who had been killed.
"Ali, Ali, take care of my son. He came to you," he beseeched to the imam said to be buried at the shrine. "He is my youngest son, the one that I loved most. I wanted to see his children."
Special correspondent Luma Mousawi contributed from Baghdad
--------
At the Ready to Answer Sadr's Call
Militiamen Meld Into Shiite Throng but Vow to Return on Leader's Orders
By Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, August 28, 2004; Page A16
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A40085-2004Aug27?language=printer
BAGHDAD, Aug. 27 -- When loudspeakers atop the golden minarets of the Imam Ali shrine broadcast orders Friday morning demanding that fighters in Najaf surrender their weapons, Saad Muslim promptly complied. He walked over to rebel cleric Moqtada Sadr's militia headquarters and deposited his sniper rifle onto a pile of firearms and rocket-propelled grenades.
Then he slipped out of this battle-scarred city. After three weeks of fighting U.S. and Iraqi security forces at the behest of Sadr, Muslim simply changed out of his black Mahdi Army militia uniform and melted into a crowd of Shiite pilgrims heading back to the Baghdad slum where he lives.
But should the mercurial Sadr beseech his followers to take up arms again, Muslim vowed to comply without hesitation. "If Moqtada asks us to return to fight, if he needs us anytime, we will obey," said Muslim, an unemployed 31-year-old with thick arms and a thin beard. "We will run back with our guns and fight again. We are all at his service."
The agreement, brokered by Iraq's top Shiite religious leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, that ended the tense confrontation between the Mahdi Army militia and security forces contains a serious loophole: It gives Sadr and his supporters the chance to fight another day.
In exchange for vacating the shrine and the rest of Najaf, Sadr's supporters received what amounted to a full amnesty. They were allowed to return home by joining a throng of pilgrims streaming through the city. Sadr was informed in a statement by a government cabinet minister that he was "free as any Iraqi citizen to do whatever he would like."
"The winner in all this is Moqtada," said an Arab diplomat who has close relations with Iraq's interim government. "The agreement allows him and his people to walk free -- and that's a recipe for further trouble."
Unlike other strife-torn nations that have tried to demobilize militias, Iraq has not earmarked any money for financial incentives, job-training programs and other measures to dissuade members of the Mahdi Army, most of whom have no jobs and little education, from regrouping.
A U.S.-funded effort to dismantle militias in Iraq with stipends and training programs does not apply to the Mahdi Army. Sadr never signed a demobilization agreement with the U.S. occupation authority, which directed funds toward paramilitary groups, such as the Kurdish pesh merga and the Shiite Badr Brigades, allied with the United States. A more recent Iraqi government initiative to spend $200 million to improve living conditions in Najaf and Baghdad's Sadr City, a Mahdi Army stronghold, includes no funding for dismantling the militia.
"You cannot expect these young men to distance themselves from the militia unless there is a program that will give them a chance to earn a decent living and improve their living conditions," said Jamal Benomar, a senior U.N. political adviser to the interim government. "They're a group of people with no jobs and no future. The same reasons that led them to join this movement still exist."
Iraqi government officials contend that the nature of Sadr's militia makes it impossible to provide financial emoluments to individual members. The militia, they note, does not have clear membership rolls. Most participants are volunteers who pick up arms when summoned by Sadr.
Government officials said a requirement that Mahdi Army members turn in weapons before leaving Najaf would make it more difficult for the militia to regroup. But Iraq is awash in cheap guns. For militiamen who do not have spare weapons at home, purchasing an AK-47 assault rifle requires only about $50.
It was not clear whether the weapons being surrendered in Najaf would be turned over to the police, as the government demanded. Wooden trolleys piled with guns and ammunition and covered with blankets were pushed out of the militia headquarters.
"We will not hand over our weapons to the police," said Hatef Hussein, a guard at the militia headquarters. If commanders "want to keep it for the future in case things don't work out, it's their choice."
When fighting between Sadr loyalists and U.S. forces began in early August -- sparked by a Mahdi Army attack on a police station in Najaf -- Iraq's interim prime minister, Ayad Allawi, and several of his closest cabinet ministers wanted to crush the militia. The attack on the police station broke a truce reached in June after more than two months of often-intense battles between the Mahdi Army and the U.S. military. Another deal, Allawi reasoned, would simply provide another chance for Sadr to renege.
Allawi's attitude was shared by senior U.S. military commanders and diplomats in Iraq, who were also mindful of Sadr's record of non-compliance.
But the Mahdi Army proved to be a tougher opponent than Iraqi and U.S. officials had anticipated. By holing themselves up in and around the shrine -- one of Shiite Islam's holiest sites -- the militiamen forced U.S. troops to moderate their offensive. When the militiamen wanted to regroup or rest, they could retreat into the safety of the shrine, which was off-limits for U.S. gunners.
The standoff and reports of collateral damage to the shrine -- which U.S. military officials contend was caused by misfired Mahdi Army mortars -- sparked growing anger among Iraq's majority Shiites, forcing Allawi's government to pursue a settlement. Among the government's demands was that all militia weapons be handed over to the police.
But when a delegation of Iraqi leaders affiliated with the government was unable to obtain Sadr's consent, Allawi yielded to an initiative by Sistani. His plan did not include a provision obligating the Mahdi Army to turn in its weapons.
Iraqi and U.S. officials said the settlement nevertheless left Sadr in a much weaker position. Hundreds of his militiamen have been killed and wounded. Moderate Shiite leaders have asserted control over the shrine. And without the sanctuary of the shrine, the senior U.S. official said, if Sadr "steps out of line somewhere else, you can roll over him with a tank."
Even if U.S. forces had been able to kill or capture all the militiamen in Najaf, a senior U.S. official doubted they would have crushed the Mahdi Army. Thousands of fighters from Sadr's stronghold in a Baghdad slum would have joined the militia, he said, "making the problem even worse."
Perhaps mindful of flaws in the deal, the U.S. Embassy here sought to distance itself from the outcome on Friday. Embassy spokesman Robert Callahan praised the government for displaying "patience and restraint throughout," but he emphasized that Iraq's interim leaders were "in charge throughout the standoff."
"The United States provided extensive military and logistical support, but the Iraqi interim government made the decisions," he said.
Special correspondent Naseer Nouri in Najaf contributed to this report.
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New Wave of Violence in Iraq Kills Five
By TODD PITMAN
The Associated Press
Saturday, August 28, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A41161-2004Aug28?language=printer
BAGHDAD, Iraq - Shiite militants and U.S. forces battled Saturday in Baghdad's Sadr City slum, and a mortar barrage slammed into a busy eastern Baghdad neighborhood, marking a fresh round of violence in the capital. Five people died and dozens were wounded, officials said.
The violence came as Iraqis in the holy city of Najaf cleaned up broken glass and rubble and returned to their devastated offices and shops after three weeks of devastating combat.
Dozens of municipal workers were out for the first time in weeks, sweeping debris off roads lined with battle-scarred buildings, ripped up by U.S. bombs.
But fighting flared in Sadr City, an al-Sadr stronghold in Baghdad, as gunbattles broke out between militants and U.S. forces.
U.S. soldiers in Humvees drove through the impoverished neighborhood with loudspeakers, demanding people stay home because coalition forces were "cleaning the area of armed men," according to an Associated Press reporter at the scene. Sporadic gunfire could be heard.
Saad al-Amili, a Health Ministry official, said three people were killed and 25 were wounded in the skirmishes.
Militants fired assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades at American troops patrolling the area, said U.S. Capt. Brian O'Malley of the 1st Brigade Combat Team, adding that U.S. forces suffered no casualties.
As the battles raged, insurgents fired a round of mortars into a crowded eastern Baghdad neighborhood, killing two boys washing cars in a street near the former Iraqi National Olympic Committee building, said Interior Ministry spokesman Col. Adnan Abdul-Rahman.
Witnesses said at least four mortars also landed within an hour in the same area in Palestine street, a main Baghdad thoroughfare, as cars drove by. Panicked people scrambled for safety.
The dead teenagers were taken to a nearby morgue, where tearful relatives pounded their chests in grief and others hugged and kissed the boy's bodies. At least six other people were injured, said Bashir Mohammed of Baghdad's al-Kindi hospital.
A separate volley of mortar rounds also fell near the Palestine Hotel, where foreign journalists and contractors stay.
One 120 mm mortar shell fell near Firdous Square, the roundabout in front of the Palestine where U.S. forces helped Iraqis topple a statue of Saddam Hussein on April 9, 2003. The shell didn't explode and could be seen sticking out of the street.
Iraqi security forces blocked traffic at the roundabout while they waited for experts to defuse and remove the shell.
Another round fell near the Baghdad Hotel in the same area, but caused no casualties, a foreign security official said on condition of anonymity.
In Najaf, 100 miles south of Baghdad, U.S. forces pulled back from the Imam Ali Shrine and the Old City around it by Saturday, but maintained positions in the rest of the city.
Police Lt. Qusai Mohammed said Iraqi security forces searched the main mosque in the nearby city of Kufa late Friday and found a cache of weapons hidden there.
In Najaf, 100 miles south of Baghdad, Iraqi police spread out across the Old City on Saturday, patrolling in vehicles and on foot and taking over checkpoints that until recently were manned by al-Sadr's Mahdi Army militia.
U.S. forces pulled back from the shrine and the Old City, but maintained positions in the rest of Najaf and in nearby Kufa.
"We have repositioned our forces throughout the two cities, and Iraqi security forces have now assumed complete control and responsibility for security in the Old City," said Marine Capt. Carrie Batson, a U.S. military spokeswoman.
Police said there were still unexploded bombs throughout the Old City and prevented civilians from entering for their own safety. No visitors were allowed in the shrine, whose doors remained closed and locked.
Police Lt. Qusai Mohammed said Iraqi security forces searched the main mosque in Kufa late Friday and found a cache of weapons hidden there.
Around the shrine compound, municipal street cleaners in orange uniforms swept up debris, trash and rubble from the fighting, loading it onto trucks. Shards of glass littered the streets and burnt cars could be seen on the roads. Some buildings around the shrine compound were blackened by blasts or fires. Some have gaping holes torn out of them. Beside some roads were huge craters in the ground, gouged by the impact of U.S. bombs.
Al-Sadr's paper portrait stared down from walls and power poles.
His officials said Saturday that they had carried out a prisoner exchange with authorities, releasing 10 policemen they had captured in exchange for 12 militants the police were holding.
The peace plan, presented by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani on Thursday and accepted by the Iraqi government and al-Sadr, calls for the cities of Najaf and Kufa to be declared weapons-free, for all foreign forces to withdraw from Najaf and leave police in charge of security and for the government to compensate those harmed by the fighting.
Dozens of al-Sadr loyalists piled their Kalashnikov rifles in front of the firebrand cleric's office Friday, but thousands of others were believed to be still armed, and some were seen pushing carts full of machine-guns and rocket launchers through a narrow alley.
Meanwhile, in the volatile city of Fallujah, a U.S. airstrike killed three people and wounded 11 others, including a 6-year-old girl, said Dr. Abdel Rahman Ahmad, of Fallujah General Hospital. U.S. warplanes also bombed the city's industrial zone, wounding two factory guards, hospital officials said.
The military said it was targeting an anti-aircraft gun mounted on the back of a truck. Militants "attempted to fire on one of our aviation assets and we responded with missile fire," said Lt. Col. Thomas V. Johnson, a Marine spokesman.
In the northern city of Mosul, gunmen shot dead university professor, Iman Abdul-Munem Younis, as her car was stopped at an intersection, said Maj. Mohammed Hussein, a security officer at a Mosul hospital. The motive for the attack was not known.
Younis headed the translation department at the University of Mosul's College of Arts.
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U.S. Warplanes, Tanks Bombard Fallujah
By TODD PITMAN
The Associated Press
Saturday, August 28, 2004; 1:01 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A41578-2004Aug28?language=printer
BAGHDAD, Iraq - Shiite militants and U.S. forces battled Saturday in the Baghdad's Sadr City slum and a mortar barrage slammed into a busy eastern neighborhood in a new round of violence in the capital that left five people dead and dozens wounded, officials said.
The violence contrasted with calm in holy city of Najaf where residents cleaned up broken glass and rubble and returned to their wrecked offices and shops after three weeks of devastating clashes between Shiite fighters and U.S. troops.
Dozens of municipal workers were out for the first time in weeks, sweeping debris off roads lined with battle-scarred buildings, ripped by U.S. bombs.
Fighting stopped in the city after militants loyal to rebel Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr filed out of the revered Imam Ali Shrine and turned over the keys to religious authorities, symbolizing their acceptance of a peace deal brokered by Iraq's top Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.
But gunbattles broke out between militants and U.S. forces in Sadr City, a Baghdad stronghold of al-Sadr's Mahdi Army militia.
U.S. soldiers in Humvees drove through the impoverished neighborhood with loudspeakers, demanding people stay home because coalition forces were "cleaning the area of armed men," according to an Associated Press reporter at the scene. There was sporadic gunfire.
Saad al-Amili, a Health Ministry official, said three people were killed and 25 were wounded in the skirmishes.
Also, militants fired assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades at American troops patrolling the area, said U.S. Capt. Brian O'Malley of the 1st Brigade Combat Team, adding that U.S. forces suffered no casualties. Fighters fired eight mortar shells at U.S. troops in Sadr City but missed, hitting a small power station and knocking out electricity to a six-block area, he said.
As the battles raged, insurgents fired a round of mortars into a crowded eastern Baghdad neighborhood, killing two boys washing cars in a street near the former Iraqi National Olympic Committee building, said Interior Ministry spokesman Col. Adnan Abdul-Rahman. At least four mortars landed in the area, witnesses said.
The dead teens were taken to a nearby morgue, where tearful relatives pounded their chests in grief and others hugged and kissed the bodies. At least six other people were injured, said Bashir Mohammed of Baghdad's al-Kindi hospital.
Meanwhile, U.S. warplanes carried out airstrikes for the second straight day in the city of Fallujah, a center for Sunni Muslim insurgents who have been battling U.S. forces for more than 18 months. U.S. forces also exchanged gunfire with insurgents on the city's eastern outskirts, and fighting was reported on the main highway that runs to neighboring Jordan.
The airstrikes, which witnesses said began at around 7 p.m. and continued for an hour, hit the city's eastern al-Askari neighborhood as well as the industrial area at the eastern entrance of Fallujah. At least four homes were destroyed and people were seen being rushed to hospital.
Smoke could be seen billowing into the air and fire blazed in the sky after the strikes.
Lt. Col. Thomas V. Johnson, a Marine spokesman, said U.S. troops based on the edge of Fallujah responded with tanks and artillery after their positions took "sporadic fire." He said one fire in the city had been started by a U.S. strike and was "believed to be related to a hit on a significant weapons cache."
On Friday, U.S. airstrikes targeted the same neighborhoods, killing three people and wounding 13 others, including a 6-year-old girl, medical officials said. The military said Friday's attack had targeted an anti-aircraft gun mounted on the back of a truck that had attempted to fire on a U.S. plane.
U.S. forces have repeatedly carried out airstrikes in Fallujah, west of Baghdad, since Marines ended a three-week siege of the city in April aimed at rooting out insurgents.
In other violence:
- A volley of mortar rounds fell near the Palestine Hotel in central Baghdad, where foreign journalists and contractors stay. There were no casualties.
- Police found the bodies of a slain Turkish truck driver and an Iraqi man late Friday on a highway near Beiji, 155 miles north of Baghdad, a Turkish diplomat said Saturday. Separattely, a mortar strike in Beiji on Friday killed a civilian and wounded three people, the U.S. military said.
- Iraqi police on Saturday mistakenly opened fire on U.S. troops, who returned fire, wounding two policemen in the northern city of Kirkuk, an Iraqi National Guard commander, Maj. Gen. Anwar Mohammed Amin, said.
- Rebels blew up a pipeline inside the West Qurna oilfields in southern Iraq late Friday, sparking a fire that burned for a day. The attack will effect exports, though it was not immediately clear by how much, said a South Oil Co. official in West Qurna
Exports from Iraq's oil-rich south have fallen to about 900,000 barrels a day, about half the normal average of 1.8 million barrels a day, after an attack Wednesday on a cluster of pipelines. Insurgents have repeatedly sabotaged Iraq's crucial oil industry, its main source of income, in an effort to hamper reconstruction efforts.
In Najaf, 100 miles south of Baghdad, Iraqi police spread out across the Old City on Saturday, patrolling in vehicles and on foot and taking over checkpoints that until recently were manned by al-Sadr's Mahdi Army militia.
U.S. forces pulled back from the Imam Ali Shrine and the Old City, but maintained positions in the rest of Najaf and in nearby Kufa.
"We have repositioned our forces throughout the two cities, and Iraqi security forces have now assumed complete control and responsibility for security in the Old City," said Marine Capt. Carrie Batson.
Police said there were still unexploded bombs throughout the Old City and prevented civilians from entering for their own safety.
No visitors were allowed in the shrine, whose doors were locked. Militants had used it as a base for attacking U.S. forces.
Minister of State Qassim Dawoud visited the shrine and said it had been cleaned up, adding, "I hope it will open up soon."
Police Lt. Qusai Mohammed said Iraqi security forces searched the main mosque in Kufa, an al-Sadr stronghold, and found a cache of weapons hidden there late Friday.
Around the Imam Ali compound, municipal street cleaners in orange uniforms swept up debris, trash and rubble from the fighting, loading it onto trucks. Shards of glass littered the streets and burnt cars lined the roads. Posters with al-Sadr's portrait stared down from walls and power poles.
Al-Sadr officials said Saturday they swapped 10 policemen they captured in exchange for 12 militants held by police.
The peace plan, presented by al-Sistani on Thursday and accepted by the Iraqi government and al-Sadr, calls for Najaf and Kufa to be declared weapons-free, for all foreign forces to withdraw from Najaf and leave police in charge of security and for the government to compensate those harmed by the fighting.
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After the Siege, a City of Ruins, Its Dead Rotting
The New York Times
By ALEX BERENSON
August 28, 2004
AJAF, Iraq, Aug. 27 - The wild dogs of Najaf ate well this week.
In this holy city, in lightless basements, in empty crypts, in the shadow of the golden dome of the shrine of Imam Ali, thousands of men have tried desperately and often successfully to kill one another. They have fought with knives and guns, grenades and mortars, tanks and mines and roadside bombs, and sometimes even their bare hands. Now, as a cease-fire halts the three-week fight between American forces and Iraqi insurgents, the toll from the battle is only too clear. On Friday afternoon, the decomposed bodies of insurgent fighters lay in houses in and around the Old City, which surrounds the shrine.
One house at the western edge of the city held four blasted corpses, missing arms and legs, their stench heavy in the hot midday sun. Dogs had been at the bodies overnight, marines said. Indeed a dog skulked nearby as Iraqi medics carried the remains to an ambulance for transport to the shrine, where they are washed before burial.
As many as 1,000 guerrillas may have been killed since early August, American commanders say, along with 11 American marines and soldiers. More than 100 have been wounded, including dozens of serious injuries.
About 3,000 American soldiers and marines took part in the fight, battling somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000 guerrillas, a number that varied as Iraqis joined or quit the battle.
For every shot they took, American troops returned scores or hundreds. For every mortar round the guerrillas lobbed, the gunners at the Marine base here responded with a 100-pound artillery shell. The insurgents had donkey carts loaded with rocket-propelled grenades, the Americans 70-ton tanks that can survive direct hits from mortars and grenades. The American advantage was especially large at night, when night-vision goggles allowed troops to see in the dark.
The two sides have caused uncounted civilian casualties and inflicted tremendous damage on Najaf's Old City. The area stinks of sewage and soot, and its streets are filled with rubble from bombed-out buildings. Even the mosque has been slightly damaged. Civilians walked freely around the shrine on Friday, and the area was nominally peaceful, but passions are running high just below the surface. Just before the noon prayer call, this reporter was accused of being a spy and set on by a crowd just west of the shrine, then briefly taken captive by Moktada al-Sadr's guerrillas, blindfolded and tied up, and threatened with death before being released unharmed after senior Sadr officials intervened.
Overwhelming American firepower has caused nearly all of the structural damage, although it is unclear whether guerrillas or American troops are responsible for more civilian casualties.
Unlike the guerrillas, American troops generally appeared to make an effort not to fire at random, but when fired upon they responded with overwhelming force. They joke that they are living bait, luring guerrillas out of their holes to be killed.
"When we take fire, we just usually light it up," said Pfc. Anthony Johnson, a soldier in the Second Battalion, Seventh Cavalry, which fought in the southern part of the city.
For three weeks, the fighting was fierce and nearly nonstop, moving from a sprawling cemetery just north of the Old City to the blocks in the southern part of the Old City and then nearly to the gates of the shrine itself.
Armed mainly with rocket-propelled grenades, mortars and light machine guns, the insurgents tried to counter American troops equipped with tanks and supported by artillery and air power.
The resulting battle was intense but lopsided, especially after the first few days of fighting, when the American military brought in two heavy Army battalions to take over the fighting in the cemetery and south of the Old City while the marines raided strongholds elsewhere in Najaf and Kufa.
Still, American soldiers and commanders say they have been surprised by the tenacity and toughness of the guerrillas, fighters loyal to Mr. Sadr, the rebel Shiite cleric.
"They're brave," said Specialist Mark Siapco, a soldier in the First Battalion, Fifth Cavalry, which has fought north of the shrine. "They're crazy."
In the most brazen attack, a guerrilla jumped onto an American tank in the cemetery two weeks ago and killed two soldiers before fleeing.
"You have to be careful about underestimating your enemy," said Lt. Col. Myles Miyamasu, commander of the battalion. "Their tenacity, though not equal to our own, probably surprised us a little."
Besides the deaths and wounds, many more men have stories of close calls, dud mortar shells that failed to explode or bullets that smashed into body armor instead of skin and bone. On the front lines, soldiers no longer blink at mortars that explode 50 feet from their armored vehicles or rocket-propelled grenades trailing sparks by their heads, instead methodically trying to figure out the location of the guerrillas in order to destroy them. "A close call would be getting hit in your Kevlar," the chest and back armor that every soldier and marine wears, Specialist Siapco said. "A bullet whizzing by, that doesn't count. You don't have to worry about that."
American forces advanced daily so that by Thursday the rebels had no ground left to give. Early that morning, American tanks reached the gates of the shrine and fought in its shadow. On a bombed-out street illuminated only by the stars and the glow from the lights attached to the mosque's walls and minarets, the tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles turned their turrets left and right, searching for targets.
Guerrillas fired rocket-propelled grenades from buildings nearby, but even direct hits did not seriously damage the American armor. The Bradleys returned fire, pouring bursts of 25-millimeter high-explosive shells, essentially miniature grenades, into the buildings.
The shells glowed red, setting fires that burned orange in the night. With the shrine's golden dome as a backdrop, the street had a surreal beauty, and soldiers said they were astonished to be fighting so close to one of the holiest sites in Islam.
But the Mahdi Army did not stop fighting. Snipers took aim at Maj. Doug Ollivant, an American commander directing the battle from about 100 yards away, and a hidden mortar position rained shells around Major Ollivant's armored Humvee. The mortar was so close to the Americans that soldiers could hear shells being fired 30 seconds before they landed, because they essentially were traveling straight up and down.
"It's going to kill you, you know," Major Ollivant said, as one soldier lighted a cigarette not long after a mortar crashed down nearby.
By Friday afternoon, with a cease-fire in place, the scene in the Old City was very different. Men walked through the streets, surveying the damage and walking past American troops who would soon be pulled back from their positions.
"You never know if some of these guys were the guys fighting us," one soldier said to another, watching the men walk by.
"I guarantee you some were," the second responded.
But First Sgt. Justin Lehew of the Marines, whose men killed the fighters whose bodies the medics were gathering Friday afternoon, said his troops were not unhappy that the fight had ended without a climactic battle.
"They just want to go home," Sergeant Lehew said. "Like everybody else."
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U.S., Shiites Fight in Baghdad; 5 Killed
Associated Press
By RAVI NESSMAN, Writer
Sat Aug 28, 2004
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&e=2&u=/ap/20040828/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq
BAGHDAD, Iraq - Shiite militants and U.S. forces battled throughout the Baghdad slum of Sadr City, and a mortar barrage slammed into a busy neighborhood in the capital in a new wave of violence Saturday that killed at least five people and wounded dozens of others.
U.S. warplanes and tanks later bombarded targets in Sunni stronghold of Fallujah, and U.S. forces exchanged gunfire with insurgents along the city's eastern outskirts and the main highway running to neighboring Jordan, witnesses said. The fighting left at least 14 people injured, hospital officials said.
The new violence came as residents of Najaf began digging out of the rubble and debris left by three weeks of fierce fighting between militants and U.S. forces in the holy city. The crisis ended Friday when the militants withdrew under a peace deal brokered by Iraq (news - web sites)'s most senior Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.
Iraqi police spread out across Najaf's devastated Old City on Saturday, patrolling in vehicles and on foot and taking over checkpoints that until recently were manned by followers of rebel Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. U.S. forces pulled back from the neighborhood, the site of much of the fighting.
"It's a joyful thing, the armed men have left Najaf and (neighboring) Kufa," interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi told al-Iraqiyah television Saturday.
Around the Imam Ali Shrine - which al-Sadr fighters surrendered Friday after weeks of using it as a stronghold - street cleaners in orange uniforms swept up debris, trash and rubble, loading it onto trucks. Shards of glass littered the streets, and burnt cars could be seen on the roads, cratered by bomb blasts. Some buildings were blackened by blasts. Others had big holes in them.
A delegation of five government ministers visited al-Sistani to thank him for his peace efforts. They also visited the shrine.
"The shrine inside is cleaned up," Minister of State Qassim Dawoud said. "We hope to open the mosque to the public within 10 days."
Though Najaf remained calm, fighting flared in Sadr City, an al-Sadr stronghold in Baghdad named for the cleric's slain father, as militants armed with rifles and mortars fought with U.S. forces.
Sadr City has been the scene of repeated clashes in the 16 months since the fall of Saddam Hussein (news - web sites), but the violence intensified in recent weeks as the Najaf fighting spread to Shiite communities across the country.
Allawi blamed the continuing violence on renegade al-Sadr followers who do not want to honor the peace deal.
"I believe there are some people who are disobeying Muqtada al-Sadr's orders" to stop fighting, he told Al-Iraqiyah television.
U.S. soldiers in Humvees drove through the neighborhood with loudspeakers, telling people to stay inside because coalition forces were "cleaning the area of armed men," according to an Associated Press reporter at the scene.
Gunfire crackled in the streets as U.S. tanks rolled by and helicopters patrolled the sky. Militants stood in the streets calmly launching round after round of mortars at U.S. forces. Black smoke rose over the neighborhood. A blue sedan was peppered with dozens of bullet holes.
Saad al-Amili, a Health Ministry official, said three people were killed and 25 wounded in the skirmishes. A young boy was receiving an intravenous drip at the hospital, while a little girl in a pink dress grimaced at the large, bleeding wound in her leg.
Militants fired eight mortars at U.S. troops, but all of them missed and instead hit an electricity substation, cutting power to five or six blocks of Sadr City, U.S. Capt. Brian O'Malley of the 1st Brigade Combat Team, said. U.S. forces suffered no casualties.
Insurgents also fired a round of mortars into a crowded eastern Baghdad neighborhood, killing two boys washing cars in a street, said Interior Ministry spokesman Col. Adnan Abdul-Rahman. At least four mortar rounds landed within an hour in the same area, sending panicked pedestrians scrambling for safety, witnesses said.
The dead teenagers were taken to a nearby morgue, where tearful relatives pounded their chests in grief and others hugged and kissed the boy's bodies. At least six other people were injured, said Bashir Mohammed of Baghdad's al-Kindi hospital.
Another mortar round hit a fuel tank at the Golden Beach hotel, starting a fire that enveloped much of the building in flames. Yet another round fell near the Palestine Hotel, where foreign journalists and contractors stay, but did not explode.
Meanwhile, Iraqi militants kidnapped two Frenchmen to protest France's ban on students wearing Islamic head coverings in public schools, which goes into effect on Wednesday.
Al-Jazeera television said it had received a tape from a group calling itself the Islamic Army in Iraq showing several seconds of videotape with the two hostages. One of them said in poor Arabic, "We are being held by the Islamic Army in Iraq." The second hostage spoke French.
The kidnapping could not be independently confirmed. The French Foreign Ministry said it had no information.
The station's newsreader said the group described the French law banning religious apparel in public schools as "an aggression on the Islamic religion and personal freedoms" and gave the French government 48 hours to overturn the law, without mentioning any ultimatum.
The latest U.S. strikes in Fallujah, a hotbed of Sunni Muslim insurgents, struck the Askari neighborhood and an industrial area in the eastern section of the city. At least 14 people were injured, including eight children, said Dr. Ali Khamis of Fallujah General Hospital.
Witnesses said the air raids began at 7 p.m. and clashes continued for several hours. Smoke billowed into the air, and fire blazed in the night sky after the strikes.
Lt. Col. Thomas V. Johnson, a Marine spokesman, said U.S. troops were responding with tank and artillery after coming under fire. A blaze in the city was sparked by a strike that apparently hit a "significant weapons cache," he said.
On Friday, U.S. airstrikes targeted the same neighborhoods, killing three people, medical officials said. U.S. forces have repeatedly carried out airstrikes in Fallujah, 40 miles west of Baghdad, since Marines pulled back following a three-week siege in April aimed at rooting out Sunni Muslim insurgents.
In other violence:
_ Gunmen killed five policemen and injured two others in the center of the city of Baqouba, a hotbed of violence 35 miles northeast of Baghdad, said police Lt. Col. Salman Saadoon.
_ Police found the bodies of a slain Turkish truck driver and an Iraqi man on a highway near Beiji, 155 miles north of Baghdad, a Turkish diplomat said Saturday on condition of anonymity. It was not known who killed the men.
_ A civilian was killed and two other people were wounded, including an Iraqi police officer, when rebels fired a mortar round in Beiji on Friday, the U.S. military said.
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It's peace but the dead are everywhere
August 28, 2004
The Guardian
Luke Harding in Najaf
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1292748,00.html
In an alleyway next to Najaf's Imam Ali shrine, Commander Sayed Haider rested yesterday.
For more than three weeks he and his fellow fighters from the Mahdi army had battled against the vast firepower of the US military. Now was a time to reflect.
"We believe that we are right. This is our country. This is our city. We will not accept that people come and occupy our land," he said.
Nearby, fighters were lugging the corpse of a dead comrade out from the shattered ruins of a hotel; others were brewing tea.
Thousands of pilgrims, meanwhile, had begun flowing past the sandbags and metal barricades which until recently had blocked the path of American tanks.
"We didn't give in for one reason," Mr Haider explained, as his platoon posed for photos, still holding their rocket-propelled grenade launchers. "Our beliefs," he said.
In the end, the battle for Najaf that had plunged Iraq's interim government into crisis ended, to everyone's surprise and relief, peacefully yesterday.
On Thursday evening Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq's most important Shia leader, and Mr Haider's boss Moqtada al-Sadr, had agreed a deal under which Mr Sadr's Shia militia would vacate the Imam Ali shrine and go home. To some surprise, they did.
Initially not everyone was on message: as the pilgrims filed through into a narrow alleyway of bullet-ridden camera shops and colonnades, a sniper started firing. But by mid-morning, the mood had turned jolly.
"I've been here for five months. I've only seen my wife once a month during that time. I'm going back to Baghdad as soon as I've finished my breakfast," Abu al-Musawi said, waving a victory kebab. "It's peace," he added. Inside the shrine, dozens of Sadr supporters were dancing in a circle, waving placards of their leader; outside in the street a man was pushing a cart, carrying a mortar ineptly hidden under a blanket.
Asked whether he had now handed in his Kalashnikov to the Iraqi authorities, Abu Gaffar, a 25-year-old Mahdi army fighter, looked baffled. "It's my personal weapon. I can't give it to the police or the army. I'll keep it in a safe place," he promised.
Until yesterday, the market square leading to the shrine and the alleys around it had been the centre of vicious fighting between US marines and the Mahdi. Yesterday, across what was the frontline, the full scale of the devastation became clear. Tank rounds littered the road; the al-Dawha hotel had been blown apart; several of the tombs in Najaf's old cemetery had been pulverised. The souk was a tangle of metal debris; on the floor, unnoticed, lay a ripped poster of David Beckham.
Over in the old city it was the same story. In among the piles of rubbish lay a dead dog; from the seemingly empty houses came the smell of rotting flesh.
But what had it all meant?
Yesterday Abu Hussein Muhammad, a Najaf local, said he did not support Mr Sadr and was sceptical that peace would now descend on Iraq.
"We support Bush and the coalition forces. They allowed us to get rid of this monster," he said.
Mr Hussein said that the Mahdi army had slit the throat of one of his neighbours, a police officer. "These people are savages," he said.
There was stark evidence for his claim: in a building that served as Mr Sadr's Sharia court, just behind the shrine, police stumbled upon some of his army's apparent victims.
The Guardian counted 20 corpses - stinking, blackened and disfigured, on the floor beneath a judicial clock. It appeared they had been tortured. Given the state of the bodies, nobody could be sure. But other survivors were unequivocal in their praise for Mr Sadr. "Moqtada is the son of Iraq," Abu Ahmed, 28, said on his way to the shrine, his two-year-old son Ahmed perched on his shoulders clutching a multicoloured plastic Kalashnikov.
What kind of future did he envisage for Ahmed? "He'll join the Mahdi army," Mr Ahmed said. "I'll teach him to fight Americans."
By late morning the human shields who had spent days sleeping inside the Imam Ali shrine had left. The cleaners had arrived and were rolling up the carpets. A few golden tiles had fallen off one of the minarets, but otherwise the building appeared remarkably undamaged.
In an air-conditioned audience room, Mr Sadr's spokesman Sheikh Ahmed Shaibani explained the five-point peace plan signed by Mr Sadr and Mr Sistani.
Under the agreement the Mahdi army would leave Najaf and Kufa; the Iraqi police would take over security in both towns; and the Iraqi government would compensate those whose property was destroyed in the fighting.
The Americans would also pull out of both cities - something that yesterday had not happened.
Asked what the uprising had achieved, Mr Shaibani said it had proved that the al-Marjia'ya - the committee of Shia scholars headed by Mr Sistani - was the ultimate authority in Iraq.
He added: "The Mahdi army will never be disarmed. We have proved it is a religious army."
Tantalisingly, Mr Shaibani hinted that Mr Sadr might take up a post in Iraq's next government - provided next year's elections were "honest" and the Americans did not try to manipulate them.
The political parties would also create a "suitable environment" for a proper census to be carried out to facilitate elections and the "return of full sovereignty" to Iraq, he announced.
By late afternoon Iraqi troops were patrolling the old city for the first time; American soldiers were loafing some distance away on a traffic roundabout. Three tanks were sitting in a dusty car park.
Earlier, before going home, the Mahdi army fighters had been recounting their tales of martyrdom.
"In the last couple of hours before the ceasefire one of my friends died while he was firing his Kalashnikov at a helicopter," Jawad Abdul Khadi, 24, said. "Fortunately our brothers shot it down over the cemetery."
Mr Khadi claimed that during the entire battle only 61 of his "brothers" were killed - with only "one or two fighters" dying each day.
And what would happen now he was asked?
"There are still a lot of us left," he said.
-------- israel / palestine
Palestinians on Fast in Israeli Jails Struggle for Attention
August 28, 2004
By STEVEN ERLANGER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/28/international/middleeast/28hungerstrike.html?pagewanted=all&position=
BETHLEHEM, West Bank, Aug. 27 - Several thousand Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails were in their 13th day of a hunger strike on Friday, but their protest has so far not inspired great public support and Israeli officials insist that the effort is beginning to founder.
The Palestinians are looking for new ways to mobilize their cause, and the unusual protest by thousands of prisoners is supposed to be one of them. But the world is preoccupied with Iraq, and Palestinians themselves have had their attention diverted by internal political struggles, the Olympics and even a Palestinian heartthrob singer in the finals of an Arab-world contest called "Super Star."
Still, Issa Qaraqe, director of the Palestinian Prisoners Association, speaking here in a storefront tent covered with photographs of the city's prisoners and detainees, argued that the issue of the prisoners and their strike was "the central issue of Palestinian society, taking priority over everything else."
The strike, he said, "is a kind of referendum or political answer to the Israeli concept that deals with the prisoners only as terrorists and criminals - if the prisoners have such status among the people, you can't say that every Palestinian is a terrorist."
Mr. Qaraqe insisted that the strike was not fundamentally political, but was based on the urgent need to improve "deteriorating conditions," limit strip searches and ensure more contact with families. "The timing is not perfect," he said. "And unfortunately the international response is below our expectations."
With half of the estimated 8,000 prisoners on strike, he said, there should be more attention, "and after 13 days now their lives are in danger."
There has been no force-feeding of prisoners yet, he said, and the protest has been nonviolent. "But if, God forbid, a prisoner dies, tension will rise very quickly," he said, a concern shared by United Nations officials who asked for anonymity.
Israeli officials, however, say the strike has peaked and is waning. Ofer Lefler, of the Israeli Prisons Authority, said in an interview on Friday that 2,000 of the approximately 4,000 prisoners in civilian jails began the strike on Aug. 15, and that by Aug. 20 there were 3,000 striking.
But the number on Friday was down to 2,600, Mr. Lefler said. There is no way to independently confirm his figures, and the Israeli military has refused to comment on the situation of the some 4,000 Palestinians in military jails or detention centers.
Mr. Lefler said he could see the strike weakening. "The youngsters don't understand what it's all about," he said. "They haven't really had time to get used to prison life, and now they're expected to go on hunger strike. The older prisoners say the timing's bad - the Olympics, everyone's busy with 'Super Star' in Lebanon - and that they've achieved more in the past through negotiation."
Even a rally on Friday in Abu Dis, in front of the 25-foot-high concrete wall that is the separation barrier in that part of Jerusalem, was sparsely attended, with as many Israeli and foreign peace proponents and journalists as Palestinian citizens.
The Palestinian prime minister, Ahmed Qurei, spoke about the prisoners' plight, as did Arun Gandhi, the grandson of Gandhi, who said Israeli treatment of the prisoners and detainees was incompatible with its commitment to democracy and human rights.
In a terse statement issued Friday, the United Nations coordinator for the Middle East peace effort, Terje Roed-Larsen, urged Israel "to make every effort" to resolve its dispute with the prisoners and guarantee their health.
On Friday evening, the Palestinian Prisoners Association said about 800 Palestinian detainees in an Ashkelon prison had suspended their hunger strike until Monday after some of their demands had been met by the prison governor. But it was not clear what concessions were made, and the association said Palestinians held elsewhere remained on strike.
Mr. Lefler insisted that the Israeli government was making no concessions, not allowing hunger strikers, who have vowed to drink only water, to have tea, soup or cigarettes. His boss, the public security minister, Tzahi Hanegbi, has said he will not negotiate with the prisoners and is prepared to watch them die - a comment that was criticized in Israeli newspapers.
The Israelis have been trying to break the strike with psychological methods, like grilling meat in the cellblocks and putting civilian Israeli prisoners, who are not on hunger strike, among the Palestinians.
The prisoners are weighed every day, and their blood pressure and temperature are checked twice a day, Mr. Lefler said.
The International Committee of the Red Cross is making prison visits and meeting with families, but has said little in public. On Thursday, it said it would "strengthen its team of medical doctors" to step up monitoring of the prisoners' health.
Mr. Gandhi's visit is one way to draw attention to the strike, Palestinian leaders said. But his plea for nonviolent resistance is falling on stony ground, at least among the relatives of the prisoners.
Here, Rashideh Darawi, 44, displayed photographs of two of her sons, both in Israeli detention - Ziad, 27, who was a security officer for the Palestinian Authority and has served more than nine years in jail on charges of helping to kill Israelis, and Muhammad, 20, a member of the Palestinian National Guard, who was in administrative detention without charge for a year, then released for five months, before being arrested again a month ago.
Mrs. Darawi had another son, Salem, a tailor, who died at age 22, a suicide bomber in West Jerusalem who failed to kill anyone other than himself."They were all Fatah people," Mrs. Darawi said. "They believed in peace when there were hopes for peace. And when peace evaporated, they turned to Fatah."
Abdul Karim Hasan Zawahra, 62, whose son, Muhammad, 30, is in jail and who is trying to feed his daughter-in-law and three grandchildren, said: "What would you do? You rest in your home, and someone comes and attacks you. Well, the first time perhaps you do nothing and keep silent, but it happens again and again. And you begin to think of how to revenge yourself. We are in a state of war, not a state of peace."
-------- pakistan / india
Musharraf Ally Sworn in As Pakistan PM
By MATTHEW PENNINGTON
The Associated Press
Saturday, August 28, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A41451-2004Aug28.html
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - Pakistan's economic czar Shaukat Aziz was sworn in as prime minister Saturday and said his government's greatest challenge would be combatting terrorism and maintaining law and order.
Aziz also promised to modernize the armed forces, reorganize the law enforcement and judicial systems and tackle the endemic poverty and unemployment.
"Our biggest challenge is to improve peace and security in the country, especially the situation created by terrorism," he told lawmakers.
Aziz, 55, is a close ally of President Gen. Pervez Musharraf, whose support of the U.S.-led war on terrorism and military campaigns against al-Qaida militants along the Afghan border have stoked anger among Islamic militants.
Pakistan has been hit by a wave of terrorist attacks this year, and Aziz himself was targeted in an assassination attempt July 30 while campaigning. He was unhurt but nine others were killed.
Aziz was elected by parliament on Friday despite a boycott by the opposition which condemned the process as undemocratic, claiming it was stage-managed by Musharraf who still holds the levers of power. The president can dissolve parliament or fire the prime minister.
The new Cabinet was to be announced on Tuesday or Wednesday, and Aziz was expected to retain the finance ministry portfolio that he has held since Musharraf took power in a bloodless coup in 1999.
Standing alongside Musharraf at the presidential palace, Aziz took the oath of office Saturday morning, and later won a confidence vote 191-0 in the 342-seat National Assembly, or lower house, where pro-Musharraf lawmakers hold a majority.
The opposition abstained from both Friday's election for the premiership and the confidence vote because their candidate, Javed Hashmi, was barred from attending.
Hashmi is serving a 23-year jail term for attempting to instigate an army rebellion. His supporters claim his conviction in April was politically motivated - Hashmi was one of Musharraf's staunchest critics.
Aziz replaces Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain, who stepped down this week after only two months in the post. Hussain, leader of the ruling party, was the shortest-serving prime minister in Pakistan's 57-year history.
He stepped in as caretaker prime minister when Zafarullah Khan Jamali, who reportedly fell out with Musharraf, resigned in June. The move gave Aziz, Musharraf's favored candidate, time to win a seat in the National Assembly - a requisite for any prime minister.
Aziz said the peaceful transfer of power was "indication that our democracy is maturing in Pakistan. It's the start of a new era to build a strong and vibrant Pakistan."
Analysts credit Aziz with helping revive Pakistan's economy in recent years, but say that because of Musharraf's domination, the change in prime ministers is not expected to alter key policies - the alliance with Washington and peace talks with rival India, for example.
Aziz said national defense was his government's top priority, and that it would modernize the army, air force and navy. "We will provide additional resources to meet all of their needs," he told lawmakers.
Defense spending already accounts for about a fifth of the government budget.
Aziz promised "further expertise" for the country's nuclear program, saying it has "central status for the defense of our country."
The nuclear program, developed as a deterrent against India's military might, was tainted earlier this year after Pakistan's top scientist confessed to selling sensitive nuclear technology to Iran, Libya and North Korea with official permission.
Aziz, who worked 30 years for Citibank before becoming finance minister, said his government would promote "economic diplomacy so that Pakistan gets market access, so that there are free trade agreements and investment is promoted."
-------- russia / chechnya
Explosive Suggests Terrorists Downed Plane, Russia Says
August 28, 2004
By STEVEN LEE MYERS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/28/international/europe/28russia.html?pagewanted=all&position=
MOSCOW, Aug. 27 - Russia's security service announced Friday that investigators had found traces of an explosive in the wreckage of one of the two passenger airliners that crashed simultaneously on Tuesday, and declared its downing a terrorist act.
The announcement came as an Islamic extremist group said its fighters had hijacked the two planes to avenge the deaths of Muslims in the war in Chechnya and elsewhere.
The evidence of an explosive aboard one of the planes, Sibir Airlines Flight 1047, is the strongest indication yet that deliberate acts, not human or mechanical errors as Russian officials initially suggested, were involved in the crashes, which killed a total of 89 people. If that is confirmed, as is now expected, the twin disasters would be the country's worst act of terrorism in the skies.
Officials said investigators were focusing attention on two women with Chechen names - one aboard each plane - as possible suicide bombers, raising the specter of an ominous new front in Russia's fight against terrorism.
In the last two years women known as "black widows" and said to be avenging the deaths of husbands, brothers or sons in Chechnya have been involved in some of the Russia's most lethal suicide attacks, including the bombing of a subway train in Moscow in February that killed at least 41 people. None have attacked the country's airliners before.
The chief spokesman for the Federal Security Service, Sergei N. Ignatchenko, said in a telephone interview that investigators continued to analyze traces of an explosive identified as hexogen to learn what kind of device brought down Flight 1047, a Tupolev-154 that crashed near the southern city of Rostov-on-Don with 46 people on board.
He said investigators had not found explosives on the second plane, Volga AviaExpress Flight 1303, which crashed about 100 miles south of Moscow, killing 43 people.
"Without a doubt hexogen is an indication of an explosion," he said. "The only question is what kind of form it was. Additional analysis is being conducted to determine where it was and what level, why it led to this and so forth."
The Web site of a group calling itself the Islambouli Brigades of Al Qaeda claimed responsibility for both crashes, though it described two hijackings and made no mention of any bombings, according to reports by The Associated Press in Cairo and Reuters in Dubai.
Such statements are impossible to verify independently, and Mr. Ignatchenko declined to discuss the veracity of the claim. All he would say about the group was that it had not previously been known to operate in Russia.
Earlier this month the group claimed to have carried out an attempt to assassinate Shaukat Aziz, Pakistan's prime minister-designate. The attack killed eight people but left Mr. Aziz unhurt.
The involvement of an extremist group believed to be behind an attack in Pakistan would be an ominous turn for Russia, linking terrorist attacks here to the shadowy networks of terrorists loosely tied to Al Qaeda that have carried out attacks around the world.
The Web site threatened new attacks in Russia, citing the war in Chechnya and what it called Russian involvement in other Muslim countries.
The latter might be a reference to the killing of Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev, a separatist leader and former Chechen president who died in February when a bomb exploded in his vehicle in the Persian Gulf emirate of Qatar. Russia denied involvement, but in June a court in Qatar convicted two Russian secret agents of Mr. Yandarbiyev's murder.
"Russia's slaughter of Muslims is still continuing and will not stop except for a bloody war," the statement on the Internet said, according to Reuters. "Our mujahedeen were able with God's help to deal a first strike, which will be followed by other operations in a campaign aimed at helping our Muslim brothers in Chechnya and other Muslim countries enduring Russia's atheism."
President Vladimir V. Putin, for a second day, did not address the crashes publicly, leaving it to security and transportation officials to make statements.
Russia has long placed blame for the continued fighting in Chechnya on international terrorism, something disputed by Chechnya's separatist leaders, who say they are fighting an indigenous struggle for independence. After the crashes, representatives of Aslan Maskhadov, who was president of Chechnya until Russian forces deposed him when the second war there began in 1999, denied any involvement.
The two airliners took off from Domodedovo International Airport, southwest of Moscow, both headed to cities in southern Russia. Transportation Minister Igor Y. Levitin disclosed Friday that an inspection at Domodedovo in May had uncovered violations of safety precautions for passengers and cargo, prompting demands for additional security equipment, according to the official Russian Information Agency.
Flight 1047, which was headed to Sochi on the Black Sea, sent two distress signals shortly before disappearing from radar, including one indicating a hijacking. Flight 1303, headed to Volgograd, sent no distress signals.
According to officials cited by Russian news agencies, two passengers - identified as S. Dzhebirkhanova and Amanta Nagayeva, both evidently Chechens - have drawn the scrutiny of investigators. Ms. Nagayeva, officially registered as a resident of Chechnya's capital, Grozny, bought a ticket an hour before Flight 1303 departed. Ms. Dzhebirkhanova is reported to have exchanged a ticket for a flight to Sochi a day later, on a much larger aircraft, for one on Flight 1047 on Tuesday night.
In previous terrorist incidents Russian officials have mistakenly identified Chechens as possible suspects, only to retract the allegations later. Mr. Ignatchenko declined to discuss the investigations of the two women.
He added, though, that investigators had identified "a circle of individuals" in the case of Flight 1047 who might be connected to that crash. He would not elaborate.
The disasters occurred only five days before Chechnya is to hold an election to replace President Akhmad Kadyrov, the Kremlin's handpicked politician who was killed in a bombing in Grozny in May. That has fueled speculation that the crashes, like other terrorist acts in Russia, were linked to the long, bloody conflict in Chechnya, now a decade old.
Mr. Ignatchenko cautioned against drawing an immediate link to the situation in Chechnya, suggesting that perhaps other motivations had been involved.
"We would not rush to say there is a Chechen link," he said, "because there is no evidence now."
--------
Russia Reports Evidence of Terror Attack
Explosive Found in Wreckage; Chechen Women Boarded Planes That Crashed
By Peter Baker
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, August 28, 2004; Page A20
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A40083-2004Aug27.html
MOSCOW, Aug. 27 -- The Russian government abruptly shifted gears Friday and concluded that at least one of the two planes that fell out of the sky almost simultaneously this week was blown up by terrorists, as a radical Islamic group claimed responsibility for the twin tragedies.
Investigators said they had discovered traces of a type of explosive previously used by Chechen bombers in the wreckage of a Tu-154 passenger jet that came apart in midair and plummeted to the countryside Tuesday night. Analysts were still studying fragments of the other plane, a Tu-134 airliner, which crashed about 500 miles away.
The discovery discredited the government's initial theory that human or mechanical error caused the crashes and renewed attention on Russia's war with separatist rebels in the restive southern region of Chechnya. Under the scenario being pieced together by Russian security services, a Chechen woman boarded each plane at a Moscow airport and triggered explosives in flight that brought down the jets within three minutes of each other, killing 90 people.
The crashes appeared to mark an escalation in a wave of terrorism that has unsettled countries around the world. For the first time since the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackings in the United States, terrorists apparently managed to infiltrate more than one plane in a coordinated attack, evading enhanced airport security.
The synchronized attacks, if carried out by Chechen separatists, would signal a change in tactics. Until now, the guerrillas have often struck soft targets, such as a subway cars, rock concerts and theaters, but never destroyed an airliner.
"They certainly wanted to demonstrate that they're very determined to continue their struggle with all possible means," said Sergei Arutyunov, a Chechnya scholar at Moscow's Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology. "Whether they really planned to use the planes as a 9/11 isn't clear, but it may have just been easier to blow them up."
The haunting echoes of the Sept. 11 attacks also raised questions about the involvement of outside Islamic fundamentalist groups. An extremist organization apparently affiliated with al Qaeda claimed responsibility for the Russian crashes on an Internet site, asserting that it had hijacked the planes in retaliation for what it called Russian brutality in Chechnya.
Officials said they could not determine the authenticity of the statement, which was signed in the name of the Islambouli Brigades. A group calling itself the Islambouli Brigades of al Qaeda claimed responsibility for an assassination attempt against Pakistan's prime minister-designate in July.
"Russia continues to slaughter the Muslims and will not stop unless a war starts where there will be bloodshed," the statement said, asserting that five attackers boarded each plane. "Our mujaheddin, thanks to God, were able to make the first strike, which will be followed by a series of other operations in a wave of support to our brothers, the Muslims of Chechnya and other Muslim areas that suffer the blasphemy of Russia."
In a cryptic addition, the statement said the attackers "succeeded despite the problems they faced at the beginning," a reference that was not explained.
Russia has linked the Chechen separatist movement to international terrorists, and Osama bin Laden has called the war in Chechnya a battlefield of a global holy war. But independent analysts have maintained that the Russian government exaggerates the relationship.
The government had been reluctant to tie the plane crashes to terrorism, a reticence critics attributed to an election Sunday in Chechnya in which the Kremlin wants to install its handpicked candidate to replace the region's former president, who was assassinated. But the weight of the evidence and universal criticism made it untenable to continue discounting terrorism.
At the crash site near the southern city of Rostov-on-Don, the Federal Security Service (FSB) said it had found traces of hexogen, a white crystalline powder also known as cyclonite or RDX. A powerful explosive often used by military forces, hexogen was also used in a series of apartment building bombings in 1999 blamed on Chechen separatists.
Russian investigators focused on two female Chechen passengers killed in the crashes whose families have not come forward to seek their remains. One was listed as S. Dzhebirkhanova on a passenger manifest for the Tu-154 that crashed near Rostov-on-Don, and the other was identified as Amanta Nagayeva, a passenger aboard the Tu-134 that fell in the Tula region about 100 miles south of Moscow.
Search crews in Tula found what they said they believed were Nagayeva's remains Friday, raising to 44 the number of people aboard the Tu-134 and the overall death toll to 90. Officials said part of her body was found in the tail section and other parts were found three miles away, suggesting she was at the center of an explosion.
Nagayeva was the last person to board the Tu-134, which was bound for Volgograd, buying her ticket just an hour before the flight. Dzhebirkhanova held a ticket for a different flight but switched hers at the airport at the last minute to the Tu-154, which was heading to the Black Sea resort of Sochi, according to Russian news accounts.
Security specialists said the two women or their accomplices possibly bribed someone to sneak their explosives on board. "It's not hard," said Sergei Goncharov, a former commander with the Alpha anti-terrorist commando forces. "The metal detectors will not detect it, and we can assume there was someone in security who was cooperating with them. Maybe they bought them off."
The Tu-154 sent out a distress signal and a hijacking alarm, but no voice communication, before it crashed, according to officials, while the Tu-134 issued no signals. Russian planes have general distress buttons in the cockpit as well as in the galley and elsewhere in the cabin. In the cockpit, behind locked, bulletproof doors, pilots can also send a hijack warning by punching in a special four-digit code.
A Russian pilot who regularly flies Tu-134 jets said he and his colleagues were told in training that as little as 400 grams of explosives would be enough to blow a hole the size of a soccer ball in the hull of the aircraft, causing violent decompression at the altitudes flown by those planes.
"If that happens, then it's very dangerous," said the pilot, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the situation. "A middle-aged man dies in two minutes maximum, and everyone becomes unconscious at once. That's why I think the crew didn't have any time to communicate anything to the ground."
--------
Explosives found in second Russian jet wreck
Hexogen was found in the fragments of the Tu-134 aircraft
Saturday 28 August 2004,
Aljazeera
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/D559E2AF-F69C-411D-850D-DDDAF1652ED9.htm
Explosives have been found in the wreckage of the second of two jets which have crashed almost simultaneously this week, Russia's FSB security service has said.
"Additional examination of the fragments of the Tu-134 aircraft which crashed on Tuesday ... has revealed traces of hexogen," an FSB spokesman said by telephone on Saturday.
The FSB said on Friday that hexogen, more widely known as RDX, had been found in the wreckage of the other plane which crashed on Tuesday in southern Russia.
Investigators had been pursuing leads linked to terrorism in the crashes before Sunday's election, certain to return a pro-Moscow president in Chechnya.
Interfax news agency quoted Sergei Ignatchenko, an FSB spokesman, as saying Russia was "studying international experience in fighting terrorism in air transport". He said Russia was examining the system used in Israel.
Tougher security
As the investigation proceeded and fragments of wreckage were removed from crash sites, Russia's transport minister toughened security measures and vowed to prevent any recurrence.
Igor Levitin said his concern was to ensure safe air travel. Safety measures, previously undertaken solely by airports, would now be shared with the Interior Ministry.
"We want to toughen all requirements in terms of cargo and baggage ... Passengers must be made to feel that everything is in order once they are seated in an aircraft"
Igor Levitin, Russia's transport minister "From today, they (Interior Ministry officials) are being included in teams conducting searches," Levitin, ordered by President Vladimir Putin to head a commission investigating the crashes, said in an interview.
"We want to toughen all requirements in terms of cargo and baggage ... Passengers must be made to feel that everything is in order once they are seated in an aircraft."
Authorities understood the crashes were "an extraordinary event ... We must look thoroughly into this to understand what happened and take measures to ensure it does not happen again."
Investigators have carefully avoided any suggestion that Chechen fighters were behind the crashes.
Speculation
But Russian media have speculated that two passengers, believed to be Chechen women, blew up the planes in the run-up to Sunday's election.
A Tu-134 aircraft crashed on a flight from Moscow to Volgograd, while a few minutes later a Tu-154 came down en route from the capital to the Black Sea resort of Sochi.
NTV television showed investigators wrapping up search operations on the Tu-134 crash site. Television also showed pallbearers in black passing through Volgograd streets with coffins draped in wreaths. Mourners were shown weeping at a funeral in Sochi.
Russian media said investigators were trying to determine whether two women with Chechen names were linked to the crashes. The daily Izvestia reported that the brother of one woman had been seized by Russian forces in Chechnya three years ago.
Denouncing the elections
Chechnya's Muslim fighters, who denounce the presidential election as a farce, have staged spectacular attacks to press their independence drive.
Moderate separatists accuse Russia's special forces of spreading misinformation and deny any connection with a group which claimed responsibility for the crashes on Friday.
Chechen Interior Minister Alu Alkhanov, backed by the Kremlin, is almost sure to win Sunday's poll, called to replace a president assassinated in May. He faces six obscure rivals.
Putin first secured election in 1999 by calling for tough policies against armed fighters. He sent Russian troops back to the region for the second time since the end of Soviet rule. Reuters
-------- spies
FBI probes DOD office
By RICHARD SALE,
August 28, 2004
(UPI)
http://about.upi.com/products/perspectives/UPI-20040824-102938-1916R
The FBI has intensified its investigation of senior members of what was formerly known as the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans on suspicion that one of them passed highly classified U.S. military information to the government of Israel, according to federal law enforcement officials.
In some cases, colleagues, former associates and members of other government agencies have been interviewed as many as four times by teams of FBI agents, FBI officials told United Press International.
Two of the people interviewed are Bill Luti, former chief of OSP, and Harold Rhode of the Near East/South Asia office, according to participants in the investigation.
The OSP, an intelligence unit, was set up by the No. 3 man in the Pentagon, Douglas Feith, undersecretary of defense for policy, according to retired Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, who was a staffer in the office from June 2002 through March 2003.
Luti, a former Navy captain, switched to the Pentagon from Vice President Richard Cheney's staff, according to a congressional investigative memo.
According to other congressional memos, Luti was made deputy undersecretary and reported directly to Feith.
Luti also presided over the NESA office that worked closely with OSP "with sometimes an interchangeable staff," according to one congressional memo described the OSP "as a loose group of acolytes and hired hands" for Cheney, and (Cheney's chief of staff) I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Feith -- all "performing a mixture of intelligence, planning and other unspecified operational duties in support of preordained policy."
According to Kwiatkowski, Luti was a "name-dropper, who often referred to deadlines and assignments coming from 'Scooter.'"
Pentagon spokesman, Lt. Col Chris Conway, told UPI that neither Luti nor Rhode had been interviewed or polygraphed by the FBI nor had their bosses alerted them that they were the subjects of an investigation.
A federal law enforcement official was not surprised. He said, "Any target of an investigation is the last person we would talk to. The fact that subjects haven't been approached is part of normal investigative procedure."
Rhode, another prominent official of the NESA office, also works for the Office of Net Assessment, Pentagon officials said.
According to one federal law enforcement official, Rhode and Luti and other OSP officials have been frequently mentioned in FBI interviews, "chiefly the nature and extent of his contacts with Israel," according to federal law enforcement officials.
A Pentagon spokesman said Rhode has been working for Net Assessment "for the last 10 years."
A former very senior CIA official told United Press International that Rhode recently had his security clearances lifted.
In an e-mail to UPI, Rhode denied this. "I have never had my security clearances revoked or canceled."
At least three former CIA officials told UPI that in 1998 Rhode had his clearances suspended, based on allegations he had given classified information to Israel.
In the same e-mail, Rhode denied this as well, adding: "Nor have I been informed that I am under any type of investigation."
Two former senior U.S. intelligence officials also stated that Rhode is on administrative leave.
However, Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. Chris Conway said answering the question about whether or not Rhode is on administrative leave would violate the privacy act and therefore had no comment.
The NESA/OSP office was located on the fourth floor of the Pentagon, D ring, 7th corridor, according to Kwiatkowski, the former staffer.
According to one former senior U.S. intelligence official who maintained excellent contacts with serving U.S. intelligence officials in the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad, "Rhode practically lived out of (Ahmad) Chalabi's office."
This same source quoted the intelligence official with the CPA as saying, "Rhode was observed by CIA operatives as being constantly on his cell phone to Israel," and that the information that the intelligence officials overheard him passing to Israel was "mind-boggling," this source said.
It dealt with U.S. plans, military deployments, political projects, discussion of Iraq assets, and a host of other sensitive topics, the former senior U.S. intelligence official said.
Other members of OSP are also under scrutiny, but federal law enforcement officials declined to confirm additional names furnished them by UPI. Pentagon spokesman Conway said, "We have no knowledge of any probe of particular OSP members."
Rhode is a close member of an inner circle of senior Bush officials who in the past have had skirmishes with the FBI over allegations that they provided classified information to Israel, several serving and former U.S. intelligence officials said.
FBI spokesman, Bill Carter said, "It has been our long-standing policy not to comment on matters of this type or to confirm or deny the existence of any investigation."
A great many examples of this was substantiated by Stephen Green, a highly respected author of two books on U.S.-Israeli relations, who, in a February article in Counterpunch, noted that the Pentagon finally downgraded Ledeen's security clearances from Top Secret-SCI to Secret in the mid-1980s, after an earlier boss, Noel Koch, the Principal Assistant Secretary for International Security Affairs, had urged the FBI to begin a probe of Ledeen, then a consultant on terrorism, for passing classified materials to a foreign country, believed to be Israel. (Green notes that Ledeen "was carried in Agency files as an agent of influence of a foreign government: Israel," a fact he confirmed for UPI in an interview.
Former agency officials said they knew this to be accurate.
In 2001, Ledeen was hired by Feith to work on contract for the Office of Special Plans, which involved the handling of sensitive materials, Green said, a fact confirmed last week to UPI by congressional investigators.
Yet according to Green, in March 1983, Feith, then a Middle East analyst on the National Security Council, was fired by Judge William Clark, who had replaced Richard Allen as national security adviser, because Feith "had been the object of an inquiry into whether he had provided classified material to an official of the Israeli Embassy in Washington" and that the FBI "had opened an inquiry."
Former Counterterrorism Chief Vince Cannistraro confirmed that Feith was fired from the NSC for leaking classified data to Israel.
In 1982, Feith went to work for Pentagon official Richard Perle, according to Green and confirmed by U.S. intelligence sources.
Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, who an administration official described as having played a "large role in getting Feith" his current job, was working for the Arms Control and Disarmament agency in 1978 and was the subject of an investigation that alleged he had provided "a classified document on the proposed sale of U.S. weapons to an Arab government to an Israeli government official" via "an AIPAC intermediary," according to Green. The probe was eventually dropped.
In 1981, Wolfowitz, who was working as head of the State Department Policy Planning Staff, hired Ledeen as a Special Advisor, Green said.
----
Report: Suspect has ties to Wolfowitz, Feith
FBI looks at Pentagon worker in Israel spy probe
Friday, August 27, 2004
WASHINGTON (CNN)
http://www.cnn.com/2004/US/08/27/fbi.spy/index.html
The FBI has evidence that a person who has been working at high levels in the Pentagon may be a spy for Israel, senior U.S. officials confirmed to CNN on Friday.
The suspect could have been in a position to influence Bush administration policy toward Iran and Iraq, the senior official said.
However, another government official said the suspect is "not in a level to influence policy."
"He is an analyst in an undersecretary's office," this official said.
A senior Pentagon official confirmed to CNN that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld "had been made generally aware that the Justice Department had an investigation going on."
CBS News, which first reported the story, said the FBI had developed evidence against the suspect, including photographs and conversations recorded through wiretaps.
The network said the suspect has ties to two senior Pentagon officials: Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith.
Multiple sources have told CNN that the investigation is well along, and one government official described the evidence against the suspect as a "slam dunk case" and said "there has been no decision to prosecute the individual."
Officials said the suspect passed classified documents to Israel through the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a pro-Israel lobbying group.
But AIPAC released a statement late Friday calling the news reports "false and baseless."
The statement said AIPAC learned Friday that "the government is investigating an employee of the Department of Defense for possible violations in handling confidential information."
A designation of the material as confidential would indicate a much lower level of secrecy than if it had been designated as classified.
AIPAC said it "is cooperating fully" with government authorities, including providing documents and information and making staff members available for interviews. Sources told CNN that two AIPAC employees have been interviewed in the case by the FBI.
"Neither AIPAC nor any of its employees has violated any laws or rules, nor has AIPAC or its employees ever received information they believed was secret or classified," the statement said. "AIPAC is an American organization comprised of proud and loyal U.S. citizens committed to promoting American interests. We do not condone or tolerate any violation of any U.S. law or interests."
Washington insiders note that it is not unusual for friendly governments to have access to certain classified information, so even if the allegations are correct, not everyone involved may have thought they were involved in espionage. Still, one U.S. source is calling the case "a very serious matter."
David Siegel, a spokesman for the Israeli Embassy in Washington, denied the allegations.
"The United States is Israel's most cherished friend and ally. We have a strong, ongoing, working relationship at all levels, and in no way would Israel do anything to impair this relationship."
An Israeli official in Washington said the U.S. government has not contacted the Israelis about any such investigation.
Despite the close relationship between the two countries, espionage against the United States on behalf of Israel would not be without precedent. Former U.S. Navy intelligence analyst Jonathan Pollard is serving a life sentence for passing classified material to Israel.
The Justice Department, speaking for the FBI, refused to comment, saying only, "We cannot confirm or deny the report."
An FBI spokesman said the bureau has no comment on the CBS report.
CNN's David Ensor, Barbara Starr, Kelli Arena and Terry Frieden contributed to this report.
----
Pentagon rocked by Israeli spy case
Agents say the mole may have influenced Middle East policy
Saturday 28 August 2004,
Aljazeera
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/BB11E463-32A5-4516-AFB7-EC323FADC7C9.htm
The FBI is investigating an analyst, named by US media, who is suspected of passing secret documents about Iran to Tel Aviv.
The US Defence Department confirmed on Saturday that the FBI was questioning a high-placed official suspected of spying for Washington's close ally but did not name him.
The Washington Post's website, however, quoted two sources who identified the alleged spy as Larry Franklin, a desk officer in the Defence Department's Near East and South Asia Bureau.
The sources said Franklin worked at the Defence Intelligence Agency before moving to the Pentagon's policy branch three years ago and is nearing retirement.
The suspect is closely associated with two pro-Israeli senior White House officials: Under Secretary of Defence for Policy Douglas Feith, with whom the alleged spy works, and Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz.
The Post and the New York Times both quoted unnamed officials as saying the analyst was suspected of passing classified documents to Israel via the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the powerful pro-Israel lobby in Washington.
But the Israeli Embassy has denied the allegations. "They are completely false and outrageous," an embassy spokesman said.
Officials at AIPAC called the charges "baseless and false".
Embarrassing
The fact that the alleged spy is associated with Feith and Wolfowitz may prove embarrassing for the White House. Both officials, actively involved in planning the invasion of Iraq, have been accused of promoting the war to serve Israeli interests.
The suspect works for pro-Israel senior official Douglas Feith (L)
Before the invasion of Iraq in April 2003, Feith created a special intelligence unit that tried to prove Iraq's ties to al-Qaida - a link that has been almost universally discredited.
In 1996, Feith endorsed a policy document issued by a Jerusalem-based thinktank that called for the toppling of Saddam Hussein to further Israeli security interests.
The news was first broken by CBS News on Friday, which quoted federal agents saying the spy may have been in a position to influence the Bush administration policy on Iran and Iraq.
"The FBI has a full-fledged espionage investigation under way and is about to ... roll up someone agents believe has been spying not for an enemy but for Israel, from within the office of the secretary of defence," the network said.
Solid evidence
It said the FBI believed it had solid evidence that the suspected mole supplied Israel with classified material that included secret White House deliberations on Iran.
The network described the spy as "a trusted analyst" assigned to a unit within the defence department tasked with helping develop the Pentagon's Iraq policy.
If proved, this would not be the first case involving an Israeli spy in the US. In 1986, a navy analyst, Jonathan Pollard, was jailed after he was found guilty of spying for Israel.
Pollard is believed to have provided Israeli intelligence with names of important American agents inside the former Soviet Union and Russia.
A number of key CIA agents in the eastern bloc were allegedly executed as a result of Pollard's spying.
----
Israel Denies Spying Allegations
Aug 28, 2004
By PETER ENAV
Associated Press Writer
http://ap.washingtontimes.com/dynamic/stories/I/ISRAEL_SPY_PROBE?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
JERUSALEM (AP) -- Israeli officials on Saturday denied allegations that Israel spied on the United States to get information about Iran, despite deep concerns about Tehran's nuclear program.
U.S. law enforcement officials on Friday said the FBI was investigating whether a Pentagon analyst fed Israel secret materials about White House deliberations on Iranian policy.
The officials refused to identify the suspect, but said the person is an analyst in the office of Douglas J. Feith, undersecretary of defense for policy.
Feith, the No. 3 official in the Pentagon, has close ties to Israel. He prepared an important policy paper for former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu before Netanyahu's election in 1996, and is a former law partner of Marc Zell, an Israeli-American attorney with business interests in Iraq.
The allegations threaten to create tensions between Israel and its closest ally and revived bitter memories of the 1985 arrest of U.S. Navy analyst Jonathan Pollard, who is serving a life sentence for passing secrets to Israel. The Pollard affair continues to cloud ties between the U.S. and Israeli intelligence communities.
Yuval Steinitz, chairman of parliament's Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, said Saturday that lessons from the Pollard affair have restrained Israel from spying against Washington for two decades.
"Following the Pollard crisis 20 years ago, there was a decision not to spy against the U.S. government or its subsidiaries, and I am confident that this is the case," he said.
Steinitz said that despite Israel's deep concern about Iran's nuclear program it would not be tempted to break its ban on spying against the United States.
"Israel is very concerned ... that the ayatollahs will acquire nuclear weapons because this is an unpredictable regime with close network to terror organizations around the world," he said. "But if you think this might change our previous decision to spy on the U.S., the answer is no."
The U.S. investigation centers on whether the Pentagon analyst passed secrets about Bush administration policy on Iran to the main pro-Israeli lobbying group in Washington, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which then was said to have given the secrets to the Israeli government, one official said.
AIPAC denied the allegations, and David Siegel, spokesman for the Israeli Embassy in Washington called them "completely false and outrageous."
In recent months, Israeli officials have repeatedly expressed concerns about Iran's nuclear ambitions. Last month, military Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Moshe Yaalon accused Iran of developing nuclear weapons in violation of promises to the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency.
"We have to pay serious attention to Iran's intention to arm itself with nuclear capabilities. This should not only concern Israel, but all the countries of the free world," Yaalon said.
His remarks, along with warnings from other Israeli security officials, have raised fears in Tehran that Israel was contemplating a pre-emptive strike against Iranian facilities, much as it had done in 1981 when its air force bombed an Iraqi nuclear reactor near Baghdad while Iraq was at war with Iran.
Last week, Iran threatened to destroy Israel's Dimona nuclear reactor if the Jewish state were to attack Iran's nuclear facilities.
----
Bush signs intelligence orders
August 28, 2004
By Joseph Curl
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20040828-120756-6596r.htm
President Bush yesterday signed executive orders to expand the power of the CIA director and to create a new National Counterterrorism Center that will enhance information sharing among intelligence agencies.
Following through on his pledge to swiftly enact recommendations made by the bipartisan September 11 commission, the president temporarily granted to the CIA director many of the functions of a commission-proposed national intelligence director, who would oversee all 15 of the nation's intelligence agencies.
"We're now reforming our intelligence service so we can get better intelligence and share the intelligence better to disrupt terrorist plots," the president said in a Miami speech late yesterday. "We've got a lot of work to do."
"But I just want to warn you: Reform isn't easy in Washington. There's a lot of entrenched interests up there. A lot of people say, they like the status quo. It's not enough to advocate reform. You've got to be able to get the job done."
White House spokesman Scott McClellan said the president's action grants only interim authority for the director of central intelligence.
"Until the national intelligence director is created by Congress, we want to make sure that we have an interim structure in place to oversee some of these steps that we are taking," he said.
The move will give the CIA director temporary authority over budgetary issues at the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Reconnaissance Office, a senior administration official said yesterday.
Mr. Bush signed another executive order yesterday to create a new National Counterterrorism Center (NCC) tasked with enhancing information sharing among intelligence agencies.
That order says the center will "serve as the primary organization in the United States government for analyzing and integrating all intelligence possessed or acquired by the United States government pertaining to terrorism and counterterrorism."
The CIA director - whom the order designates as the president's principal adviser on intelligence matters - will appoint the NCC director, with the approval of the president, and oversee the new agency.
Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, the Democratic presidential candidate, immediately criticized the president's actions. He said the White House has come to the table on changes to national security "dragging and kicking" each time.
"Now they say they're willing to embrace a director of national intelligence, but they're not really willing to embrace it because they won't give him budget authority," he said.
Vice-presidential candidate Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina said the president "is finally acknowledging that we have failed to enact the intelligence reform needed to keep our country safe."
"Expanding the powers of the existing director of central intelligence is a far cry from creating a true national intelligence director with real control over personnel and budgets," he said.
Both are wrong, according to a senior White House official, who said the CIA director would have authority to set national intelligence priorities over the objections of Cabinet-level officials such as the defense secretary and would have new powers to decide the U.S. intelligence community's $40 billion annual budget.
Another executive order issued by Mr. Bush yesterday establishes a presidential board on safeguarding Americans' civil liberties. The president also issued two directives: one calling for the establishment of a governmentwide standard for identifying federal employees and contractors with access to government facilities; and the other strengthening the government's procedures for screening databases for suspected terrorists.
The president was under pressure to move quickly on the most pressing of 40 recommendations made by the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, which detailed events surrounding the attacks of September 11, and issued a report criticizing U.S. intelligence. The expansive report laid out numerous failures by the intelligence community, especially its inability to share important information.
But Mr. Bush's moves yesterday address the two main recommendations: Creation of a strong national intelligence director and a unifying national counterterrorism center to handle intelligence.
According to the NCC executive order, the agency will:
•Concentrate analytical expertise on terrorism in one location.
•Assign strategic operational planning for counterterrorism activities.
•Serve as the central and shared knowledge bank on terrorists and international terror groups.
•Identify counterterrorism intelligence requirements.
•Assign operational responsibilities to lead agencies for counterterrorism activities.
The moves will "improve our ability to find, track and stop terrorists," Mr. McClellan said.
In order to create a new national intelligence director, Congress will have to amend the National Security Act of 1947 that created the CIA, the National Security Council and the Defense Department at the outset of the Cold War.
Until then, the expanded powers will be wielded by acting CIA Director John E. McLaughlin.
Mr. Bush has nominated former House intelligence chief Rep. Porter J. Goss, Florida Republican, as CIA director to replace George J. Tenet, who resigned last month after lapses involving Iraq and September 11. Mr. Goss will face confirmation hearings before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence early next month.
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FBI Probe Targets Pentagon
Official Analyst Allegedly Gave Data to Israel
By Bradley Graham and Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, August 28, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A40004-2004Aug27.html
The FBI is investigating a mid-level Pentagon official who specializes in Iranian affairs for allegedly passing classified information to Israel, and arrests in the case could come as early as next week, officials at the Pentagon and other government agencies said last night.
The name of the person under investigation was not officially released, but two sources identified him as Larry Franklin. He was described as a desk officer in the Pentagon's Near East and South Asia Bureau, one of six regional policy sections. Franklin worked at the Defense Intelligence Agency before moving to the Pentagon's policy branch three years ago and is nearing retirement, the officials said. Franklin could not be located for comment last night.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and top Pentagon lawyers were told of the investigation some time ago.
One government official familiar with the investigation said it is not yet clear whether the case will rise to the level of espionage or end up involving lesser charges such as improper disclosure or mishandling of classified information.
The investigation has been underway for some months. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and top Pentagon lawyers were informed of it some time ago, officials said. But many other senior Pentagon officials expressed surprise at the news when it was first reported last night on CBS.
Several Pentagon officials sought to play down Franklin's role in policymaking, saying that he was not in a position to have significant influence over U.S. policy.
"The Defense Department has been cooperating with the Department of Justice for an extended period of time," the Pentagon said in a statement last night. "It is the DOD's understanding that the investigation within DOD is very limited in its scope." Even so, the case is likely to attract intense attention because the official being investigated works under William J. Luti, deputy undersecretary of defense for Near East and South Asian Affairs. Luti oversaw the Pentagon's "Office of Special Plans," which conducted some early policy work for the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
That office is one of two Pentagon offices that Bush administration critics have claimed were set up by Defense Department hawks to bypass the CIA and other intelligence agencies, providing information that President Bush and others used to exaggerate the Iraqi threat.
The other office was run by a Luti superior, Douglas J. Feith, undersecretary of defense for policy, and was known as the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group. Feith reports to Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, who in turn reports to Rumsfeld.
Neither the House nor Senate intelligence committees, however, found support for allegations that the analysts in the offices collected their own intelligence, or that their information significantly shaped the case the administration made for going to war. A law enforcement official said that the information allegedly passed by Franklin went to Israel through the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a pro-Israel lobbying organization. The information was said to have been the draft of a presidential directive related to U.S. policies toward Iran.
In addition to Franklin, the FBI investigation is focusing on at least two employees at AIPAC, the law enforcement official said.
Last night, AIPAC vigorously denied any wrongdoing and said it is fully cooperating with the investigation.
"Any allegation of criminal conduct by the organization or its employees is baseless and false," spokesman Josh Block said in a written statement. "We would not condone or tolerate for a second any violation of U.S. law or interests." He said he had been traveling and so had no additional information on the situation.
Another AIPAC official said: "Our folks are pretty outraged about this. We've had these kinds of accusations before, and none of them has ever proven to be true."
David Siegel, spokesman for the Israeli Embassy, said: "We categorically deny these allegations. They are completely false and outrageous."
Israel is a close ally of the United States, but espionage investigations here involving its government are not unprecedented. In 1987, a U.S. Navy intelligence analyst, Jonathan J. Pollard, admitted to selling state secrets to Israel and was sentenced to life in prison.
Franklin's name surfaced in news reports last year that disclosed he and another Pentagon specialist on the Persian Gulf region had met secretly with Manucher Ghorbanifar, a discredited expatriate Iranian arms merchant who figured prominently in the Iran-contra scandal of the mid-1980s.
That meeting, according to Pentagon officials, took place in late 2001. It had been formally sanctioned by the U.S. government in response to an Iranian government offer to provide information relevant to the war on terrorism. Franklin and the other Pentagon official, Harold Rhode, met with the Iranians over three days in Italy. Ghorbanifar attended these meetings. Rumsfeld has said that the information received at the meetings led nowhere.
Staff writer Dan Eggen and researcher Alice Crites contributed to this report.
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Bush Gives CIA Director More Power
By Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, August 28, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A39822-2004Aug27.html
President Bush signed executive orders and directives yesterday bolstering the authority of the CIA director over the nation's intelligence programs and budgets, signaling a renewed effort by the White House to shape the national security debate roiling Congress and the presidential campaign.
The White House characterized the changes as an interim step toward the naming of a national intelligence director, which must be done by legislation, and the administration signaled that it is prepared to move closer than previously indicated to the far-reaching recommendations of the Sept. 11 commission.
In its best-selling report, released last month, the bipartisan panel advocated naming an intelligence director with broad powers to shape budgets and make personnel decisions across the government. Bush had previously endorsed such a position in name but had not indicated how much authority the person would have and disagreed that the director should work alongside the president.
White House spokesman Scott McClellan said the changes will "improve our ability to find, track and stop terrorists."
But Sen. John Edwards (N.C.), the Democratic vice presidential candidate, characterized the moves as an acknowledgment that Bush has "failed to enact the intelligence reform needed to keep our country safe."
"The proposal announced today does not get the job done," Edwards said in a statement. "Expanding the powers of the existing director of central intelligence is a far cry from creating a true national intelligence director with real control over personnel and budgets."
Among other things, the orders released publicly yesterday give the CIA director more direct control over the intelligence budgets of other departments, including defense. The orders give the CIA chief the ability to transfer funds between agencies or to halt spending that is not consistent with national security priorities.
The change is a blow to the Defense Department and a major boost for the embattled CIA, which is currently run by an acting director and has faced intense criticism in recent months for its handling of intelligence related to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and the Iraq war. The head of the Senate intelligence committee, Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), proposed legislation earlier this week to dismantle the agency.
Under Bush's interim plans, the acting CIA director, John E. McLaughlin, who succeeded Director George J. Tenet, would have the power to approve or disapprove of items in the budgets of all 15 intelligence agencies, including a vast array of programs overseen by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. The Pentagon controls about 80 percent of the nation's estimated $40 billion intelligence budget. Bush has nominated Rep. Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.) to take the CIA post permanently.
Bush's orders yesterday also created a national counterterrorism center to oversee anti-terrorism efforts at home and abroad, called for devising standards "for secure and reliable forms of identification" for federal workers and contractors, and created a board within the Justice Department to monitor government laws and policies for civil liberties violations.
The orders, which amounted to an administration endorsement of many of the Sept. 11 commission's key recommendations, came on the same day that a leading Senate Republican issued some of the strongest criticism to date of the panel's proposals.
Sen. Ted Stevens (Alaska), chairman of the Appropriations Committee and the senior Republican in the Senate, said the commission failed to adequately take into account the organization changes and improved coordination between intelligence agencies since the 2001 attacks.
"I don't see how it would be anything but a step backward to approve the 9/11 report," Stevens told reporters. "We need more consideration of the 9/11 report. I would hate to see it rushed to judgment."
He added that there had been "fantastic change" since Sept. 11, 2001, largely because "the walls are down" between agencies.
The leaders of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, which is spearheading intelligence legislation in the Senate, also issued a statement playing down the importance of Bush's orders. Chairman Susan Collins (R-Maine) and ranking Democratic member Joseph I. Lieberman (Conn.) said the changes were "important steps forward" but "are only steps and ultimately will not be able to substitute for the legislation we hope to move in a bipartisan fashion" by Oct. 1.
A senior White House official who briefed reporters declined to specify how much further the administration would go in giving a national intelligence director budget and personnel authority, which is likely to be strongly resisted by Rumsfeld and other department heads. Bush will support giving the director "all the power they need," said the official, who cannot be identified under the terms of a conference call with reporters.
In addition to increasing the power of the CIA director, Bush signed orders establishing a counterterrorism center that would encompass the duties of other entities formed since the 2001 attacks, including the CIA-run Terrorist Threat Integration Center. Other orders set guidelines for improved intelligence sharing among agencies.
Staff writer Dan Morgan contributed to this report.
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Bush Order Extends C.I.A. Director's Reach
August 28, 2004
By DOUGLAS JEHL
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/28/politics/28intel.html
WASHINGTON, Aug. 27 - President Bush issued a new order on Friday enhancing the powers of the director of central intelligence, but the White House said that new legislation was still needed to establish the kind of strong national intelligence director recommended by the independent Sept. 11 commission.
The move, along with a separate order to establish a new national counterterrorism center, was described by the White House as "a down payment'' toward the more extensive overhaul recommended by the commission, whose terms are now the subject of a debate on Capitol Hill.
A senior White House official called the moves a strong signal that Mr. Bush wanted the existing head of the Central Intelligence Agency, as an interim measure, to take the lead in overseeing all of the country's 15 intelligence agencies, along the lines envisioned for a future national intelligence chief.
The official said the order would give the existing intelligence chief limited new authorities in determining the budget of national-level intelligence programs.
But Congressional Democrats called on the White House to go further by endorsing a recommendation by the Sept. 11 commission that any new national intelligence director established by Congress be given hiring, firing and budgetary authority over all the intelligence agencies.
"At the end of the day, Congress is going to have to enact comprehensive reform, and we need real leadership from the president to get it done,'' said Senator John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee.
"Will the president rise to the challenge and override turf battles to support a national intelligence director with true budget authority over the entire intelligence community?'' Mr. Rockefeller asked in a statement. "That remains an open question."
The White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, would say only that Mr. Bush would work with Congress to make sure that the proposed national intelligence director had enough authority over spending and hiring and firing "so they can do the job and do it effectively.''
The moves were among four executive orders and two presidential directives issued by the White House on Friday to promote an intelligence overhaul, as Mr. Bush promised early this month in response to the recommendations issued by the Sept. 11 commission. Mr. McClellan said the moves would "improve our ability to find, track and stop terrorists.''
Nevertheless, Senator John Edwards of North Carolina, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, said the moves would "fall short" of what's needed to enact "meaningful intelligence reform."
"The proposal announced today does not get the job done," Mr. Edwards said in a statement issued Friday. "Expanding the powers of the existing director of central intelligence is a far cry from creating a true national intelligence director with real control over personnel and budgets."
In a conference call with reporters, a senior White House official described Mr. Bush as having "strained the limits of his executive authority'' in his effort to strengthen the powers of the current intelligence chief to the greatest extent possible under existing law. But when asked to point specifically to new authority granted to a director of central intelligence under the order, the White House official cited only a change that would allow the intelligence chief to "determine'' the intelligence budget, in addition to his old powers to "develop and present'' it to the president.
Under the National Security Act of 1947, the director of central intelligence has always had the authority to coordinate activities of other intelligence agencies, such as the National Security Agency and National Reconnaissance Office, even though they are part of the Pentagon. The order issued by Mr. Bush amends in part Executive Order 12333, issued by President Ronald Reagan in 1981.
A White House official made clear that one purpose of the orders was to reinforce powers that the intelligence chief has under law, but has not always exercised. "What it does is it states the president's clear intention that the D.C.I. execute his full authority,'' the official said.
The other two executive orders issued by Mr. Bush on Friday would establish a "President's Board on Safeguarding Americans' Civil Liberties,'' to provide advice in an arena that has the potential to conflict with aggressive counterterrorism efforts, and would promote the sharing of information about terrorism among government agencies.
Hospitals Called Possible Targets
WASHINGTON, Aug. 27 (AP) - Al Qaeda terrorists looking for a target in the United States might try to attack a Veterans Affairs hospital rather than a base or other high-security installation, according to a bulletin circulated Thursday by the F.B.I. and the Homeland Security Department to law enforcement agencies nationwide.
The authorities said they had no credible intelligence about a specific threat against such hospitals, but the bulletin said there had been persistent reports of suspicious activity at medical facilities across the nation.
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Pentagon Official Suspected of Giving U.S. Secrets to Israel
August 28, 2004
By JAMES RISEN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/28/politics/28spy.html?pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, Aug. 27 - The F.B.I. is investigating a Pentagon official on suspicion of passing secrets to Israel, government officials said Friday.
The espionage investigation has focused on an official who works in the office of Douglas Feith, the under secretary of defense for policy, officials who have been briefed about the investigation said. The F.B.I. has gathered evidence that the official passed classified policy documents to officials at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a major pro-Israeli lobbying group, which in turn provided the information to Israeli intelligence, the officials said.
The bureau has evidence that the Pentagon official has given the Israelis a sensitive report about American policy toward Iran, along with other materials, the officials said.
Several government officials identified the official who was under investigation, but he could not be immediately reached for comment about the accusations.
Neither the official under suspicion nor anyone else associated with the case has been arrested, the officials said. Government officials suggested Friday that investigators were seeking the cooperation of the Pentagon official being investigated.
Justice Department officials declined to comment on the matter.A spokesman for the Israeli Embassy, David Siegel, denied the accusations of espionage. "They are completely false and outrageous," he said.
"The United States is Israel's most cherished friend and ally," Mr. Siegel said. "We have a strong ongoing relationship at all levels, and in no way would Israel do anything to impair this relationship."
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee also denied any wrongdoing. The organization said in a statement: "Any allegation of criminal conduct by the organization or its employees is baseless and false." The group added, "We are fully cooperating with the governmental authorities and will continue to do so."
The F.B.I. inquiry has been under way for at least a year and has been one of the bureau's most sensitive spy cases in years, officials said. One official said that the suspected involvement of people working at a major pro-Israeli lobbying organization led the Justice Department to move cautiously.
The fact that the official under investigation works for Mr. Feith has also made the case politically sensitive for the Bush administration.
Before the war in Iraq, Mr. Feith created a special intelligence unit that sought to build a case for Iraq's ties to Al Qaeda, an effort that has since been heavily criticized by American intelligence professionals as an effort to justify the war.
Mr. Feith has also long been known as a major supporter of Israel, and while he was out of government in 1996 signed a paper, titled "A Clean Break," issued by a Jerusalem-based policy group that called for the toppling of Saddam Hussein in order to enhance Israeli security. Before he came to the Pentagon, Mr. Feith was also a partner in a law firm with L. Marc Zell, a lawyer with a firm now based in Israel.
In a statement released Friday night, the Pentagon said that the Department of Defense "has been cooperating fully with the Department of Justice on this matter for an extended period of time."
"The investigation involves a single individual at D.O.D. at the desk officer level, who was not in a position to have significant influence over U.S. policy," the statement continued. "Nor could a foreign power be in a position to influence U.S. policy through this individual. To the best of D.O.D.'s knowledge, the investigation does not target any other D.O.D. individuals.''
One United States official said that he did not know why the desk officer would have passed on the information and that he could not assess the potential damage. "He had a certain expertise and had access to things, but he wasn't a policymaker," the official said.
Some of the classified information that investigators suspect was passed to Israel dealt with sensitive discussions about the United States' position toward Iran, officials said.
As a result, the investigation is likely to give rise to questions about whether Israel may have used the information to influence American policy in the Middle East.
The Pentagon analyst who officials said was under suspicion was one of two department officials who traveled to Paris for secret meetings with Iranian dissidents, including Manucher Ghorbanifar, an arms dealer. Mr. Ghorbanifar was a central figure in the Iran-contra affair in the 1980's, in which the United States government secretly sold arms to Iran in exchange for the release of American hostages in Lebanon and to finance the fighters, known as contras, opposing the Sandinista government in Nicaragua.
The secret meetings were first held in Rome in December 2001, were approved by senior Pentagon officials and were originally brokered by Michael Ledeen, a conservative analyst at the Washington-based American Enterprise Institute who has a longstanding interest in Iranian affairs.It was not clear whether the espionage investigation was directly related to the meetings with Mr. Ghorbanifar. Nor was there immediate evidence of whether money had changed hands in exchange for classified information.
American policy towards Iran is now of critical importance to Israel, which is increasingly concerned by evidence that Tehran has accelerated its program to develop a nuclear weapon. The Bush Administration has become concerned that Israel might move militarily against Iran's nuclear complex.
American counterintelligence officials say that Israeli espionage cases are difficult to investigate, because they involve an important ally that enjoys broad political influence in Washington. Several officials said that a number of espionage investigations involving Israel had been dropped or suppressed in the past in the face of political pressure. The last major Israeli spy case to become public involved Jonathan Pollard, a Naval intelligence analyst who was arrested in 1985 for passing large volumes of classified material to his Israeli intelligence handlers. He was sentenced to life in prison, and over the years, Israeli officials have lobbied American presidents to try to win his release.
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Israel at Center of Spying Probe
Aug 28, 2004
Los Angeles Times
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=2026&ncid=2026&e=1&u=/latimests/20040828/ts_latimes/israelatcenterofspyingprobe
By Richard B. Schmitt and Mark Mazzetti Times Staff Writers
WASHINGTON - The Justice Department (news - web sites) has launched an espionage investigation into whether a top policy analyst working for the Pentagon's third-ranking official may have passed classified information to Israel through a powerful pro-Israeli lobbying group, sources familiar with the probe said Friday.
The investigation, being handled by the counterespionage division of the FBI, is said to focus on an incident last year in which the analyst allegedly turned over a presidential directive on U.S. policy toward Iran to two people affiliated with the Washington-based American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the sources said. Those two in turn may have given the information to Israel.
Officials are concerned because the directive that was transmitted was in draft form and still being debated by U.S. policymakers, possibly putting the Israeli government in a position to influence the final document, officials said. U.S. policy toward Iran is important for Israel, which is concerned about Iran's potential nuclear capabilities.
Moreover, investigators fear that the suspect - who works for Douglas J. Feith, chief policy advisor to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld - also may have been in a position to compromise government information about that country and the U.S. war effort.
The notion of a trusted ally such as Israel betraying the U.S. by taking secrets would be a major embarrassment for the Bush administration, especially coming just before the start of the Republican National Convention next week.
The sources said the Pentagon aide being scrutinized also has ties to Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, who, with Feith, was a key architect of U.S. Iraq (news - web sites) strategy. But the sources said there was no immediate evidence of information having been compromised.
The Pentagon late Friday played down the prominence of the official under investigation and the importance of the information that might have been conveyed to Israel.
"DOD has been cooperating fully with the Department of Justice (news - web sites) on this matter for an extended period of time," a Pentagon statement said. "The investigation involves a single individual at DOD at the desk officer level, who was not in a position to have significant influence over U.S. policy. Nor could a foreign power be in a position to influence U.S. policy through this individual. To the best of DOD's knowledge, the investigation does not target any other DOD individuals."
The probe, which has entailed FBI wiretaps and undercover surveillance and photography, was first reported Friday by CBS News. Justice Department officials declined to comment about the investigation, or on reports that an arrest or arrests were imminent.
The official under suspicion was described by senior Defense officials as a civilian employee and Iran specialist working at the Pentagon's office of Near East and South Asian Affairs. NESA is the office charged with setting the Pentagon's policy for the entire Middle East. Before going to work for Feith, the analyst worked for the Defense Intelligence Agency.
Since the Sept. 11 attacks, NESA has had the lead on war-planning for Afghanistan and Iraq, and for determining the Defense Department's positions on Iraq, Syria and other volatile spots throughout the region. The office is run by William J. Luti but falls ultimately under the purview of Feith.
Luti ran the Pentagon's secret Iraq war-planning shop known as the "Office of Special Plans" in late 2002 and 2003.
According to one senior Defense official: "This investigation has been going on for some time. We were notified of it a long time ago and have been working closely with the Justice Department."
Iran, which has generated international worry over its potential nuclear capability, has expressed concern in recent days that Israel or the United States may use warplanes to destroy its facilities. In response to perceived threats, Iran has boasted that its new generation of missiles could strike Israel.
The issue is further complicated by links between top civilians in the Pentagon and Iraqi politician Ahmad Chalabi. Chalabi, a longtime ally of Wolfowitz and Feith, has been investigated by American officials in connection with the transmittal of U.S. secrets to Iran.
The contents of the U.S. documents allegedly provided to Israel were not disclosed Friday.
The Israeli government strenuously denied any impropriety.
"We deny these allegations," said David Siegel, spokesman for the Israeli Embassy in Washington. "The United States is Israel's most cherished friend and ally. We have a strong ongoing relationship at all levels, and in no way would Israel do anything to impair this relationship."
AIPAC also firmly denied wrongdoing.
"Any allegation of criminal conduct by AIPAC or our employees is false and baseless," the organization said in a statement. "Neither AIPAC nor any of its employees has violated any laws or rules, nor has AIPAC or its employees ever received information they believed was secret or classified."
AIPAC, a large advocacy group, has been known to spend an average of $1 million a year lobbying in Washington, although it makes no campaign contributions in its own name.
"AIPAC is cooperating fully with the governmental authorities," the organization said in a statement. "It has provided documents and information to the government and has made staff available for interviews. We will continue to offer our full cooperation and are confident that the government will find absolutely no wrongdoing by our organization and its employees."
AIPAC is considered one of the capital's most astute and influential lobbying organizations, long maintaining ties with top figures in the U.S. government.
AIPAC "has and will continue to have discussions with policymakers at all levels of government," the group said in its statement, responding to reports about the investigation.
Allegations of improper sharing of classified material with Israel have cropped up over the years. But the only case of espionage was that of Jonathan Jay Pollard, a former U.S. Navy intelligence officer who pleaded guilty in 1986 to spying for Israel and was sentenced to life in prison.
The Pollard affair was a considerable source of political tension between the U.S. and Israel. Pollard, who was awarded Israeli citizenship in 1998, remains in a U.S. prison.
Few espionage cases have reached into the upper echelons of the Defense Department. The highest-profile cases in recent years involved former FBI agent Robert Hanssen - who was sentenced to life in prison in 2002 for accepting watches, diamonds and cash for spying for Russia - and Aldrich H. Ames, a former CIA counterintelligence official who pleaded guilty in 1994 to spying for the Soviet Union and was blamed for the deaths of several U.S. agents.
Within the military, retired Army Reserve Col. George Trofimoff was sentenced to life in prison in 2001 after he was convicted of spying for the Soviet Union and Russia, passing photos of U.S. documents to foreign agents.
And in 1985, retired Navy Warrant Officer John A. Walker Jr. pleaded guilty to passing secrets to the Soviet Union. His son, Navy Seaman Michael L. Walker, 22, also pleaded guilty to charges of spying for the Soviets. Two others were convicted in connection with the spying.
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FBI probes DOD office
UPI
8/28/04
By Richard Sale
http://www.majority.com/news/upi-spy.htm
The FBI has intensified its investigation of senior members of what was formerly known as the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans on suspicion that one of them passed highly classified U.S. military information to the government of Israel, according to federal law enforcement officials.
In some cases, colleagues, former associates and members of other government agencies have been interviewed as many as four times by teams of FBI agents, FBI officials told United Press International.
Two of the people interviewed are Bill Luti, former chief of OSP, and Harold Rhode of the Near East/South Asia office, according to participants in the investigation.
The OSP, an intelligence unit, was set up by the No. 3 man in the Pentagon, Douglas Feith, undersecretary of defense for policy, according to retired Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, who was a staffer in the office from June 2002 through March 2003.
Luti, a former Navy captain, switched to the Pentagon from Vice President Richard Cheney's staff, according to a congressional investigative memo.
According to other congressional memos, Luti was made deputy undersecretary and reported directly to Feith.
Luti also presided over the NESA office that worked closely with OSP "with sometimes an interchangeable staff," according to one congressional memo described the OSP "as a loose group of acolytes and hired hands" for Cheney, and (Cheney's chief of staff) I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Feith -- all "performing a mixture of intelligence, planning and other unspecified operational duties in support of preordained policy."
According to Kwiatkowski, Luti was a "name-dropper, who often referred to deadlines and assignments coming from 'Scooter.'"
Pentagon spokesman, Lt. Col Chris Conway, told UPI that neither Luti nor Rhode had been interviewed or polygraphed by the FBI nor had their bosses alerted them that they were the subjects of an investigation.
A federal law enforcement official was not surprised. He said, "Any target of an investigation is the last person we would talk to. The fact that subjects haven't been approached is part of normal investigative procedure."
Rhode, another prominent official of the NESA office, also works for the Office of Net Assessment, Pentagon officials said.
According to one federal law enforcement official, Rhode and Luti and other OSP officials have been frequently mentioned in FBI interviews, "chiefly the nature and extent of his contacts with Israel," according to federal law enforcement officials.
A Pentagon spokesman said Rhode has been working for Net Assessment "for the last 10 years."
A former very senior CIA official told United Press International that Rhode recently had his security clearances lifted.
In an e-mail to UPI, Rhode denied this. "I have never had my security clearances revoked or canceled."
At least three former CIA officials told UPI that in 1998 Rhode had his clearances suspended, based on allegations he had given classified information to Israel.
In the same e-mail, Rhode denied this as well, adding: "Nor have I been informed that I am under any type of investigation."
Two former senior U.S. intelligence officials also stated that Rhode is on administrative leave.
However, Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. Chris Conway said answering the question about whether or not Rhode is on administrative leave would violate the privacy act and therefore had no comment.
The NESA/OSP office was located on the fourth floor of the Pentagon, D ring, 7th corridor, according to Kwiatkowski, the former staffer.
According to one former senior U.S. intelligence official who maintained excellent contacts with serving U.S. intelligence officials in the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad, "Rhode practically lived out of (Ahmad) Chalabi's office."
This same source quoted the intelligence official with the CPA as saying, "Rhode was observed by CIA operatives as being constantly on his cell phone to Israel," and that the information that the intelligence officials overheard him passing to Israel was "mind-boggling," this source said.
It dealt with U.S. plans, military deployments, political projects, discussion of Iraq assets, and a host of other sensitive topics, the former senior U.S. intelligence official said.
Other members of OSP are also under scrutiny, but federal law enforcement officials declined to confirm additional names furnished them by UPI. Pentagon spokesman Conway said, "We have no knowledge of any probe of particular OSP members."
Rhode is a close member of an inner circle of senior Bush officials who in the past have had skirmishes with the FBI over allegations that they provided classified information to Israel, several serving and former U.S. intelligence officials said.
FBI spokesman, Bill Carter said, "It has been our long-standing policy not to comment on matters of this type or to confirm or deny the existence of any investigation."
A great many examples of this was substantiated by Stephen Green, a highly respected author of two books on U.S.-Israeli relations, who, in a February article in Counterpunch, noted that the Pentagon finally downgraded Ledeen's security clearances from Top Secret-SCI to Secret in the mid-1980s, after an earlier boss, Noel Koch, the Principal Assistant Secretary for International Security Affairs, had urged the FBI to begin a probe of Ledeen, then a consultant on terrorism, for passing classified materials to a foreign country, believed to be Israel. (Green notes that Ledeen "was carried in Agency files as an agent of influence of a foreign government: Israel," a fact he confirmed for UPI in an interview.
Former agency officials said they knew this to be accurate.
In 2001, Ledeen was hired by Feith to work on contract for the Office of Special Plans, which involved the handling of sensitive materials, Green said, a fact confirmed last week to UPI by congressional investigators.
Yet according to Green, in March 1983, Feith, then a Middle East analyst on the National Security Council, was fired by Judge William Clark, who had replaced Richard Allen as national security adviser, because Feith "had been the object of an inquiry into whether he had provided classified material to an official of the Israeli Embassy in Washington" and that the FBI "had opened an inquiry."
Former Counterterrorism Chief Vince Cannistraro confirmed that Feith was fired from the NSC for leaking classified data to Israel.
In 1982, Feith went to work for Pentagon official Richard Perle, according to Green and confirmed by U.S. intelligence sources.
Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, who an administration official described as having played a "large role in getting Feith" his current job, was working for the Arms Control and Disarmament agency in 1978 and was the subject of an investigation that alleged he had provided "a classified document on the proposed sale of U.S. weapons to an Arab government to an Israeli government official" via "an AIPAC intermediary," according to Green. The probe was eventually dropped.
In 1981, Wolfowitz, who was working as head of the State Department Policy Planning Staff, hired Ledeen as a Special Advisor, Green said.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- courts / tribunals
Judge Delays Hearing on N.Va. Detainee
Man Held in Hamas Probe; Exclusion of Public at Issue
By Eric Rich
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, August 28, 2004; Page A02
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A39025-2004Aug27.html
BALTIMORE, Aug. 27 -- A federal magistrate judge Friday excluded the public from a forthcoming detention hearing for an Annandale man who has been held as a witness in an investigation of the radical Palestinian group Hamas.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Paul W. Grimm, granting a government request, found that considerations surrounding the detention of Ismael Selim Elbarasse were "inextricably intertwined" with evidence derived from a secret grand jury proceeding in Chicago, where Elbarasse is sought for questioning.
Grimm spoke of the "difficult overlap" of detention hearings, traditionally conducted openly, and grand jury proceedings, which are closed by law. "Trying to make the two fit is trying to put a square peg in a round hole," Grimm said.
Elbarasse's detention hearing, scheduled for Friday, did not go forward, as Grimm instead heard the government argue that the hearing should be closed and attorneys for two newspapers argue that it should not. Fran Kessler, a chief deputy clerk, later said only that the hearing had been postponed at the request of the parties.
Elbarasse, 57, was named as an unindicted co-conspirator by the grand jury in Chicago. Authorities say Elbarasse was an assistant to Mousa Mohammed Abu Marzook, one of three men charged in an indictment unsealed in Chicago last week.
The indictment charges Marzook, deputy chief of Hamas's political wing, with conspiring to raise millions of dollars for Hamas, which the U.S. government considers a terrorist group for carrying out bombings, kidnappings and other attacks in Israel.
Elbarasse was arrested last Friday on a material witness warrant from Chicago after police said they saw his wife videotaping the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. In court filings, the FBI alleged that the two may have been scouting a potential terrorist target -- an assertion that Elbarasse's family has disputed and that one of his attorneys has called "trash."
No charges were filed in connection with the videotaping, but Elbarasse was subsequently held as a material witness. Elbarasse's public defender took no position on whether the detention hearing should be closed.
Elbarasse, who appeared to scrawl on a legal pad before the proceeding began, did not speak.
Attorneys for The Washington Post and the Baltimore Sun argued that the public has a right to observe the proceeding and that jailing a person who has not been charged with a crime is a matter of great public interest.
"Someone could simply disappear," said Mary R. Craig, the Sun's attorney, "and there is no public explanation of what happened."
The Post's attorney, Daniel H. Rosenthal, said that the government's burden was to overcome "a long historical tradition of openness" and that Grimm's task was to evaluate merely whether Elbarasse is a flight risk.
After the terror attacks of 2001, the secrecy surrounding detentions under the material witness statute drew legal challenges and condemnation from some quarters. One federal judge, Gladys Kessler of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, called the government's use of the material witness statute "deeply troubling" and questioned whether the witnesses were actually being held to testify before grand juries investigating terrorism, as the government has claimed.
Grimm's decision was consistent with rulings in other such cases, said Stephen A. Saltzburg, a professor at George Washington University Law School. "Judges are very unlikely in this day and age to second-guess" prosecution requests to close such hearings, said Saltzburg, a former official in the Justice Department.
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Terror Suspect Charged in Cuba
Reuters
Saturday, August 28, 2004; Page A02
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A39958-2004Aug27.html
GUANTANAMO BAY, Cuba, Aug. 27 -- A Sudanese man described as an al Qaeda paymaster was formally charged Friday with conspiring to commit terrorism.
Ibrahim Ahmed Mahmoud al Qosi was the last of four suspected al Qaeda fighters held at the U.S. military prison here to appear before a military commission this week for pretrial hearings on charges that carry a maximum penalty of life in prison.
Qosi, 44, wore a skullcap and stroked his beard during the brief hearing. He waived formal reading of the charges and did not enter a plea.
The hearing was cut short and rescheduled for early October because a conflicting assignment had prevented his military lawyer from preparing his case.
According to the charges, Qosi joined al Qaeda in 1989 while its leader, Osama bin Laden, lived in Sudan and became an accountant and money manager for the group. In Sudan and Pakistan, he distributed salaries and funds to buy explosives and weapons and signed checks on bin Laden's behalf, the government alleges.
From 1996 until his capture in December 2001, he allegedly served as a driver and bodyguard for bin Laden in Afghanistan.
President Bush authorized the military commissions to try foreign militants after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. This is the first time the United States has held such proceedings since the end of World War II.
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Yemenis sentenced over bombing
bbc
28 August, 2004
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/3607312.stm
A Yemeni court has sentenced 15 men on terror charges, including the bombing of the French Limburg tanker and a plan to kill the US ambassador to Yemen.
One of the defendants was sentenced to death while the other defendants received jail terms of up to 10 years.
The Limburg oil tanker was badly damaged in an attack, blamed on al-Qaeda, which took place off the Yemeni coast in October 2002.
The militants were also found guilty of detonating explosives at embassies.
Boycott
One of the men was found guilty of involvement in an attack on a helicopter carrying Texas-based Hunt Oil employees and detonating explosives at a civil aviation authority building.
The death sentence was handed down to a man who was found guilty of shooting dead an Yemeni policeman at a checkpoint in 2002.
The accused interrupted the summing up, shouting out "Fear God!" and "Lies!".
Most of their lawyers had boycotted the proceedings, which they said were unfair.
"These are illegal sentences because the lawyers were not given the chance to defend them," said the father of one of the defendants.
Yemen's co-operation with the US's "War on Terror" has led to the detention of hundreds of people who are suspected of having ties with al-Qaeda.
-------- homeland security / national intelligence
Mayor Cites Rise in Security Costs
August 28, 2004
By WINNIE HU
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/28/politics/campaign/28secure.html
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said yesterday that New York City's elaborate security preparations for the Republican National Convention would cost between $60 million and $70 million, about twice what city officials initially expected a year ago.
But the mayor said that much of that cost - about $50 million - would be covered by the federal government, leaving a final tab of between $10 million and $15 million for the city's taxpayers.
"We originally started out projecting that the cost of security would be about $25 million, and that would be borne by the taxpayers of New York City," Mr. Bloomberg said on his weekly radio program on WABC-AM. "That cost has, because of Madrid, multiplied dramatically," he said.
In March, train bombings in Spain killed 191 people.
"I think now it will probably be something - $60 million, $70 million, $60 million, $65 million - but we got $50 million, which we hadn't counted on from the federal government so the cost to the taxpayers of New York City will be $10 million or $15 million," Mr. Bloomberg said.
He said these security costs would also be offset by what he described as the "enormous economic boom" fueled by the convention.
The event is expected to draw as many as 50,000 people to New York City, including 5,000 Republican delegates and 15,000 journalists.
The Bloomberg administration has estimated that the four-day convention, which begins on Monday, will add about $265 million to the local economy.
--------
Government Warns of New Targets
August 28, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/28/politics/28terror.html
WASHINGTON, Aug. 27 - Al Qaeda terrorists looking for a target in the United States might try to attack a Veterans Affairs hospital rather than a base or other high-security installation, according to a bulletin circulated by the F.B.I. and the Homeland Security Department on Thursday to law enforcement agencies nationwide.
The authorities said they had no credible intelligence about a specific threat against such hospitals, but the bulletin said there had been persistent reports of suspicious activity at medical facilities across the nation. These included reports of "possible reconnaissance activities" this year at military medical installations in Bethesda, Md., and Aurora, Colo., said the bulletin, which was obtained on Friday by The Associated Press.
Later investigation of these two incidents uncovered no links to terrorism. Though the installations involved are not veterans hospitals, the bulletin urged police and security officials to pay special attention to such institutions.
--------
Waking Up to Security That Never Sleeps
Precautions for GOP Convention Send Ripples Through New Yorkers' Lives
By Michael Powell and Michelle Garcia
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, August 28, 2004; Page A05
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A39961-2004Aug27?language=printer
NEW YORK, Aug. 27 -- With streets blocked off and police blimps flying overhead, rifle-toting National Guardsmen striding through Grand Central Terminal and radiation detectors in place, this city all but bristles with security and anti-terrorist armament.
Police have doubled the number of undercover officers riding the buses and subways, and video cameras provide 24-hour feeds from bridges and tunnels. The federal government has cleared a seven-mile-radius airspace "frozen zone" over Madison Square Garden -- site of the Republican National Convention -- and a high-tech, 2,000-square-foot nerve center at police headquarters will hold representatives from 66 federal, state and city law enforcement agencies.
For months, federal officials have warned of the threat of an attempted terrorist strike before the Nov. 2 presidential election, with New York City and the Republican National Convention presenting prime targets. Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge insists none of this should rattle New Yorkers.
"Any attempts of a terrorist will be frustrated and repelled by multiple layers of security that they will encounter all around the city, and for that matter all around the region," Ridge said last week.
New York may have never been so well guarded. But some New Yorkers find the buildup to the GOP convention unsettling. In interviews, several dozen spoke of the disruptions caused by the phalanxes of police and National Guard troops, by protesters bent on civil disobedience, and by the roving security details assigned to Republican VIPs. Many residents, particularly immigrants, worry that they will spend a week as suspects in their city.
"People are afraid now," said Mohammad Razvi, an auxiliary police officer and executive director of a respected community group that serves Pakistani and Bangladeshi immigrants. "Whenever these terror warnings go up, they are like: 'Oh, no, are they going to pick on us again?' "
About half of those interviewed in recent weeks spoke of nagging fears of terrorist attacks. Some Manhattan families have decided to leave this week; others without the resources to get away say they will avoid Lower Manhattan.
Assistant Corporation Counsel Gail Donoghue argued the city's case in court when civil libertarians challenged the Police Department's authority to conduct random searches of demonstrators' bags. But she tends to cast a jaundiced eye on official assurances of personal safety.
"If someone's willing to die, they can always pull off an attack," she said. "I have to be here, unfortunately. But I'm definitely riding my bike that week. I view the subway as an unnecessary risk."
At 90th Street and Park Avenue, Carol Kamine-Brown paused to calculate the number of blocks between Madison Square Garden and her office, in case something happens. "Well, it's about 25 blocks -- I guess that's okay," she said. "But I have no intention, none, none, none, to go anywhere near the Garden. And I plan to ride the express bus in from Brooklyn next week instead of the subway."
Transit officials say that while there may be disruptions, subways, commuter trains and buses will run on regular schedules, although buses in Midtown will face some rerouting. Typically, ridership drops about 10 percent in the week before Labor Day, with many New Yorkers on vacation. Penn Station, which lies beneath Madison Square Garden, will be open, although only one of the six exits will remain open for commuters.
The streets immediately around the Garden will be closed frequently, particularly while the convention is in evening session. City officials say trucks serving the garment and flower districts will be allowed to pass, albeit at odd hours. Area business owners have, by and large, spoken of security as a necessary intrusion and have resigned themselves to long delays.
All this security comes at a high cost. Mayor Michael Bloomberg has acknowledged that the city will spend $65 million on security, about double his original estimate. And the city comptroller, William C. Thompson Jr., has estimated that disruptions to business and traffic and transit delays could push the total city tab to more than $300 million.
City officials have talked of security as a straightforward matter, suggesting that all New Yorkers should endorse the show of force during uncertain times. Bloomberg -- who has faced criticism for lobbying so hard to bring the convention to New York -- insisted that any disruption would be minor.
"The measures are going to strike the right balance between providing security without inconveniencing New Yorkers," he said. "New York City is being well protected on land, at sea and in the air."
But antiwar activists contend that such extensive security precautions carry a downside, perhaps scaring off some of the hundreds of thousands of potential protesters.
In these final days before the convention, the police have talked in nearly equal terms of preparing for terrorists and possibly violent protesters. They have thrown up a fenced outdoor pen on the far West Side of Manhattan to hold any overflow of people arrested in demonstrations.
The New York Daily News reported this week that unnamed "police intelligence sources" had warned that "50 of the country's leading anarchists" are coming to New York and that some had "histories of violent and disruptive tactics." The newspaper ran a fuzzy photo of one such man on its front cover, treatment usually reserved for al Qaeda suspects.
The man, Richard Picariello, is an antiwar organizer but is not affiliated with any anarchist group. Nor has any public official presented any evidence that anarchists plan more than sustained civil disobedience.
Civil disobedience and direct action are tactics planned by various other groups. Several protesters rappelled down the side of the Plaza Hotel on Friday and hung a large anti-Bush banner before they were arrested by police.
Police officials have issued permits for marches and demonstrations in every corner of Manhattan. But organizers worry that if there is trouble, police may not discriminate between the violent few and the many thousands engaged in peaceful protest.
"We see a lot of misinformation that's building up the hysteria," said Jamie Moran, a member of RNC Not Welcome, a collective that includes anarchists. "The police and some in the news media are attaching terrorist labels to us . . . making it look as if the anarchists are an organized crime syndicate."
In Brooklyn, along the stretch of grocery stores, Urdu video stores, sari shops and mosques known as Little Pakistan, the ramped-up security and presence of thousands of federal law enforcement officials evokes mixed emotions in many residents.
Two members of this Pakistani community died in the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center, so many share the fear of another attack . But federal immigration and FBI agents also interviewed and temporarily detained many members of this community in the months after those attacks. Hundreds were later deported for immigration violations. As a result, there is a lingering and palpable wariness about the enforcement power of a government on full alert.
At the recent Pakistan Day parade, organizers say that so many police lined the streets that some Pakistani Americans stayed away.
"People come into this office wanting to know whether they should come out" of their homes, said Razvi, the executive director of the Council of People's Organizations, which has an office on Coney Island Avenue. "I tell people to have their identification . . . but they are likely not going into the city next week."
--------
New York Secures Tunnels, Bridges for RNC
By DESMOND BUTLER
The Associated Press
Saturday, August 28, 2004; 11:25 AM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A41389-2004Aug28.html
NEW YORK - Vehicle inspections are routine at tunnels and bridges throughout the New York City these days. One recent morning, four police officers at the Queens-Midtown tunnel flagged down a white van in a stream of Manhattan-bound traffic. The driver jumped out and cheerfully opened the back. The officers looked inside, found nothing of interest and waved the van through the checkpoint.
Over the next hour, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority officers inspected about two dozen vehicles, most of them commercial vans and large trucks.
As New York prepares to open the Republican National Convention, cops are guarding the city's roadways, bridges, tunnels and ports. Some security measures were put in place after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, but inspections have increased ahead of the convention.
More than 1 million people travel the city's bridges and tunnels every day.
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, a state agency that manages public transportation and nine bridges and tunnels in the city, is deploying many of its 1,600 officers to monitor Manhattan-bound traffic. In addition, the federal government is helping with vehicle inspections.
The New York Police Department will restrict vehicles from an 18-square-block area around Madison Square Garden during the convention, compounding normal traffic delays into Manhattan.
Some checkpoints will have elevated ramps that allow visual inspection underneath a vehicle. Officers will use bomb-sniffing dogs and radiation detectors.
Preventing vehicle bombs is a priority.
"The chief concern is trucks," said Steve Coleman, spokesman for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, a bistate agency that manages many bridges, tunnels and shipping ports.
Commercial vehicles have been banned from traveling to lower Manhattan from New Jersey via the Holland Tunnel, and inspections may be intensified at points including the George Washington Bridge and the Lincoln Tunnel.
The agency on Friday demonstrated a new truck, equipped with radiological detection technology, that it has deployed at bridges and tunnels. Also being used are handheld devices that can detect radiation and explosives.
The Port Authority also is stepping up patrols and increasing the visibility of security at shipping facilities in the New York area with help from the Coast Guard and the Homeland Security Department.
Taxi drivers already are complaining.
"The convention will be bad for business," said Muzammil Moon, a cab driver for more than 10 years. "But we have to keep making a living, so I am going to work, but stay away from the West Side if I can."
Some commuters who drive into the city are altering their plans.
Ross Amarante, who lives in New Jersey, normally takes the Lincoln Tunnel into his office, five blocks from Madison Square Garden. His company, a clothing wholesaler, will hold its meetings in its New Jersey office as long as the GOP is in town.
"We have rescheduled all of our meetings out of New York next week," he said. "We don't want the headaches."
-------- immigration / refugees
Bosnian Refugee Accused of Lying For Immigration
By Jonathan Finer
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, August 28, 2004; Page A03
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A40116-2004Aug27.html
BOSTON, Aug. 27 -- Prosecutors here say a construction worker who lives in a suburb north of Boston was part of a military unit that executed hundreds of Muslim civilians in the former Yugoslavia during the conflict there in the 1990s.
Marko Boskic was arrested Wednesday at his home in Peabody, Mass., according to the office of U.S. Attorney Michael J. Sullivan. He was charged Thursday with two counts of making false statements on immigration forms to conceal his membership in the 10th Sabotage Detachment, a Serb military unit that carried out the slaughter near the Bosnian town of Srebrenica in July 1995.
If convicted, he faces a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison followed by three years of supervised release and a fine of $250,000 for each count. He also could be deported.
"Lying to gain safe harbor in the United States undermines the integrity of our immigration policies and will not be tolerated," Sullivan said in a statement. "We continue to aggressively pursue this investigation both here and abroad."
The Boston Globe reported Friday that Boskic is believed to be one of eight men who carried out orders to kill 1,200 unarmed men and boys near the village of Pilica, part of a wave of violence that claimed some 8,000 lives in just over a week. It is considered the largest-scale massacre of civilians in Europe since World War II.
But a spokeswoman for Sullivan's office said that so far Boskic, a 40-year-old Bosnian Croat, had not been identified as one of the killers.
According to an affidavit submitted by a federal investigator, Boskic entered the United States from Germany in April 2000 after seeking refugee status by claiming he had avoided military service.
"I didn't want to fight in an ethnic war against people I lived with," he wrote on an immigration form, according to the affidavit.
A soldier from the 10th Sabotage Detachment identified Boskic in a video of an awards ceremony for the unit. The video was provided by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, a U.N. organization that prosecutes war crimes, according to the affidavit.
Boskic's name came up last year during the war crimes trial of former Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic, when Drazen Erdemovic, who pleaded guilty to involvement in the killings at Pilica, identified Boskic as a participant.
Boskic's attorney, Max D. Stern, of Boston, did not return a telephone call seeking comment.
Since arriving in the United States, Boskic has had several brushes with law enforcement, including arrests for assault and drunken driving.
Arthur Liaperdos, who lives next door to Boskic, called him "unfriendly" and said he often heard Boskic fighting with a girlfriend and saw him pushing her.
-------- terrorism
Suicide bombs and rebel attacks as disillusioned Chechnya votes
Scotsman.com
28 Aug 2004
CHRIS STEPHEN AND FOREIGN STAFF
http://news.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=1007592004
THEIR previous leader was assassinated in a bomb blast, scores of their fellow countrymen have been killed this month and yesterday it was confirmed that terrorist explosives were responsible for downing a civilian aircraft last week.
Yet tomorrow, Chechens are expected to do their duty and traipse along to polling stations across the country and calmly vote in a "democratic election".
They go certain they know who is going to win - the Kremlin's favoured candidate, Alu Alkhanov - and most of them believe that, whatever they vote, nothing will change.
The region's woes have been brought home to the wider Russian public by this week's double air disaster, in which two aircraft plunged out of the sky within minutes of each other after taking off from a Moscow airport.
Moscow said yesterday that the two jets which crashed on Tuesday night, with the loss of more than 80 lives, appear to have exploded in mid-air, and investigators think both may have been destroyed by female suicide bombers.
Two Chechen women have been identified among passenger lists, with suspicions aroused because they were the only passengers not claimed by anxious relatives.
If confirmed, it would mark a return of the so-called Black Widows, a force of female Chechen suicide bombers who last summer struck terror into the heart of Moscow.
At one of the crash sites near the southern city of Rostov-on-Don, Russian investigators said they had found evidence of explosives of the kind supposedly used by Chechen rebels in the past.
The attack is a stark reminder that the rebel forces which Moscow has repeatedly insisted have been crushed are alive and well, and capable of launching attacks outside the province boundaries.
Fears of violence and the absence of any real choice is likely to persuade many people in the southern province that there is no point in casting a ballot.
The Russian authorities, keen to present the election as evidence of "normality", have stepped in with polling incentives to encourage ordinary Chechens to cast a ballot.
Voters have been told that if they attend polling stations, they will be able to apply for a mobile phone without the lengthy security checks normally needed in the province to make sure they are not connected to rebel forces.
And thousands of refugees have been lured back to the province with the promise of long-awaited compensation payments for homes damaged during the five-year war.
Nevertheless, this remains a dubious election. Its timing could hardly be worse, marking the fifth anniversary of a war started when Vladimir Putin, then prime minister, sent tanks into the province in 1999.
Five years on, the army has failed to subdue the rebels and has been accused of widespread human rights abuses.
There is also a feeling that the rebels now call the shots.
Last Saturday underscored the tenuous hold authorities have on normality. Officials organised a volunteer clean-up day under the slogan "Clean City - Clean Elections" and state-run television showed smiling volunteers hoeing flower beds in Grozny and sweeping up garbage.
Later that night, dozens of fighters attacked police posts and polling stations in the capital. Russian and Chechen officials tried to downplay the attack, but reports said more than 30 Chechen police or Russian servicemen and civilians were killed.
It is the kind of attack Chechens have come to expect.
Each winter, Chechen separatist forces melt away into the southern mountains and Moscow declares "normalisation". Then each summer, the rebels return to launch more offensives. This June saw more than 90 people killed when rebel units hit a string of security posts in the neighbouring province of Ingueshetia.
Even the timing of this election was set by the rebels, when they shot dead the previous president, Akhmad Kadyrov, last May.
Under his rule, his own troops had begun taking over the duties of Russian forces, allowing for troop withdrawals. The new Kremlin candidate, Alu Alkhanov, the province's interior minister, is competent but has no clan to back him and is likely to be a figurehead, with Moscow forced to once more take the lead in the war against the rebels.
Candidates who support the rebels and their demand for independence from Russia have either been disqualified or have refused to stand, leaving six nonentities to run against Mr Alkhanov, none of them with any realistic chance of winning.
State television has tilted things further Mr Alkhanov's way by showing him in the company of President Vladimir Putin, a clear indication that he is the Kremlin's favoured candidate.
Few in the province seem to believe this is a truly fair election.
But the Kremlin badly needs a success. The Russian army has proved unable to subdue the rebels in part because they have safe bases over the border in Georgia. Mr Putin has refused to enter into political talks with the rebels, insisting that Russia must retain control of its troubled province.
For ordinary Chechens, the suffering goes on.
DESPERATE CHECHENS SEEK REFUGE IN THE WEST AS YEARS OF TERRORISM TAKE THEIR TOLL
UMA wanted nothing to do with the Chechen war and sat out the fighting hundreds of miles from her homeland. But the war found her anyway.
"They caught my cousin, and he confessed on television to killing 200 people. Now there is a blood feud against my family. They say he killed women too, so none of us are safe," the 34-year-old said in Moscow.
She plans to flee abroad, to any country that will take her, joining the thousands of Chechens leaving every month, making them one of the world's largest groups of asylum seekers. Many complain of prejudice and hostility in Russia itself.
The United Nations says nearly 37,000 Russian citizens - mostly from Chechnya - claimed asylum in the West in the 12 months to April. As soon they can, Uma, her husband and her five children will follow them.
Chechens reject allegations by Russian officials they are leaving for economic reasons, saying there is danger to their lives if they stay.
Chechens who move to other Russian regions are frequently denied legal registration or schooling for their children.
--------
Al Qaeda operations inexpensive: Report Most cost less than $50,000
Aug. 28, 2004
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1093645213718&call_pageid=968332188854&col=
UNITED NATIONS-The Al Qaeda terror network spent less than $50,000 (U.S.) on each of its major attacks except the Sept. 11, 2001, suicide hijackings, and one of its hallmarks is using readily available items like cellphones and knives as weapons, a U.N. report says.
The report released Thursday by a new team monitoring the implementation of United Nations sanctions against Al Qaeda and the Taliban detailed just how little it cost to mount terror operations.
For example, the report said the March attacks in Madrid, in which nearly 10 simultaneous bombs exploded on four commuter trains, used mining explosives and cellphones as detonators and cost about $10,000 to carry out. The blasts killed 191 people, Spain's worst terror attack.
Only the sophisticated attacks in the United States on 9/11, using four hijacked aircraft, "required significant funding of over six figures," the report said. Nearly 3,000 people died in the attacks.
The report said U.N. sanctions have only had "a limited impact," primarily because the U.N. Security Council has reacted to events "while Al Qaeda has shown great flexibility and adaptability in staying ahead of them.''
It cited Al Qaeda's transformation from an organization with an established base supporting Afghan fighters run by Osama bin Laden ``to its current manifestation as a loose network of affiliated underground groups" with common goals.
With the exception of the 9/11 attacks, Al Qaeda's operations have been inexpensive, the monitoring team said in the report to the Security Council.
The twin nightclub bombings in Bali, Indonesia, in October, 2002, killed 202 people and cost less than $50,000. So did the twin truck bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in August, 1998, which killed 231 people, the report said.
And the November, 2003, attacks in Istanbul, Turkey - four suicide truck bombings that killed 62 people - cost less than $40,000.
-------- torture
Rumsfeld corrects himself on abuse
New York Times
Eric Schmitt,
August 28, 2004
http://www.startribune.com/stories/484/4952423.html
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- In his first comments on the two major investigative reports issued this week at the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on Thursday incorrectly described one of the reports' central findings about the U.S. military's treatment of Iraqi prisoners by saying there was no evidence that prisoners had been abused during interrogations.
The reports, one by a panel Rumsfeld had appointed and one by three Army generals, made clear that some abuses occurred during interrogations, that others were intended to "soften up" prisoners who were to be questioned, and that many intelligence personnel involved in the interrogations were implicated in the abuses.
But on Thursday, in an interview with a radio station in Phoenix, Rumsfeld, who was traveling outside Washington this week, said, "I have not seen anything thus far that says that the people abused were abused in the process of interrogating them or for interrogation purposes." A transcript of the interview was posted on the Pentagon's Web site Friday.
Rumsfeld repeated the assertion a few hours later at a news conference there. After an aide slipped him a note during the news conference, however, Rumsfeld corrected himself, noting that an inquiry by three Army generals had, in fact, found "two or three" cases of abuse during interrogations or the interrogation process. In fact, however, the Army inquiry found that 13 of 44 instances of abuse involved interrogations or the interrogation process, an Army spokeswoman said. The report itself explicitly describes the extent to which each abuse involved interrogations.
On Friday, the chief Pentagon spokesman, Lawrence Di Rita, sought to play down Rumsfeld's comments, saying, "He misspoke, pure and simple. But he corrected himself."
Rumsfeld has condemned the prisoner abuses, and did so again in his public appearances on Thursday in Arizona. But he has also hewed to the line that a small band of rogue military police were largely responsible for the beatings, acts of sexual humiliation and other abuses, especially those depicted in a notorious set of photographs that became public in April.
-------- POLITICS
-------- propaganda wars
Controversy's no stranger to AIPAC, Washington's Jewish juggernaut
WILLIAM C. MANN,
Associated Press Writer
Saturday, August 28, 2004
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/news/archive/2004/08/28/national1654EDT0609.DTL
(08-28) 13:54 PDT WASHINGTON (AP) -- AIPAC, the Jewish lobbying juggernaut, operates in such high-stakes politics that it inevitably has been unable to avoid occasional unpleasantness. But almost universally, the largest pro-Israel lobby has found all the friends its has needed in Congress.
More often than not, the politician who tried to face down the American Israel Public Action Committee came out the worse for it.
In 1975, for example, President Ford was angered because Israel refused to end its eight-year occupation of Egypt's Sinai Peninsula and ordered a reassessment of the United States' relationship with the Jewish state. Largely because of AIPAC, the move ended with 76 Senators reaffirming the special U.S.-Israeli bond.
Even friends in high places, however, have not made a perpetually smooth ride for AIPAC over the years.
The latest scrape came with word Friday that FBI investigators suspect AIPAC has acted as middleman to funnel to Israel details of secret Bush administration deliberations about Iran, a murky assertion adamantly denied by the group.
Founded half a century ago, AIPAC claims 65,000 members -- in all 50 states -- and says its central mission is to support U.S. interests in the Middle East and to advocate for a strong relationship with Israel.
It has a hold on the mechanisms of power that has been called mystical. Douglas Bloomfield, a former legislative director of the organization, says it's more mundane than that.
"AIPAC is successful because it represents American national interests, and it works within the political forces," Bloomfield said Saturday in an interview.
On its Web site, AIPAC lists an agenda topped by this: "Stopping Iran From Acquiring Nuclear Weapons."
The item says: "AIPAC works with Congress to enact even more comprehensive legislation to contain Iran and to expand U.S.-Israel strategic cooperation to build a defense against this threat."
Both Israel and AIPAC have denied the allegations that a Pentagon official has compromised U.S. policy deliberations about Iran to Israel. The Pentagon, where the purported leak originated, has said little except that the person being investigated was not in a policy-making position.
Even in its denial of any such activity, AIPAC gave no indication of second thoughts about its procedures or policies.
"As American citizens concerned about the enduring strength of the U.S.-Israel relationship, AIPAC has and will continue to have discussions with policy-makers at all levels of government," the statement said.
"The right to petition our government is one of the fundamental rights of American citizens, which AIPAC members proudly exercise every day."
That they do. The organization says its representatives hold every year more than 2,000 meetings with members of Congress and guide through the legislative process more than 100 pro-Israel initiatives.
The organization's affinity with Congress has paid off handsomely over the decades, but during the 1980s new leaders turned away from relying almost totally on lobbying Congress to working with administrations as well. Conflict over which side would prevail was given then as a reason for Bloomfield's 1988 resignation as the Reagan administration was ending and the first President Bush was about to take office.
AIPAC was reeling from allegations that it had violated its nonpartisan mandate in that November's congressional elections and had mapped out a campaign smear the Rev. Jesse Jackson, a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Also, signs of discord were emerging in Israel's all-important relationship with the United States. The Reagan administration had decided to deal for the first time with Yasser Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, after Arafat declared his recognition that Israel had a right to exist.
"The partisanship that is perceived as creeping into AIPAC's decision-making will hurt them in the long run," then-Rep. Lawrence Smith, a Florida Democrat, said. "They have to understand that the real bedrock of support for Israel is the Congress. Administrations come and go. We're pretty constant and reliable."
AIPAC was at the time in a bitter campaign against a proposed Reagan administration arms sale to Saudi Arabia. That was one of the few such battles AIPAC lost, on a 52-48 Senate vote.
----
Bush acknowledges Iraq mistakes
Bush has said Washington is 'adjusting to conditions'
Reuters
Friday 27 August 2004,
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/F187504B-6EDC-4AC2-9CD3-1547620E4091.htm
US President George Bush has acknowledged for the first time that he miscalculated post-war conditions in Iraq, according to the New York Times daily.
The newspaper quoted Bush as saying during a 30-minute interview that he made "a miscalculation of what the conditions would be" in post-war Iraq.
But he insisted the 17-month-long battle against resistance forces was the unintended by-product of a "swift victory" against Saddam Hussein's military, the Times reported on Thursday.
Bush said his strategy had been "flexible enough" to respond.
"We're adjusting to our conditions" in places like Najaf, the paper quoted him as saying.
The Times said Bush deflected further inquiries as to what had gone wrong with the occupation.
US casualties
According to the Pentagon, 969 US troops have died in Iraq since the invasion, 828 of them since 30 April 2003. An additional 6690 soldiers have been wounded, most of them during the occupation.
Nearly 1000 US troops have been killed since the invasion
In an interview published on Friday in newspaper USA Today, Bush said Americans would re-elect him to a second term even if they disagreed with his decision to invade Iraq.
Bush said voters "know who I am and I believe they're comfortable with the fact that they know I'm not going to shift principles or shift positions based upon polls and focus groups".
Bush told USA Today that: "The American people have seen me make the hardest of decisions. That's just going to have to be a part of their decision-making process."
Nuclear concerns
In the Times interview, the president also discussed the issue of North Korea and Iran's nuclear ambitions, saying he would not be rushed to set deadlines.
The newspaper said: "Bush displayed none of the alarm about North Korea's growing arsenal that he once voiced regularly about Iraq."
On the leaders of North Korea and Iran the paper quoted him as saying: "I don't think you give timelines to dictators."
Bush also told the Times he would continue diplomatic pressure, adding: "I'm confident that over time this will work - I certainly hope it does."
--------
China Frees Pioneering Journalist
By Philip P. Pan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, August 28, 2004; Page A19
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A40616-2004Aug28.html
FUYANG, China, Aug. 27 -- Authorities in southern China on Friday released a pioneering newspaper editor whose arrest five months ago sent a chill through the nation's increasingly independent-minded newsrooms and prompted a campaign on his behalf by journalists, lawyers, writers and retired officials.
Cheng Yizhong, 39, the former executive editor of the Southern Metropolis Daily in the coastal city of Guangzhou, returned home at about 10 p.m. and appeared to be in good health, according to a source close to his family. But it was not clear if conditions were placed on his release or whether he would be permitted to return to the newspaper.
"We hope all those officials who defy the progress of time and, for their own selfish interests, try to suppress freedom of speech and social conscience have learned a lesson," Xu Zhiyong, one of Cheng's lawyers, said in a statement posted on his Internet site. "We hope they won't manufacture absurd cases of injustice again. We hope they won't damage China's image again."
Cheng was arrested March 19 in a corruption probe that party sources said was a veiled act of retaliation by local officials who were upset by the newspaper's aggressive reporting. The sudden decision to release him instead of putting him on trial underscored divisions in the ruling Communist Party about the creeping expansion of media freedoms.
The government owns and controls China's newspapers and television stations, but the limits of permissible news coverage are becoming increasingly blurred as journalists and others in the party argue that a more assertive press can help the leadership fight corruption and improve governance. Market reforms have also given state media outlets an incentive to report real news instead of propaganda.
Cheng, who built the Southern Metropolis Daily into one of the country's most daring -- and profitable -- newspapers, was on the cutting edge of this change. Last year, the tabloid published an investigative report about the death of a young college graduate in police custody that sparked nationwide outrage and led Beijing to abolish a long-entrenched system of detention camps.
But the report also angered local party officials in Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong province, who responded by ordering an investigation into the newspaper's finances. One day before Cheng's arrest, the Daily's general manager, Yu Huafeng, and another executive, Li Minying, were convicted on what appear to be trumped-up corruption charges and received 12- and 11-year prison sentences, respectively.
Supporters of the newspaper quickly launched a campaign against the crackdown that included a news conference in Beijing, a petition drive on the Internet and a series of quiet appeals within party channels. Among those who spoke out on behalf of Cheng and his colleagues were three retired party leaders in Guangdong, sources said.
--------
Bush Says Kerry 'More Heroic' for Going to Vietnam
Aug 28, 2004
WASHINGTON (Reuters)
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=domesticNews&storyID=6095238
President Bush on Saturday described John Kerry's tour of duty in Vietnam as more heroic than his own service in the Air National Guard, saying his Democratic rival had been "in harm's way."
But the president told NBC's "Today Show" that both sides should drop the debate over their wartime service, saying, "I think that we ought to move beyond the past. ... The real question is who best to lead us forward."
Asked if he believed that he and Kerry "served on the same level of heroism," Bush replied, "No, I don't. I think him going to Vietnam was more heroic than my flying fighter jets. He was in harm's way and I wasn't."
Excerpts of the interview, conducted on Saturday for broadcast on Monday, were released by NBC.
The president continued to defend his own service in the Air National Guard, saying, "On the other hand, I served my country. Had my unit been called up, I would have gone."
Kerry's war record in Vietnam has dominated the 2004 presidential campaign in recent weeks, after advertisements by a group called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth accused him of lying about the events that led to his decoration for bravery.
The White House on Thursday said it would file a lawsuit to try to force the Federal Election Commission to crack down on the ads. Bush says he does not believe Kerry lied about his record, but he has refused to condemn the ads directly.
Kerry accuses the Bush campaign of colluding with the Swift Boat Veterans on the ads, a charge the White House has denied. But its case was hurt this past week when a top lawyer for the Bush campaign, Benjamin Ginsberg, resigned after disclosing he was providing legal advice to the veteran's group.
Federal election rules bar organizations that take unrestricted donations from coordinating their activities with campaigns or political parties.
The issue has also caused tension with Republican Sen. John McCain, another Vietnam veteran and influential lawmaker who has urged Bush to condemn the ads and get them halted.
McCain is backing Bush for the White House, but the Arizona senator has defended his friend Kerry and threatened to raise the issue with Bush when they campaign in Iowa next week.
-------- us politics
From Vietnam to Iraq: Pretext and precedent
William B. Bader (IHT)
Saturday, August 28, 2004
http://www.iht.com/bin/print.php?file=536103.html
The guns of August 1964
WASHINGTON - The first 10 days of the politically charged August of 1964 present a timely reminder of what can happen when a president shrouds the road to war in a fog of deception in the belief that it is necessary to do so for the people's own good.
On the basis of what President Lyndon Johnson said had happened in the Gulf of Tonkin, Congress unblinkingly provided the authority to "take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression." These words translated into a war in which three million Vietnamese and 58,000 Americans died, a war that Johnson never expected to win.
President Richard Nixon used the same unrestricted license that the purported Tonkin incident provided to justify his own acts of war in Southeast Asia. A precedent for presidential seizure of the war powers in times of crisis was now at the ready. President George W. Bush seized it last year and easily took another trusting Congress down one more road to war. On June 10, 1964, as the Vietnam War was turning sour, the National Security Council discussed whether or not to seek a congressional resolution. Secretary of State Dean Rusk found agreement to his caution that "We should ask for a resolution only when the circumstances are such as to require action, and, thereby, force Congressional action."
The required package of "circumstances" soon arrived on Capitol Hill. On Aug. 4 the president dramatically announced to the American people that, in response to attacks against U.S. naval vessels operating in international waters, a major carrier-based air attack against North Vietnam was under way (never mind that the aircraft had not yet taken off).
What actually happened in the Gulf of Tonkin, however, was not what the Congress was told; the true story lay hidden until March of 1968.
The Maddox was not on a "routine patrol" on Aug. 1 when it was attacked. The U.S. destroyer was within the territorial waters of Vietnam engaged in an electronic reconnaissance mission in consort with a South Vietnam commando raid on the North. The South Vietnamese raiders were trained and led by Americans using Swift boats. The North Vietnamese had every reason to send - foolishly - torpedo boats to attack the Maddox.
The immediate response of the United States was to send a warning to the North Vietnamese to cease these unprovoked attacks and then to order the Maddox, now accompanied by the U.S. destroyer Turner Joy, to continue its patrol.
No credible evidence of a second attack on Aug. 4 has ever been produced, and it probably never happened. The reports of the attack given to Congress and the public were spurious. The commander of the Maddox quickly expressed his doubts over whether there had been an attack, but Washington was already committed to confirming a second attack. A telling example - to be echoed in Iraq - that policy makers sometimes reach for the intelligence they want rather than the intelligence they need.
There are lessons from the Tonkin experience that have serious relevance to the "circumstances" and rhetoric surrounding the Iraq resolution. The first is that in justifying a military intervention, even if it has a cold war or "war on terrorism" patina, be careful of your repertoire of advertised "facts" lest you tear at the fabric of trust that underpins bipartisan policies. Trust, once torn as it was by the Johnson Administration's deceptive explanation of the Tonkin incidents, is extremely difficult to repair.
Another lesson is that "raw intelligence" should be kept out of the hands of national security advisers and politicians - even in times of crisis. The "rip, read and run" school - running to presidents, the press and members of Congress with intelligence which has yet to be analyzed by professionals - is a prescription for confusion, internal bickering, misinterpretation (particularly in the arena of communications intelligence), and comprised sources and methods.
During the Johnson administration's efforts to keep secret the truth of what really happened in the Gulf of Tonkin - efforts that persisted with increasing vigor and vitriol over a four-year period - raw intelligence became the trump card that would silence the critics. In 1968, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, headed by Senator J. William Fulbright, that he had texts of intercepts of Vietnamese naval traffic that proved that the Vietnamese did attack the Maddox and the Turner Joy. The "raw" intercepts later proved to be reports on the first, uncontested attack.
A third lesson is that when taking on an administration as to the evidence presented in paving the road to war, the timing of any inquiry is critical to its success. Fulbright became skeptical of the 1964 presentation, but he could not find a way to penetrate what he came to believe was a web of deception. In 1966 he attempted unsuccessfully to repeal the Tonkin Resolution. In August 1967, as the Vietnam War fell ever deeper into a quagmire, he decided to try again. He chose me, a junior staffer with a naval intelligence background and an historian's training, to undertake a confidential inquiry into the events. Six months later that research blossomed into an executive session of the Foreign Relations Committee that contributed to Johnson's demise. It took four years to retrace accurately the road to war in Vietnam. A credible audit by the Foreign Relations Committee of the Iraq war resolution will require the same preconditions that produced the Tonkin postmortem - the passage of time and a continuing festering of the efforts to restore peace and security to the region. Fulbright went to the Senate floor after the 1968 hearing to declare the resolution null and void - calling the resolution a "contract based on misrepresentation."
The U.S. Constitution is starkly clear on the war powers: "The Congress shall have the Power to declare War." The recent Congressional performance along the road to war speaks to the deep erosion of that power. Justice Robert Jackson was prescient more than a half-century ago when he wrote of the foreign policy powers: "There is a zone of twilight in which the president and Congress may have concurrent authority, or in which the distribution is uncertain. Congressional inertia, indifference or quiescence may sometimes, at least as a practical matter enable, if not invite, an independent presidential responsibility." The Congressional road to war in Vietnam and Iraq was so marked.
Perhaps the most important lesson for Congress to take from this tale of two roads to war is that a declaration of war is among America's most solemn and sacred documents. The text of a document that sends citizens to fight and die for a proclaimed just cause cannot be forgiven for "stretching the truth" or justifying critical mistakes of fact by claiming that "every other intelligence service made the same mistakes." The Foreign Relations Committee has a constitutional and moral responsibility to reconsider the text of the Iraq war resolution in the light of what will be one day a full disclosure of what was behind those clauses that moved the United States to declare war.
In 1971, in an action that drew no notice or interest, Congress repealed the Tonkin resolution. During consideration of the Iraq resolution, the precedent and lessons of Tonkin were absent.
William B. Bader, author of the forthcoming "The Road to War: Roosevelt, Johnson and Bush," is a former chief of staff of the Foreign Relations Committee who investigated the Tonkin incidents in 1967 and 1968.
----
Row breaks out on Kissinger's 'advice' to military junta
MARGARET NEIGHBOUR,
Sat 28 Aug 2004
The Scotsman
http://news.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=1009052004
A CONVERSATION between former United States secretary of state Henry Kissinger and Argentina's foreign minister gave the military junta the impression it had US backing for its notorious "dirty war", it has been claimed.
According to a newly declassified document released yesterday, near the outset of Argentina's ruthless campaign against dissidents in 1976, Mr Kissinger told the junta's foreign minister: "If there are things that have to be done, you should do them quickly."
The conversation left Argentine generals with the belief that Mr Kissinger gave them "a carte blanche for the dirty war", said Carlos Osorio of the National Security Archives, a foreign policy research centre in the US.
But a former US state department official who attended Mr Kissinger's meeting in June 1976 with Argentina's foreign minister, Admiral Cesar Augusto Guzzetti, hit back, saying that view was "a distortion of history".
And William Rogers, vice-chairman of Mr Kissinger's lobbying firm, Kissinger Associates said: "The idea that he would tell another country to violate human rights quickly or slowly or under any circumstances is preposterous."
Mr Kissinger has denied condoning abuses. But the documents revive the debate about Mr Kissinger's relationship with military dictators in Latin America when he was secretary of state in the Nixon and Ford administrations.
Argentina's military rulers seized power in March 1976, beginning six years of rule in which they kidnapped, tortured and killed dissidents. The government says 8,900 people disappeared over that period - human rights groups put the figure around 30,000.
Three months after the coup, Mr Kissinger met Admiral Guzzetti while in Santiago, Chile, to attend an Organisation of American States meeting. Detailed notes of the meeting were taken by Luigi Einaudi, a member of the state department policy planning staff. Mr Einaudi is now assistant secretary-general at the OAS.
In a recent interview, Mr Einaudi said his recollections of the meeting were vague after 28 years, but he doubted Mr Kissinger would have said anything to condone abuses.
Yet according to his account at the time, Mr Kissinger told Admiral Guzzetti he wished his government well.
Mr Einaudi's record also shows Mr Kissinger referred to problems in Chile, then led by General Augusto Pinochet.
"You will have to make an international effort to have your problems understood," he said. "Otherwise you too will come under increasing attack. If there are things that have to be done, you should do them quickly. But you must get back quickly to normal procedures."
-------- OTHER
-------- genetics
New jawbone is grown for cancer patient
August 28, 2004
By Emma Ross
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20040827-110032-6734r.htm
LONDON - A German who had his lower jaw cut out because of cancer has enjoyed his first solid meal in nine years - a bratwurst sandwich - after surgeons grew a new jaw bone in his back muscle and transplanted it to his mouth in what experts call an "ambitious" experiment.
According to this week's issue of the Lancet medical journal, the German doctors used a mesh cage, a growth chemical and the patient's own bone marrow, containing stem cells, to create a new jaw bone that fit exactly into the gap left by the cancer surgery.
Tests have not been done yet to verify whether the bone was created by the blank-slate stem cells, and it is too early to tell whether the jaw will function normally in the long term, but the operation is the first published report of a whole bone being engineered and incubated inside a patient's body and transplanted.
Stem cells are the master cells of the body that go on to become every tissue in the body. They are a popular area of research, with scientists trying to find ways to prompt them to make desired tissues and perhaps organs.
While researchers debate whether the technique resulted in a scientific advance involving stem cells, the operation has achieved its purpose and changed a life, said Stan Gronthos, a stem cell expert at the Institute of Medical and Veterinary Science in Adelaide, Australia.
"A patient who had previously lost his mandible [lower jaw] through the result of a destructive tumor can now sit down and chew his first solid meals in nine years ... resulting in an improved quality of life," said Mr. Gronthos, who was not connected with the experiment.
The operation was done by Dr. Patrick Warnke, a reconstructive facial surgeon at the University of Kiel in Germany. The patient, a 56-year-old man, had his lower jaw and half his tongue cut out almost a decade ago after getting mouth cancer. Since then, he had only been able to slurp soft food or soup from a spoon.
In similar cases, doctors can sometimes replace a lost jawbone by cutting out a piece of bone from the lower leg or from the hip and chiseling it to fit into the mouth.
This patient could not have that procedure because he was taking a potent blood thinner for another condition and doctors considered it too dangerous to harvest bone from elsewhere in his body.
Dr. Warnke and his group began by creating a virtual jaw on a computer, after making a three-dimensional scan of the patient's mouth.
The information was used to create a thin titanium micromesh cage. Several cow-derived pure bone mineral blocks the size of sugar lumps were then put inside the structure, along with a human growth factor that builds bone and a large squirt of blood extracted from the man's bone marrow, which contains stem cells.
The surgeons then implanted the mesh cage and its contents into the muscle below the patient's right shoulder blade. He was given no drugs, other than routine antibiotics to prevent infection from the surgery.
The implant was left in for seven weeks, when scans showed new bone formation. It was removed about eight weeks ago, along with some surrounding muscle and blood vessels, put in the man's mouth and connected to the blood vessels in his neck.
Scans showed new bone continued to form after the transplant.
-------- ACTIVISTS
NYC police arrest bike protesters
(UPI)
August 28, 2004
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20040828-071355-5963r.htm
New York, NY, Aug. 28 -- New York City police have arrested more than 250 bicycle-riding protesters after some 5,000 of them held an anti-GOP demonstration blocking some streets.
Most of the 250-plus riders detained Friday night faced disorderly conduct charges, the New York Times reported Saturday.
Police distributed flyers to the 5,000 cyclists at the start of their ride warning anyone breaking traffic laws could be subject to arrest.
The clampdown, two days before the start of the Republican National Convention at Madison Square Garden, followed the arrest Thursday of 22 demonstrators.
The arrests, the Times noted, are already more than three times the number of people arrested during the entire Democratic National Convention in Boston.
----
Police hurl teargas at anti-Powell marchers
28 August 2004
Reuters
http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/0,2106,3017546a12,00.html
ATHENS: Greek police have hurled tear gas to disperse demonstrators marching on the US embassy in Athens to protest against a visit by US Secretary of State Colin Powell to the Olympics this weekend.
Minor scuffles broke out when scores of police in riot gear blocked about 1,000 demonstrators in front of the Greek parliament and fired the gas to push them back.
"Police fired limited rounds of teargas. There are no reports of injuries," a police spokesman said, adding the march was ending peacefully.
The marchers had crossed the Greek capital waving banners saying "Powell Get Out", adding to the security headaches of the Greek government, anxious to safeguard the safe image of the August 13-29 Games.
The protesters, mingling with bewildered tourists in central Athens, marched peacefully until scores of riot police barricaded behind police buses blocked their path and they tried to push through the cordon.
"Powell's visit here is a political provocation of the first order; 94 per cent of Greeks were against the war in Iraq," said demonstrator Christos Petrakos, 38, an English teacher.
Powell arrives in Athens today to attend the closing ceremony of the Games and meet Greek officials. Greece has spent an unprecedented 1 billion euros for the security of the first post-September 11 summer Games.
"We must respect the democratic right to protest but we will not allow any demonstrators to get out of hand and cause any damage," a senior government source said before the march.
Greek protests have occasionally been marred by violence either because of police heavy-handedness or anarchists and radicals infiltrating the crowds.
"It's our democratic right to protest. I have been out on the street protesting every single war since Vietnam. We won then and we will now," said Maria Stilou, 64, an economics teacher.
Public Order Minister George Voulgarakis had urged Greeks to act in an orderly fashion.
----
Protesters at Heart of Debate on Security vs. Civil Rights
August 28, 2004
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
The New York Times
WASHINGTON, Aug. 27 - Chris Scheets, a part-time cook and full-time anarchist in a college town in Missouri, piled into a van on Friday with some friends to make the trek to New York City to protest the Republican National Convention.
It was a trip he had not figured he would be making.
Late last month, F.B.I. agents followed him for days, Mr. Sheets said, and he and two friends were subpoenaed before a federal grand jury to tell what they knew about possible violent protests in New York. That led the three to cancel a trip to Boston to demonstrate that day at the Democratic National Convention, and Mr. Scheets said he was so frazzled that he scrapped plans to go to New York.
He changed his mind, he said in an interview, because "I still think it's necessary to protest things going on in this country."
Mr. Scheets, 20, now finds himself at the center of a brewing debate on security at major political events and maintaining civil rights, as the Federal Bureau of Investigation has mounted an extensive effort to identify and question people who it suspects may be planning acts of violence at political demonstrations.
Mr. Scheets and his friends, Ben Garrett, 24, and Daniel Coate, 22, have maintained low profiles since their case surfaced last week, with their lawyers refusing to identify them publicly. Breaking their silence, the three men insisted in interviews that they were not planning any violence at the conventions and that they could not explain the F.B.I.'s interest in them.
The three, all from Kirksville, Mo., received letters from federal prosecutors last month informing them that they were targets of an investigation into domestic terrorism. A federal law enforcement official said this week that the inquiry was active.
Federal law enforcement officials in Missouri and Washington refused to comment specifically on the inquiry or say why the men were subpoenaed, because it is a grand jury case. They repeated that the inquiries in Missouri and elsewhere were just focused on identifying violent demonstrators, not chilling political protests.
Attorney General John Ashcroft was asked about the official interviews last week at a news conference. Mr. Ashcroft defended the inquiry and added that it was "an outrageous distortion to suggest that any interviews we conducted were designed to thwart freedom."
He suggested that the interviews were largely limited to efforts at disrupting a reported plot to bomb a news van at the Democratic convention.
"The interviews," Mr. Ashcroft said, "were designed to support freedom, to enrich it, to make sure it was not interrupted or otherwise disrupted by violent criminal terrorist activities and plans."
The attorney general said "a very few individuals" had been questioned. Law enforcement officials placed the number at no more than about 24. Civil rights monitors and protest leaders said they believed that at least 50 people, and perhaps many more, had been contacted in Atlanta, Boston, Denver, Kansas City, New York, St. Louis and elsewhere. In the Missouri case, Mr. Garrett said he knew of 25 or 30 friends and relatives contacted by the F.B.I.
Several people questioned by the bureau said agents never asked specifically about a possible bomb plot in Boston. Instead, the people said they had generally been asked the same set of questions: whether they were planning violence at the conventions or other major political events, whether they knew anyone who was and whether they realized it could be considered a crime to withhold such information.
Although the three from Missouri described themselves as anarchists intent on creating a "nonhierarchical" structure in American society, they said they opposed violence. Their recent experience, they said, has only intensified their concerns.
"On the one hand, this whole experience has made me more reluctant to go to protests, because I'm worried about what the F.B.I. might do," said Mr. Coate, a graduate student in English at Truman State University in Kirksville. "But mostly, it's made me more determined than ever, because I want to exercise my right to free speech whether they want me to or not."
--------
PROTESTERS
100 Cyclists Are Arrested as Thousands Ride in Protest
August 28, 2004
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/28/politics/campaign/28protest.html?pagewanted=all&position=
Thousands of cyclists rode through the streets of Manhattan last night in an anti-Republican, pro-environment display of bike power that ended in more than 100 arrests by the police after the ride blocked some streets.
Despite tension over police warnings to obey traffic laws against blocking traffic and running red lights, the cyclists - numbering 5,000, the police say - did just that in a meandering course that started at Union Square and wound its way to the West Side, Central Park, Midtown and the East Village.
As of 11 p.m., Paul J. Browne, a police spokesman, said that officers were still processing people who were detained, but that he expected more than 100 people to face charges, mainly for disorderly conduct.
The arrests, two days before the convention starts, seemed to herald a busy period for the police, who must patrol a stream of demonstrations large and small, several each day. The police on Thursday made 22-convention related arrests, more than three times the number during the entire Democratic National Convention in Boston.
The police apprehended riders in several spots, including more than 50 on Seventh Avenue at 36th Street near Madison Square Garden, where the Republican National Convention will be next week. Riders had chanted "No more Bush" as they passed, and participants in the ride, a monthly fixture for several years, said that many more people than usual took part, out of animosity toward the convention.
The two-hour ride began about 7:15 p.m. in Union Square with a cacophony of bells, whistles, hooting and howling, and the police seemed to tolerate it.
An hour and a half into the ride, the police patience appeared to grow thin, as helmeted officers dragged netting across Seventh Avenue and 14th Street to block the ride.
Hundred of cyclists at first gathered by the net and then most turned west on 14th Street and south on Greenwich Street and kept riding toward the East Village.
As the ride backed up, the police arrested dozens of people on Seventh Avenue near the Garden on charges of blocking streets, saying some riders had stopped traffic on side streets to let the larger mass through.
More arrests took place at the end of the ride in the East Village, including along Second Avenue outside St. Mark's-in-the-Bowery Church, where cyclists gathered for a celebration of the ride and shouted abuse at the police who were arresting their companions.
"Ninety-five percent of the ride was beautiful,'' said Bill DiPaola, executive director of Time's Up!, an environmental group that participates in and promotes the monthly ride. "People were cheering us on the streets, but at the end it was difficult to funnel people off and it was very clear the police were upset at how well the ride went.''
The ride is known as a Critical Mass, a bike ride that claims no organizers and simply materializes, thanks to leaflets and Internet messages, on the last Friday of every month. The rides have been held in New York for the last several years, and are usually tolerated by the police, who in the past have cited only a few riders for traffic violations and have sometimes even escorted the group.
The rides are meant to protest cars and their pollution, but the ride last night was advertised as the R.N.C. Critical Mass, and scores of riders wore clothes or carried signs with messages against the convention and President Bush. Others wore fanciful attire, like a woman who rode in a peach wedding dress. One woman pushed her friend in a shopping cart.
Abby Lublin, a 28-year-old schoolteacher from Brooklyn, decorated her bike with a bust of Mr. Bush, hanging by a rope and attached to a milk crate.
Dick Camacho, a photographer, wore a rainbow cape with the message, "We the people say no to the Bush agenda." But like most riders, he emphasized the desire to send a message to motorists.
"Its a rush to see bikes take over the streets," he said.
Before the ride began, police officers distributed fliers outlining traffic laws related to biking, and a commander had sent a letter this week to a leading bicycling advocacy group expressing concern about the growing size of the ride and increasing violations of traffic laws.
Several police officers trailed riders in the front of the pack, which broke up into at least three masses shortly after the ride began. .
Bicycles could form a pivotal part of the coming protests.
Apart from the ride last night, Time's Up! has called for a Bike Bloc tomorrow in solidarity with the large Midtown antiwar march organized by United for Peace and Justice. The group suggests riders meet at Union Square before the march for details.
The group also plans to ride around ground zero tonight during Ring Out the Republicans, a protest expected to draw people ringing bells, and on Tuesday, a day expected to be devoted to civil disobedience.
Time's Up! has also prepared several bikes to be used by "street medics," legal observers and food servers during convention protests.
"The main thing we are pushing is that bikes need to be thought of as an integral part of how people get around," said Brandon Neubauer, an organizer with the group. "We are just trying to raise awareness in the city that bikes need to be looked at and respected."
In the past few weeks the group has been operating a makeshift workshop in a storefront at 49 East Houston Street, strewn with bicycle parts, fast-food containers, anti-convention posters and leaflets and T-shirts with messages like "One Less Car."
Mr. Neubauer said he did not believe bicycles block traffic, "because we are traffic."
"We are reclaiming public space," he said.
The Police Department warned yesterday that it was illegal to ride in a procession on public streets without a permit, or to ride outside of designated bike lanes.
Earlier in the week, Michael Scagnelli, chief of transportation at the department, sent a letter to Transportation Alternatives, an advocacy group promoting bicycling, walking and public transit, warning that the police would not tolerate lawbreaking.
But organizers of the rides said that most people were law-abiding, and suggested that the police chose to crack down because the ride last night was expected to be larger than usual.
Critical Mass rides began 12 years ago in San Francisco and have since spread to more than 300 cities around the world, organizers say. Rides have been organized for the last eight years in New York, and only occasionally have riders received tickets, participants said.
"Most of the time the police accommodate us," Mr. DiPaola said.
Paul Steely White, of Transportation Alternatives, said he believed the growing size of the rides had aroused police concern because of the blocked traffic.
"We saw it coming as the rides have been growing,'' Mr. White said, adding that he found it paradoxical that any crackdown on riders would come at a time when the city's Transportation Department has advised people to use bikes as an alternative because of the heavy traffic expected near convention sites.
Colin Moynihan, William K. Rashbaum and Judy Tong contributed reporting for this article.
--------
250 Arrested in Bicycling Protest
Associated Press
Saturday, August 28, 2004; Page A05
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A40504-2004Aug27.html
NEW YORK, Aug. 27 -- Nearly 250 bicyclists were arrested Friday night during a mass protest that passed Madison Square Garden the first major police crackdown on demonstrators as a wave of activists is expected to arrive for the Republican National Convention.
The cyclists had snaked through Manhattan for the monthly Critical Mass ride. But what was usually a crowd of hundreds swelled to thousands, with organizers saying the excursion drew a horde of bikers protesting the convention.
Police Deputy Commissioner Paul Browne said the cyclists caused "massive disruptions" and endangered motorists trying to drive through the city. About 250 cyclists were arrested, including one for throwing a beer can at an officer, he said. The officer was not injured.
--------
Protest in Athens Against Powell Visit Turns Violent
By Craig Whitlock and Peter Carlson
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, August 28, 2004; Page A15
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A39938-2004Aug27.html
ATHENS, Aug. 27 -- Thousands of antiwar demonstrators clashed with Greek riot police in the main tourist district of Athens on Friday after a rally to protest U.S. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell's upcoming visit to the Olympics degenerated into a rock-throwing melee.
Greek security forces pepper-sprayed the crowd and launched at least one tear gas canister after confronting the protesters next to the Parliament building in Syntagma Square. The police acted after some demonstrators hurled bottles and rocks and were blocked from reaching the U.S. Embassy, their intended destination about a half-mile away.
In the ensuing ruckus, marchers set fire to trash cans and smashed some storefront windows before dispersing about an hour later. In spite of the violence, no serious injuries were reported.
The contingent of about 500 police refrained from making mass arrests and spent most of its energy trying to direct the protesters away from nearby crowds of tourists, many of whom watched from a safe distance. Some journalists were not so lucky; at least three cameramen and reporters were physically assaulted by demonstrators.
Political protests are a common occurrence in Greece, and it is not unusual for them to turn violent. There is also a long history of anti-American and anti-capitalist sentiment among demonstrators here, although the Greek government and Olympics organizers had managed to keep the Games free of such distractions until Friday night.
The march was prompted by news that Powell will visit Athens on Sunday to attend the Closing Ceremonies and meet with Greek Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis. An estimated 5,000 people joined in the demonstration, including labor unions, anarchists, Marxists and others opposed to U.S. foreign policy in Iraq, Afghanistan and Israel.
"Colin Powell -- Out! Out!" the protesters shouted in English as they carried hundreds of placards indicating their dissatisfaction with a variety of things, from the U.S. invasion of Iraq to the Olympics themselves. "War Games, Olympic Games, Game Over," read one sign.
Maria Styllou, a teacher at a local technical college, called Powell "a murderer" and said the vast majority of Greeks are vehemently against the U.S. presence in Iraq. In an interview beforehand, she predicted that the demonstration would turn ugly and that the police would respond with tear gas, adding that such outcomes are routine in Athens.
"That's what they're going to do," she said. "We push, and they tear-gas."
Nick Skiadas, 18, a recent high school graduate from Athens, said many Greeks were fed up with the Olympics and upset that the government has devoted so much money to the Games. "You can buy so many cameras and so many police officers, but we need the money for schools and hospitals," he said.
Greece has spent $1.5 billion on security for the Olympics and has deployed about 70,000 police officers, soldiers and other forces, primarily to deter a terrorist attack. Prior to the march, Greek government officials said they would permit the demonstration to take place but declared the U.S. Embassy off-limits, as well as the nearby Hilton Hotel where many members of the International Olympic Committee are staying.
"We have organized the Games in a secure environment, whereby security measures have been absolutely discreet and personal rights have been fully respected," said George Voulgarakis, the Greek minister for public order. "I want to believe that the protests planned for today and tomorrow will take place by fully respecting what the Greek people have achieved after so much effort."
The Greek Communist Party said it was planning another march on Saturday along a similar route.
--------
Bangladeshi Police Beat Demonstrators
By FARID HOSSAIN
The Associated Press
Saturday, August 28, 2004; 10:08 AM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A41226-2004Aug28.html
DHAKA, Bangladesh - Bangladeshi police beat demonstrators with batons Saturday during opposition-led strikes demanding the government resign over a deadly grenade attack on a political rally.
At least 50 people were injured in the clashes in southeastern Chittagong city and eastern Narsinghdi district, the domestic news agency United News of Bangladesh reported.
In Narsinghdi, 25 miles east of the capital Dhaka, baton-wielding police broke up a crowd of about 400 people who tried to hold a rally. About 30 people were injured, UNB said.
About 20 protesters were hurt in similar skirmishes in Chittagong city, 130 miles southeast of Dhaka, the report said.
Saturday's strike is the third such protest called by the opposition Awami League, which blames the government for the Aug. 21 grenade attack that killed 20 people and injured more than 300 at a rally outside the opposition Awami League's headquarters in central Dhaka. Opposition leader Sheikh Hasina escaped the assault unharmed, but she claims police allowed the assailants to flee - a charge the government denies.
Streets in Dhaka - a city of 10 million people - were empty of cars, trucks and buses during the dawn-to-dusk strike. Many commuters walked or used rickshaws. About 7,000 police and paramilitary troops patrolled Dhaka on Saturday, while extra security was deployed in more than 60 other cities and towns to monitor and control the strikers, a senior police official said on condition of anonymity.
A homemade bomb exploded in downtown Dhaka early Saturday, injuring a boy, witnesses said. No one took responsibility for the blast.
Strikes are a common opposition tactic in this impoverished South Asian nation to highlight demands and embarrass the government. Those who defy strike calls risk attacks by organizers.
The Awami League has staged a campaign of general strikes accusing Zia's government of corruption, incompetence and failure to stop rising crime. Zia's ruling Bangladesh Nationalist Party denies the allegations.
--------
A snapshot of some of the groups protesting at GOP convention
Knight Ridder Newspapers
By Shannon McCaffrey
Aug 28, 2004
http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/9494669.htm
NEW YORK - The following organizations are among those that have received permits from either the New York City Police Department or the City of New York Parks and Recreation Department to protest during the Republican National Convention:
-American Friends Service Committee, a nonviolent Quaker organization founded in 1917 to give conscientious objectors a way to aid civilian victims of war, plans to have 1,000 people in Central Park on Wednesday for a memorial display of 900 combat boots, representing fallen U.S. soldiers in Iraq.
-Buddhist Peace Fellowship, which promotes Buddhist teachings on nonviolence and human rights, plans several demonstrations during the convention. Members will sit and meditate in Washington Square Park.
-Christian Defense Coalition, a pro-family and religious rights group that filed a lawsuit to prevent the removal of a Ten Commandments monument from an Alabama courthouse, will conduct prayer vigils outside Madison Square Garden and near the World Trade Center site on Saturday and Sunday.
-Code Pink Women for Peace, a women's anti-war group, was formed in reaction to the U.S. military action in Iraq. The group chose its name as a play on the Bush administration's color-coded threat level. It plans a rally on Sunday in Riverside Park at the statue of Eleanor Roosevelt.
-Hip Hop Summit Action Network, a national coalition of entertainment industry leaders and musicians promoting hip hop music, sees itself as an agent of social change. Sean "P. Diddy" Combs, Def Jam Records founder Russell Simmons and NAACP Director Kwesi Mfume are on the board of directors. The group will hold a march and rally with the New York City AIDS Housing Network on Monday.
-National Organization for Women, the nation's largest feminist organization with 500,000 members, plans a rally of 35,000 in Central Park on Wednesday.
-New York City Central Labor Council, a coalition of 400 member unions affiliated with the AFL-CIO, plans a rally Wednesday to mobilize the union vote to turn out against President Bush.
-Not in Our Name opposes the war in Iraq and many of the government's actions in the campaign against terrorism, such as the detention of immigrants and "police state" measures such as the USA Patriot Act. It plans a rally of 1,000 people Sunday in Union Square Park.
-One People's Project opposes racist groups. Its Web site promotes itself as an online resource for "those on the front lines fighting fascism" and contains a "rogue's gallery" skewering people such as conservative pundits Ann Coulter and Pat Buchanan. It's holding a musical performance Thursday in Tompkins Square Park.
-Peaceful Tomorrows, a group of Sept. 11 families seeking alternatives to war, plans a rally and exhibit on Sunday in Central Park.
-Planned Parenthood, a pro-abortion rights group, plans to have 10,000 people march on Saturday across the Brooklyn Bridge and then rally in City Hall Park.
-Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign, an anti-poverty group promoting better access to housing, education, health care and jobs, will hold a "March for Our Lives" at Dag Hammarskjold Plaza.
-Sierra Club, a national environmental group opposed to a number of Bush administration policies, has small vigils planned for almost every day of the convention at Fountain Plaza South.
-United for Peace and Justice, a large coalition of 800 anti-war groups, plans a Sunday march past Madison Square Garden and a rally expected to draw 250,000 people. Controversy has surrounded the protest - expected to be the convention's largest - after the city said the group couldn't rally in Central Park because the crowd would destroy the lawn. The group accepted, then rejected, alternative plans to rally on West Side Highway.
-Vietnam Veterans Against The War was formed to oppose the Vietnam War but has grown to oppose other U.S. military actions as well. It plans an all-day rally, called "We Remember He Lied - They Died," in Union Square Park with families of military members and Sept. 11 victims.
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