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NUCLEAR
The new nuclear nightmare
Return of the atom
Nuclear power is cheapest option
Nuclear Insecurity
Nuclear waste mystery
Kazakhstan - Nuclear fuel lies near sea
India Test Fires Nuclear - Capable Missile
India Test Fires Nuclear - Capable Missile
India tests nuclear-capable ballistic missile
Pakistan calls for "strategic restraint" after Indian missile test
Citing Peaceful Uses, Iran Leader Asserts Right to Nuclear Program
Jordan to check for possible radiation from Dimona
KEPCO to replace pipes at Mihama nuclear plant
Kerry presidency to block N-proliferation
Next President May Have To Deal With Nuclear Terrorism
Los Alamos Chemicals reached Rio Grande
Company wants to decommission S.D. nuclear power plant building
MILITARY
Rebels in Sudan Region Say No Letup in Attacks
Clashes Break Out in Baghdad
In Western Iraq, Fundamentalists Hold U.S. at Bay
Israel denies any link to Pentagon spy allegations
Gandhi's Grandson Urges Palestinians to March Home
NATO in Iraq to teach military management
Pakistan Losing Grip on Extremists
Magazine: U.S. Soldier Says Torture Encouraged
Russians Find Explosives on 2nd Plane
Behind The Israeli Mole Affair
Analyst Who Is Target of Probe Went to Israel
F.B.I. Said to Reach Official Suspected of Passing Secrets
Israel Denies Spying Against U.S.
US probe of Pentagon policy leak broader than one case
Nato risks MI6 lives by naming agents on website
Israeli officials deny Pentagon spy
A spy turned diplomat recalls his career that changed with Asia
FBI kept eye on Pentagon mole suspect
Abuse Probes' Impact Concerns the Military
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Hearings Open With Challenge to Tribunals
Analysis Intelligence Agencies Pose Complex Conundrum for Administration
Detainee Still in Limbo
Chechen bombed Russian jet 'in revenge for brother's death'
Hicks tells of '10 hours of hell'
POLITICS
Howard tells Bush: I don't care if you won't see me
Howard fury over White House ban
Democrat 'Ashamed' He Helped Bush
The 9/11 Report: A Dissent
Series of Misjudgments Cost President His Lead
Ex-head of BBC says Tony Blair lied
Dyke: Blair's world of 'lies and bullying'
Dyke: Blair tried to gag BBC war reports
By refusing to accept second place, Reagan ended (and won) Cold War
Reform Party Reaffirms Nader Is Nominee
'NY Times' Releases Survey of 9/11 Families
OTHER
The ethics of meddling with nature
ACTIVISTS
Marchers Denounce Bush as They Pass G.O.P. Convention Hall
Protesters Flood New York, Cheney Praises Bush
Protesters Gird to Send A Message
Protesters Are Anti-G.O.P., but Democrats Don't Claim Them
MORE THAN 500,000 SAY NO TO THE BUSH AGENDA AT NYC MARCH
One Irishman in his boat spreads anti-war message
Mayhem fears as protesters target Bush
Protesters Are Anti-G.O.P., but Democrats Don't Claim Them
Angry mobs protest Schroeder's reforms
-------- NUCLEAR
The new nuclear nightmare
August 29, 2004,
Chicago Tribune
http://www.chicagotribune.com/technology/chi-0408290527aug29,1,1922164.story?coll=chi-techtopheds-hed
About half a century ago, President Dwight Eisenhower and his aides had what seemed to be a brilliant idea to avert a nuclear arms race. It came to be called "Atoms for Peace." Those who had nuclear weapons, mainly the Soviet Union and the United States, would help those who didn't have such weapons develop peaceful nuclear energy projects, like power reactors. In return, those nations were expected not to divert uranium to build a bomb.
The idea backfired disastrously. It hastened the spread of nuclear technology--and weapons--around the world. Moreover, it stoked a lucrative private competition to supply such technology to more and more countries and demolished any attempts even to partially stuff the nuclear genie back in the bottle.
Now the world faces a looming threat. Osama bin Laden has spoken of acquiring nuclear weapons as a "religious duty." North Korea may have as many as eight bombs, and has reportedly begun selling key ingredients for making bombs to other countries. Iran is playing a cat-and-mouse game with the United Nations' nuclear inspectors while it continues work that will enable it to build its own bomb.
Earlier this year, a vast nuclear black market was exposed, its tendrils leading no one knows exactly where. But this is certain: All the nuclear technology and know-how needed to make a bomb was for sale, short of the actual fissile material, to the highest bidders. The market, led by Pakistani nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan, was thriving, dramatically accelerating the capability of North Korea, Iran and Libya to build bombs.
That black market--dubbed the "nuclear Wal-Mart"--has exploded years of assumptions and presumptions about how effective efforts to prevent nuclear proliferation have been.
Even the normally cautious director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, has been speaking bluntly about the need for urgent reform in the treaties and agreements that are supposed to limit the spread of nuclear weapons.
"If the world does not change course," he wrote, "we risk self-destruction."
That is not hyperbole. A bomb far more powerful than those exploded at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II can now fit into a car trunk.
On July 1, 1968, the U.S. and dozens of other countries signed the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. It sought to freeze the number of nuclear nations at five--the U.S., France, Britain, the Soviet Union and China--while helping nations that forswore nuclear weapons to build peaceful nuclear reactors.
The non-proliferation treaty and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which was empowered to monitor treaty compliance, have failed to halt the spread of the bomb. Determined cheaters could, and did, develop weapons in secret, capitalizing on the expertise gained legitimately from nuclear nations. A map of the known and suspected nuclear nations appears on today's Commentary page.
The current web of international treaties and controls on nuclear weapons and power reactors was set up for a far different world. For one thing, these agreements were targeted at nations. They were not designed to deal with the likelihood that a terrorist group would, at some point, attempt to buy, steal or build a bomb, or detonate radioactive material in a so-called dirty bomb. All those frightful possibilities are more likely now.
In June 2003, Eliza Manningham-Buller, director of Britain's domestic intelligence service, MI5, told a London think tank that renegade scientists have helped Al Qaeda in its effort to develop chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear weapons (CBRN). "Sadly, given the widespread proliferation of the technical knowledge to construct these weapons, it will only be a matter of time before a crude version of a CBRN attack is launched at a major Western city and only a matter of time before that crude version becomes something more sophisticated," she said.
The U.S. seems to agree. The federal government reportedly is resurrecting a scientific art that had faded since the cold war: fallout analysis. That's the ability to quickly trace the roots of a nuclear explosion to who detonated it and where the nuclear material originated.
There is no way to rid the world of this threat. It can be reduced, but not eliminated. It would be simpler if it were only a matter of dismantling nuclear weapons, but it's not. There are hundreds of tons of the materials needed to build bombs--highly enriched uranium or plutonium--all over the world. Some of it is well guarded, some not. Some is used in hundreds of civilian reactors, often located on university campuses, used for research, training and medicine.
By one estimate, there's enough highly enriched uranium and plutonium already in the world to fuel at least 100,000 nuclear weapons. There are plants in several countries churning out even more enriched material.
Ever since Atoms for Peace, there has been talk of banning the manufacture of more bomb-grade materials for weapons and even for peaceful uses. Unfortunately, that has come to nothing. And even if a ban were enacted tomorrow, the threat would still be immense. Because the threat is so diverse, there is no magic bullet, no single approach, to thwart it.
Diplomacy alone won't do it. Some nuclear nations--notably India, Pakistan and Israel--haven't even signed the non-proliferation treaty. There's no way to stop the nuclear trade without international law enforcement and an enhanced global intelligence effort. A U.S.-led effort, known as the Proliferation Security Initiative, scored a huge coup in recent months, helping force the shutdown of Libya's nuclear weapons program and exposing the underground nuclear bazaar.
Earlier this year, Russia joined the effort, another positive development. The U.S. and Russia must accelerate programs to dismantle weapons and secure weapons-grade materials in the former Soviet Union and elsewhere. Behind that must be a credible allied military threat against any nation that seeks to secretly develop nuclear weapons.
Diplomatic efforts have not been entirely feckless. Over the years, those efforts have helped to restrain many nations from developing weapons and spreading nuclear technology. More nations have abandoned nascent efforts to acquire or develop nuclear weapons than now possess them. Egypt, Sweden, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Yugoslavia, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Australia, Libya, Argentina and Brazil have considered and abandoned the goal of going nuclear.
Sweden and Switzerland, however, are not Iran and Iraq. The difficulty that Saddam Hussein's Iraq had in trying to build the bomb was not a testament to the IAEA, which was completely bamboozled.
Iraq came perilously close to succeeding. David Albright, who worked as an IAEA weapons inspector there, says the Iraqis were hampered by inexperience, poor management and technical mistakes. One example: A technical error in the melting of uranium metal caused so much to be wasted that there wasn't enough left for a bomb. The world can't rely on such luck to stop the spread of nuclear weapons.
The first step to controlling nuclear proliferation has to be the creation of a potent IAEA, empowered to focus on blowing the whistle early on countries such as Iran and North Korea. The idea should be to alert the world to nuclear outlaws more quickly than is accomplished now--and to act on that information. As it is, the IAEA is so bound by its narrow rules, it still hasn't declared Iran is seeking to build nuclear weapons.
Gary Milhollin of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control rightly has called the IAEA's response "the blunder of the century."
For many years the world assumed that the horrific consequences of a nuclear explosion, and the threat of nuclear retaliation, were deterrent enough. That's no longer the case. Terrorists, living in their shadowy worlds, cannot be deterred in the way that nations can. There are no economic or political capitals of terrorism to target for retaliation.
The task, then, is evident: to make it as difficult as possible for terrorists or rogue states to buy, steal or develop nuclear weapons. As the world's only superpower, the U.S. can set a nuclear agenda for the world. With its economic and diplomatic clout, it can make things happen.
It won't be easy. Many countries with nuclear capabilities shun more international controls, often because they're costly to enforce and threaten to cut into lucrative nuclear markets.
Treaties alone won't do it. A treaty is still just a piece of paper. Terrorists don't sign treaties. Those nations that would help them often don't abide by treaties.
The world is a far different place than was envisioned by Atoms for Peace. In the 1950s, some officials, including some top Soviets, apparently protested to Ike that his Atoms for Peace idea could easily spread weapons-grade materials--and the potential to build bombs--worldwide, writes Paul Leventhal, founding president of the Nuclear Control Institute. The U.S. response? "Ways will be found" to prevent that.
Fifty-one years later, it's obvious that those ways never were found. That doesn't mean a nuclear holocaust is inevitable. But it does mean that the world cannot afford to believe in serendipity to protect itself from the most devastating weapons ever devised.
At the dawn of the nuclear age, Eisenhower's aides comforted themselves with one myth. As the 21st Century nuclear threat grows and evolves, world leaders have been clinging to another: That the world's most dangerous weapons could be kept out of the hands of terrorists through diplomacy and good intentions.
We cling to that myth at our peril.
Worldwide nuclear stockpiles 2004
Total estimated warheads: 28,185
NPT nuclear weapon states
Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty
1. Russia 17,000
2. United States 10,000
3. China 410
4. France 350
5. United Kingdom 185
Non-NPT weapon states
6. Israel 100
7. India 50-90
8. Pakistan 30-50
Suspected weapons or weapons program
9. Iran
10. N. Korea
Source: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Chicago Tribune
This is the first in a series of editorials on the modern nuclear danger. On Wednesday: How to thwart terrorists.
----
Return of the atom
JOHN LLOYD
The Scotsman,
Sun 29 Aug 2004
http://news.scotsman.com/opinion.cfm?id=1013412004
THE greatest test which the last century handed to humanity in the present one is: how to cope with its deadly knowledge. Science, as well as cures for malaria and polio, machines to take much of the drudgery out of labour and space travel, also gave us toxic chemicals, deadly biological weapons and nuclear bombs - all of which we call, reasonably, weapons of mass destruction.
It is true that the machine gun, which the 19th bequeathed to the 20th century, can also be so called. It certainly was by the hundreds of thousands mowed down by it in the war which began 90 years ago. But nuclear fission, and biochemistry have added more than just a twist. They have made mass deaths possible through the agency of a small group - or even one individual. It is the fear with which we now live: science's ability to privatise terror.
The two-score men who hijacked four aircraft for use against targets in New York and Washington almost three years ago dramatised the fact, but did not create it. They revealed the limits of the conventional imagination: that is, that no-one in the intelligence agencies, or in the airport security business, thought through what could happen if men were willing to die for their beliefs. They showed, by analogy, that which those who were privy to the preparation of chemical, biological and nuclear weaponry - or were willing to speculate about the new world their development was creating - already knew. That is, that we were providing the technological base for weapons which did not, as previous generations of arms had done, strengthen state power, but radically weakened it. The weapons made it immediately clear to those who could use their imaginations that these horrors could escape from official control, and pass into the hands of global criminals. This was, after all, the reality on which the James Bond fantasies, and those of his imitators, were based.
We do not know if we can escape the doom now presaged by the 'worst case scenarios' with which we have become familiar. We do not know, because it is not clear that we can control the products of science. Those of us who live in well-organised, rich and generally disciplined societies, have become used to systems which have so far kept catastrophes at bay. But the fear that something will break down - that some chain of human failures which should not happen, but do, will end in Chernobyl - or much worse, has haunted us in various forms for decades, and can dominate our thoughts. Most Londoners now, it seems, have periodic micro-panics about entering the tube; and who does not have a flash of the images of 9/11 when they see a plane fly low over a city?
Such a general feeling of insecurity helped cause a movement against nuclear power in much of the world over the past two decades; the dangers of Three Mile Island, which were over-hyped, and of Chernobyl, which were under-hyped, seemed to cement the case made by environmentalists and anti-nuclear campaigners for an end to nuclear power. The fact that civilian programmes can be used to generate the enriched uranium needed for bomb-making also played a large part in the movement. But now a greater fear arises - the sudden leap in the oil price over the summer, the fragility of Middle Eastern supply and the realisation that we are now living in the century in which, the experts predicted, the oil would begin to run out, have combined to remind us that this 100 years will not be able to run on oil, as the last one did. And so the old bogey becomes the new friend. If the oil runs out and gas supply is similarly limited, and coal is far too dirty to burn, then what is left? The fuel that was advertised as the cleanest, most convenient and ultimately the cheapest in the world: nuclear. If the choice is ultimately between its risks and going back to candlelight and the steam engine, then the choice appears to be made for us.
Its added attraction, now, is that it makes us more independent. Any country that can afford a civilian nuclear programme can limit its dependence on such unstable regions as the Middle East and the former Soviet Union. Those who have to think of planning in the long term will want to place as little of the country's future energy supplies as possible in the hands of the Saudi royal family or an Iraqi government.
To be sure planners will, for some years, have to cope with those among us who react to global warming and oil shortages by buying large sport utility vehicles; but at least, through nuclear power, we can keep the lights on.
Yet here is the paradox. That which makes us independent also makes us interdependent. Nuclear programmes, both civilian and military (and the two are closely linked), require the kind of global policing which other technologies do not. The sheer destructive power of the fissile atom means that countries cannot be entrusted to look after their own programmes, which is why there has to be an International Energy Agency with interventionist powers - even if these powers are actually too mild and constrained for the purpose.
Three of the hottest spots in the world today are heated by nuclear power. One only - the tension between the nuclear armed states of India and Pakistan - has subsided, at least for now, as both sides' administrations, prompted by the Americans, have got back to rather surly negotiation.
But Iran, which hides a nuclear weapons programme behind a civilian nuclear system, is not responding to the carrots offered to it by the European Union; and North Korea, a human prison house, is responding neither to American carrots nor American sticks.
One of the foreign affairs briefings John Kerry has received in the past two months is one from scientists and scholars telling him he may have to think about invading North Korea from an early date in his putative presidency.
One reason why I have not joined the anti-American chorus of the past two years is the conviction that we live in a dangerous world, which cannot do without a police force and which does not have one, outside of America.
The United Nations is an ideal, not a power: an ideal whose words are made flesh, when force must be used, only by the intervention of militaries which can achieve large tasks; and for these, the Americans are indispensable. One only has to think how far the countries of the European Union - or of the former Soviet Union, or China, or India, or any others - have gone in seeking to protect the helpless herders of Darfur, in Sudan. They are waiting for the United States, as is the UN.
And we wait, too, for a country that seems to have lost its sense of environmental care, to find it again. America is needed, to put the security of nuclear systems, both civilian and military, at the top of its agenda: to persuade, pressure and threaten the rogue states that common security is better than individual adventure; and to show by example that the world's resources are finite, and need care and replenishing. The future is likely to be nuclear, like it or not. It will not be much of a future unless we strengthen the rules, and live by them.
----
[To reply - http://www.independent.co.uk/story.jsp?story=55123 ]
Nuclear power is cheapest option
By Tim Webb
UK Independent
29 August 2004
http://news.independent.co.uk/business/news/story.jsp?story=556186
Building new nuclear power stations would be cheaper than building new coal or gas power stations, new research from energy consultancy Wood Mackenzie shows.
Gas and coal prices have almost doubled over the past year, raising the costs of fossil fuel generation, which provides around 70 per cent of the UK's electricity.
This means that now, for the first time, it would cost more to build and operate a coal-fired power station than to build and operate a nuclear power station.
And assuming a 10 per cent rise in gas prices, it would be more expensive to build and operate a gas-fired station 10 years from now, roughly the time it takes to plan and build a nuclear reactor. Rising demand means that more power stations must be built before 2010.
Consistently higher fuel prices, and the new estimated €8/ton (£5.40) tax on carbon emissions - to be introduced in January - could bring the building of more nuclear reactors back on the agenda. Nuclear power does not emit carbon so it is not liable for the tax.
Stewart Gray, the vice-president of gas and power at Wood Mackenzie, estimates that it would cost £37 per megawatt/hour of electricity generated to finance, build, operate and decommission a nuclear reactor. This, based on industry projections, assumes the reactor operates for 25 years.
Nuclear reactor costs are mainly fixed, unlike fossil fuel generators which are exposed to volatile commodity prices.
He estimates it now costs around £37MW/h to generate electricity from coal, compared with a historic cost of £29.50 per MW/h. But next year this is set to increase to £41.30MW/h because of the emissions tax.
Current gas generating costs are £26.1MW/h, almost £10 more expensive than it was a year ago. If current gas prices increased by another 10 per cent, he estimates, generating costs, could reach £37.2MW/h for gas power stations in 2015, when carbon taxes are to rise to €40/ton.
-------- accidents and safety
Nuclear Insecurity
Aug. 29, 2004
CBS 60 Minutes
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/02/12/60minutes/main599957.shtml
"If you understand the consequences associated with the loss of that kind of material, it would make the World Trade Center event of Sept. 11 pale in comparison." Richard Levernier
Richard Levernier conducted mock terrorist assault drills for the Department of Energy for the years leading up to 9/11. (Photo: CBS)
Of all the places in the United States that you'd think would be prepared to defend against a terrorist attack, the nine nuclear weapons factories and research labs operated by the Department of Energy would be at the top of the list.
But recent federal investigations have found that the department may not be up to the task.
Just last month, Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham essentially shut down all nuclear weapons research, after two classified computer discs were reported missing at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
It is the latest in a string of serious lapses that Correspondent Ed Bradley first told you about last February -- lapses that have led government investigators to conclude that security at nuclear weapons facilities may be inadequate. As a senior Department of Energy nuclear security specialist, Richard Levernier's job was to test how well-prepared America's nuclear weapons sites were to defend against a terrorist attack. He says security is not only inadequate, but some facilities are at high risk.
"And when you're dealing with nuclear -- assets in terms of weapons and materials, operating at high risk is unacceptable," says Levernier, who ran annual performance tests in the years leading up to Sept. 11.
These were tests in which U.S. Special Forces, playing the role of terrorists, armed with simulated weapons, would try to penetrate the facilities, steal imitation nuclear material, and then escape. The security guards there were expected to stop the attackers.
"Overall, the test results that I was responsible for showed a 50 percent failure rate," says Levernier. "If you understand the consequences associated with the loss of that kind of material, it would make the World Trade Center event of Sept. 11 pale in comparison."
Linton Brooks, head of the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), oversees the Department of Energy's nuclear weapons facilities -- where some 10,000 nuclear warheads and the tons of plutonium and highly enriched uranium used to manufacture them are stored.
He calls the state of security at those facilities "perfectly acceptable," and says that he's comfortable that these nuclear weapons facilities are safe.
Is there a problem defending against terrorists? "'Safe' and 'no problem' are not the same thing," says Brooks. "I am convinced that these facilities are secure and that nuclear material is not at risk. That's not the same thing as saying the there aren't a lot of things that we're working on, because this is a very difficult and demanding business." But to Levernier, "difficult and demanding" is no excuse for the fact that the mock terrorists were able to penetrate nuclear weapons sites half the time -- even though the security guards knew exactly what day and virtually what time to expect the attacks.
When Levernier conducted an unannounced inspection of security guards one January weekend at a nuclear weapons plant in Colorado, he says he was stunned by what he found.
"We found that the patrols that should be patrolling and moving around the facility were not observed," says Levernier. "Upon further investigation, we found that the vast majority of the patrols were in a facility watching the Super Bowl game."
The Department of Energy has admitted that security guards at other nuclear facilities have recently left front gates wide open, and failed repeatedly to respond to emergency alarms in top-security areas. Some have actually been caught sleeping on the job.
"People should know that the Department of Energy facilities cannot withstand a full terrorist attack," says Levernier. "I mean, a realistic attack. Serious, state-sponsored, for business."
What does Brooks think of this? "These are training exercises, so we don't think that simplistic measures of won or lost are correct," he says. "I don't want to suggest that we're entirely happy with the results of all of these things. If you never do a test that shows a problem, you are not doing a rigorous enough test." Since the Sept. 11 attacks, 60 Minutes has learned that terrorists have penetrated multiple layers of security on at least three occasions at the Y-12 nuclear complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn., the country's primary facility for processing weapons-grade uranium; and at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, where the first atomic bomb was developed.
The Department of Energy says it is now taking steps to bolster security, including more performance testing, installing more razor wire, better lighting, motion detection sensors and other new technologies, as well as the hiring of more guards.
But Matthew Zipoli, who's a member of a SWAT team of security guards at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory just outside San Francisco, and vice president of the Guards Union, says that's not enough.
"It's all window dressing. There's really no substance to the security. It's what looks good from the outside," says Zipoli.
He adds that guards are required to participate in annual counterterrorism drills with neighboring police departments, but said it never happened on his watch.
"1996 was the last time local law enforcement agencies participated in exercises with Livermore Laboratories," says Zipoli, who adds that he doesn't think he's been adequately trained to perform his job.
"We haven't been trained on the proper skills to get past an enemy. We don't have the proper equipment, so no, we don't have the proper training. And that degrades the effectiveness of our force." What's more, terrorists who might want to get into a nuclear facility may not even have to fight their way in. Hundreds of master keys and electronic key cards - some of which provide access to classified areas - have disappeared.
The Energy Department's inspector general found that officials at Lawrence Livermore lab, which holds top-secret information about the country's nuclear arsenal, failed to immediately report their missing keys.
And at Sandia National Laboratories, near Albuquerque, N.M., the locks have just been changed -- three years after keys there were reported missing. But this is something that Republican Sen. Charles Grassley, who's been leading the charge in Congress to improve nuclear security, finds hard to believe.
"If you were going to have your house keys stolen, you would change your locks right away, wouldn't you? It's unconscionable that after three years, locks had not been changed," says Grassley. "In that three-year period of time, how many times were those doors entered, and our classified information compromised?"
"I am concerned that bad guys could have had those keys. We don't know for sure if they did. But, the fact that they were lost, and there wasn't the proper concern about it, is a bigger problem," adds Grassley. "Because it -- once again, is evidence of people at these labs not taking their job at security seriously."
"I find it inexplicable and unacceptable that people don't take them seriously," says Brooks. "All I can tell you is they do now." As the Department of Energy's senior safety official at Los Alamos, Chris Steele has seen his share of problems. He's responsible for making sure that the lab's operations do not put workers or the public at undue risk from an accident at a nuclear weapons plant.
What kind of grade would he give them?
"I'm giving -- in the process of giving them an F -- because they've had systematic and systemic nuclear safety violations," says Steele.
In 2003, Steele says he cited Los Alamos for an unprecedented 45 major nuclear safety violations: "Forty-five shows that their normal mode of operation is to have violations. That they view these as glitches, that there's no sense of urgency in fixing them. And they could be precursors to disaster."
For example, Steele says Los Alamos came up with a flawed set of safety guidelines that said that in the event of a large explosion at its radioactive liquid waste facility, the subsequent fire in thousands of gallons of nuclear waste would be extinguished by the sprinkler system. The sprinkler system there would extinguish the estimated hundreds of thousands of gallons of nuclear waste, which would catch fire.
"Under the tons of rubble, the sprinkler head would rise up somehow and put out the fire. Of course, this is impossible, for a sprinkler to work under tons of rubble," says Steele.
After pointing out this and other safety hazards to his bosses, Steele was suspended, allegedly for breaching security in an e-mail exchange with his co-workers at Los Alamos.
Matthew Zipoli, the Lawrence Livermore security guard, was fired after he allegedly organized a walkout of his fellow guards.
And as for Richard Levernier, who ran the mock terrorist drills, he was demoted after giving unclassified information about his security concerns to a newspaper.
All of them claim it was retaliation, which the Department of Energy denies. But it turns out many of the allegations they told us have been substantiated by various federal government agencies.
Zipoli has since been reinstated, and Steele was cleared and is back on the job. Over at the Department of Energy, Linton Brooks says they take all incidents and allegations of lax security seriously.
All of these concerns have been outlined in reports since 1997. And they continue to occur as recently as just in the last few months. Why? "Because this is a complex system. Because there are always going to be problems, and you have to continue to deal with those problems," says Brooks.
"And what we're trying to do is to make sure that when you're sitting here with my successor, that you don't have repetitions of these problems. Because we've got a long-term system to fix it."
Just last week, the Department of Energy's inspector general found that security guards at the Y-12 weapons plant have been cheating on mock terrorist drills for the past 20 years, claiming they were successful in defending their facility when in fact, in some cases, they were not.
In response to continuing security problems, Brooks and the Department of Energy are conducting special inspections of all nine nuclear weapons sites. In the last several months, the Department of Energy says it has undertaken new steps to enhance security, including the creation of an elite paramilitary unit, and new technology to assist security officers.
As for the nuclear research that was shut down at the nation's nine nuclear weapons facilities, nearly 75 percent of that research was restarted recently -- after Energy Secretary Abraham said he was able to verify that adequate security measures were put into effect.
----
Nuclear waste mystery
The hunt is on for radioactive fuel rods that went missing from a former reactor near Eureka. It's the third case of disappearing fuel rods in the country since 2000.
Keay Davidson, Chronicle Science Writer
Sunday, August 29, 2004
San Francisco Chronicle
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/08/29/MNG6R8FL2A64.DTL
Two months after discovering that three highly radioactive nuclear fuel rods are missing from a defunct PG&E nuclear reactor near Eureka, officials are still struggling to find them.
Numerous workers in yellow radiation-proof suits are scouring the reactor cooling pond with robotic probes and video cameras, seeking the missing rods; former employees have been interviewed. The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has sent inspectors to Eureka to monitor the search.
It's the third case in which deadly hot fuel rods have disappeared from a U.S. nuclear power plant since 2000, and it's the first time at a plant in the western United States. The Eureka search could end up costing millions of dollars, and has enlisted backup searchers from as far away as the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant in Southern California.
There is no present evidence that the rods have been stolen, PG&E and NRC officials stress. "It is unlikely that the three 18-inch fuel segments were taken from (the plant) in an unauthorized manner," PG&E investigator Greg M. Rueger stated in an Aug. 16 report to NRC. PG&E officials still hope to find the missing rods somewhere inside the equipment-cluttered pool -- or, if not there, someplace outside of the plant, perhaps at one of six outside sites to which the rods might have been accidentally shipped years ago.
Despite their hopes, though, federal and utility officials are always haunted by a worst-case scenario: The possibility that radiation-packed nuclear rods could fall into the hands of terrorists. By attaching highly radioactive sources to chemical explosives, then detonating them, terrorists might kill hundreds or thousands of people, spark mass panic, wreck property values, devastate the nation's insurance industry, and turn a metropolis into a ghost town.
Regarding the missing fuel rods, "I keep thinking of that old TV show 'Car 54 Where Are You?' " joked Dan Hirsch, an anti-nuclear activist with the Committee to Bridge the Gap in Santa Cruz. "The accounting for these very dangerous materials seems poor. ... Obviously, the PG&E situation shows their accounting is poor. But it's indicative of a problem nationwide."
"A terrorist who obtained high-level (radioactive) waste could create a really awful incident," Hirsch said. "A millionth of an ounce of plutonium will cause lung cancer if inhaled."
Cases of missing fuel rods at three separate power plants since 2000 "show that historically, NRC's material control and accounting practices have been extremely lax," said Ed Lyman, a physicist at the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington.
Such cases worry Lyman because they raise doubts about whether the nation can keep track of fuel rods slated for use at a potentially much more dangerous site scheduled for construction near Savannah, Ga. That one is a nuclear plant that will burn weapons-grade plutonium from discarded nuclear bombs. Terrorists might have a field day if they swiped plutonium from such a plant, Lyman said.
In searching for the rods, PG&E officials stress they're trying to avoid repeating mistakes made in the first missing-rods case, four years ago at a plant on the East Coast. That case had a Keystone Kops quality that PG&E officials have no desire to emulate.
In late 2000, officials at the Millstone 1 nuclear plant in Connecticut noticed an odd discrepancy in their records. Soon they realized that they couldn't locate two nuclear fuel rods containing 17 pounds of uranium and 1.4 ounces of plutonium, which were supposed to be sitting within the blue, eerily glowing waters of the plant's cooling pond. As it turned out, the rods had last been seen two decades earlier, but no one noticed they were missing until 2000.
Even so, the missing rods didn't become an exceptionally urgent issue until the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11. Nine days later, the NRC staff reported the missing rods to the agency's board of commissioners. For many months afterward, officials at the Millstone plant used video cameras and other equipment to scour through the plant's equipment-crowded cooling pond, struggling to spot the missing rods -- to no avail.
NRC fined the Millstone plant $288,000 for its failure to keep track of the rods and for its failure to notify the NRC of their loss in a timely manner.
To this day, no one knows where the Millstone rods are. Yet every agency that got involved in the search has its own theory of where they ended up and denies responsibility for the ultimate outcome.
The NRC and Millstone officials maintain that the rods, which constitute "high-level" or extremely deadly radioactive waste, were accidentally shipped in "low-level waste" packages to burial sites in either Barnwell, S.C., or Hanford, Wash. -- they're not sure which. (NRC appears slightly less positive of this outcome than Millstone, but in any case NRC "considers this matter closed," the agency declares in an April 14 document.) Yet Barnwell officials insist they never received the fuel rods.
"Our regulator, the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control, required us to review our records of the Millstone shipments," said Deborah Ogilvie, a spokeswoman for the Barnwell site, which is operated by Chem-Nuclear Systems LLC. "There was nothing in the records that would lead us to believe that (the rods) were included in those shipments."
If Ogilvie, NRC and Millstone are right, then the rods must have gone to the U.S. Department of Energy's Hanford Nuclear Reservation near Richland in semiarid eastern Washington state. That's where plutonium for the Nagasaki A-bomb was created in the 1940s.
Hanford spokeswoman Colleen Clark said that if the rods came Hanford, they'd have been buried at a 100-acre low-level waste site that is on the Hanford property. But there's a caveat: That waste site is no longer the Energy Department's direct responsibility because the agency previously leased it under a 100-year contract to a private firm, US Ecology of Boise, Idaho.
And what does US Ecology say? The company insists it never received the rods, and for a simple reason: The rods are still inside the Millstone cooling pond, more than 2,000 miles away on the other side of the continent.
"We've reviewed the documents and looked at all the data that's available, and believe that's where the fuel rods are located. ... They're still in (the Millstone) pool," said US Ecology spokesman Chad Hyslop.
The second case of missing fuel rods occurred early this year, at the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant in Vernon, Vt. Plant officials reported they were missing two segments of a used nuclear fuel rod. After a three-month search of the pool, they relocated the rods in mid-July.
To date, that's the only missing-rod case with a happy ending.
The third, and latest, case involves PG&E's Humboldt Bay Power Station near Eureka. The Eureka plant's now-defunct reactor is a relic of the early era of commercial nuclear energy: From 1963 to 1976, the 65-megawatt reactor drove a turbine that generated electricity for residents on the North Coast and points inland.
Afterward, the reactor was shut down, and the plant is now powered solely by natural gas. But radioactive fuel rods still sit -- slowly cooling off -- in the reactor's cooling pond, which is 22 feet wide, 28 feet long, and up to 36 feet deep. The pool is a jungle of aged metal and dying radioactive fuel: The pool contains 390 "fuel assemblies," each of which is a bundle of a few dozen multiple used fuel rods.
On June 23, PG&E analysts noted "the first indication of a discrepancy" in their records about three radioactive portions of a used fuel rod. Each fragment is 18 inches long and about a half-inch thick, and contains used uranium dioxide fuel inside a stainless-steel cladding.
On July 7, using robotic equipment, PG&E technicians began the tedious search for the missing rods inside the pond. In a July 16 interview, PG&E spokesman John Nelson stressed that the utility was "very confident" the three rod fragments would eventually be found in the pool, perhaps within a few weeks.
No such luck, though. On Aug. 17, PG&E issued a new statement: "Plant personnel have completed the physical search of the most likely locations and all easily accessible spaces in the plant's used fuel storage pool, but the (fuel rod) segments have not yet been found."
So, what now?
In an interview Friday, Nelson said the search continues. The utility also is investigating the possibility that no later than 1986, the rods were mistakenly shipped to one of six outside sites, either nuclear fuel "reprocessing" plants (all now defunct) in Ohio, New York or Livermore, or to low-level radioactive waste dumpsites at Barnwell, Hanford or Beatty, Nev.
The search might take up to five years, PG&E speculates, and there's no guarantee of success. For example, if the rods were sent to the reprocessing plant in West Valley, N.Y., the searchers are out of luck because the New York plant's shipping receipt records from that time period have reportedly been destroyed.
Hirsch, the anti-nuclear activist, said: "My hope and suspicion is that this (Eureka) incident is sloppiness rather than terrorism. But sloppiness is not particularly reassuring in a terrorist era. "
-------- asia
Kazakhstan - Nuclear fuel lies near sea
Casper, Wyoming Star Tribune
(AP)
Sunday, August 29, 2004
http://www.casperstartribune.net/articles/2004/08/29/news/world/e3e218b145f5ec6987256efe007b17bd.txt
MANGYSTAU, Kazakhstan -- In a storage pool at a mothballed nuclear power plant on the shores of the Caspian Sea rests a key ingredient for anyone seeking to build a nuclear weapon: Containers of spent atomic fuel with enough plutonium to make dozens of bombs.
Despite international concern about the waste at the Mangyshlak nuclear power plant, plans to transport it away from the Caspian shore have stalled in a dispute between Kazakhstan and the United States over where and how it should be removed.
Kazakhstan has earned much international good will for unilaterally disarming after the 1991 Soviet collapse and handing over its nuclear arsenal to Russia under watch of the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Still, the nation's atomic legacy as a testing ground for the Soviet nuclear program has left it with numerous waste sites, as well as the remnants of an active atomic power program.
The Mangyshlak Atomic Energy Complex is one of those places, lying in a decrepit industrial area outside the city of Aktau in the moonlike desolation of western Kazakhstan. The reactor was shut down in 2003 for economic reasons, having worked a decade beyond its intended 20-year lifetime.
It lies behind two series of walls and radiation detectors, past a security checkpoint featuring metal detectors and X-ray machines, then gates opened by electronic badges and a numeric code.
The sealed canisters of radioactive materials lie in a pool under metal floors welded together with seals from the IAEA. Video cameras with satellite feeds to the IAEA monitor the room, and IAEA experts visit once a month.
The 330 tons of spent nuclear fuel contain more than 3 tons of plutonium enriched to more than 90 percent. That's better than usual weapons-grade but would require extensive processing to be made into bombs.
-------- india / pakistan
India Test Fires Nuclear - Capable Missile
August 29, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-india-missile.html
NEW DELHI (Reuters) - India successfully test fired a long-range nuclear-capable Agni II missile off its eastern coast Sunday, a defense ministry spokesman said.
It was the third successful test firing of the Agni II, following tests in 1999 and 2001.
The latest test came a week ahead of talks between the Indian and Pakistani foreign ministers, who are due to meet in New Delhi Sunday to discuss a faltering peace process launched by the nuclear rivals last year.
The surface-to-surface Agni II missile has a range of 1,250 miles.
India is developing a range of missiles -- including the Agni, or ``fire'' in Sanskrit -- as part of its nuclear defense strategy against neighbors China and Pakistan.
The Agni I has an estimated range of 750 miles and the Agni III, still under development, will have a range of 2,500 miles.
India staged nuclear tests and declared itself a nuclear power in 1998, prompting Pakistan to respond with similar tests.
The two nations have fought three wars and came near to a fourth in 2002 over Kashmir, India's only Muslim-majority state.
There has been an increase in separatist violence in recent weeks in Kashmir and India's ruling Congress party has accused Pakistan of not keeping its promise to halt support for militants fighting New Delhi's rule there.
--------
India Test Fires Nuclear - Capable Missile
August 29, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-India-Missile-test.html
NEW DELHI (AP) -- India test-launched a surface-to-surface missile capable of carrying nuclear weapons Sunday, a defense ministry spokesman said.
The Agni II missile lifted off from India's missile testing range on the coast of eastern Orissa state, said Defense Ministry spokesman Amitabh Chakravorty.
This was the third trial of the Agni II missile, which has a range of up to 1,560 miles. The missile can carry conventional and nuclear warheads weighing a little more than a ton, according to defense ministry figures.
Indian authorities had informed their counterparts in Pakistan about the test ahead of the missile launch, B. S. Menon, a defense ministry official told The Associated Press.
India routinely test-fires missiles it is developing for military use. When it tests larger missiles, it gives notice to neighboring Pakistan, and Pakistan does likewise. The nuclear-armed rivals have fought three wars.
Defense Minister Pranab Mukherjee and over 100 scientists and military officials were on hand to witness the test launch, Menon said.
Scientists at India's Defense Research and Development Organization, who have developed the missile, had earlier carried out trial runs of the missile in April 1999 and in January 2001.
Sunday's test was satisfactory and met all the parameters that the scientists were checking, including its guidance accuracy and its performance, Menon said.
India's missile arsenal includes the short-range ballistic missile Prithvi; the medium range Akash missile; the anti-tank Nag missile; and the supersonic Brahmos missile.
----
India tests nuclear-capable ballistic missile
Aug 29, 2004
BHUBANESHWAR, India (AFP)
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040829170937.537jwumo.html
India on Sunday successfully tested its indigenous Agni-II ballistic missile, the military said as it announced it was armed with a shorter-range version of the nuclear-capable missile.
The medium-range Agni-II (Fire), with a maximum range of 2,500 kilometres (1,560 miles), was fired from a mobile launcher on Wheeler Island off eastern Orissa state, officials said.
Agni-II has been flight-tested three times since 1999, the previous occasion being in January 2001.
"The launch of Agni II from its rail mobile launcher met all the mission objectives, including achieving the high accuracy in guiding the payload to the designated target at a 12,00-kilometre range," project chief R.N. Agarwal said in New Delhi.
He said a network of tracking stations monitored the missile's flight until its payload hit the target.
"The white-hot object was tracked by pre-positioned naval ships confirming the impact and success of the mission," Agarwal added.
Indian defence ministry sources, meanwhile, said Sunday's flight-test comes just after the military armed itself with Agni-I missiles, which have a range of 700 kilometres.
India's previous battle-ready batteries comprise of the Prithvi (earth) surface missiles which can carry a half-tonne nuclear warhead to a maximum distance of 250 kilometres.
India's nuclear rival Pakistan, meanwhile, cautioned New Delhi's military establishment against missile tests.
"Pakistan does not favour an open-ended arms race in South Asia. We believe that a strategic restraint is in the interest of both nations," Pakistani foreign ministry spokesman Masood Khan said in a statement in Islamabad.
"We would hold further talks on this subject in the near future," Khan said.
The latest missile test also comes a week ahead of peace talks in New Delhi between the foreign ministers of India and Pakistan aimed at ending decades of hostility over disputed Kashmir.
In June 19-20 official-level talks in the Indian capital, both sides agreed to set up a hotline to prevent nuclear confrontation, to continue a ban on nuclear tests and to conclude an agreement on informing each other in advance about impending missile tests.
The missile tested Sunday powered by solid fuel is capable of carrying 1,000-kilogramme (2,200-pound) nuclear or conventional warheads, the official said.
Developed by India's Defence Research Development Organisation (DRDO), the 20-metre (65-foot) missile weighs 16 tonnes. It can be fired from rail- and road-based launchers.
India's Defence Minister Pranab Mukherjee and senior officials of his ministry and scientists were present at the launch, officials here said.
The Agni is one of five missiles developed by the DRDO under its Integrated Guided Missile Development Programme launched in 1983.
The other four missiles are the Prithvi, the surface-to-air Trishul (Trident), multi-purpose Akash (Sky), and the anti-tank Nag (Cobra).
India and Pakistan held nuclear tests two weeks apart in 1998 and have since come close to war twice in their dispute over Kashmir.
----
Pakistan calls for "strategic restraint" after Indian missile test
ISLAMABAD (AFP)
Aug 29, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040829114508.bsbjlax7.html
Pakistan Sunday called for "strategic restraint" after India's test-firing of a nuclear-capable missile and said it hoped that the South Asian arms race would not spiral out of control.
Foreign ministry spokesman Masood Khan said Pakistan had been informed in advance of the test-firing of the Agni device and that the two countries would hold talks on the subject soon.
"Pakistan does not favour an open-ended arms race in South Asia. We believe that a strategic restraint is in the interest of both nations," Khan said in a statment.
"We would hold further talks on this subject in the near future," he added.
Nuclear powers Pakistan and India, who have recently begun a rapprochment process after years of tension, frequently test ballistic missiles.
The latest firing comes a week ahead of peace talks in New Delhi between the foreign ministers over the disputed Himalayan region of Kashmir.
In June the neighbouring countries agreed to set up a hotline to prevent nuclear confrontation, to continue a ban on nuclear tests and to conclude an agreement on informing each other in advance about impending missile tests.
India and Pakistan held nuclear tests two weeks apart in May 1998 and have since come close to war twice in their dispute over Kashmir.
-------- iran
Citing Peaceful Uses, Iran Leader Asserts Right to Nuclear Program
August 29, 2004
New York Times
By NAZILA FATHI
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/29/international/middleeast/29iran.html
TEHRAN, Aug. 28 - President Mohammad Khatami, in a rare news conference, said Saturday that Iran would not give up its right to have a nuclear program and that it was willing to guarantee it was seeking nuclear technology for peaceful purposes.
"We have suggested that the Middle East should be cleaned of all kinds of nuclear weapons," he said.
"On the other hand, we want to be able to master nuclear technology," he added, to enable Iran to manufacture uranium as fuel for its nuclear plants. "We want it and no one can deprive us of having it."
In return, Mr. Khatami said that Iran was willing to "provide any guarantee" to prove that its nuclear program was for peaceful purposes.
"We do not welcome tension," he said. "We do not welcome our case to be sent United Nations Security Council."
"We will do our best to resolve our differences through negotiations with the International Atomic Energy Agency and the international community," he added, referring to the United Nations international monitoring agency for nuclear programs.
Iran has allowed tougher inspections of its nuclear sites since October, but this is the first time the government has said publicly that it would provide a guarantee to ease international concerns.
The United Nations nuclear agency is expected to release its report about Iran's nuclear activities during the first week of September.
The United States has accused Iran of trying to develop nuclear weapons and has urged the United Nations agency to send Iran's case to the Security Council, which could impose sanctions.
The agency concluded in its report in June that Iran had secretly begun its uranium enrichment program in the mid-1980's. That finding has raised concerns over Iran's nuclear ambitions.
President Khatami brushed off claims by John R. Bolton, the American under secretary for arms control, who said Iran had informed three European Union countries - Germany, Britain and France - that it could produce weapons-grade uranium within a year.
"We do not consider Mr. Bolton as fair and do not accept his claims," Mr. Khatami said. "If the United States really had any proof or documents against Iran, it would have made more noise rather than just claims. This shows that they do not have real proof."
Relations have become tense between Iran and neighboring Iraq as well. The Iraqi defense minister has accused Iran of arming militia forces close to Moktada al-Sadr, the Iraqi cleric whose militia has battled American and Iraqi forces in Najaf.
Ibrahim Jafari, deputy president of Iraq, made a surprise visit to Iran on Tuesday, and the deputy prime minister of Iraq, Barham Saleh, came to Iran on Saturday. The trip was aimed at preparing for a visit by Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, Iran's official news agency, IRNA, reported.
Mr. Khatami denied accusations that Iran was stirring chaos in Iraq, and said that his country wanted stability and security in Iraq.
He further warned the United States, saying that America must know it should not repeat "the unsuccessful experience" of invading Iraq and attack Iran, contending that the result would be even worse in the case of Iran.
-------- israel
Jordan to check for possible radiation from Dimona
By Yoav Stern,
Haaretz Correspondent
29/08/2004
http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/spages/470802.html
Jordan will ask the United Nation's nuclear watchdog body to help it check whether it has been affected by radiation from Israel's nuclear reactor in Dimona. The Jordanian newspaper Al-Rai reported Sunday that the Foreign Ministry has asked the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to send experts and equipment to "determine whether there is a correlation between radiation from Dimona and the appearance of unusual diseases in the area." In addition, the agency will be asked to check radiation levels in the northeast of the Kingdom, along the border with Iraq.
A debate between Jordanian citizens and officials over the issue erupted last month after released Israeli nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu told the London-based Al-Hayat newspaper that the nuclear reactor in Dimona was operated only when the wind blew in an easterly direction, toward the Kingdom. Vanunu's remarks were followed by a public outcry, which continued even after the government announced the matter had been checked in the past.
A Jordanian delegation of legislators will travel Wednesday to the region that borders with Israel just east of Dimona, in order to assess the steps being implemented by the Jordanian government to identify possible nuclear radiation.
-------- japan
KEPCO to replace pipes at Mihama nuclear plant
Yomiuri Shimbun,
August 29, 2004
http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/newse/20040829wo22.htm
Kansai Electric Power Co. says it will replace weakened pipes at its No. 2 reactor at the Mihama Nuclear Power Plant in Mihamacho, Fukui Prefecture, in an attempt to alleviate public concern.
The power utility, which knowingly continued to use severely weakened pipes at its No. 2 reactor for eight months beginning in December, said Friday, "As we said in our explanation, they (the pipes) were strong enough."
In its explanation, KEPCO cited an exemption in government technical standards for power plants that it claimed applied to nuclear reactors. It also said the pipes at the No. 2 reactor were strong enough, and so continued to use them.
The Economy, Trade and Industry Ministry's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency said in a report Friday to an inspection committee meeting on the Aug. 9 fatal accident at the No. 3 reactor, "This is an inappropriate explanation, there is a problem using them (the pipes) because they do not meet reactor safety regulations."
-------- terrorism
Kerry presidency to block N-proliferation
By Khalid Hasan,
August 29, 2004
Pakistan Daily Times
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_29-8-2004_pg1_6
WASHINGTON: Under a Kerry presidency, the United States is certain to modify its present policy on non-proliferation, making it far more stringent and compliance-oriented.
The basis of that policy is expected to be a report recently produced by some of the leading experts in the field for the Carnegie Endowment for Peace. 'Universal Compliance: a strategy for nuclear security' was written by George Perkovich, Joseph Cirincione, Rose Gottemoeller, Jon Wolfsthal, and Jessica Mathews. To help prevent terrorists from acquiring nuclear weapon capabilities, the United States should lead an initiative to ensure that Pakistan and India employ state-of-the-art practices and technologies to secure nuclear weapons, material, and know-how, the report proposes.
The report, a "blueprint to strengthen national security and prevent nuclear terrorism", while recognising the limitations of the current system of nuclear "haves" and "have-nots," nevertheless introduces a new balance of rules and obligations that apply to nuclear and non-nuclear states, as well as non-state actors. The report says that "stopping the spread of nuclear weapons requires more international teamwork than the Bush Administration recognises, and more international resolve than previous administrations could muster."
The report lays down that non-nuclear weapon states must reaffirm commitments never to acquire nuclear weapons and forego acquisition of facilities to produce nuclear-weapon usable materials. Securing weapon-usable fissile materials should be the single greatest non-proliferation priority. Nations must establish criminal prohibitions against individuals, corporations, and states assisting others in secretly acquiring the technology, material, and know-how needed for nuclear weapons. All states must honour their obligations to end nuclear explosive testing and diminish the role of nuclear weapons. They should also assess the technical feasibility of verifiably eliminating nuclear arsenals. States that possess nuclear weapons must exert greater leadership to resolve regional conflicts that could cause nuclear weapons to be used.
The report calls for the development of a greater international consensus on threats and the division of labour to combat them. NATO leaders should be persuaded to produce a collective proliferation threat assessment to review at the 2006 NATO summit. In many countries, stealing nuclear material is no more of a crime than stealing money, and this must be remedied. Tougher national/international laws should be developed to "deter and criminalise" nuclear proliferation. The resolve of the UN Security Council to enforce, develop meaningful inspections, broaden counter-proliferation strategy, and establish international guidelines for preemption should also be ensured. States that withdraw from NPT should be punished. The report recommends that to prevent proliferation, nuclear weapons must be devalued as instruments of security and status. States that contribute to non-proliferation with economic, political, and other inducements should be rewarded. States with nuclear weapons, the report stresses, must exert greater leadership to moderate and resolve regional conflicts that drive proliferation and possible use of nuclear weapons. The non-proliferation imperative must drive nuclear weapon policy, not vice versa, it adds. States with nuclear weapons and stockpiles of weapon-usable materials should take the goal of nuclear disarmament seriously enough to issue white papers on how they could verifiably eliminate their nuclear arsenals and secure all fissile materials.
As for Iran, the US should more fully back European Union leaders in negotiating the dismantlement of Tehran's nascent uranium enrichment and plutonium separation capabilities, in return for perks. Resolving the nuclear proliferation challenge should be the highest priority in relations with Iran. As for the Middle East, the report emphasises the urgency of incremental steps to establish a zone free of weapons of mass destruction. Also recommended is the establishment of a regional security dialogue predicated on the recognition by all states of each other's right to exist. To build political support for non-proliferation, Israel should ratify the Chemical Weapons Convention and join the Biological Weapons Convention. Washington is called upon to appoint a presidential envoy to negotiate with North Korea.
----
Next President May Have To Deal With Nuclear Terrorism
By GEORGE WILL
8/29/2004
http://www.theday.com/eng/web/news/re.aspx?re=89A2107E-AF71-4276-9190-69473B8D3963
"Why do you use an ax when you can use a bulldozer?"
- Osama bin Laden
As Republicans convene less than four miles from Ground Zero, the presidential contest is crystallized by that proximity. The next four years will be the most dangerous in the nation's history because the 9/11 attacks were pinpricks compared to a clear and almost present menace. Which candidate can best cope with the threat of nuclear terror?
A blood-chilling book on that is "Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe" by Graham Allison of the Kennedy School of Government, currently an adviser to John Kerry. Allison's indictment of the Iraq War - as a dangerous distraction from and impediment to the war on nuclear terror he advocates - is severable from his presentation of stark facts about the simultaneous spread of scientific knowledge and apocalyptic religious worldviews:
A dirty bomb - conventional explosives dispersing radioactive materials that are widely used in industry and medicine - exploded in midtown Manhattan could make much of the island uninhabitable for years. As many as one in every 100 Manhattanites might develop cancer. Perhaps even more people would die in the panic than would be killed by radiation. But even dirty bombs are relative pinpricks.
The only serious impediment to creating a nuclear weapon is acquisition of fissionable material - highly enriched uranium (HEU) or plutonium. In 1993, U.S. officials used ordinary bolt cutters to snip off the padlock that was the only security at an abandoned Soviet-era facility containing enough HEU for 20 nuclear weapons. In 2002, enough fissile material for three weapons was recovered from a laboratory in a Belgrade suburb. Often an underpaid guard and a chain-link fence are the only security at the more than 130 nuclear reactors and other facilities using HEU in 40 countries.
Allison says that at least four times between 1992 and 1999 weapons-useable materials were stolen from Russian research institutes but recovered. How many thefts have not been reported? The U.S. Cold War arsenal included Special Atomic Demolition Munitions that could be carried in a backpack. The Soviet arsenal often mimicked America's. Russia denies that "suitcase" nuclear weapons exist, so it denies reports that at least 80 are missing. Soviet military forces deployed 22,000 tactical nuclear warheads - without individual identification numbers. Who thinks all have been accounted for? Russia probably has 2 million pounds of weapons-useable material - enough for 80,000 weapons.
In December 1994, Czech police seized more than eight pounds of HEU in a parked car on a side street. A senior al-Qaida aide's proclaimed goal of killing 4 million Americans would require 1,400 9/11s, or one 10-kiloton nuclear explosion - from a softball-sized lump of fissionable material - in four large American cities.
Of the 7 million seaborne cargo containers that arrive at U.S. ports each year, fewer than 5 percent are inspected. Fewer than 10 percent of arriving noncommercial private vessels are inspected. Given that 21,000 pounds of cocaine and marijuana are smuggled into the country each day, how hard would it be to smuggle a softball-sized lump of HEU on one of the 30,000 trucks, 6,500 rail cars or 50,000 cargo containers that arrive every day?
President Bush recently said Democratic critics of rapid development of ballistic missile defenses are "living in the past." Perhaps. Some missile defense is feasible and, leaving aside costs, desirable. But costs cannot be left aside. Kerry, were he politically daring and intellectually nimble, might respond:
"The president is living in 1983, when Ronald Reagan proposed missile defenses to counter thousands of Soviet ICBMs. A nuclear weapon is much less likely to come to America on a rogue nation's ICBM - which would have a return address - than in a shipping container, truck, suitcase, backpack or other ubiquitous things. So allocating vast amounts of scarce financial and scientific resources to missile defenses rather than other security measures is imprudent."
On the other hand, Allison argues that any hope for preventing, by diplomacy, nuclear terrorism depends on "readiness to use covert and overt military force if necessary" against two potential sources of fissile material - Iran and North Korea. But the candidate Allison is advising has opposed virtually every use of U.S. force in his adult lifetime.
Intelligent people can differ about all that Allison says. But campaign time is becoming scarce for intelligent differing about how to prevent some American Ground Zero from becoming so poisoned by radiation that no one will be able to come within four miles of it.
George Will is a syndicated columnist. E-mail: georgewill@washpost.com.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- new mexico
Los Alamos Chemicals reached Rio Grande
ROGER SNODGRASS, roger@lamonitor.com,
Monitor Assistant Editor
Sunday, August 29, 2004
http://www.lamonitor.com/articles/2004/08/23/headline_news/news02.txt
A hydrologist working with a Santa Fe public interest group has concluded that groundwater contamination from Los Alamos National Laboratory has reached the Rio Grande.
The conventional hydrological model of the Pajarito Plateau, as expressed by scientists at the laboratory, maintains that migration of contaminants from the laboratory will require tens of thousands of years to reach the Rio Grande.
George Rice, a groundwater hydrologist who lives in San Antonio, has authored a report, "New Mexico's Right to Know," for Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety, a nuclear watchdog organization that has voiced a number of concerns about radioactive and chemical emissions from the laboratory.
Rice concluded "that LANL derived contaminants have emerged at springs along the Rio Grande."
In 2002 and 2003 CCNS led rafting trips along the Rio Grande, collecting samples of water and vegetation for laboratory analysis. The results from those expeditions were published in a previous report and challenged the laboratory to account for the presence of minute traces of radionuclides and perchlorates that might have originated in the last 60 years from nuclear weapons operations.
Laboratory hydrologists subsequently acknowledged a new lack of consensus on the question and have begun to explore alternative hypotheses.
Rice's report, while not peer-reviewed, is footnoted with 273 references and documented by groundwater monitoring data from the laboratory and the New Mexico Environment Department.
Diverging from CCNS's earlier finding, Rice found some of the previous data about perchlorates and radionuclides to be questionable, but he did identify two cases "where a clear relationship to LANL activities can be established and the data appear to be reliable."
One is at Ancho Spring, where Rice found LANL's record in 1995 of two kinds of high explosives used up gradient at Technical Area 16.
Six additional tests at Ancho Springs since 1995 have not shown any further signs of the high explosives.
Rice explained the singular appearance by suggesting that the contaminants might have filtered into the groundwater as a "discrete slug," that has since been flushed from the aquifer.
The laboratory stated at the time that the samples might have been contaminated by soils that contained high explosives.
Rice concluded that there was as yet no evidence to invalidate the results of the 1995 sample.
As for perchlorate, a potentially toxic chemical that has been used to produce explosives and process plutonium at LANL, Rice narrowed the field to samples detected at springs 4 and 4C, down gradient of Pajarito Canyon, where a majority of LANL operations are conducted. These are the only locations where perchlorate samples measured slightly above the highest background concentration of .5 micrograms per liter.
"All that in a nutshell is to say that contaminants have reached the Rio Grande via the groundwater route," Rice reiterated last week in an interview.
Laboratory hydrologists have emphasized that any concentrations of the contaminants detected to date are considered minute and well below regulated limits.
Rice, NMED and laboratory hydrologists all agree on the importance of careful and continued monitoring.
-------- south dakota
Company wants to decommission S.D. nuclear power plant building
Associated Press
Sun, Aug. 29, 2004
http://www.aberdeennews.com/mld/aberdeennews/news/9530582.htm
SIOUX FALLS, S.D. - Xcel Energy has applied to decommission a building at a non-working nuclear power plant that the company owns in eastern South Dakota between Sioux Falls and Brandon.
Plans are to remove remaining contamination at the last building associated with the Pathfinder plant, said Joel Beres, a spokesman for Xcel in Minneapolis. The contamination has low levels of radiation and is confined to pipes inside the turbine building, said Beres.
Repeated surveys have detected no radiation in groundwater, surface water or soil, he said.
A public meeting with Xcel Energy and government officials is planned Tuesday evening to review cleanup and decommissioning plans.
The plant has been out of action since 1967 when two tubes burst there.
The reactor fuel was removed in the early 1970s, and the two most contaminated buildings came down in 1992, said Beres. The reactor was an early prototype and produced only a small amount of commercial power.
"It was sort of a novel design, and it was a pioneering effort at the time," Beres said. "It was one of the very first commercial nuclear reactors."
Meanwhile, Northern States Power (now Xcel) decided to focus instead on the much larger Prairie Island and Monticello reactors in Minnesota, said Beres.
Still, Beres said Pathfinder helped spur the industry.
"Those people went on to build other plants in NSP, so there was a lot of good operational information," he said.
Steve Wegman, an analyst with the South Dakota Public Utilities Commission, said part of his family's history is tied to the Pathfinder plant.
"My dad got to build it," he said. "And the cool thing is, I got to shovel pea gravel when it was decommissioned." The pea-sized gravel ensured that the reactor could never be used again, he said.
The plant also was notable for its design, which used superheated steam, he said.
Xcel Energy operates a natural gas power plant at the site and the company is building a third gas turbine there.
Information from: Argus Leader, http://www.argusleader.com
-------- MILITARY
-------- africa
Rebels in Sudan Region Say No Letup in Attacks
By Ed Johnson
Associated Press
Sunday, August 29, 2004; Page A22
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A42644-2004Aug28.html
EL FASHER, Sudan, Aug. 28 -- Rebels in the Darfur region of Sudan said Saturday that government forces and Arab militiamen have continued to bomb and torch villages and kill civilians -- with attacks on six villages in the past three days, including one that killed 64 people.
To protest the continuing violence, the rebels said that for 24 hours they would boycott the peace talks with the Sudanese government underway in Abuja, Nigeria. Meanwhile, a U.N. team completed a mission that could determine whether Sudan will face international sanctions.
Security has improved in camps in the violence-torn Darfur region, but displaced villagers still face attacks and abuse when they leave their camps, a U.N. team said Saturday.
More than 1.5 million black African villagers have been driven from their homes by the militiamen known as the Janjaweed, who are allegedly backed by the government. Many of those people are now living in 147 camps scattered across Darfur, a region the size of France.
An estimated 50,000 people 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 Monday to take actions to stop the militiamen or face possible sanctions. The government 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 whether he expected U.N.-imposed sanctions.
De Mul, the U.N. deputy humanitarian coordinator, said he saw improvements in the camps.
Sudanese government negotiators said they couldn't confirm or deny the attacks and decried the rebel walkout. "It's very sorrowful," a delegation spokesman, Ibrahim Mohamed, said of the boycott. "We are here to negotiate and stop such painfulness."
The 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.
Earlier in the day, Sudan's government ruled out any discussion at the Abuja talks of an African Union proposal to send up to 2,000 peacekeepers into Darfur.
-------- iraq
Clashes Break Out in Baghdad
U.S. Forces Battle Insurgents as Militia Returns From Najaf
By Robin Shulman
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, August 29, 2004; Page A20
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A42651-2004Aug28?language=printer
BAGHDAD, Aug. 28 -- For one commander in the militia loyal to Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr, the trip home to Baghdad after a cease-fire was reached in Najaf was just a pit stop.
It was time enough to receive dozens of well-wishers delivering congratulations for resisting the Americans. Time enough to weep with the visitors over the damage inflicted to the sacred Imam Ali shrine in the holy city.
And time enough for the commander, who gave his name only as Abu Hayder, to prepare to return to Najaf on Sunday morning and figure out how to redistribute weapons that fighters had laid aside.
"It seems the truce is only in Najaf," Abu Hayder said. "Every other area is on fire."
Hundreds of Sadr's supporters recently returned from fighting in Najaf, where a calm prevailed Saturday after a three-week battle ended between the militia and U.S. and Iraqi forces. But as they arrived in Baghdad, a new round of clashes broke out in their Sadr City neighborhood between insurgents and U.S. soldiers.
"It is essential that the fight continue, and it will continue until the Americans are expelled," said Sheik Raed Kadhimi, a spokesman for Sadr's office in the Kadhimiya neighborhood of Baghdad.
Shiite insurgents fired mortars, rocket-propelled grenades and assault rifles at the 1st Brigade Combat Team from the U.S. Army's 1st Cavalry Division. The U.S. forces drove through the neighborhood in Humvees, using loudspeakers to order people stay in their houses because U.S. and allied forces were "cleaning the area of armed men," the Associated Press reported.
Three Iraqis were killed and 25 were wounded in the battles, according to the Health Ministry, while the U.S. forces reported no casualties.
Fighters also fired a round of mortars into a neighborhood in eastern Baghdad, killing two boys who were washing cars in the street, the AP said.
"It's clearly not over. This is an agreement that concerned Najaf and Kufa," a senior U.S. official said on condition of anonymity, referring to the sacred city and an adjoining town. "Moqtada Sadr has a decision to make which we'll see in actions, not words, very soon."
On Friday, a peace deal brokered by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the highest-ranking Shiite cleric in Iraq, ended the fighting in Najaf. The deal stipulated that weapons be prohibited in Najaf and Kufa, that all foreign forces leave Najaf, and that the Iraqi government compensate civilians whose homes or businesses were damaged in the battles.
A group of Iraqi officials traveled to Najaf in U.S. military helicopters Saturday to meet with Sistani and assess the damage.
"The destruction is huge," said Health Minister Alaadin Alwan, as he toured streets of bullet-pocked buildings strewn with mangled vehicles, spent ammunition and mortar shells. "It needs a great deal of work to rebuild it."
Also Saturday, for the second day, U.S. warplanes bombed the city of Fallujah, a stronghold of Sunni insurgents who have been fighting U.S. forces for more than 18 months. Several homes were destroyed and residents were rushed to a hospital as fire filled the sky, the AP reported.
A fire also burned at the West Qurna oil fields near the southern port city of Basra after insurgents blew up a pipeline there Friday.
On Friday in the city of Baiji, 125 miles north of Baghdad, police found the bodies of a slain Turkish truck driver and an Iraqi man, and a mortar attack killed one person and wounded three.
At Yarmouk Hospital in Baghdad, family members and friends gathered around wounded fighters just back from Najaf. The visitors, many of whom traveled through fighting in Sadr City to reach the hospital, offered the fighters soda, kisses and words of encouragement. Several fighters in the Mahdi Army, the force loyal to Sadr, said they expected the fight would continue.
"Shooting is going on in the neighborhood. It's really bad," said Muthana Jumaa, a Sadr City resident who was visiting a friend. "It was dangerous coming here, but I wanted to take the risk of coming to see him. It's dangerous everywhere."
Jumaa said his friend was injured in Najaf when a shell landed in a crowd during a rally called by Sistani.
In his home in the Kadhimiya neighborhood, Jafar Ali Muhammed, 27, who had fought in Najaf, said the battle had been long and exhausting, and that some of his comrades had been killed.
Muhammed said that after the peace deal was brokered, he returned to Baghdad for a 24-hour visit with one priority: marriage.
But he had experienced a couple of setbacks. He had spent the $1,400 he had saved for the wedding on weaponry, so he had to ask the local Sadr office for $30 to buy an engagement ring. And his fiancée lived in Sadr City, where fighting was raging and where he feared that U.S. soldiers might recognize and arrest him.
Then a report came that a U.S. tank had parked across from her home. The engagement was deferred.
Muhammed's mother said her religious conviction was so strong that she, too, joined the fight in Najaf and vowed to continue fighting in future.
"I left my kids here and went to fight in Najaf," said Itihad Jamil, 47, smiling gently and pushing her black veil from her eyes. "We are going to fight them until we throw them out of Iraq. Our country is our country."
--------
In Western Iraq, Fundamentalists Hold U.S. at Bay
August 29, 2004
The New York Times
By JOHN F. BURNS and ERIK ECKHOLM
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Aug. 28 - While American troops have been battling Islamic militants to an uncertain outcome in Najaf, the Shiite holy city, events in two Sunni Muslim cities that stand astride the crucial western approaches to Baghdad have moved significantly against American plans to build a secular democracy in Iraq.
Both of the cities, Falluja and Ramadi, and much of Anbar Province, are now controlled by fundamentalist militias, with American troops confined mainly to heavily protected forts on the desert's edge. What little influence the Americans have is asserted through wary forays in armored vehicles, and by laser-guided bombs that obliterate enemy safe houses identified by scouts who penetrate militant ranks. Even bombing raids appear to strengthen the fundamentalists, who blame the Americans for scores of civilian deaths.
American efforts to build a government structure around former Baath Party stalwarts - officials of Saddam Hussein's army, police force and bureaucracy who were willing to work with the United States - have collapsed. Instead, the former Hussein loyalists, under threat of beheadings, kidnappings and humiliation, have mostly resigned or defected to the fundamentalists, or been killed. Enforcers for the old government, including former Republican Guard officers, have put themselves in the service of fundamentalist clerics they once tortured at Abu Ghraib.
In the past three weeks, three former Hussein loyalists appointed to important posts in Falluja and Ramadi have been eliminated by the militants and their Baathist allies. The chief of a battalion of the American-trained Iraqi National Guard in Falluja was beheaded by the militants, prompting the disintegration of guard forces in the city. The Anbar governor was forced to resign after his three sons were kidnapped. The third official, the provincial police chief in Ramadi, was lured to his arrest by American marines after three assassination attempts led him to secretly defect to the rebel cause.
The national guard commander and the governor were both forced into humiliating confessions, denouncing themselves as "traitors" on videotapes that sell in the Falluja marketplace for 50 cents. The tapes show masked men ending the guard commander's halting monologue, toppling him to the ground, and sawing off his head, to the accompaniment of recorded Koranic chants ordaining death for those who "make war upon Allah." The governor is shown with a photograph of himself with an American officer, sobbing as he repents working with the "infidel Americans," then being rewarded with a weeping reunion with his sons.
In another taped sequence available in the Falluja market, a mustached man identifying himself as an Egyptian is shown kneeling in a flowered shirt, confessing that he "worked as a spy for the Americans," planting electronic "chips" used for setting targets in American bombing raids. The man says he was paid $150 for each chip laid, then he, too, is tackled to the ground by masked guards while a third masked man, a burly figure who proclaims himself a dispenser of Islamic justice, pulls a 12-inch knife from a scabbard, grabs the Egyptian by the scalp, and severs his head.
The situation across Anbar represents the latest reversal for the First Marine Expeditionary Force, which sought to assert control with a spring offensive in Falluja and Ramadi that incurred some of the heaviest American casualties of the war, and a far heavier toll, in the hundreds, among Falluja's resistance fighters and civilians. The offensive ended, mortifyingly for the marines, in a decision to pull back from both cities and entrust American hopes to the former Baathists.
The American rationale was that military victory would come only by flattening the two cities, and that the better course lay in handing important government positions to former loyalists of the ousted government, who would work, over time, to wrest control from the Islamic militants who had emerged from the shadows to build strongholds there. The culmination of that approach came with the recruitment of the so-called Falluja Brigade, led by a former Army general under Mr. Hussein, and composed of a motley assembly of former Iraqi soldiers and insurgents, who marched into the city in early May, wearing old Iraqi military uniforms, backed with American-supplied weapons and money.
But the Falluja Brigade is in tatters now, reduced to sharing tented checkpoints on roads into the city with the militants, its headquarters in Falluja abandoned, like the buildings assigned to the national guard. Men assigned to the brigade, and to the two guard battalions, have mostly fled, Iraqis in Falluja say, taking their families with them, and handing their weapons to the militants. The militants' principal power center is a mosque in Falluja led by an Iraqi cleric, Abdullah al-Janabi, who has instituted a Taliban-like rule in the city, rounding up people suspected of theft and rape and sentencing them to publicly administered lashes, and, in some cases, beheading. But Mr. Janabi appears to have been working in alliance with an Islamic militant group, Unity and Holy War, that American intelligence has identified as the vehicle of Abu Musaab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian-born terrorist with links to Al Qaeda whom the Americans have blamed for many of the suicide bombings in Baghdad, which is just 35 miles from Falluja, and in other Iraqi cities.
The videotapes showing the killing of the guard commander, the humiliation of the governor, and the beheading of the Egyptian all display the black-and-yellow flag of the Zarqawi group as a backdrop, and the passages of the Koran chanted as an accompaniment to the killings are drawn from passages of the Muslim holy book that have accompanied some of the videotaped pronouncements by Qaeda leaders, including Osama bin Laden. Iraqis who have watched the Falluja tapes say the Egyptian's executioner speaks in a cultured Arabic that is foreign, possibly Jordanian or Palestinian.
A Severe Blow in Falluja
Perhaps the harshest blow to the American position in Falluja came with the Aug. 13 execution of the national guard commander, Suleiman Mar'awi, a former officer in Mr. Hussein's army with family roots in Falluja. In the tape of his killing, he is seen in his camouflaged national guard uniform, with an Iraqi flag at his shoulder, confessing to his leadership of a plot to stage an uprising in the city on Aug. 20 that was to have been coordinated with an American offensive. For that purpose, he says, he recruited defectors among the militants' ranks and met frequently with Marine commanders outside the city to settle details of the attack.
American commanders in Baghdad acknowledged ruefully that Mr. Mar'awi had been killed, but they denied that there was any plan for an offensive. Still, Marine commanders at Camp Falluja, a sprawling base less than five miles east of the city, have been telling reporters for weeks that the city has become little more than a terrorist camp, providing a haven for Iraqi militants and for scores of non-Iraqi Arabs, many of them with ties to Al Qaeda, who have homed in on Falluja as the ideal base to conduct a holy war against the United States. Eventually, the Marine officers have said, American hopes of creating stability in Iraq will necessitate a new attack on the city, this time one that will not be halted before it can succeed.
Some of those officers have also acknowledged that Iraqi "scouts" working for the Americans, some disguised as militants, others working for the national guard and police, have been a source of intelligence on militant activities in Falluja, and on the location of bombing targets. The American command says it has carried out many bombing raids since the Marine pullback from the city in May, killing scores of militants. One such raid that was reported this week in a popular Baghdad newspaper, Al-Adala, said that 13 Yemenis had been killed in an air raid in Falluja as they prepared to carry out suicide bombing attacks in Baghdad, and that the Yemeni government was negotiating to bring the bodies home.
Among militants in Falluja, there has been one point of agreement with the Americans - that many of the bombing raids have hit militant safe houses, and with pinpoint accuracy. A clue as to how this has been possible is given in the tapes of the beheadings of Mr. Mar'awi, the national guard commander, and of the Egyptian, a man in his mid-30's who identifies himself on the tape as Muhammad Fawazi. Both men confess to having planted electronic homing "chips" for the Americans. As they speak, the tapes show a man wearing a red-checkered kaffiyeh headdress holding a rectangular device, colored green and encased in clear plastic, about the size of a matchbox.
The tape of Mr. Fawazi's execution breaks from the scene of the Egyptian kneeling in confession to a combat-camera film from a bombing raid on Falluja that has been posted on numerous Internet Web sites in recent weeks. The black-and-white tape, giving the pilot's eye view, shows a district of Falluja on a moonlit night, with the targeting crosshairs fixed on a large, low building across the street from a mosque, whose minaret throws a moon shadow onto the street. The sound of the pilot breathing into his mask can be clearly heard, with an exchange with a controller that speaks for the nonchalance of modern warfare. "I have numerous individuals on the road, do you want me to take them out?" the pilot asks as the tape shows about 40 men coming out of the building and heading down the street away from the mosque, toward what some Web site accounts said was a firefight between militants and American troops.
After a pause, the controller replies, saying, "Take them out."
The pilot, having fired his weapon, begins the countdown. "Ten seconds," he says.
"Roger," the controller replies. The combat camera swings suddenly, picturing the scene from behind the men below. A huge blast of smoke and flame erupts on the road, enveloping the men, as the pilot cries "Impact!"
The controller then closes the exchange. "Oh dude!" he says, with what appears to be a chuckle.
The execution tape then shifts to scenes of devastation after an air attack on Falluja. It shows a crater, rubble, people piling up belongings, injured being carried into a hospital, and distraught-looking groups of civilians, including children. Shifting back to Mr. Fawazi, it shows him with his hands tied behind his back, looking downcast at the ground, then nervously toward the camera, as the heavyset man towering over him quotes passages from the Koran ordaining death. "He who will abide by the Koran will prosper, he who offends against it will get the sword," he says, his right forefinger pumping in the air, pointing first to heaven, then down to Mr. Fawazi.
"The only reward for those who make war on Allah and on Muhammad, his messenger, and plunge into corruption, will be to be killed or crucified, or have their hands and feet severed on alternate sides, or be expelled from the land," the man says. With that, the two gunmen flanking the executioner shout "Allahu akbar!" God is great, drop their Kalashnikovs and tumble Mr. Fawazi face down on the ground. The killer pulls his knife from behind a magazine belt on his chest, grabs Mr. Fawazi by the hair, severs his head, holds it up briefly to the camera, then places it between his rope-tied hands on his back.
Police Chief Presumed Corrupt
On Aug. 21, the Marine headquarters issued a brief news release. The police chief of Anbar, Ja'adan Muhammad Alwan, had been arrested that day in Ramadi on suspicion of "corruption and involvement in criminal activities to include accepting bribes, extortion, embezzling funds, as well as possible connections with kidnapping and murder." A Marine spokesman, Lt. Eric Knapp, declined to offer more details of Mr. Alwan's charges, beyond saying, "everyone knew he was corrupt."
In the Hussein years, Mr. Alwan was a senior police officer and also a high-ranking Baathist, people who knew him at the time say. But unlike many Iraqis who prospered under Mr. Hussein, those Ramadi residents said, he had never been known as a thug. When the Americans arrived, leaders of a local clan that had secretly cooperated with the invaders vouched for him. But soon, one Ramadi resident said, "People started to hate him because he was too cooperative with the Americans." Repeated death threats followed, and the three assassination attempts. The third, in May, especially shook him, acquaintances said, because he survived a rocket attack on his car, but his eldest son lost a leg.
Soon after, the verdict on the streets of Ramadi about the police chief began to change. Although he may have raked in illegal profits, Ramadi people say, he also began cooperating with Islamic militants, even passing American military plans to them. Although such claims are unverifiable, the assassination attempts stopped. But so too, last week, did Mr. Alwan's tenure as police chief. The Marines say that his arrest followed a three-to-five month investigation, that "countless government officials were afraid of him" and that the provincial chief "contributed to crime and instability."
Asked whether Mr. Anbar was also charged with aiding the insurrection, Lt. Knapp, the spokesman, said tersely by e-mail, "We are investigating suspected ties to the insurgency." Lt. Knapp described how the police chief was lured to captivity. "To avoid bloodshed and to make the arrest as clean as possible," he wrote, a Marine officer who had been working with the police invited him to a meeting in an American camp. On his arrival at the gate he climbed into a car where he was advised of his arrest. The e-mail message concluded, "He was then removed from the vehicle, handcuffed, and blackout goggles were put on him for security reasons."
In the case of the provincial governor, Abdulkarim Berjes, Mr. Zarqawi's group, Unity and Holy War, appears to have decided that it could achieve its ends, nullifying American efforts to build governing institutions in the province, by humiliating him - a punishment many Iraqi men regard as worse than death. They then passed the videotape to the Arab satellite news channel Al Jazeera, the most-watched channel in Iraq. "He cried like a woman," one of the Iraqis who watched the tape said, after viewing the governor's reunion with his kidnapped sons in a militant safe house.
At the end of June, Mr. Berjes, a former Anbar police chief under Mr. Hussein, complained in a discussion at Camp Falluja, the Marine base, that his government was riddled with agents of the resistance. "I can no longer trust anybody," Mr. Berjes said in a farewell meeting with L. Paul Bremer III, the departing leader of the American occupation authority. "I don't know if people are working for me, or for the resistance."
Mr. Berjes was visibly shaken, having survived an insurgent ambush on his motorcade as he drove in his old American limousine to the Marine base from Ramadi.
In fact, Iraqis in Anbar say, the governor had become a despised figure, for the same reason as Mr. Alwan, the Anbar police chief - because he too enthusiastically embraced the Americans and took to calling the resistance fighters "terrorists." Following a common ritual among the resistance, militants sent him a note of formal warning, paraphrased by those who say they had been told about it as saying: "We are watching you. Remember that we consider anybody who cooperates with the Americans a traitor, to be killed under Islamic law."
On July 28, assailants entered the governor's residence in Ramadi, snatching his three grown sons and setting fire to the house. The governor got his final warning: repent and resign, or your sons die. His capitulation was broadcast on Aug. 6, in the video now circulating in Anbar markets. Standing under the Zarqawi group's flag, he glumly recites: "I announce my repentance before God and you for any deeds I have committed against the holy warriors or in aid of the infidel Americans. I announce my resignation at this moment. All governors and employees who work with infidel Americans should quit because these jobs are against Islam and Iraqis."
As the governor is reunited with his sons, a voice on the tape recites the Zarqawi group's attacks on public officials in the past three months. "We killed the president of the Iraqi Governing Council, and then the deputy minister of the interior," the voice says. "The minister of justice survived our attack, but we killed the governor of Mosul. And now we have captured the governor of Anbar. The list is just beginning, and is far from finished.'' More than three weeks after Mr. Berjes resigned, the government of Ayad Allawi, seemingly hard put to find anyone to take the job, has yet to appoint a successor.
American commanders confess they have no answers in Anbar, and say their strategy is to curb the militants' ability to project their violence farther afield, especially in Baghdad. A recent meeting between Iraq's interim prime minister, Dr. Allawi, and a delegation of tribal sheiks from Falluja who have pledged fealty to Mr. Janabi is said to have reached a standstill accord, with Dr. Allawi promising not to sanction large-scale American attacks on the Anbar cities, and the sheiks conveying Mr. Janabi's pledge to halt militant attacks on the Americans.
But leaving the militants in control could pose a disabling threat to American political plans, which may already have been shaken more than American officials will admit by events in Najaf. Top American officials say that events there, with Moktada al-Sadr's militiamen finally driven from the Imam Ali Shrine, have set the stage for a turn in American fortunes across the Shiite heartland of Iraq. But even there the prospects seem deeply clouded by the failure to effectively disarm Mr. Sadr's surviving fighters as they left the shrine with shouldered rifles and donkey carts loaded with rockets.
Mr. Sadr has signed a new pledge to join the democratic political process that will be the final measure of American success here. But he has abrogated similar undertakings, and many of his fighters vowed to take up arms again. Coupled with the militants' control in Anbar, that could unsettle plans for elections scheduled across Iraq by the end of January - the next crucial step toward a fully elected government by January 2006, an event American officials see as a way station on the path to a draw down or withdrawal of the 140,000 American troops here.
Those Americans say a rapid buildup of the new Iraqi Army, the national guard and the police, coupled with gathering momentum in "turning dirt" on the thousands of reconstruction projects financed by $18-billion in American money, should eventually improve security across Iraq. But the Americans acknowledge that a full, nationwide election in January may not be possible. For now, they have identified 15 cities across the Arab parts of Iraq that they contend can be stabilized to make voting in January possible. For the moment, they say, Falluja and Ramadi are not among them.
Iraqi staff members of The New York Timesin Baghdad contributed reporting for this article.
-------- israel / palestine
Israel denies any link to Pentagon spy allegations
JERUSALEM (AFP)
Aug 29, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040829131410.0o9ly2ns.html
Israel flatly denied Sunday deeply embarrassing allegations that one of its agents had spied on the United States by passing on top-secret Pentagon intelligence.
"We have no involvement in these allegations," a spokesman for Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's office told AFP.
"It is an internal issue in the United States which is running out of steam anyway.
"Israel has not used an agent to spy on the United States, the country which is its best ally."
US authorities have confirmed that they are investigating an aide to a senior Pentagon official who allegedly passed secrets to Israel with the help of employees of a powerful pro-Israel lobby.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation believes the man passed classified White House policy documents on Iran to Israel and received no money, but acted out of ideological support for the Jewish state, said a top US official who spoke on condition of anonymity.
The probe targets an individual in the office of Undersecretary of Defence for Policy Douglas Feith, the third most senior official at the Pentagon.
The Washington Post on Saturday identified the man as one Larry Franklin, described as a desk officer in the Pentagon's Near East and South Asia Bureau.
Ehud Yatom, an MP for Sharon's Likud party and a member of the parliamentary sub-committee which scrutinises the activities of the security services, rejected any involvement by Franklin.
"I have never heard any talk about him and Israel has no need for recourse to such agents," he told public radio Sunday.
Officials in Washington said the investigation was part of a broader, two-year FBI probe of the handling of highly classified material by civilians working at the Pentagon.
Israel pledged not to spy on the United States after the case of Jonathan Pollard, an intelligence analyst for the US navy, who passed on thousands of secret documents in the 18 months before his arrest in November 1985.
Pollard was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1987, but Israel only admitted that he was one of its spies 11 years later.
Sharon is desperate to avoid falling out with the US administration which has given its enthusiastic backing to his plans to pull settlers and troops out of the Gaza Strip while at the same time reinforcing its hold over settlements in the West Bank.
The Gaza pullout was expected to feature heavily in talks later this week in Egypt during a visit by Palestinian prime minister Ahmed Qorei.
Sources within Qorei's office told AFP that the premier was expected to leave for Cairo later Sunday or on Monday.
Although no firm timetable for his visit has been unveiled, Palestinian officials said that Qorei was likely to meet Egyptian intelligence chief Omar Suleiman, who is President Hosni Mubarak's pointman on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
"We always coordinate and discuss with our Egyptian brothers and this is part of our continued coordination with them," Qorei told reporters after a meeting of his cabinet.
Qorei failed to persuade militant groups such as Hamas to agree a halt to their campaign of attacks against Israel in talks hosted by Cairo late last year but efforts have continued since to reach a new agreement.
Egypt, keen to prevent chaos developing in neighbouring Gaza after next year's promised Israeli pullout, has pledged to help train Palestinian security services.
In events on the ground in Gaza, a 24-year-old Palestinian militant was shot dead by Israeli soldiers as he was seen approaching a border crossing into Israel.
Palestinian medics confirmed that the army had handed over the body of Solama al-Sawakra, a member of the leftist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine's (PFLP) military wing, after he had been shot near the Karni border crossing.
An Israeli military source said that forces had opened fire on three Palestinians seen crawling towards the Karni crossing in the early morning. One had been hit but the other two had fled, the source added.
A Kalashnikov assault rifle and explosives belt had been recovered from the body of the man, who was wearing a bullet-proof jacket.
The latest death brings the overall toll since the September 2000 start of the Palestinian uprising, or intifada, to 4,250, including 3,252 Palestinians and 927 Israelis.
--------
Gandhi's Grandson Urges Palestinians to March Home
reuters
Aug 29, 2004
By Cynthia Johnston
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=worldNews&storyID=6096660
RAMALLAH, West Bank (Reuters) - The grandson of Mahatma Gandhi urged Palestinian refugees Sunday to march home from Jordan en masse, even if the Israelis "kill 200 people," to shock the world into taking notice.
Arun Gandhi, whose pacifist grandfather helped end British control over the Indian subcontinent, proposed to the Palestinian parliament a peaceful march of 50,000 refugees across the Jordan River and said lawmakers should lead the way.
"What would happen? Maybe the Israeli army would shoot and kill several. They may kill 100. They may kill 200 men, women and children. And that would shock the world. The world will get up and say, 'What is going on?"' he said.
"That is the kind of electrifying action that needs to be taken," he said in the West Bank city of Ramallah.
A popular Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation which began in 2000 has been overshadowed by violence by militants, some sworn to Israel's destruction, who have killed more than 900 Israelis in suicide bomb and shooting attacks.
Human rights groups say at least 3,000 Palestinians have also been killed over the past four years.
Gandhi, on a solidarity trip to territory where Palestinians are seeking statehood, said his idea could be "crazy."
He compared Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza to the treatment of blacks under South Africa's former white-minority regime, saying what was happening to Palestinians was "10 times worse."
The fate of refugees is one of the thorniest disputes in the Palestinians' long-running conflict with Israel.
At least 700,000 Palestinians fled or were driven from their homes during the 1948 war that led to Israel's creation. Together with their descendants, the refugees now number about 4 million, many living in adjacent states like Jordan and Lebanon.
Israel rules out refugee return to Israel, saying this would amount to demographic suicide for the Jewish state.
Palestinian lawmaker Azmi al-Shueibi called Gandhi's idea "important and interesting" but said there were more pressing issues such as stopping Israeli military raids and removing checkpoints Israel says are needed to block militant attacks.
"I am willing to participate in such a march toward Palestine," he said. "Arab countries around Palestine do not help us in executing such ideas. But I think we should adopt this idea in the future."
-------- nato
NATO in Iraq to teach military management
August 29, 2004
By Ward Sanderson
Stars and Stripes European edition
http://stripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=23239&archive=true
U.S. Marine Gen. James Jones, commander of Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe, talks to Iraqi Special Forces under training by the Multinational Forces during a recent tour of Iraq. About 40 NATO members are now in Baghdad to train senior Iraqi officials.
U.S. Marine Gen. James Jones, commander of Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe, visits with Kurdish troops during a recent tour of Iraq. About 40 NATO members are now in Baghdad to train senior Iraqi officials.
While NATO has yet to announce its ultimate strategy for training security forces in Iraq, the alliance already has begun a pilot project schooling dozens of Iraqi senior officials in the ancient art of military management.
About 40 alliance personnel - about half of them American - are in the Baghdad area training top-tier military and police leaders on how to lead forces and keep Iraq's new structures from falling apart.
"That's what we're aiming for at the moment, is headquarters-level personnel," Lt. Col. Petter Lindqvist, a Norwegian officer and spokesman for the mission, said from Baghdad.
"This is like staff-college-level education."
The team arrived in Iraq two weeks ago both to begin limited training and to look at how best to train forces on a larger scale later. The team will deliver its findings to Gen. James L. Jones, the supreme commander of NATO, who then will relay his final proposals to the North Atlantic Council, the alliance's chief decision-making body, in mid-September.
After that, NATO theoretically could begin training Iraqis of more varied ranks and types.
"It includes all categories," Lindqvist said. "So at this stage we haven't limited or narrowed on any one or specific group. That might come later, though."
The alliance voted to begin training Iraqis during its June summit in Istanbul, Turkey. France and Germany opposed deploying peacekeepers into Iraq, as the United States had asked, but in the end did allow the alliance to train Iraqi forces inside or outside the country. Lindqvist said he believed most of the training would be held inside Iraq.
The current NATO team is made up of troops from Britain, Bulgaria, Hungary, Italy, Norway, Poland, Romania and the United States. They arrived from NATO bases in Mons, Belgium; Naples, Italy; Stavanger, Norway; and Norfolk, Va.
Jones, a U.S. Marine Corps general, also visited the team in Iraq for two days earlier this month. He met with military leaders and even inspected Iraqi special forces, according to statements and photos released by NATO's military headquarters in Mons.
Whatever its final form, Lindqvist said the training program will be tailored to whatever the new Iraqi forces need, as opposed to telling Iraqi officers what to do.
"We not here to impose the NATO system on the Iraqis structures," Lindqvist said. "Quite the contrary."
-------- pakistan / india
Pakistan Losing Grip on Extremists
Attacks on Officials Linked to Al Qaeda
By John Lancaster and Kamran Khan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, August 29, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A42456-2004Aug28?language=printer
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- A recent series of assassination attempts on high-level officials here is the result of a growing and deadly alliance between Pakistani extremists and second-rung al Qaeda operatives from Arab countries and Central Asia who use the border area with Afghanistan as a refuge, according to senior Pakistani intelligence sources.
The development is a disquieting one, foreign diplomats said, because it suggests that Pakistan's security services may be losing control over home-grown militants they once embraced as allies, first in the struggle against the Soviets in Afghanistan and more recently against Indian forces in Kashmir.
An attack on Lt. Gen. Ahsan Saleem Hayat, a top military commander, on June 10 was conducted by Pakistani assailants who later confessed they had been trained in small arms, explosives and conducting ambushes at an al Qaeda camp in Pakistan's rugged tribal region of South Waziristan, near the Afghan border, according to two senior intelligence officials.
The gunmen identified their instructors as Uzbeks and Arabs.
The Pakistani extremists, disguised in military-style uniforms, attacked Hayat as they waited in a stolen van in the port city of Karachi near a bridge frequented by military officials, then opened up with machine guns on his motorcade.
Hayat survived the carefully planned ambush, but 11 others were killed, including his driver. The assailants were quickly identified and rounded up, traced through a cell phone left at the scene, authorities said.
Pakistani officials said they believed that foreign al Qaeda operatives working with Pakistani militants were also behind two attempts to kill Gen. Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan's president, in December.
The same combination, they said, may have carried out the July 30 assassination attempt against Shaukat Aziz, then the finance minister, who became prime minister on Saturday.
"For a foreigner to operate in Pakistan has become more and more difficult, so obviously their effort is to use local operatives," said one of the senior intelligence officials, who spoke on condition that neither he nor his organization be identified.
On Monday, government troops killed four foreign fighters and wounded several others in a shootout in a remote tribal section on the Afghan border, authorities said. On Aug. 21, authorities announced the arrest of up to 10 al Qaeda suspects, including Pakistanis and two Egyptians, after breaking up what they said was a plot to launch attacks against the U.S. Embassy and Musharraf's residence, among other targets.
The decision to apply stronger pressure on militants poses a delicate challenge for Musharraf, who is eager to confront the domestic terrorist threat and has recently won international praise following a series of high-profile al Qaeda arrests in Pakistan in June and July.
At the same time, Musharraf is reluctant to challenge extremist groups he still regards as potential levers in the conflict with India over control of Kashmir, even though the groups theoretically have been banned, analysts said.
In an interview with a Pakistani newspaper this month, Musharraf said the groups would not "pack up" until India and Pakistan reached a settlement on Kashmir, which Pakistan regards as the key issue in peace negotiations between the nuclear-armed neighbors.
"What he's saying is, 'If there's movement on Kashmir, it will strengthen my hand to move even more strongly against these people,' " the senior intelligence official said.
Musharraf's allies are losing patience with that argument. During a trip to the region last month, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage publicly called on Pakistan to act more forcefully against the homegrown groups. One foreign diplomat cited reports that fighters from Lashkar-e-Taiba, one of Pakistan's best known banned militant organizations, had traveled to Iraq in recent months to join other foreigners battling U.S. and Iraqi government forces.
"We have received these reports, and we take them very seriously because we do know there were efforts to take some Pakistanis into Iraq," said the senior intelligence official. But the official said it was unclear whether the efforts succeeded.
The official also asserted that Musharraf had limited room to maneuver against domestic extremists, given the depth of public anger over U.S. policy in the Middle East. "I think the time has come for others to do more for Pakistan than for Pakistan to do more," said the official. "I think our commitment on terrorism is absolutely unparalleled, and it needs to be acknowledged."
On Dec. 25, Musharraf's high-wire act nearly cost him his life when two suicide bombers drove explosives-laden vehicles into his motorcade in the city of Rawalpindi, where he lives, killing 19 people but leaving the president unharmed. One of the bombers was later identified as a member of a breakaway faction of Jaish-e-Mohammed, one of the main militant groups battling Indian forces in Kashmir. The group was founded with the government's blessing in 2000 by Masood Azhar, a radical cleric.
"Jihadists like Masood Azhar were then the natural allies of Musharraf, hence the ultimate freedom to propagate and recruit jihadis under state patronage," said a former army chief of staff who spoke on condition of anonymity. Azhar may now oppose Musharraf, "but there will be a price," the former official said.
Jaish-e-Mohammed has also been linked to the attack on Aziz, the new prime minister. Investigators have identified the prime suspect in the case as Qari Ahsan, who lived in the same southern Punjab town as Azhar and was considered one of his top lieutenants, intelligence officials said. Azhar has disappeared from view; a senior intelligence official described him as a fugitive.
But the official said it would be a mistake to conclude that Jaish-e-Mohammed and other such organizations had actively turned against the government. "The leadership was under pressure from the government, so you find everyone splintering into small cells acting on their own," he explained.
The official also asserted that as a consequence of Pakistan's counterterrorism efforts, including a series of army operations in South Waziristan this year, the ability of al Qaeda -- and especially its senior leaders, Osama bin Laden and Ayman Zawahri -- to direct attacks had been "very severely curtailed."
At the same time, the official said, "there is probably a second or third tier that has started asserting itself operationally."
A leading example is a Libyan citizen, Abu Faraj Libbi, whom Pakistani authorities accuse of coordinating the December attempts on Musharraf's life. The senior official said it was "quite likely" that Libbi also had a hand in the attempt on Aziz, whose driver was killed in the bombing, although other investigators described the connection as speculative. The official said that Libbi was believed to be directing terrorist operations both in Pakistan and elsewhere from a hideout in South Waziristan.
Pakistani newspapers have run ads offering rewards of up to $345,000 each for information leading to the capture of Libbi and five Pakistanis, including Ahsan, the former Jaish-e-Mohammed lieutenant sought in connection with last month's attempt on Aziz.
The June attack on Hayat, who commands one of Pakistan's nine army corps, has been blamed on a previously unknown group called Jundullah. Its alleged leader, Ataur Rehman, holds a master's degree in statistics from Karachi University and fought with the Taliban when it enjoyed the backing of Pakistan's government during the Afghan civil war of the 1990s, investigators said.
Although officials have not specifically linked that episode to the Libyan, they said that two of the gunmen had admitted spending four weeks under al Qaeda's tutelage at a mud-walled compound in the Shakai Valley of South Waziristan. The compound was one of several destroyed in a major military assault in May.
Khan reported from Karachi.
-------- prisoners of war
Magazine: U.S. Soldier Says Torture Encouraged
Sun Aug 29, 2004
(Reuters)
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=KKKYHWCBKU3A4CRBAEKSFFA?type=topNews&storyID=6096014
BERLIN - A U.S. soldier expected to plead guilty to charges of abusing Iraqi prisoners told a German magazine he deeply regretted his actions but said the abuses were encouraged by military intelligence services.
Staff Sgt. Ivan Frederick told the weekly Der Spiegel conditions in Baghdad's Abu Ghraib jail were a "nightmare" with no clear line of command and conflicting demands placed on junior soldiers with insufficient training.
"I didn't know at all who was actually in charge," he said, according to a German translation of his remarks.
"The battalion wanted one thing from you, the company wanted something else and the secret service had their own ideas. It was just chaos," he said.
The abuse and torture of Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib caused worldwide outrage when photographs of the incidents emerged earlier this year.
A special army investigation acknowledged last week that torture had occurred and more soldiers may face trial, although so far only Frederick and six other military police reservists serving at Abu Ghraib have been charged.
Frederick said after a pretrial hearing in Germany last week he would plead guilty to some charges including assault, cruelty and indecent acts at a court martial on October 20.
"I want to apologize to the victims and their families. And in the trial, I will accept responsibility for my actions. But I hope others will follow my example," he said.
He said a notorious incident in which he was involved where naked Iraqi prisoners were photographed piled up into a pyramid occurred after a female U.S. soldier was struck in the face with a stone by a prisoner.
"First we searched them, got them stripped naked and then pushed them into this pyramid -- and then everything got out of control," he said. "One of the methods was to humiliate them so that they would break down and talk."
"I know today that I was wrong. On the one hand I was full of rage that this prisoner had injured a soldier. And they'd told me 'humiliate them'. On the other hand, no one explained in detail, how we should do it."
Frederick, a prison official in civilian life, said he had received no special training in treating military prisoners and was encouraged by intelligence officers to break prisoners down for interrogation, by any means.
"The secret service set no limits at all. It was about concrete results and they weren't interested how they were achieved," he said, adding that many more people should be called to account for the abuses in Abu Ghraib.
"There are definitely more people responsible for what occurred in Abu Ghraib, and many of them have not been charged."
-------- russia / chechnya
Russians Find Explosives on 2nd Plane
August 29, 2004
By STEVEN LEE MYERS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/29/international/europe/29russia.html
MOSCOW, Aug. 28 - Investigators found traces of explosives on the second of two passenger airliners that crashed simultaneously in Russia, security officials announced Saturday, confirming that they consider the twin air disasters to be terrorist acts.
Facing a menacing turn in Russia's fight against terrorism and eager to calm travelers, the officials announced that they would increase security at the country's airports. The new measures included having Interior Ministry officers screen passengers, starting immediately, and installing sensors able to detect the presence of explosives.
Sergei N. Ignatchenko, chief spokesman of the Federal Security Service, told news agencies that the explosive hexogen was discovered in the wreckage of Volga-AviaExpress Flight 1303, which crashed on Tuesday night outside a village near Tula, about 100 miles south of Moscow.
On Friday, investigators said they had found traces of the same explosive at the site near Rostov-on-Don where Sibir Airlines Flight 1047 crashed within minutes of Flight 1303.
Both planes took off from Domodedovo International Airport, southwest of Moscow, with Flight 1047 headed to Sochi, on the Black Sea, and Flight 1303 to Volgograd.
Investigators searching the wreckage of Flight 1303 also said they had found the remains of a 44th passenger, possibly that of a suicide bomber. That raised the death toll to 90 in Russia's worst act of air terrorism.
The officials said nothing new on Saturday about the investigation. On Friday, the Web site of an Islamic extremist group, the Islamouli Brigades of Al Qaeda, said its fighters had hijacked the airliners to avenge the deaths of Muslims in Chechnya.
Investigators have reportedly focused attention on two passengers - both women, apparently from Chechnya - who bought tickets for the flights shortly before departure. Izvestia reported that one of the women, who registered for Flight 1303 as Amanta Nagayeva, 27, was born in the Chechen village of Kirov-Urt.
The newspaper quoted the village's administrator, Dogman Akhmadova, as saying that one of Ms. Nagayeva's three brothers had been seized by Russian forces three or four years ago and never seen again.
-------- spies
Behind The Israeli Mole Affair
The Point Of Maximum Danger Of War With Iran Approaching
8-29-4
Rense.com
By Webster Griffin Tarpley
http://www.rense.com/general56/ddie.htm
WASHINGTON, DC -- News of the investigation of Larry Franklin, a middle-level functionary working for the Wolfowitz-Feith-Luti-Shulsky clique in the Pentagon, indicates that we are now approaching a critical choice-point on the road to war with Iran, and towards a synthetic terrorism attack inside the US which would be used as an additional pretext to start such a war.
The probe of an Israeli mole in the Pentagon was made public by CBS news last Friday evening. The Saturday edition of the Washington Post named Larry Franklin as being identified by sources as the person under investigation. In Sunday,s Washington Post, it was confirmed that Lawrence A. Franklin was the person at the center of investigation.
As seen in the excerpt below, this same Larry Franklin was named in my June 6 news release, "Rogue Bush Backers Prepare Super 9-11 False Flag Terror Attacks. Franklin was indicated as one of the vulnerable links in the neocon network which finds itself in a hysterical flight forward to try to salvage the debacle of their Iraq war by expanding that war to neighboring countries, notably Iran. The threat of a new round of "own goal synthetic terrorism, quite possibly in the ABC dimension, was linked to the preparation of that wider war. The logic at work was that of an "October surprise, this time on the scale adequate to shock the post 9-11 world.
The best working hypothesis to understand the new mole investigation is that neocon networks in the Pentagon may be very close to embroiling the United States in a war with Iran. This would likely come as an Israeli or US pre-emptive bombing attack on Iran,s nuclear facilities, possibly combined with a terrorist attack inside the US using weapons of mass destruction, which the corporate controlled media would immediately blame on Iran.
Whatever forces are behind the naming of Franklin, it must be assumed that their main aim is to break up neocon preparations for a surprise attack on Iran, which the neocons have been boasting about in the media with special emphasis for some weeks. Backing the Franklin probe may well be military factions who have no desire to be fed into the Iranian meatgrinder, and who not fancy neocon fascist dictatorship. The immediate goal would be to knock Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith, Bolton, Rice, Abrams and their cheering section in the media and think-tanks onto the defensive. While the exposure of Franklin is a positive step, it is far from decisive, and the neocons are still in a position to unleash the dogs of war over the next days and weeks.
We are therefore now most probably on the brink of war with Iran, and at the same time entering a period of steadily increasing danger of synthetic terrorism designed to steal or cancel the November elections, and thus freeze the current neocon clique in power for the foreseeable future. The calculation of the rogue network operating behind the scenes is evidently that terrorism taking place a few days before the elections will stampede the electorate to support Bush, while terrorism well in advance of the elections will give the public time to recover enough to advance recriminations and demands for accountability on the part of the administration. We are now entering the time frame when the terrorist controllers can expect the maximum impact of their handiwork, either in stampeding the electorate, or in calling off the elections completely.
OCTOBER SURPRISE IN SEPTEMBER?
On August 19, Martin Sieff of UPI warned: "Forget an October Surprise, a much worse one could come in September: Full-scale war between the United States and Iran may be far closer than the American public might imagine.
Sieff quoted remarks made by Iranian Defense Minister Ali Shamkhani on August 18 which bluntly warned that if Iranian military commanders believed the United States were serious about attacking Iran to destroy its nuclear power facility at Bushehr, or to topple its Islamic theocratic form of government, the Iranian military would not sit back passively and wait for the U.S. armed forces to strike the first blow, as President Saddam Hussein in neighboring Iraq did in March 2003. They would strike first.
"We will not sit to wait for what others will do to us," Shamkhani told al-Jazeera. "Some military commanders in Iran are convinced that preventive operations which the Americans talk about are not their monopoly," he added. With this, the Iran-Iraq border became a new line of hair-trigger confrontation in the restless war agitation of the neocons.
One day earlier, neocon Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security John Bolton told an audience at the Hudson Institute in Washington that it was imperative that the Iranian nuclear program be brought before the U.N. Security Council. "To fail to do so would risk sending a signal to would-be proliferators that there are no serious consequences for pursuing secret nuclear weapons programs," said Bolton. "We cannot let Iran, a leading sponsor of international terrorism, acquire nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them to Europe, most of central Asia and the Middle East, or beyond," Bolton added. "Without serious, concerted, immediate intervention by the international community, Iran will be well on the road to doing so." Similar threatening noises have come from Condoleezza Rice at the Bush National Security Council.
Iranian public opinion had been shocked by a raving, psychotic column by Charles Krauthammer in the July 23 Washington Post: Krauthammer wrote: "The long awaited revolution (in Iran) is not happening. Which [makes] the question of pre-emptive attack all the more urgent. If nothing is done, a fanatical terrorist regime openly dedicated to the destruction of 'the Great Satan' will have both nuclear weapons and missiles to deliver them. All that stands between us and that is either revolution or pre-emptive attack." Iranian observers compared this to the US propaganda campaign which had preceded the attack on Iraq.
US FORCES IN IRAK AS HOSTAGES TO IRAN
Competent US military commanders dread the prospect of war with Iran. Iran is four times the area of Iraq, and has three times the population. Its infrastructure was not destroyed during the Kuwait war in the way that Iraq,s was, and Iran has not been subjected to 13 years of crippling UN sanctions on everything, including food and medicine. The Iranian military forces are intact. In case of war, Iran could be expected to use all means ranging from ballistic missile attacks on US and Israeli bases to asymmetrical warfare. The situation of the US forces already in Iraq could quickly become extraordinarily critical. Shamkhani alluded to this prospect when he said that "The U.S. military presence will not become an element of strength at our expense. The opposite is true because their forces would turn into a hostage."
For purposes of analogy, the Iraq war so far could be compared to the first months of the Korean War, from June to November 1950. By provoking Iran to go beyond logistical support for guerrillas and the sending of volunteers, and come into the war with both feet, the neocons would be inviting a repeat of the Chinese intervention and the disastrous US retreat south from the Yalu to south of Seoul, which still stands as the longest retreat in US military history. Just as Chinese entry into the Korean conflict in late November 1950 created a wholly new and wider war, Iranian entry into the US-Iraq war would have similarly incalculable consequences. The choices might quickly narrow to the large-scale use of nuclear weapons or defeat for the current US hollow army of just 10 divisions.
ANOTHER STEP TOWARDS WORLD WAR III
In the case of Iran, the use of nuclear weapons by the US would have a dangerous complication: Iran is an important neighbor and trading partner of the Russian Federation, which is helping with Iran,s nuclear power reactor program. The threatened US/Israeli raid on Iran might kill Russian citizens as well. Such a US attack on Iran might prod the Russian government into drawing its own line in the sand, rather than sitting idle as the tide of US aggression swept closer and closer to Russia,s borders, as one country after another in central Asia was occupied. In other words, a US attack on Iran bids fair to be the opening of World War III, making explicit was already implicit in the invasion of Iraq. The Iran war project of the neocons is the very midsummer of madness, and it must be stopped.
War with Iran means a military draft, just for starters. If Iran can close the Straits of Hormuz, it might mean rationing of food and fuel. Bloated speculative financial structures could hardly survive.
The Israeli mole investigation seeks to explore the intersection of the Valerie Plame affair, the Chalabi affair, the Niger yellowcake forged documents scandal, and some key policy documents passed to the Israelis. According to a CIA veteran interviewed by CNN, the probe reaches into the National Security Council as well as the Pentagon. On June 6, I had identified Larry Franklin in these terms:
At the root of the Valerie Plame affair is the role of her husband, Ambassador Joseph Wilson, in refuting the baseless claim that Iraq had sought to purchase uranium yellowcake from Niger. This story was buttresses by documents which turned out to be forged. A prime suspect in this regard is Ledeen, and the accusation is made more plausible because the faked documents first surfaced in Rome, where Ledeen possesses extensive contacts. A federal grand jury is probing this matter. Ledeen, like so many Bush officials, is an alumnus of the 1980s George H. W. Bush-Poindexter-Abrams-Oliver North Iran-contra gun-running and drug-running scandal, and appears to have mobilized these networks as part of the post 9-11 assault on Iraq. In December 2001, Ledeen moved to revive the Iran connection, setting up a meeting between two Pentagon civilian neo-cons and Manucher Ghorbanifar, an Iranian arms dealer whom the CIA called a criminal and liar. Three days of meetings in Rome involved Harold Rhode, Larry Franklin, Ghorbanifar, and two unnamed officials of the Iranian regime. After the conquest of Iraq, Rhode was sent to Baghdad as the contact point between the Office of Special Plans and Chalabi. Ghorbanifar, in a Dec. 22, 2003 interview with Newsweek's Mark Hosenball, reported that he maintained contact with Rhode and Franklin "five or six times a week through June 2003, when he had a second meeting with Rhode in Paris. This back channel to the Iranians is now also under intense scrutiny.
In the June 6 release, I also showed that, for Bush, the notion of a confrontation with Iran was closely linked to the hypothesis of a new wave of synthetic terrorism. I pointed in this context to a key speech in which Bush had escalated his threat of both:
A dramatic turning point on the way to the current emergency came on April 21, when Bush delivered two speeches which represented a palpable escalation of the tone of his usual demagogy of terrorism and fear. In the afternoon, he assured the Newspaper Association of America, composed of newspaper editors, that Iran "will be dealt with if they pursue a nuclear development program. Bush went on to characterize the United States as "a battlefield in the war on terror. He was at pains to build up the stature of Al-Qaeda, whose members he emphatically characterized as "smarttoughand sophisticated. Because the terrorists are so formidable, Bush said the United States "is a hard country to defend. Our intelligence is good. It,s just never perfect, is the problem. We are disrupting some cells here in America. We,re chasing people down. But it is we,ve got a big country. Later, Bush spoke to the same themes at a closed-door gathering at the White House: "...On Tuesday evening, Bush told Republican congressional leaders during a meeting at the White House that it was all but certain that terrorists would attempt a major attack on the United States before the election, according to a congressional aide. The leaders were struck by Bush's definitiveness and gravity, the aide said... (Washington Post, April 22, 2004)
The general thesis of the June 6 release was this:
Washington DC, June 6 Intelligence patterns monitored here now point conclusively to the grave threat of an imminent new round of ABC (atomic-bacteriological-chemical) terror attacks in the United States, Great Britain, Canada, and possibly other nations. These attacks could include nuclear detonations, radiological dirty bombs, poison gas and other chemical weapons, or biological agents, to be unleashed in such urban settings as New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington DC, Vancouver BC, or London. The goal of these operations would be to produce a worldwide shock several orders of magnitude greater than the original 9-11, with a view to stopping the collapse of the Bush administration, the Wall Street-centered financial structures, and the US-UK strategic position generally. The attacks would be attributed by US/UK intelligence to controlled patsy terrorist groups who would be linked by the media to countries like Iran, Syria, Cuba, North Korea, Egypt, or Saudi Arabia, thus setting these states up for attack. The organizers of the attacks would in reality be substantially the same secret command cell in the United States which set up the 9-11 events and its associated networks, which has been able to continue in operation because of the abject failure of all 9-11 investigations to date to identify it. These forces are now in a desperate flight forward to escape from their current increasingly grim position. Their goal is now to establish a neocon fascist dictatorship in the United States, complete with martial law, special tribunals, press and media censorship, and the full pervasive apparatus of the modern police state.
As of the end of August, 2004, this threat is now more urgent than ever.
These issues will be discussed in my upcoming book, 9/11 Synthetic Terrorism: The Myth of the Twenty-First Century, to be published by Progressive Press. For information, please contact info@progressivepress.com.
To read the full text of the June 6 release, "Rogue Bush Backers Prepare Super 9-11 False Flag Terror Attacks,aaa' please go to: http://inn.globalfreepress.com/modules/news/article.php?storyid=355
----
Analyst Who Is Target of Probe Went to Israel
By Thomas E. Ricks and Robin Wright
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, August 29, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A42625-2004Aug28?language=printer
The FBI investigation into whether classified information was passed to the Israeli government is focused on a Pentagon analyst who has served as an Air Force reservist in Israel, and the probe has been broadened in recent days to include interviews at the State and Defense departments and with Middle Eastern affairs specialists outside government, officials and others familiar with the inquiry said yesterday.
At the center of the investigation, sources said, is Lawrence A. Franklin, a career analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency who specializes in Iran and has served in the Air Force Reserve, rising to colonel. Early in the Bush administration, Franklin moved from the DIA to the Pentagon's policy branch headed by Undersecretary Douglas J. Feith, where he continued his work on Iranian affairs.
Officials and colleagues said yesterday that Franklin had traveled to Israel, including during duty in the Air Force Reserve, where he served as a specialist in foreign political-military affairs. He may have been based at the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv on those tours, said a former co-worker at the DIA, but was never permanently assigned there.
Messages left at Franklin's Pentagon office were not returned yesterday, and nobody answered the door at his house in West Virginia. No one has been charged in the case.
FBI officials have been quietly investigating for months whether Franklin gave classified information -- which officials said included a draft of a presidential directive on U.S. policies toward Iran -- to two Israeli lobbyists here who are alleged to have passed it on to the Israeli government. Officials said it was not yet clear whether the probe would become an espionage case or perhaps would result in lesser charges such as improper release of classified information or mishandling of government documents.
On Friday, Pentagon officials said Franklin 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," a Pentagon statement said. "It is the DOD's understanding that the investigation within DOD is very limited in its scope."
At the Pentagon and elsewhere in Washington yesterday, people touched by the case said they were baffled by aspects of it.
Colleagues said they were stunned to hear Franklin was suspected of giving secret information to a foreign government. And foreign policy specialists said they were skeptical that the pro-Israel group under FBI scrutiny, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, would jeopardize its work with classified documents from a midlevel bureaucrat when it could find out almost anything it wanted to by calling top officials in the Bush administration.
"The whole thing makes no sense to me," said Dennis Ross, special envoy on the Arab-Israeli peace process in the first Bush administration and the Clinton presidency. "The Israelis have access to all sorts of people. They have access in Congress and in the administration. They have people who talk about these things," said Ross, now a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's office issued a statement yesterday saying Israel was not involved in the matter and conducts no espionage in the United States. AIPAC has strongly denied any wrongdoing and said it is "cooperating fully" with the probe.
The FBI investigation was touched off months ago when a series of e-mails was brought to investigators' attention, said a U.S. official familiar with the case. The investigation moved into high gear in recent days, another official said. On Friday, Justice Department officials briefed some Pentagon officials about the state of the inquiry.
"I think they are at the end of their investigation and beginning to brief people in the chain of command, partly to make sure that the acts weren't authorized," one official said.
Pentagon co-workers expressed shock at the news. "It's totally astonishing to all of us who knew him," said a Defense Department co-worker who asked not to be identified because of the investigation. "He is a career guy, a mild-mannered professional. No one would think of him as evil or devious."
Franklin works in the office of William J. Luti, deputy undersecretary of defense for Near Eastern and South Asian affairs. For years a bureaucratic backwater, the office has been in the thick of the action since 2001 because it formulates Pentagon policy on Iraq. It played a central role as the U.S. military prepared for the spring 2003 invasion and since then as the Pentagon has overseen the occupation.
Luti's office is part of the policy operation under Feith.
Feith has been a controversial figure in U.S.-Israeli affairs since the mid-1990s, when he was part of a study group of American conservatives, then out of government, who urged Israel's then prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, to abandon the Oslo peace accords and reject the basis for them -- that Israel should give up land in exchange for peace.
More recently, Feith has been a target of criticism from Democrats who claim that two offices in his branch -- the Office of Special Plans, headed by Luti, and the Counterterrorism Evaluation Group -- sought to manipulate intelligence to improve the Bush administration's case for war against Iraq. House and Senate intelligence committee investigators found no evidence for allegations that the Pentagon offices tried to bypass the CIA or had a major impact on the prewar debate. But in the Senate panel's report on prewar intelligence, three Democratic senators -- John D. Rockefeller IV (W.Va.), Carl M. Levin (Mich.), and Richard J. Durbin (Ill.) -- specifically criticized Feith's operation.
In Kearneysville, W.Va., about 80 miles from the Pentagon, neighbors of the Franklins interviewed yesterday said they did not know the family well. Though nobody answered the door, voices were heard in the house, which had a "God Bless Our Troops" sticker and an American flag in the window.
People who know Franklin from different phases of his life offered contrasting accounts of his political views.
A U.S. government official familiar with the investigation said Franklin was very outwardly supportive of Israel, for example. But a former co-worker at the DIA disputed that characterization, saying that he did not recall in years of working with him any strong political statements about Israel or anything else. Franklin, he said, was a solid, competent analyst specializing in Iranian political affairs, especially the views of top leaders and the course of opposition movements.
In February 2000, Franklin wrote an op-ed piece for the Wall Street Journal's European edition that was sharply critical of Iranian President Mohammad Khatami, arguing that the leader was launching a "charm offensive" that was simply a "ruse" to make the Iranian government look better to Westerners while it continued to abuse human rights.
Details of Franklin's Air Force service, and especially his time in Israel, could not be learned yesterday. A spokesman for the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv declined to comment.
In Israel yesterday, Sharon's office issued a statement. "Israel does not engage in intelligence activities in the U.S. We deny all these reports," the statement said, according to the Associated Press. That followed a strong statement Friday by the Israeli Embassy in Washington denying any wrongdoing.
One Israeli official familiar with the situation said yesterday that his government had checked "every organ here" to make sure that no part of government was involved. "We checked everything possible, and there's absolutely nothing. It's a non-event, from the Israeli point of view. Someone leaked this to [hurt] . . . the president, AIPAC and the Jews on the eve of the Republican convention," he speculated.
He added that Israel would not have been involved in such activities, "because we have a trauma here in Israel. It's called Pollard."
That was a reference to the case in which a U.S. Navy intelligence analyst, Jonathan J. Pollard, admitted in 1987 to selling state secrets to Israel. Pollard was sentenced to life in prison, and Israeli officials have said since then they do not conduct espionage against the United States.
At AIPAC, spokesman Josh Block said the organization had no comment yesterday beyond its Friday statement that the organization and its employees denied any wrongdoing and were cooperating with the government. A former AIPAC employee also said he was baffled by the news of the FBI investigation. "I have a hard time figuring out what this is about," he said. If the Israelis or their supporters want to know about deliberations in the Bush administration, he said, "all they have to do is take people to lunch."
Others in Washington, however, maintained that Israel does present a problem for the United States in certain aspects of intelligence, such as sensitive defense technologies and Iran policy.
Israel sees Iran as the single biggest threat to its existence, and so closely monitors all possible moves in Washington's Iranian policy -- especially as the Bush administration presses Tehran to disclose more about the state of its nuclear program.
One former State Department officer recalled being told that U.S. government experts considered the countries whose spying most threatened the United States were Russia, South Korea and Israel. "I also know from my time in Jerusalem that official U.S. visitors to Israel were warned about the counterintelligence threat from Israel," he said.
Taking a slightly different view, others speculated that the very closeness of the relationship between the United States and Israeli governments -- and especially the tight connections between the Israelis and Feith's policy office -- may have led officials to become sloppy about rules barring release of sensitive information.
Staff writers John Ward Anderson in Jerusalem, Dan Eggen, Amit R. Paley, Steven Ginsberg and Jerry Markon in Washington and staff researcher Madonna Lebling contributed to this report.
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F.B.I. Said to Reach Official Suspected of Passing Secrets
August 29, 2004
By JAMES RISEN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/29/politics/29spy.html?pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, Aug. 28 - The F.B.I. is in communication with a Pentagon official suspected of passing secrets to Israel and is seeking to gain his cooperation in their espionage investigation, government officials said.
The Pentagon official, Larry Franklin, a midlevel analyst who works in the policy office of the Defense Department, has been in contact with investigators with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, officials said. It could not be learned whether he was talking with the bureau directly or through a lawyer.
Government officials say they suspect that Mr. Franklin provided classified documents to officials at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a major pro-Israel lobbying group in Washington, and that the group in turn handed the materials over to Israeli intelligence. Both the lobbying group and the Israeli government have denied any misconduct. [Page 23.]
Mr. Franklin could not be located for comment.
Government officials who have been briefed on the investigation said investigators had unspecified evidence that Mr. Franklin provided the Israelis with a sensitive report about American policy toward Iran, along with other materials. Mr. Franklin focused on Iranian issues in his work.
No arrests have been made in the case, however, and the F.B.I. apparently is seeking more information from Mr. Franklin. The investigation has been going on for more than a year, government officials said.
Michael Ledeen, a conservative scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who is a friend of Mr. Franklin, said Saturday that he believed the accusations were baseless.
"I don't believe a word of it," Mr. Ledeen said. "This story is incoherent, it makes no sense. Anyone who wanted to know about U.S. policy on Iran could just read The New York Times."
The work done in the Pentagon's policy offices often involves regional strategic planning like deliberations on what stance the government should take in dealing with other countries. A little more than a year ago, one policy pushed from within the Pentagon would have relied on covert support for Iranian resistance groups to destabilize Iran's powerful clergy. In internal deliberations, some even raised the possibility of a military strike against an Iranian nuclear facility at Natanz. The ideas, reported in the news media at the time, came up in the context of developing a draft directive outlining the administration's overall policy toward the regime in Tehran.
American policy toward 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.
The investigation is the latest embarrassing incident involving Pentagon employees. In June, federal investigators began administering polygraph examinations to civilian Pentagon employees to determine who may have disclosed classified information to Ahmad Chalabi, the former Iraqi exile leader who was once a close ally of the Pentagon.
Pentagon officials have said that they are cooperating in the investigation regarding Israel. But some senior officials in the policy branch were not informed about it until Friday night, after it was reported on evening television news programs.
A government official who has been briefed on the investigation said that F.B.I. officials had earlier expressed an interest in interviewing two of Mr. Franklin's superiors, Douglas Feith, the under secretary of defense for policy, and Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary, although there is no sign that they are a focus of the investigation.
It could not be learned whether the F.B.I. had decided to go ahead with those interviews.
Former government officials have also been contacted by the F.B.I. in recent days, apparently in an effort to gain a better understanding of the relationships among conservative officials with strong ties to Israel.
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee said that it was "cooperating fully with the governmental authorities" and had "provided documents and information to the government and has made staff available for interviews."
One of the group's priorities is stopping Iran from obtaining nuclear arms and other unconventional weapons.
The 65,000-member group has long been regarded as one of the most powerful lobbies in Washington, cultivating close ties in Republican and Democratic administrations alike.
As recently as May, President Bush singled out the group for calling attention to "the great security challenges of our time," which include the "threat posed by Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons."
The F.B.I. inquiry is considered sensitive because of the case's potential political implications.
Mr. Feith and the work done under him have been the focus of intense criticism over the past year as questions have mounted about the justification for the war in Iraq. Before the war, Mr. Feith created a small intelligence unit that sought to build a case for Iraq's ties to Al Qaeda, an effort that has since been disputed by the Central Intelligence Agency.
Questions have also repeatedly been raised about work done by members of Mr. Feith's staff that skirted the normal bureaucracy. For example, Mr. Franklin participated in secret meetings with Manucher Ghorbanifar, an Iranian who had acted as an arms deal middleman in the Iran-contra affair during the Reagan administration.
The secret meetings were first held in Rome in December 2001 and were brokered by Mr. Ledeen. He said he arranged the meetings to put the Bush administration in closer contact with Iranian dissidents who could provide information in the war on terrorism. But Mr. Ledeen said Saturday that Mr. Franklin was always skeptical that the back-channel meetings were useful.
Current and former defense officials said on Saturday that Mr. Franklin worked for the Defense Intelligence Agency until about three years ago, when he moved to the Pentagon's policy office, headed by Mr. Feith, to work on Iran and other Middle East issues.
Former colleagues said that Mr. Franklin was a Soviet analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency who transferred to the Middle East division in the early 1990's. He learned Farsi and became an Iran analyst, developing extensive contacts among Iranians who opposed the Tehran government.
"He was a good analyst of the Iranian political scene, but he was also someone who would go off on his own," said one former defense colleague.
Although Mr. Franklin worked as a Middle East policy officer, a defense official said he had no effect on United States policy and few dealings with senior Pentagon officials like Mr. Wolfowitz. At one point in the run-up to the Iraq war in early 2003, Mr. Franklin was brought in to help arrange meetings between Mr. Wolfowitz and Shiite and Sunni clerics across the United States, a defense official said.
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Israel Denies Spying Against U.S.
August 29, 2004
By STEVEN ERLANGER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/29/international/middleeast/29mideast.html?pagewanted=all&position=
JERUSALEM, Aug. 28 - News that the F.B.I. has been investigating a Pentagon official on suspicion of passing secrets to Israel has caused a diplomatic scramble here, with officials rushing to deny spying on Washington and to assure the United States of its friendship.
Administration officials say the Pentagon official, who has been identified in some news reports but who could not be reached for comment early Saturday, works in the office of Douglas J. Feith, the under secretary of defense for policy.
Officials who have been briefed about the inquiry say the official is suspected of passing a classified policy draft on Iran to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a pro-Israel lobby group, which in turn is thought to have provided the information to Israeli intelligence.
Publicly, the Israeli government, through its spokesmen here and in Washington, have called the allegations wrong and outrageous, as has Aipac, the lobbying group.
"The United States is Israel's most cherished friend and ally," said David Siegel, the Israeli Embassy spokesman. "We have a strong ongoing relationship at all levels, and in no way would Israel do anything to impair this relationship."
Aipac called the allegations "baseless and false."
After the hugely embarrassing spying scandal of 1985, when Jonathan Pollard, an American intelligence analyst, was arrested and convicted of spying for Israel, the Israeli government made a firm decision to stop all clandestine spying in the United States, Yuval Steinitz, the chairman of the foreign and defense committee in Parliament, said Saturday.
Mr. Steinitz is chairman of the most powerful committee in Parliament, with oversight of all Israeli military and intelligence agencies, and is chairman of the subcommittee on intelligence. He says he has access to as much secret information as Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
"This was a firm decision," Mr. Steinitz said, "and I'm 100 percent confident - not 99 percent, but 100 percent - that Israel is not spying in the United States. We have no agents there and we are not gathering intelligence there, unlike probably every other country in the world, including some of America's best friends in Europe."
Mr. Sharon's office emphasized the same point on Saturday, issuing a statement saying: "Israel has no connection to this matter. The United States is Israel's greatest ally. Israel is not engaged in intelligence activities in the United States and denies reports to the contrary."
But Israeli officials also acknowledged that Iran is a vital security issue for them as well as for the United States, and that the views of Washington policy makers and analysts are of great interest to Israel.
Mr. Steinitz in particular considers Iran a nuclear superpower in the making, working on weapons that can hit Europe, as well as Israel, and he urged Washington and Europe to deal with Iran "before it is too late."
Still, reports of the F.B.I. investigation caused a furor here. And officials went to pains on Saturday to say that despite the importance of such intelligence, Israel only works openly in America, including diplomatic conversations and relationships with a full range of sources, from the White House and Congress to Aipac, which has its own sources. "America is the great exception," one official said. Mr. Steinitz said, "People leak sometimes when they shouldn't, that goes on everywhere, but that's a different matter."
While Israel has representatives of the Mossad, its intelligence agency, and military intelligence in Washington, they are attached to the embassy and their presence is known to American authorities, officials said.
Yossi Melman, an intelligence and terrorism expert with the Israeli daily Haaretz, said Saturday that since the case of Mr. Pollard, who remains in prison in the United States, "I know there has been a decision not to run any operations on American soil or to recruit Americans to spy for Israel."
Mossad, he said, is under instructions to have no direct contact even with officials from Aipac, "and I know that Israel is very, very sensitive about having even open contacts with Jewish members of the administration, because of the ramifications of Pollard" and the concern that Israel would be accused of playing on any dual loyalty that an American Jew might feel.
This is a case of an American accused of passing information to an American organization, Mr. Melman said. "While Aipac is pro-Israel, and maintains contacts with the Israeli Embassy and shares analysis, it does not deal with Israeli intelligence services," he said. "If Aipac passed on a secret document, that would be a sensitive matter for Israel. But if Aipac said, 'It's our understanding that the Americans in Doug Feith's office are thinking this and that,' that's different," he said.
But the lines are often hard to draw, especially with an issue as sensitive as the one involving Iran, which is considered by American and Israeli officials to be working on nuclear weaponry even though it has said its program is only to generate electricity - in a sense, presenting a publicly ambiguous stance, much as does Israel, which has developed nuclear weapons as a deterrent but refuses to discuss the matter. Iran is also interesting to Israel, although less so to the United States, for the financial and military support it provides Hezbollah, the militant anti-Israel group based in Lebanon and active in the West Bank.
For Mr. Steinitz, a hawk with Likud, Iran is a clear and present danger for the entire West. "The Iran nuclear program is so ambitious that after producing a first bomb, they could produce 20 bombs a year," he said. "This isn't North Korea or Iraq or even Pakistan. Iran will soon become a global power with intercontinental missiles that will threaten Europe and NATO, with disastrous political results for Israel, the moderate Arab world and the United States," he said.
But the problem of Iran is global, he said. "It's up to the Americans and Europeans to solve Iran, not little Israel."
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US probe of Pentagon policy leak broader than one case
WASHINGTON (AFP)
Aug 29, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040829103801.4jp31ob3.html
The investigation of a Pentagon aide suspected of passing secrets to Israel is part of a broader, two-year FBI probe of the handling of highly classified material by civilians working at the Pentagon, officials said.
The probe goes beyond allegations that a single mid-level policy analyst gave a classified Iran policy document to Israel, to focus on other civilians working at the Pentagon, according to three officials familiar with the matter who spoke on condition of anonymity.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation has contacted the analyst and is seeking his cooperation in the investigation, The New York Times reported Sunday.
Reports Saturday identified him as Larry Franklin, an Iran specialist in the office of Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, the third most senior civilian official at the Pentagon.
He is thought to have given Israeli lobbyists a draft of a top secret presidential order on Iran policy that ultimately was never completed due to disagreements among President George W. Bush's advisors. The lobbyists are alleged to have passed it on to their government.
Having a draft of the document would allow Israel to influence policy while it was being made. Iran is known to have funded militant groups within Israel and is high on the list of Israel's security concerns.
The FBI believes Franklin acted out of ideological support for the Jewish state rather than for money, according to a top US official who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Investigators are questioning employees of a powerful Washington lobby group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which called allegations of its involvement "false and baseless."
They are also trying to determine whether Franklin acted with the authorization of his superiors.
The case drew terse comments from the US government and vehement denials from Israel.
"Obviously anytime there's an allegation of this nature it is a serious matter," White House spokesman Scott McClellan said Saturday, refusing to say more.
"We have no involvement in these allegations," a spokesman for Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's office told AFP in Jerusalem Sunday.
"It is an internal issue in the United States which is running out of steam anyway. Israel has not used an agent to spy on the United States, the country which is its best ally."
The Pentagon issued a two sentence statement late Friday saying that it "has been cooperating with the Department of Justice on this matter for an extended period of time.
"It is the (Department of Defense's) understanding that the investigation within the DoD is limited in its scope," the statement said.
Other sources differed, saying the probe involved interviews of current and former officials at the White House, Pentagon and State Department, concerning security practises of Defense Department civilians.
Since June, federal agents have been investigating whether Pentagon officials gave classified information to former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed Chalabi.
Feith's office had close ties to Chalabi and advocated the now-discredited theory that Saddam Hussein had ties to Al-Qaeda, an argument used to push the case for war. Feith's office was also instrumental in post-war planning, now seen seen as inadequate.
No one has been charged in the current investigation although reports say arrests could come as early as next week. Charges may involve mishandling of classified material rather than the more serious charge of espionage.
Israel pledged not to spy on the United States after the case of Jonathan Pollard, an intelligence analyst for the US Navy, who passed on thousands of secret documents in 18 months before his arrest in November 1985.
Pollard was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1987, but Israel only admitted that he was one of its spies 11 years later. It has since lobbied Washington to grant him a pardon.
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Nato risks MI6 lives by naming agents on website
29/08/2004
telegraph.co.uk
By David Bamber and Guy Dennis
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/08/29/wnato29.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/08/29/ixnewstop.html
Nato has exposed the identities of four MI6 intelligence officers working in the Balkans, sparking intense anger from Britain.
The four were named on the alliance's website in a summary of news, translated into English, from the former Yugoslavia.
The site identified the men eight weeks ago, on July 9, and their names remained there until yesterday, when The Telegraph alerted Nato to its blunder.
Within hours of being told of the error, embarrassed officials removed the web page yesterday afternoon. Their prompt action did not appease senior intelligence officials in London, who last night expressed fury at Nato's mistake and warned that the men's lives had potentially been placed in danger.
The names of the four officers had originally been published in Nacional, a weekly news magazine in Croatia which sells just 35,000 copies. By having the article translated into English and put on its website, www.nato.int, the alliance circulated their names worldwide.
The naming of the men followed the recent unmasking by the Nedeljni Telegraf, a newspaper in Belgrade, the Serbian capital, of a man who was allegedly the chief MI6 officer in Serbia.
The four people named by Nato all allegedly work for MI6, the secret intelligence service, in Bosnia and Herzegovina. One is said to be the director of the information sector and Nato even names his wife.
A second man is named as head of British intelligence in Bosnia and the third is an intelligence officer - the website also names his fiancee. The fourth man is allegedly a spy in the office of Donald Hays, an American who is the principal deputy high representative of the international community in Bosnia.
Officials said that it would be embarrassing for the Government if Britain has been caught spying on a key ally.
Last night a senior intelligence officer confirmed that the names published by Nato seemed accurate and described the mistake as a "major breach of security". He said that the men would have to be withdrawn from the Balkans and be re-deployed elsewhere.
Patrick Mercer, the Conservative shadow homeland security minister, said: "With friends like these we really don't need enemies.
"This is a terrible breach of security. MI6 works abroad to make sure terrorists do not reach these shores and it is unbelievable their identities would be revealed by Nato."
Mr Mercer, who served in Bosnia in 1997 with distinction as a colonel in the Sherwood Foresters Regiment, added: "There must be a full inquiry into how this happened and serious consequences must follow."
Gerald Moor, a former senior military intelligence officer in the Ministry of Defence, who is now chief executive of Inkerman, a private intelligence and security firm, said Nato had committed a serious "cock-up".
He added: "If these people have been exposed it would have interfered with operations and could endanger people working alongside them."
MI6 has a large presence in the Balkans and works closely with Sfor, the Nato-led peacekeeping force which includes 1,000 British troops, to track down wanted war criminals.
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Israeli officials deny Pentagon spy
29aug04
heraldsun
By Jean-Luc Renaudie in Jerusalem
http://www.heraldsun.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5478,10602484%5E401,00.html
ISRAELI officials denied any links with a highly placed Pentagon employee reportedly suspected of passing on to Israel sensitive White House policy documents on Iran, state radio said today.
"The reports that we were spying in the United States or used an agent at the Pentagon are baseless," Yuval Steinitz, chairman of the defence and foreign affairs committee of the Israeli parliament and its sub-committee supervising the intelligence services, told the military radio station.
CBS News yesterday quoted US Federal Bureau of Investigation officials as saying they believe they have solid evidence that the suspected mole supplied Israel with classified materials relating to US policy on Iran.
Other senior Israeli officials quoted by public radio said Israel had not conducted intelligence gathering activities on US soil for years.
"This case is very bizarre and we don't know what it's about," one official said.
The radio added that the defence ministry "had carried out checks with the services and concluded that Israel is not involved in the least espionage activity in the United States".
CBS quoted sources as saying the suspected spy, described as a trusted analyst at the Pentagon, last year turned over a presidential directive on US policy toward Iran while it was "in the draft phase when US policy-makers were still debating the policy."
This put the Israelis, according to one source, "inside the decision-making loop" so they could "try to influence the outcome."
The analyst is also said to have close links with Pentagon hawks Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, who are concerned with policy on Iraq. Wolfowitz is deputy defence secretary and Feith is undersecretary of defence for policy.
Authorities have requested information about the two employees of the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) - a powerful pro-Israeli lobby in Washington - supposedly implicated in the case, CBS reported.
AIPAC told CBS News it is cooperating with the government and has hired outside counsel.
It later issued a statement saying: "Any allegation of criminal conduct by AIPAC or our employees is false and baseless. 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."
A spokesman for the Israeli embassy in Washington, Dan Siegel, told the network the allegations "are completely false and outrageous."
Israel pledged not to spy on the United States after the case of Jonathan Pollard, an intelligence analysts for the US Navy, who passed on thousands of secret documents in 18 months before his arrest in November 1985.
Pollard was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1987, but Israel only admitted that he was one of its spies 11 years later. It has since lobbied Washington to grant him a pardon.
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A spy turned diplomat recalls his career that changed with Asia
washtimes
August 29, 2004
http://www.washtimes.com/books/20040828-103502-7068r.htm
CHINA HANDS: NINE DECADES OF ADVENTURE, ESPIONAGE, AND DIPLOMACY IN ASIA
By James Lilley, with Jeffrey Lilley
Public Affairs, $30, 448 pages, illus.
REVIEWED BY JOSEPH C. GOULDEN
James Lilley recently summed up his long career by describing himself as a "Cold Warrior turned peacemaker," a ranking CIA operative who turned diplomat to smooth relations with our longtime adversary, the People's Republic of China, and to nudge South Korea and Taiwan towards democracy.
The intelligence officer who ran covert operations against the PRC for decades found great irony in going to Peking as CIA's first station chief there. His odyssey is told in "China Hands: Nine Decades of Adventure, Espionage, and Diplomacy in Asia," written with son Jeffrey, a Washington lawyer now doing international development work.
The plural ("hands") in the book's title is a tribute to the author's older brother, Frank, who served in Japan during the postwar military occupation. A pacifist and idealist, Frank became disillusioned with war's impact on Asia and killed himself at the age of 26. James Lilley chose the route of pragmatic reality - one must work through problems towards achievable goals. Hence his long career in government.
Mr. Lilley was born in Tsingtao, China, in 1928, the son of a Standard Oil executive. He studied at Yale, which in the early Cold War years served as a rich talent pool for the new (formed in 1947) CIA. He thought of joining the State Department but a professor scoffed that it was "stuck in concrete." Intelligence, conversely, was a "growth industry."
As Mr. Lilley writes, "I was excited by the prospect of an adventurous career and by the idea that I could contribute to efforts to stem the tide of communism. It was a good cause, and I believed that the United States and its values were worth fighting for."
Peter Braestrup, later an esteemed Washington journalist, wrote in the Yale 1951 class book, "we face the realization that the very civilization we have trained ourselves to foster has been placed on the verge of destruction." Mr. Lilley was one of "about a hundred" of his classmates who joined CIA.
Unsurprisingly, with the Korean War raging, his first assignment was running operations against Communist China. (Amusingly, the passage of time had wreaked severe damage to his linguistic skills: "I could speak Chinese like a four-year-old. I had mastered the vocabulary to count, eat, swear and defecate.")
Working under the cover of a military officer, Mr. Lilley had three tasks: to support a purported 1.6 million Kuomintang guerrillas left in China when the Nationalist government collapsed; to organize a "third force"of Nationalist officers, who trained in Saipan and Okinawa, for insertion into the mainland; and to obtain information on the Communist military, using "communications intercepts, air reconnaissance, and human agents."
CIA received "virtually unlimited funding," hoping that "robust clandestine efforts" would sap China's resources and force it to divert manpower from Korea. But the agent operations came to naught.
The most painful failure for Mr. Lilley involved Yale classmate Jack Downey, who along with fellow paramilitary officer Dick Fectau parachuted into China to "rescue" an agent who in fact had been captured and turned. Both men were seized and served prison terms that did not end until President Nixon's rapprochement with China more than 20 years later.
So CIA tried another tack. Mr. Lilley was dispatched to Hong Kong University in 1953 under the cover of a language and literature student.
During the day he studied such classic Chinese texts as "The Doctrine of Filial Piety." At night, "I was a case officer looking for targets of opportunity in the streets, bars and hotels . . . engaging the local Chinese communities, particularly refugees who represented valuable sources of information on conditions in China."
In due course the Hong Kong station had working penetrations of Chinese Communist organizations "such as the Bank of China and the Chinese Resource Corporation," the latter a major trading group.
But there were disappointments. Mr. Lilley's apparatus gained accurate information on the awesome cost of Mao Tse-tung's "Great Leap Forward," but reports "which had seemed so important to us in the field appeared to have had minimal impact in the corridors of Washington power."
As deputy chief of station in Laos, a key task was insuring a friendly majority in the National Assembly. "We figured out who to support without letting our fingerprints show. As part of our 'nation building' effort in Laos, we pumped a relatively large amount of money to politicians who would listen to our advice . . . 'friendly' politicians won 54 of 57 seats." Ambassador William Sullivan called Mr. Lilley "Mr. Tammany Hall."
Back in Hong Kong in the late 1960s, Mr. Lilley found that the Cultural Revolution caused unrest and disillusionment that made gathering intelligence easier.
One key source was in Xinhua, the Chinese news agency, staffed by high party and intelligence officials. That source "provided us with early indications the Red Chinese were interested in opening up to the U.S. after two decades of hostile relations."
And when the decision was made in 1973 to open diplomatic relations, Mr. Lilley persuaded the director of central intelligence, James Schlesinger, and National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger to send him to Peking as station chief, with the Chinese being fully aware of his intelligence credentials.
Mr. Kissinger promised the Chinese, "We will identify him so you watch him. We promise he will undertake no other activity but to be a channel of communications."
To Mr. Lilley's distress, a month after he arrived in Peking the columnist Jack Anderson charged that the "CIA had quietly planted an operative in the U.S. mission in Peking"and identified Mr. Lilley by name. Mr. Anderson's source was John Marks, a soured foreign service officer who was "naming names" of covert operatives worldwide.
The disclosure "effectively ended my career in clandestine operations for the CIA" after 29 years.
Now commenced a second career: on the National Security Council staff; in Taiwan as de facto ambassador, then as ambassador to South Korea, where Mr. Lilley gave an autocratic government successful nudges towards democracy. This last he describes as his "proudest accomplishment."
In 1988, President George H.W. Bush sent him back to the PRC, this time as ambassador, at a time of rising domestic unrest. Mr. Lilley soon realized that an explosion was nigh, so he warned Washington in many cables. In one he described strongman Deng Xiaoping as an "Old Testament character. Revenge was in his nature," and warned that he would crush any dissidents.
To Mr. Lilley's chagrin, the State Department considered his warning cable "alarmist" and refused to send it to the White House. The Tiananmen Square massacre came a few days later. Nonetheless, Mr. Bush and Mr. Lilley persevered, and talked the Chinese back into a semblance of civilized behavior.
By the time Mr. Lilley's tenure ended, relations were uneasy but nonetheless ongoing. (He would later be amused when the Chinese accused him of personally organizing the Tiananmen demonstrations. He writes, "As a CIA officer, I had been involved in some political subterfuge in my career, but I couldn't organize 200,000 Chinese youths in four weeks to almost overthrow an authoritarian state. That was beyond my capabilities.")
Mr. Lilley is now on a third career, as Asian expert at the American Enterprise Institute, and a regular as a TV talking head and op-ed commentator. He remains a problem-solving pragmatist. Like his long-dead brother Frank, he does not see military might as the ultimate solution (though it is nonetheless a card that should not be discarded).
When he left China two years after the Tiananmen massacre, his final report stated, "Our effort should be to bend China, not to break it or change it fundamentally . . . China is what it is, not as we want it to be."
Joseph C. Goulden is writing a book on Cold War intelligence. His e-mail is JosephG894@ aol.com.
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FBI kept eye on Pentagon mole suspect
ASSOCIATED PRESS
By Curt Anderson
August 29, 2004
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20040829-123340-7423r.htm
The FBI spent more than a year covertly investigating whether a Pentagon analyst funneled highly classified material to Israel, officials said yesterday. Prosecutors were still weighing whether to bring the most serious charge of espionage.
Charges could be brought in the case as early as this week, said two federal law enforcement officials speaking on the condition of anonymity because the investigation is continuing. The case has taken so long in part because of diplomatic sensitivities between the United States and its close ally Israel, they said.
Although the information involved - material describing Bush administration policy toward Iran - was described as highly classified, prosecutors could determine that the crime falls short of espionage and could result in lesser, but still serious, charges of mishandling classified documents, the officials said.
They said the still-classified material did not detail U.S. military or intelligence operations and was not the type that would endanger the lives of U.S. spies overseas or betray sensitive methods of intelligence collection.
The target of the probe was identified by the two officials as Larry Franklin, a senior analyst in a Pentagon office dealing with Middle East affairs. Mr. Franklin, who did not respond to a telephone message left at his office yesterday, formerly worked for the Defense Intelligence Agency.
Efforts to find a home telephone number were not successful.
In a statement late Friday, the Defense Department, without saying he was under investigation, described Mr. Franklin as someone 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."
Mr. Franklin works in an office overseen by Douglas J. Feith, the defense undersecretary for policy. Mr. Feith is an influential aide to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, whose previous work included prewar intelligence on Iraq, including purported ties between Saddam Hussein's regime and al Qaeda terrorism network.
In August 2003, Mr. Franklin and a Pentagon colleague were in the news after it was disclosed that they had met two years earlier with Manuchar Ghorbanifar, who was among the Iranians who suggested to the Reagan administration in the 1980s that profits from arms-for-hostages deals be funneled into covert arms shipments to U.S.-backed Contra rebels battling the leftist Nicaraguan government.
The investigation centers on whether Mr. Franklin passed classified U.S. material on Iran to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the highly influential main Israeli lobbying organization in Washington, and whether that group, in turn, passed it on to Israel. Both AIPAC and Israel deny the allegations.
The U.S. law enforcement officials stressed that the investigation is not yet complete and that others could be implicated. They would not comment on whether that might include officials at AIPAC, which said it has been cooperating in the investigation.
"Any allegation of criminal conduct by AIPAC or its employees is false and baseless," AIPAC officials said.
In Israel, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon issued a statement yesterday saying that Israel has no connection to the matter. Israeli officials say their government halted all espionage activities in the United States after the 1985 arrest of Navy analyst Jonathan Pollard on charges of passing secrets to Israel.
"Israel does not engage in intelligence activities in the U.S. We deny all these reports," the statement says.
The investigation is being handled by U.S. Attorney Paul McNulty, whose Virginia district includes the Pentagon and whose office regularly deals with classified material, terrorism and other sensitive matters. The FBI's counterintelligence division and counterespionage prosecutors at the main Justice Department in Washington are also involved in the case.
The law enforcement officials said that until the past few weeks the investigation has been kept under tight wraps and included use of sophisticated electronic surveillance techniques they would not further describe. They also would not say whether such surveillance was conducted inside the Pentagon itself, although it has involved at least one computer of Mr. Franklin's, they said.
The United States has strongly backed Israeli efforts to block nuclear development in Iran, with Mr. Bush including Iran with Iraq and North Korea as part of an international "axis of evil."
Yet his administration has battled internally over how hard a line to take toward Iran. The State Department generally has advocated more moderate positions, while more conservative officials in the Defense Department and some at the White House's National Security Council have advocated tougher policies.
Mr. Sharon's government has pushed the Bush administration toward more toughness against Iran.
-------- us
Abuse Probes' Impact Concerns the Military
Chilling Effect on Operations Is Cited
By Bradley Graham
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, August 29, 2004; Page A20
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A42649-2004Aug28.html
Efforts to investigate and punish those responsible for mistreatment of detainees in Iraq are hampering current military intelligence-gathering operations, prompting extra caution by interrogators and tipping off detainees to U.S. methods, according to senior Army intelligence officers.
Former defense secretary James R. Schlesinger, who led a panel that reported Tuesday on the detainee abuse, was the first to warn this week of what he called "a chilling effect" on interrogation operations. Since then, several high-ranking military officers in Washington have spoken of concern among commanders in the field about the trend.
"Have I had people say that to me, as I've done my investigations in Iraq and also in Afghanistan? Yes," said Maj. Gen. George R. Fay, who headed an Army probe of military intelligence soldiers involved in the abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad. "People are much more reluctant today to be in any way aggressive relative to the collection and the interrogation process."
Another senior Army officer said the widespread publicity about U.S. military intelligence practices has enabled many who end up being taken in for questioning to arrive much better informed about what to expect.
"They know that if the United States captures them, they will get a medical exam," the officer told reporters at a Pentagon briefing Wednesday. "They'll get their teeth fixed. They will get essentially a free physical, and they will be released if they don't talk after a certain amount of time.
"That's the perception of some of the senior officers who work on that. They're getting folks who now know that."
The exposure of U.S. procedures and the throttling back of interrogation practices have come at a time when intelligence analysts are under considerable pressure to produce information about insurgent groups in Iraq and terrorist networks around the world.
"It is essential in the war on terror that we have adequate intelligence and that we have effective interrogation," Schlesinger said.
But the chilling effect has meant reductions and delays in intelligence collection, he added.
The Pentagon has not been alone in feeling this chill. Other government officials recently reported that the CIA has suspended the use of such extraordinary interrogation techniques as feigned suffocation and the refusal of pain medication for injuries -- tactics that had been approved by the White House but are now under review by administration lawyers.
The suspension is related to a White House decision two months ago to review and rewrite sections of an August 2002 Justice Department opinion on interrogations that said torture might be justified in some cases.
Pentagon lawyers have also been reassessing the rules that apply to detainee operations and military interrogations. But Fay, in an interview Thursday with Washington Post editors and reporters, said existing Army doctrine and guidelines provide sufficient "tools" for interrogators to do their work.
Interrogations of captured al Qaeda members in 2002 and 2003 have been credited by U.S. authorities with yielding valuable information about the terrorist network -- its structure, financing, training and planned attacks.
The extent to which this kind of information flow has been curtailed by the fallout from the prison abuse scandal could not be determined. Military officials were reluctant to provide specific examples of the chilling effect and appeared uncertain even about what gauge to use.
"It's a very difficult thing to measure," Fay said.
In its report, the Schlesinger panel concluded that more work is needed to bring the handling of detainees and military interrogation practices back into line with international law and historical U.S. standards. But the panel also noted that the intelligence challenge confronting U.S. forces has shifted dramatically in the move from the Cold War to the war on terrorism.
"The intelligence problem then was primarily one of monitoring known military sites, troops locations and equipment concentrations," the report said. "The problem today, however, is discovering new information on widely dispersed terrorist and insurgent networks."
As documented in the report, the Pentagon has found itself poorly prepared to deal with this problem, handicapped by a shortage of intelligence analysts, interrogators and interpreters. Further, military intelligence training has for years focused on gaining tactical information -- that is, an enemy's position, strength and movements on a battlefield. By contrast, the need now is for strategic information about a global terrorist threat.
"We have a shortcoming in our system that's emerging out of this" investigation into what went wrong at Abu Ghraib, Gen. Paul J. Kern, who oversaw the Army's probe of military intelligence, told Post staff members Thursday. "That's why you get a lot of questions from these young soldiers: How do I do this? Where do I get all this information?"
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- courts / tribunals
Hearings Open With Challenge to Tribunals
Defense Attorneys Say Military Commissions Deny Due Process to Detainees
By Scott Higham
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, August 29, 2004; Page A12
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A42635-2004Aug28?language=printer
GUANTANAMO BAY, Cuba -- The historic opening last week of U.S. military commissions that have not been used since World War II was marked by twists and turns and a carefully crafted defense strategy designed to bring the cases against suspected terrorists into the American court system.
While it is too early to tell whether they will be successful, the military and civilian defense lawyers spent much of the week lambasting the commissions as legal relics and creating a record of what took place at the Navy base here for possible U.S. court review.
In the end, the attorneys are hoping that federal judges will agree with their central argument: that the suspected al Qaeda terrorists and Taliban fighters being tried in a makeshift military courtroom here cannot receive due process and fair trials under the commission process.
"These cases are headed straight to federal court," said Navy Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift, appointed by the military to represent a man who served as Osama bin Laden's personal chauffeur. "They are making this up as they go along."
Commission officials and prosecutors dismissed the challenges. They say the commissions, created by President Bush two months after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, are designed to provide fair trials while protecting national security. Suspects receive key protections, they note, including the rights to be considered innocent until proven guilty and to not be convicted unless prosecutors establish guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.
"More than anyone in the courtroom, I want a full and fair process," said Army Col. Robert L. Swann, the chief prosecutor of the commissions. "If there is a case on appeal, I want it sustained on appeal."
Last week, the military held the first hearings in what is expected to be a series of trials of suspected terrorists and Taliban fighters to be held before the commissions. The defense lawyers, most of them military officers appointed by the government, dominated the proceedings by questioning the legitimacy of the commissions, their rules and procedures, and the fitness of the men assigned to sit in judgment of their clients. They argued that Bush overstepped his authority by creating the commissions, that their clients' rights to speedy trials have been denied, and that the commissions violate the equal protection clause of the Constitution because only non-U.S. citizens can be tried before them.
Many of the points the defense lawyers tried to make may find their way before U.S. judges because they involve constitutional questions. So far, two of the four defendants formally charged have portions of their challenges already pending in federal court. A third challenge in the case of an accused paymaster for al Qaeda is about to be filed in U.S. court, according to his defense lawyer, Air Force Lt. Col. Sharon Shaffer. The case of a fourth man, who admitted in court on Thursday that he is a member of al Qaeda, is on hold while lawyers try to figure out whether he can represent himself or hire an attorney from his home country of Yemen.
Government lawyers dispute defense claims that the commissions are illegitimate. They say the president had the authority to create the commissions, that they borrow procedures from other international tribunals and that the rules do not violate the rights of the accused to receive fair trials.
Defense lawyers for two of the suspects this week questioned the qualifications of the presiding officer of the commissions, Army Col. Peter E. Brownback III, and the other officers appointed to the panel. Together, six commissioners, including Brownback and an alternate, will serve as judges and jurors during the trials. The defense lawyers were permitted to challenge the commissioners under voir dire as they tried to establish that the composition of the commission was fraught with potential conflicts that undermined fairness.
For instance, the defense attorneys said Brownback, who served as a military lawyer and judge for 27 years before he came out of retirement to preside over the commissions, would exercise "undue influence" over the other commission members, who are military officers but not lawyers. When they gather to deliberate the cases, the defense attorneys argued, Brownback will have more influence over the proceedings because of his legal background.
The attorneys asked that he be removed from the case. Brownback said his departure still would not satisfy the attorneys.
"The secretary of defense said there's going to be a lawyer on this thing," Brownback responded Wednesday during hearings in the case against David Hicks, an Australian accused of fighting alongside the Taliban. "You're objecting to the structure of the panel. It doesn't matter what I think. It's the structure. You can bounce me off, and they'll put on another lawyer."
Brownback said he will forward the challenge to John D. Altenburg Jr., a retired Army major general who serves as the appointing authority of the commissions. But the defense lawyers said that poses a conflict, too, because Brownback and Altenburg are "close personal friends." They said the two have known each other since 1977, that Brownback's wife worked for Altenburg, and Altenburg hosted Brownback's retirement ceremony in 1999.
The civilian attorney for Hicks, Joshua Dratel, asked Brownback whether he might be influenced by his relationship with Altenburg.
"A reasonable person who took the time to examine my record would say no," Brownback said. The defense lawyers also challenged the backgrounds and qualifications of four other commission members selected to serve on the panel. Air Force Lt. Col. Timothy Toomey served as an intelligence officer who worked in Afghanistan and Iraq. Marine Col. R. Thomas Bright supervised an operation that sent suspected terrorists and Taliban fighters to Guantanamo Bay. Marine Col. Jack Sparks Jr. lost one of his Marine reservists, a firefighter, in the attack on the World Trade Center. Army Lt. Col. Curt Cooper said he did not know precisely what the Geneva Conventions were and noted in a commission questionnaire that he was deeply affected by a visit to Ground Zero at the World Trade Center.
"How are you supposed to separate that experience?" Dratel asked.
"They are separate things," Cooper said.
"How do you go about doing that?"
"I make no connection in my mind between these charges and my visit to the World Trade Center," Cooper said.
The lead prosecutor in the Hicks case said the commissioners could be fair and they should not be removed from the panel.
"We believe that none of these challenges should be granted," Marine Lt. Col. Kurt J. Brubaker said.
Brownback told the defense attorneys that he would forward to Altenburg the request to dismiss the commissioners. But the defense lawyers said that, too, poses a potential conflict. Altenburg was the officer who selected the commissioners in the first place.
On Friday, Altenburg said in a telephone interview that he could not discuss the challenges because he would have to rule on them. He said he has tried to distance himself from the proceedings -- he will not travel to Guantanamo -- so he can remain neutral when he rules on challenges and motions.
"We'll have to look at each one of these cases and make a decision: Do they in fact have too much involvement?" Altenburg said, referring the defense claims of conflicts on the commission.
The defense attorneys also are trying to establish that the rules of the commission are unclear, undermining the integrity of the trials. On Thursday, an accused propagandist for al Qaeda, Ali Hamza Ahmed Sulayman al Bahlul, blurted out in the courtroom through an interpreter that he was a member of the terrorist organization. He was about to describe his relationship to the Sept. 11 attacks when Brownback cut him off.
The presiding officer then turned to the commissioners and told them to disregard al Bahlul's remark. It could not be considered evidence under the rules of the commission, he said. But prosecutors objected, saying such remarks could be admitted because there is no requirement to warn suspects against self-incrimination in commission rules.
"We note our objection to that statement," one prosecutor said.
After the hearing, Navy Lt. Susan McGarvey, a lawyer and spokeswoman for the commissions, said prosecutors were correct and that the evidence could be admitted.
The defense attorneys issued a range of other objections, including that the translations provided to their clients were uneven at best.
Those claims were included in an hour-long special aired Thursday throughout the Arab world on the television network al-Jazeera. A reporter for the network here, Mohammed Alami, asked Swann on Friday whether he was troubled that international observers and foreign governments were criticizing the commissions as unfair.
Swann defended the fairness of the commissions: "They're entitled to their opinion. I'm entitled to mine."
-------- homeland security / national intelligence
Analysis Intelligence Agencies Pose Complex Conundrum for Administration
By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, August 29, 2004; Page A14
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A42637-2004Aug28.html
The bombshell set off last week by Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) in introducing a wide-ranging intelligence reorganization bill -- one that would essentially dismantle the CIA -- has suddenly awakened Congress and the Bush administration to the difficulties of changing the complex interrelationships in the U.S. intelligence community.
Even the relatively simple notions of "putting one man in charge" by creating the post of a national intelligence director, giving that person budgetary authority over the 15 agencies that make up the U.S. intelligence community, and establishing a national counterterrorism center have raised questions that Congress and the administration have only begun to deal with.
On Friday, President Bush may have bought more time to answer those questions when he took an interim step: signing executive orders strengthening the powers of the CIA director and setting up a counterterrorism center. The CIA director now has added ability to coordinate efforts of intelligence agencies, while Congress and the executive continue the debate over what powers a new intelligence chief would possess and how the bureaucracy would be redrawn.
All of the moves are responses to the Sept. 11 commission's call to reinvigorate and reorganize the U.S. intelligence community. Former New Jersey governor Thomas H. Kean (R), chairman of commission, has lamented that the community is a team playing without a quarterback. His deputy chairman, former representative Lee H. Hamilton (D-Ind.), has often argued for change because the CIA director has too many duties to adequately direct the community.
The Roberts bill, however, would give a new national intelligence director even more responsibilities and roles, judging from the details in the measure's 193 pages.
For example, the director would be responsible for providing national intelligence that is "timely, objective, independent of political considerations and based upon all sources available" to the president, heads of executive branch departments and agencies, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and senior military commanders.
The director would prepare the national intelligence budget, as well as manage and oversee the reprogramming of funds and personnel across all U.S. intelligence agencies; determine and approve requirements for collection, analysis and dissemination of intelligence; and resolve conflicts when they occur.
These will not be easy jobs. Moving money from program to program, for example, probably would have to go through the Defense Department, the Office of Management and Budget and several congressional committees. As Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld put it last week before the Senate Armed Services Committee, funding reprogramming is "something that just by its very nature requires coordination among all three and Congress. And quite honestly, the Congress has been one of the biggest difficulties with respect to that issue."
Another role for the intelligence chief would be to establish requirements and priorities "to govern the collection, analysis and dissemination of national intelligence by elements of the national intelligence service." Currently, that function -- setting priorities for the CIA and other agencies -- is the responsibility of the president through the National Security Council.
The intelligence chief would also be charged to set "requirements and priorities" for the attorney general and the FBI to carry out foreign intelligence electronic surveillance and physical searches inside the United States. The Roberts bill gives the intelligence chief responsibility to "promote and evaluate the utility of national intelligence to consumers within the U.S. Government," another new role.
Asked about these multiple roles, a senior Senate aide involved in putting the legislation together said the defense secretary carries out just as many or more activities, and that the bill simply would put the intelligence chief on the same level as the Pentagon's civilian boss.
The national counterterrorism center, as defined by the Roberts bill, would have a separate budget beginning in fiscal 2006, and be one of several such centers the measure would establish -- an arrangement similar to that proposed by the Sept. 11 commission. The other centers would deal with issues such as weapons proliferation, counter-intelligence and narcotics trafficking, according to the measure.
The head of the counterterrorism center would directly advise the president and National Security Council as well as his boss, the intelligence chief. The counterterrorism center director also would "direct the tasking of national intelligence collection using human and technical means" and "coordinate the intelligence and intelligence-related operations of the U.S. Government." The national intelligence center concept, which originated in the Sept. 11 commission's report, has been criticized by some for creating new "stovepipes," or government intelligence operations concerned solely with one subject or one area of intelligence -- which were criticized by the commission.
The most immediate reaction caused by the Roberts bill came from current and former senior CIA officials over the senator's notion that the CIA would be split up and made a part of a new National Intelligence Service.
Acting CIA Director John E. McLaughlin put out a strong statement supporting his employees and attacking the plan by Roberts, who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee that oversees his agency.
"Knowing the uncertainty that this rapid-fire succession of proposals can cause, I would just stress to everyone that we are nowhere near the end of this debate," McLaughlin said. "Ideas will come and go. Some will stick; many will be winnowed out. In that regard, I honestly do not think any of this will lead to the breakup of the CIA given the Agency's vital front line role in the War on Terror."
The proposal even prompted former CIA director George J. Tenet to break his retirement silence with a statement describing Roberts's proposal as part of the current push for intelligence reform that he described as "the mad rush to rearrange wiring diagrams in an attempt to be seen as doing something. It is time for someone to say, 'stop!' Someone needs to stand up for all the good that is done by the men and women of CIA."
-------- immigration / refugees
Detainee Still in Limbo
U.S. Unsuccessful in Deporting Palestinian
Associated Press
Sunday, August 29, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A42630-2004Aug28.html
ELIZABETH, N.J., Aug. 28 -- Immigration agents tried unsuccessfully to put a Palestinian detained in limbo in the United States on a cargo ship without a passport, according to lawyers for the man and a shipping company.
Salim Yassir, 28, was caught in 2000 trying to enter the United States aboard a ship from England. Since then, he has been imprisoned while officials try to deport him to a country willing to accept him.
Israel has refused to accept Yassir, who is originally from the Gaza Strip, because he has no original Israeli or Palestinian travel documents. Libya, where Yassir lived as a teenager, officially expelled all Palestinian refugees in 1995.
Earlier this month, a federal appeals court ordered the judge in Yassir's case to consider releasing him, saying his deportation "does not appear reasonably foreseeable."
Immigration officials instead tried to put Yassir on a ship to England without a passport, said his lawyer and a lawyer for the shipping company Wallenius Lines, which owned the ship on which Yassir arrived in the United States.
"Instead of releasing him, they try to take him in the middle of the night and put him on a ship," Yassir's lawyer, Joshua Bardavid, told the Star-Ledger of Newark.
Wallenius's lawyers learned about the plan Thursday and refused to allow him on the ship, which was to depart the Port of Baltimore on Friday.
"It would have been a difficult situation, to put it mildly," said Frank Turner, a lawyer for Wallenius.
Immigration officials declined to comment to the newspaper, and a spokesman for the federal detention center in Elizabeth, where Yassir is housed, did not immediately return a call Saturday.
In a telephone interview last month, Yassir said he was willing to be deported anywhere.
"I'm ready to go," he said. "I just need my freedom. If they want to deport me, I'm ready to go."
-------- terrorism
Chechen bombed Russian jet 'in revenge for brother's death'
29 August 2004
independent.co.uk
By Andrew Osborn in Moscow
http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/story.jsp?story=556258
One of the prime suspects in last week's probable suicide bombing of two Russian airliners, a 27-year-old Chechen woman, was yesterday revealed to have had a compelling motive for her alleged actions: revenge.
Amanta (also known as Aminat) Nagaeva experienced the sharp end of the brutal decade-long conflict between Russia and the separatist region first hand, according to her neighbours in Chechnya.
Three or four years ago, one of her three brothers was suspected of terrorism and was abducted, apparently by federal Russian forces. Like many others who have suffered the same fate he has never been seen again and is presumed dead.
The Russian daily Izvestia said her profile fitted that of the archetypal Chechen female suicide bomber Black Widows, as they are often known. "As experience shows, practically all the female suicide bombers who have blown themselves up in Moscow or the Caucasus were the wives of [rebel] fighters killed in battles with federal forces or had lost close relatives involved in the hostilities," the paper wrote.
"Nagaeva had an obvious motive to become a suicide bomber; by blowing herself and the plane up she was avenging her brother." Nagaeva was on a TU-134 bound for Volgograd which broke up in mid-air 120 miles south of Moscow, while the other prime suspect, a Chechen woman known only as S Dzhebirkhanova, was on a TU-154 heading for the Black Sea resort of Sochi which dropped out of the air within minutes of the other plane. Eighty-nine people died in the two explosions.
Investigators' suspicions were aroused when nobody came to identify the two women's bodies, and their fears that the catastrophe was man-made were confirmed when the FSB security service uncovered traces of a high explosive traditionally favoured by Chechen rebels in the wreckage of one of the planes.
The two women's behaviour was also suspiciously similar. Both checked in at the very last minute, provided minimal passport data to check-in and security staff and sat towards the rear of the planes near the toilets and the engines. Both also appear to have been at the very epicentre of the explosions.
In the case of Nagaeva, what remained of her body was spread over a wide area with investigators finding first a leg, then her head and finally her rib cage. Such a gruesome and wide distribution of body parts is familiar to Russian investigators. The body of the Chechen suicide bomber who blew herself up last December near the Kremlin was similarly dismembered.
The revelations of the women's apparent roles emerged as Russian authorities announced they had found traces of the explosive hexagon in the wreckage of the second airliner. The previous day, similar traces had been found in the wreckage of the TU-154 that crashed in southern Russia, evidence, said officials, that the plane was brought down by a terrorist act. Both planes crashed on Tuesday night after taking off from Moscow's Domodedovo airport, one of Russia's most modern and sophisticated air hubs. The findings of explosives indicated significant weaknesses in security for the air transport network that spans the sprawling country.
The timing of last week's tragedy was also significant; five days before today's presidential elections in Chechnya and close to what would have been the birthday of Akhmad Kadyrov, the previous Chechen president who was murdered in May. Chechen rebels are notorious for the strong sense of symbolism behind the timing of their attacks on Russian targets.
An obscure Islamist group called the "Islambouli Brigades" has also claimed responsibility for the attacks, saying they were designed to punish Russia for its unofficial war in Chechnya. Investigators believe that the bombs, which may have been as small as a bar of soap or may have been in the form of the traditional suicide belt donned by Black Widows, were detonated in the toilets so as to immediately pulverise the planes' twin engines.
Russian media have speculated that the two women received inside help from someone working at Domodedovo to smuggle the explosives aboard. The firm in charge of airport security has already admitted that there are "holes" in the security screening process and that it only uses its best detection equipment on a selective basis.
Inspectors found serious shortcomings at the same airport in May, and in the wake of last week's double disaster President Vladimir Putin ordered airport operators to be stripped of their responsibility for security in favour of the Ministry of the Interior.
Mr Putin had hoped that today's presidential election in Chechnya (which is expected to be won easily by a Kremlin-backed candidate) would cover the republic in a Moscow-manufactured veil of normality. But that hope died with the two airliners' 89 passengers.
"When such a horrific terrorist act happens," said Masha Lipman of Moscow's Carnegie Centre, "the whole demonstration of a political process becomes futile."
-------- torture
Hicks tells of '10 hours of hell'
29aug04
heraldsun
http://www.heraldsun.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5478,10598270%255E401,00.html
DAVID Hicks told his father during their emotional reunion last week that he was sorry for all the trouble he caused.
Speaking to The Sunday Telegraph yesterday, Terry Hicks also said he was angry at Australian Government claims that his son was not abused by US captors.
His son had given him a detailed account of "10 hours of absolute hell" he endured after his capture in Afghanistan in December, 2001.
Mr Hicks was in Florida yesterday en route from the Cuban prison camp and will fly home to Adelaide today. After not seeing his 29-year-old son for five years, he met him twice last week - before and after Hicks was arraigned before a military tribunal to face three terror-related charges.
"He said, 'I'm sorry for all the stress and everything else I've caused the family,"' Mr Hicks said.
"I said, 'You don't have to apologise. We're with you and so are thousands of other people.'
"This is something that happened - this could happen to anyone. It's just unfortunate it was us."
Mr Hicks said the worst aspect of the reunion was David's story of being abused in Afghanistan.
"What he told us of his treatment on his capture is just absolutely shocking," he said. "He was stressed telling us, but he wanted to get it out. It's not fit to print."
Last week, Foreign Minister Alexander Downer brandished a Pentagon report saying there was no evidence Hicks and fellow Australian detainee Mamdouh Habib were abused by US captors.
But Mr Hicks said his son's account matched those given by three British detainees released earlier this year.Mr Hicks said his son told him he was taken off a prison ship back to Afghanistan. Hooded and manacled, he claimed to have been beaten and abused by two American captors.
-------- POLITICS
Howard tells Bush: I don't care if you won't see me
29/08/2004
telegraph.co.uk
By Melissa Kite, Deputy Political Editor
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;sessionid=2E05TFYXWDCVJQFIQMFCNAGAVCBQYJVC?xml=/news/2004/08/29/ntory29.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/08/29/ixnewstop.html&secureRefresh=true&_requestid=20961
Michael Howard issued a blistering rebuff to George W Bush yesterday after the President barred the Tory leader from the White House as punishment for his attacks on Tony Blair over the Iraq War. In a furious phone call earlier this year, Karl Rove, Mr Bush's closest adviser, told Mr Howard's aides: "You can forget about meeting the President. Don't bother coming. You are not meeting him."
Yesterday, after the White House ban was disclosed in the strongly pro-Blair Sun, Mr Howard issued a strongly-worded statement: "A Conservative government would work very closely with President Bush or President Kerry but my job as leader of the Opposition is to say things as I see them in the interests of our country and to hold our Government to account.
"If some people in the White House, in their desire to protect Mr Blair, think I am too tough on Mr Blair or too critical of him, they are entitled to their opinion. But I shall continue to do my job as I see fit."
Mr Howard's aides went even further, insisting that he would "have nothing to do with those trying to sustain Tony Blair in office wherever they might be".
A senior aide said: "There had been channels of discussion open as to whether he should go to Washington when Karl Rove telephoned to tell him not to bother. Howard's reaction was very cool. He is not going to be cowed by anybody from criticising the Prime Minister."
The confrontation between Mr Bush and Mr Howard is the deepest split between an American president and a Conservative leader since the row between Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher over the US invasion of Grenada in 1983. They rapidly resumed their close alliance after the crisis. However, the bitter and public division between President Bush and Mr Howard appears unbridgeable.
Mr Bush's ban was imposed in February after Mr Howard accused Mr Blair of a "serious dereliction of duty" for going to war without asking basic questions about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and told him that he should be "seriously considering his position".
Mr Howard's aides confirmed that Mr Rove had indeed sent a brusque message to the Tory leader. But they were quick to point out that Mr Howard had sent a robust reply. "He told us to tell Rove one word - Tough," said a senior aide.
The complete breakdown in relations between the White House and Conservative Central Office is all the more remarkable given Mr Howard's strong Atlanticist convictions. He has often said that his conservative politics were inspired by trips to the United States, and he is the founder of the Atlantic Partnership, which fosters links between America and Europe.
In contrast, the Bush team has remained close to William Hague and Iain Duncan Smith, Mr Howard's immediate predecessors. Dick Cheney, the vice-president, telephoned Mr Duncan Smith to thank him last March when the Tories supported Mr Blair in the Commons vote on Iraq.
The disclosure in yesterday's Sun that Mr Bush had snubbed Mr Howard was widely assumed in Westminster to have been a plant by Labour officials. However, Tory aides claimed that if No 10 did leak the story the tactic had backfired as the public would endorse Mr Howard's stand.
A senior Tory MP close to Mr Howard said: "I don't think he will lose any sleep. The whole party senses that whilst we want to be friends with America it is not electorally helpful at the moment given the general reaction to the Iraq war."
Mr Howard's criticism of Mr Blair over Iraq has been hardening. In March he withdrew support for the Butler inquiry into intelligence used in the War. In July, he said that he would not have supported the Government in the eve-of-war vote if he had known the intelligence was so flawed.
Despite Mr Bush's ban, a Tory delegation of 20 MPs and officials led by Liam Fox, the party co-chairman, will continue its visit to the Republican Convention in New York.
-----
Howard fury over White House ban
29 August 2004
independent.co.uk
By Francis Elliott and Rupert Cornwell
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/story.jsp?story=556333
Michael Howard last night accused George Bush of seeking to protect Tony Blair in an extraordinary row sparked by news that the Tory leader has been banned from the White House.
Mr Howard hit back after it emerged that his calls for Mr Blair to stand down over the Iraq war have enraged the US President. The simmering feud was laid bare yesterday as it emerged that Karl Rove, Mr Bush's most powerful official, told the Tory leader that he "could forget about meeting the President".
Mr Howard last night launched an unprecedented attack on Mr Bush. "If some people in the White House, in their desire to protect Mr Blair, think I am too tough on Mr Blair or too critical of him, they are entitled to their opinion. But I shall continue to do my job as I see fit," he said.
Senior Conservatives last night admitted that relations between the leader and Mr Bush broke down in February after Mr Howard called for the Prime Minister's resignation in a Commons debate.
In a furious message to Mr Howard's office Mr Rove said: "You can forget about meeting the President full stop. Don't bother coming, you are not meeting him."
The Independent on Sunday has learnt that it was the first of a series of rows between the Tory leader and Mr Bush's most senior aide to have flared this year.
Mr Rove is known in Washington as a ruthless political operator for whom loyalty to his boss is paramount.
Some Tories suspect a Downing Street dirty tricks operation to embarrass Mr Howard on the eve of the Republican Convention in New York. "You have to wonder how this got out when it did," said one.
Liam Fox, the Tory chairman, is leading a delegation of Conservative MPs to attend the formal adoption of Mr Bush as the party's presidential candidate. He now finds himself at the centre of a furious row between the two parties, hitherto strong ideological allies.
Mr Howard is the first Tory leader in modern times to have been denied a meeting with a Republican president. Traditionally, the Tories and Republicans have been considered natural allies.
William Hague was invited to the convention in 2000 at which Mr Bush was first selected as candidate, and even Iain Duncan Smith was granted two audiences. Mr Blair's unstinting support for Mr Bush has led to a recasting of traditional transatlantic alliances forged on the right by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.
It is the Tory leader's position as an outcast from the Bush White House that is now likely to gain the most attention, however.
Labour is bound to seize on the rift as evidence that Mr Howard is suffering the consequences of "opportunistic" attacks on the Government.
Some observers even predicted that the row could spell the beginning of the end of his leadership, which has been dogged in recent months by a failure to overtake Labour in the polls.
Mr Howard's most recent campaign, against political correctness, launched last week, was criticised as being like something from One Foot in the Grave. Others insist that Mr Howard will gain credibility for his stance.
-------- corruption
Democrat 'Ashamed' He Helped Bush
Associated Press
Sunday, August 29, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A42628-2004Aug28.html
DALLAS, Aug. 28 -- Former Texas House speaker Ben Barnes said he is "more ashamed at myself than I've ever been" because he helped President Bush and the sons of other wealthy families get into the Texas National Guard so they could avoid serving in Vietnam.
"I got a young man named George W. Bush into the National Guard . . . and I'm not necessarily proud of that, but I did it," Barnes, a Democrat, said in a video clip recorded May 27 before a group of John F. Kerry supporters in Austin.
Barnes, who was House speaker when Bush entered the Guard, later became lieutenant governor.
The video was posted June 25 on the Web site www.austin4kerry.org but received little notice before Friday, when Jim Moore, an Austin-based author of books critical of Bush, sent e-mails calling attention to it as Republicans prepare to convene in New York.
Bush joined the National Guard in 1968 and served until 1973. He has said he received no special treatment and did not seek help to be admitted to the Guard.
Barnes said he became ashamed after walking through the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and looking at the names of the dead. "I became more ashamed of myself than I've ever been, because it was the worst thing I did -- help a lot of wealthy supporters and a lot of people who had family names of importance get in the National Guard," he said.
Barnes said Saturday in a telephone interview that the video "speaks for itself."
He declined to answer questions about what role he had in helping Bush, but he said he may have more to say next week.
Earlier Saturday, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said of Barnes's comments: "It is not surprising coming from a longtime partisan Democrat. The allegation was discredited by the commanding officer. This was fully covered and addressed five years ago. It is nothing new."
Five years ago, Barnes's lawyer issued a statement saying Barnes had been contacted by the now-deceased Sidney Adger, a Houston oilman and friend of Bush's father, who was then a congressman. Adger asked Barnes to recommend Bush for a pilot position with the Air National Guard, and he did, the statement said.
-------- investigations
The 9/11 Report: A Dissent
August 29, 2004
By RICHARD A. POSNER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/29/books/review/29POSNERL.html?pagewanted=all&position=
The idea was sound: a politically balanced, generously financed committee of prominent, experienced people would investigate the government's failure to anticipate and prevent the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Had the investigation been left to the government, the current administration would have concealed its own mistakes and blamed its predecessors. This is not a criticism of the Bush White House; any administration would have done the same.
And the execution was in one vital respect superb: the 9/11 commission report is an uncommonly lucid, even riveting, narrative of the attacks, their background and the response to them. (Norton has published the authorized edition; another edition, including reprinted news articles by reporters from The New York Times, has been published by St. Martin's, while PublicAffairs has published the staff reports and some of the testimony.)
The prose is free from bureaucratese and, for a consensus statement, the report is remarkably forthright. Though there could not have been a single author, the style is uniform. The document is an improbable literary triumph.
However, the commission's analysis and recommendations are unimpressive. The delay in the commission's getting up to speed was not its fault but that of the administration, which dragged its heels in turning over documents; yet with completion of its investigation deferred to the presidential election campaign season, the commission should have waited until after the election to release its report. That would have given it time to hone its analysis and advice.
The enormous public relations effort that the commission orchestrated to win support for the report before it could be digested also invites criticism -- though it was effective: in a poll conducted just after publication, 61 percent of the respondents said the commission had done a good job, though probably none of them had read the report. The participation of the relatives of the terrorists' victims (described in the report as the commission's ''partners'') lends an unserious note to the project (as does the relentless self-promotion of several of the members). One can feel for the families' loss, but being a victim's relative doesn't qualify a person to advise on how the disaster might have been prevented.
Much more troublesome are the inclusion in the report of recommendations (rather than just investigative findings) and the commissioners' misplaced, though successful, quest for unanimity. Combining an investigation of the attacks with proposals for preventing future attacks is the same mistake as combining intelligence with policy. The way a problem is described is bound to influence the choice of how to solve it. The commission's contention that our intelligence structure is unsound predisposed it to blame the structure for the failure to prevent the 9/11 attacks, whether it did or not. And pressure for unanimity encourages just the kind of herd thinking now being blamed for that other recent intelligence failure -- the belief that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction.
At least the commission was consistent. It believes in centralizing intelligence, and people who prefer centralized, pyramidal governance structures to diversity and competition deprecate dissent. But insistence on unanimity, like central planning, deprives decision makers of a full range of alternatives. For all one knows, the price of unanimity was adopting recommendations that were the second choice of many of the commission's members or were consequences of horse trading. The premium placed on unanimity undermines the commission's conclusion that everybody in sight was to blame for the failure to prevent the 9/11 attacks. Given its political composition (and it is evident from the questioning of witnesses by the members that they had not forgotten which political party they belong to), the commission could not have achieved unanimity without apportioning equal blame to the Clinton and Bush administrations, whatever the members actually believe.
The tale of how we were surprised by the 9/11 attacks is a product of hindsight; it could not be otherwise. And with the aid of hindsight it is easy to identify missed opportunities (though fewer than had been suspected) to have prevented the attacks, and tempting to leap from that observation to the conclusion that the failure to prevent them was the result not of bad luck, the enemy's skill and ingenuity or the difficulty of defending against suicide attacks or protecting an almost infinite array of potential targets, but of systemic failures in the nation's intelligence and security apparatus that can be corrected by changing the apparatus.
That is the leap the commission makes, and it is not sustained by the report's narrative. The narrative points to something different, banal and deeply disturbing: that it is almost impossible to take effective action to prevent something that hasn't occurred previously. Once the 9/11 attacks did occur, measures were taken that have reduced the likelihood of a recurrence. But before the attacks, it was psychologically and politically impossible to take those measures. The government knew that Al Qaeda had attacked United States facilities and would do so again. But the idea that it would do so by infiltrating operatives into this country to learn to fly commercial aircraft and then crash such aircraft into buildings was so grotesque that anyone who had proposed that we take costly measures to prevent such an event would have been considered a candidate for commitment. No terrorist had hijacked an American commercial aircraft anywhere in the world since 1986. Just months before the 9/11 attacks the director of the Defense Department's Defense Threat Reduction Agency wrote: ''We have, in fact, solved a terrorist problem in the last 25 years. We have solved it so successfully that we have forgotten about it; and that is a treat. The problem was aircraft hijacking and bombing. We solved the problem. . . . The system is not perfect, but it is good enough. . . . We have pretty much nailed this thing.'' In such a climate of thought, efforts to beef up airline security not only would have seemed gratuitous but would have been greatly resented because of the cost and the increased airport congestion.
The problem isn't just that people find it extraordinarily difficult to take novel risks seriously; it is also that there is no way the government can survey the entire range of possible disasters and act to prevent each and every one of them. As the commission observes, ''Historically, decisive security action took place only after a disaster had occurred or a specific plot had been discovered.'' It has always been thus, and probably always will be. For example, as the report explains, the 1993 truck bombing of the World Trade Center led to extensive safety improvements that markedly reduced the toll from the 9/11 attacks; in other words, only to the slight extent that the 9/11 attacks had a precedent were significant defensive steps taken in advance.
The commission's contention that ''the terrorists exploited deep institutional failings within our government'' is overblown. By the mid-1990's the government knew that Osama bin Laden was a dangerous enemy of the United States. President Clinton and his national security adviser, Samuel Berger, were so concerned that Clinton, though ''warned in the strongest terms'' by the Secret Service and the C.I.A. that ''visiting Pakistan would risk the president's life,'' did visit that country (flying in on an unmarked plane, using decoys and remaining only six hours) and tried unsuccessfully to enlist its cooperation against bin Laden. Clinton authorized the assassination of bin Laden, and a variety of means were considered for achieving this goal, but none seemed feasible. Invading Afghanistan to pre-empt future attacks by Al Qaeda was considered but rejected for diplomatic reasons, which President Bush accepted when he took office and which look even more compelling after the trouble we've gotten into with our pre-emptive invasion of Iraq. The complaint that Clinton was merely ''swatting at flies,'' and the claim that Bush from the start was determined to destroy Al Qaeda root and branch, are belied by the commission's report. The Clinton administration envisaged a campaign of attrition that would last three to five years, the Bush administration a similar campaign that would last three years. With an invasion of Afghanistan impracticable, nothing better was on offer. Almost four years after Bush took office and almost three years after we wrested control of Afghanistan from the Taliban, Al Qaeda still has not been destroyed.
It seems that by the time Bush took office, ''bin Laden fatigue'' had set in; no one had practical suggestions for eliminating or even substantially weakening Al Qaeda. The commission's statement that Clinton and Bush had been offered only a ''narrow and unimaginative menu of options for action'' is hindsight wisdom at its most fatuous. The options considered were varied and imaginative; they included enlisting the Afghan Northern Alliance or other potential tribal allies of the United States to help kill or capture bin Laden, an attack by our Special Operations forces on his compound, assassinating him by means of a Predator drone aircraft or coercing or bribing the Taliban to extradite him. But for political or operational reasons, none was feasible.
It thus is not surprising, perhaps not even a fair criticism, that the new administration treaded water until the 9/11 attacks. But that's what it did. Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, ''demoted'' Richard Clarke, the government's leading bin Laden hawk and foremost expert on Al Qaeda. It wasn't technically a demotion, but merely a decision to exclude him from meetings of the cabinet-level ''principals committee'' of the National Security Council; he took it hard, however, and requested a transfer from the bin Laden beat to cyberterrorism. The committee did not discuss Al Qaeda until a week before the 9/11 attacks. The new administration showed little interest in exploring military options for dealing with Al Qaeda, and Donald Rumsfeld had not even gotten around to appointing a successor to the Defense Department's chief counterterrorism official (who had left the government in January) when the 9/11 attacks occurred.
I suspect that one reason, not mentioned by the commission, for the Bush administration's initially tepid response to the threat posed by Al Qaeda is that a new administration is predisposed to reject the priorities set by the one it's succeeding. No doubt the same would have been true had Clinton been succeeding Bush as president rather than vice versa.
Before the commission's report was published, the impression was widespread that the failure to prevent the attacks had been due to a failure to collate bits of information possessed by different people in our security services, mainly the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. And, indeed, had all these bits been collated, there would have been a chance of preventing the attacks, though only a slight one; the best bits were not obtained until late in August 2001, and it is unrealistic to suppose they could have been integrated and understood in time to detect the plot.
The narrative portion of the report ends at Page 338 and is followed by 90 pages of analysis and recommendations. I paused at Page 338 and asked myself what improvements in our defenses against terrorist groups like Al Qaeda are implied by the commission's investigative findings (as distinct from recommendations that the commission goes on to make in the last part of the report). The list is short:
(1) Major buildings should have detailed evacuation plans and the plans should be communicated to the occupants.
(2) Customs officers should be alert for altered travel documents of Muslims entering the United States; some of the 9/11 hijackers might have been excluded by more careful inspections of their papers. Biometric screening (such as fingerprinting) should be instituted to facilitate the creation of a comprehensive database of suspicious characters. In short, our borders should be made less porous.
(3) Airline passengers and baggage should be screened carefully, cockpit doors secured and override mechanisms installed in airliners to enable a hijacked plane to be controlled from the ground.
(4) Any legal barriers to sharing information between the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. should be eliminated.
(5) More Americans should be trained in Arabic, Farsi and other languages in widespread use in the Muslim world. The commission remarks that in 2002, only six students received undergraduate degrees in Arabic from colleges in the United States.
(6) The thousands of federal agents assigned to the ''war on drugs,'' a war that is not only unwinnable but probably not worth winning, should be reassigned to the war on international terrorism.
(7) The F.B.I. appears from the report to be incompetent to combat terrorism; this is the one area in which a structural reform seems indicated (though not recommended by the commission). The bureau, in excessive reaction to J. Edgar Hoover's freewheeling ways, has become afflicted with a legalistic mind-set that hinders its officials from thinking in preventive rather than prosecutorial terms and predisposes them to devote greater resources to drug and other conventional criminal investigations than to antiterrorist activities. The bureau is habituated to the leisurely time scale of criminal investigations and prosecutions. Information sharing within the F.B.I., let alone with other agencies, is sluggish, in part because the bureau's field offices have excessive autonomy and in part because the agency is mysteriously unable to adopt a modern communications system. The F.B.I. is an excellent police department, but that is all it is. Of all the agencies involved in intelligence and counterterrorism, the F.B.I. comes out worst in the commission's report.
Progress has been made on a number of items on my list. There have been significant improvements in border control and aircraft safety. The information ''wall'' was removed by the USA Patriot Act, passed shortly after 9/11, although legislation may not have been necessary, since, as the commission points out, before 9/11 the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. exaggerated the degree to which they were forbidden to share information. This was a managerial failure, not an institutional one. Efforts are under way on (5) and (6), though powerful political forces limit progress on (6). Oddly, the simplest reform -- better building-evacuation planning -- has lagged.
The only interesting item on my list is (7). The F.B.I.'s counterterrorism performance before 9/11 was dismal indeed. Urged by one of its field offices to seek a warrant to search the laptop of Zacarias Moussaoui (a candidate hijacker-pilot), F.B.I. headquarters refused because it thought the special court that authorizes foreign intelligence surveillance would decline to issue a warrant -- a poor reason for not requesting one. A prescient report from the Arizona field office on flight training by Muslims was ignored by headquarters. There were only two analysts on the bin Laden beat in the entire bureau. A notice by the director, Louis J. Freeh, that the bureau focus its efforts on counterterrorism was ignored.
So what to do? One possibility would be to appoint as director a hard-nosed, thick-skinned manager with a clear mandate for change -- someone of Donald Rumsfeld's caliber. (His judgment on Iraq has been questioned, but no one questions his capacity to reform a hidebound government bureaucracy.) Another would be to acknowledge the F.B.I.'s deep-rooted incapacity to deal effectively with terrorism, and create a separate domestic intelligence agency on the model of Britain's Security Service (M.I.5). The Security Service has no power of arrest. That power is lodged in the Special Branch of Scotland Yard, and if we had our own domestic intelligence service, modeled on M.I.5, the power of arrest would be lodged in a branch of the F.B.I. As far as I know, M.I.5 and M.I.6 (Britain's counterpart to the C.I.A.) work well together. They have a common culture, as the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. do not. They are intelligence agencies, operating by surveillance rather than by prosecution. Critics who say that an American equivalent of M.I.5 would be a Gestapo understand neither M.I.5 nor the Gestapo.
Which brings me to another failing of the 9/11 commission: American provinciality. Just as we are handicapped in dealing with Islamist terrorism by our ignorance of the languages, cultures and history of the Muslim world, so we are handicapped in devising effective antiterrorist methods by our reluctance to consider foreign models. We shouldn't be embarrassed to borrow good ideas from nations with a longer experience of terrorism than our own. The blows we have struck against Al Qaeda's centralized organization may deflect Islamist terrorists from spectacular attacks like 9/11 to retail forms like car and truck bombings, assassinations and sabotage. If so, Islamist terrorism may come to resemble the kinds of terrorism practiced by the Irish Republican Army and Hamas, with which foreign nations like Britain and Israel have extensive experience. The United States remains readily penetrable by Islamist terrorists who don't even look or sound Middle Eastern, and there are Qaeda sleeper cells in this country. All this underscores the need for a domestic intelligence agency that, unlike the F.B.I., is effective.
Were all the steps that I have listed fully implemented, the probability of another terrorist attack on the scale of 9/11 would be reduced -- slightly. The measures adopted already, combined with our operation in Afghanistan, have undoubtedly reduced that probability, and the room for further reduction probably is small. We and other nations have been victims of surprise attacks before; we will be again.
They follow a pattern. Think of Pearl Harbor in 1941 and the Tet offensive in Vietnam in 1968. It was known that the Japanese might attack us. But that they would send their carrier fleet thousands of miles to Hawaii, rather than just attack the nearby Philippines or the British and Dutch possessions in Southeast Asia, was too novel and audacious a prospect to be taken seriously. In 1968 the Vietnamese Communists were known to be capable of attacking South Vietnam's cities. Indeed, such an assault was anticipated, though not during Tet (the Communists had previously observed a truce during the Tet festivities) and not on the scale it attained. In both cases the strength and determination of the enemy were underestimated, along with the direction of his main effort. In 2001 an attack by Al Qaeda was anticipated, but it was anticipated to occur overseas, and the capability and audacity of the enemy were underestimated. (Note in all three cases a tendency to underestimate non-Western foes -- another aspect of provinciality.)
Anyone who thinks this pattern can be changed should read those 90 pages of analysis and recommendations that conclude the commission's report; they come to very little. Even the prose sags, as the reader is treated to a barrage of bromides: ''the American people are entitled to expect their government to do its very best,'' or ''we should reach out, listen to and work with other countries that can help'' and ''be generous and caring to our neighbors,'' or we should supply the Middle East with ''programs to bridge the digital divide and increase Internet access'' -- the last an ironic suggestion, given that encrypted e-mail is an effective medium of clandestine communication. The ''hearts and minds'' campaign urged by the commission is no more likely to succeed in the vast Muslim world today than its prototype was in South Vietnam in the 1960's.
The commission wants criteria to be developed for picking out which American cities are at greatest risk of terrorist attack, and defensive resources allocated accordingly -- this to prevent every city from claiming a proportional share of those resources when it is apparent that New York and Washington are most at risk. Not only do we lack the information needed to establish such criteria, but to make Washington and New York impregnable so that terrorists can blow up Los Angeles or, for that matter, Kalamazoo with impunity wouldn't do us any good.
The report states that the focus of our antiterrorist strategy should not be ''just 'terrorism,' some generic evil. This vagueness blurs the strategy. The catastrophic threat at this moment in history is more specific. It is the threat posed by Islamist terrorism.'' Is it? Who knows? The menace of bin Laden was not widely recognized until just a few years before the 9/11 attacks. For all anyone knows, a terrorist threat unrelated to Islam is brewing somewhere (maybe right here at home -- remember the Oklahoma City bombers and the Unabomber and the anthrax attack of October 2001) that, given the breathtakingly rapid advances in the technology of destruction, will a few years hence pose a greater danger than Islamic extremism. But if we listen to the 9/11 commission, we won't be looking out for it because we've been told that Islamist terrorism is the thing to concentrate on.
Illustrating the psychological and political difficulty of taking novel threats seriously, the commission's recommendations are implicitly concerned with preventing a more or less exact replay of 9/11. Apart from a few sentences on the possibility of nuclear terrorism, and of threats to other modes of transportation besides airplanes, the broader range of potential threats, notably those of bioterrorism and cyberterrorism, is ignored.
Many of the commission's specific recommendations are sensible, such as that American citizens should be required to carry biometric passports. But most are in the nature of more of the same -- more of the same measures that were implemented in the wake of 9/11 and that are being refined, albeit at the usual bureaucratic snail's pace. If the report can put spurs to these efforts, all power to it. One excellent recommendation is reducing the number of Congressional committees, at present in the dozens, that have oversight responsibilities with regard to intelligence. The stated reason for the recommendation is that the reduction will improve oversight. A better reason is that with so many committees exercising oversight, our senior intelligence and national security officials spend too much of their time testifying.
The report's main proposal -- the one that has received the most emphasis from the commissioners and has already been endorsed in some version by both presidential candidates -- is for the appointment of a national intelligence director who would knock heads together in an effort to overcome the reluctance of the various intelligence agencies to share information. Yet the report itself undermines this proposal, in a section titled ''The Millennium Exception.'' ''In the period between December 1999 and early January 2000,'' we read, ''information about terrorism flowed widely and abundantly.'' Why? Mainly ''because everyone was already on edge with the millennium and possible computer programming glitches ('Y2K').'' Well, everyone is now on edge because of 9/11. Indeed, the report suggests no current impediments to the flow of information within and among intelligence agencies concerning Islamist terrorism. So sharing is not such a problem after all. And since the tendency of a national intelligence director would be to focus on the intelligence problem du jour, in this case Islamist terrorism, centralization of the intelligence function could well lead to overconcentration on a single risk.
The commission thinks the reason the bits of information that might have been assembled into a mosaic spelling 9/11 never came together in one place is that no one person was in charge of intelligence. That is not the reason. The reason or, rather, the reasons are, first, that the volume of information is so vast that even with the continued rapid advances in data processing it cannot be collected, stored, retrieved and analyzed in a single database or even network of linked databases. Second, legitimate security concerns limit the degree to which confidential information can safely be shared, especially given the ever-present threat of moles like the infamous Aldrich Ames. And third, the different intelligence services and the subunits of each service tend, because information is power, to hoard it. Efforts to centralize the intelligence function are likely to lengthen the time it takes for intelligence analyses to reach the president, reduce diversity and competition in the gathering and analysis of intelligence data, limit the number of threats given serious consideration and deprive the president of a range of alternative interpretations of ambiguous and incomplete data -- and intelligence data will usually be ambiguous and incomplete.
The proposal begins to seem almost absurd when one considers the variety of our intelligence services. One of them is concerned with designing and launching spy satellites; another is the domestic intelligence branch of the F.B.I.; others collect military intelligence for use in our conflicts with state actors like North Korea. There are 15 in all. The national intelligence director would be in continuous conflict with the attorney general, the secretary of defense, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the secretary of homeland security and the president's national security adviser. He would have no time to supervise the organizational reforms that the commission deems urgent.
The report bolsters its proposal with the claim that our intelligence apparatus was designed for fighting the cold war and so can't be expected to be adequate to fighting Islamist terrorism. The cold war is depicted as a conventional military face-off between the United States and the Soviet Union and hence a 20th-century relic (the 21st century is to be different, as if the calendar drove history). That is not an accurate description. The Soviet Union operated against the United States and our allies mainly through subversion and sponsored insurgency, and it is not obvious why the apparatus developed to deal with that conduct should be thought maladapted for dealing with our new enemy.
The report notes the success of efforts to centralize command of the armed forces, and to reduce the lethal rivalries among the military services. But there is no suggestion that the national intelligence director is to have command authority.
The central-planning bent of the commission is nowhere better illustrated than by its proposal to shift the C.I.A.'s paramilitary operations, despite their striking success in the Afghanistan campaign, to the Defense Department. The report points out that ''the C.I.A. has a reputation for agility in operations,'' whereas the reputation of the military is ''for being methodical and cumbersome.'' Rather than conclude that we are lucky to have both types of fighting capacity, the report disparages ''redundant, overlapping capabilities'' and urges that ''the C.I.A.'s experts should be integrated into the military's training, exercises and planning.'' The effect of such integration is likely to be the loss of the ''agility in operations'' that is the C.I.A.'s hallmark. The claim that we ''cannot afford to build two separate capabilities for carrying out secret military operations'' makes no sense. It is not a question of building; we already have multiple such capabilities -- Delta Force, Marine reconnaissance teams, Navy Seals, Army Rangers, the C.I.A.'s Special Activities Division. Diversity of methods, personnel and organizational culture is a strength in a system of national security; it reduces risk and enhances flexibility.
What is true is that 15 agencies engaged in intelligence activities require coordination, notably in budgetary allocations, to make sure that all bases are covered. Since the Defense Department accounts for more than 80 percent of the nation's overall intelligence budget, the C.I.A., with its relatively small budget (12 percent of the total), cannot be expected to control the entire national intelligence budget. But to layer another official on top of the director of central intelligence, one who would be in a constant turf war with the secretary of defense, is not an appealing solution. Since all executive power emanates from the White House, the national security adviser and his or her staff should be able to do the necessary coordinating of the intelligence agencies. That is the traditional pattern, and it is unlikely to be bettered by a radically new table of organization.
So the report ends on a flat note. But one can sympathize with the commission's problem. To conclude after a protracted, expensive and much ballyhooed investigation that there is really rather little that can be done to reduce the likelihood of future terrorist attacks beyond what is being done already, at least if the focus is on the sort of terrorist attacks that have occurred in the past rather than on the newer threats of bioterrorism and cyberterrorism, would be a real downer -- even a tad un-American. Americans are not fatalists. When a person dies at the age of 95, his family is apt to ascribe his death to a medical failure. When the nation experiences a surprise attack, our instinctive reaction is not that we were surprised by a clever adversary but that we had the wrong strategies or structure and let's change them and then we'll be safe. Actually, the strategies and structure weren't so bad; they've been improved; further improvements are likely to have only a marginal effect; and greater dangers may be gathering of which we are unaware and haven't a clue as to how to prevent.
Richard A. Posner is a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School and the author of the forthcoming book ''Catastrophe: Risk and Response.''
-------- propaganda wars
Series of Misjudgments Cost President His Lead
By John F. Harris and Mike Allen
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, August 29, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A42626-2004Aug28?language=printer
No gloating, President Bush warned his White House staff in November 2002. It was an order he strained to follow himself.
Flush with his success at leading Republicans to victory in congressional midterm elections, Bush claimed the results as a mandate for his policies on terrorism, Iraq and tax cuts, and for his brand of trust-my-gut conservatism. "I think the way to look at this election is to say that people want something done," he told reporters. To skeptics at home and abroad, he declared: "I don't spend a lot of time taking polls . . . to tell me what I think is the right way to act; I just got to know how I feel."
As Bush heads to the Republican National Convention in New York this week, the man who stood astride the political world at that news conference in 2002 is a distinctly more life-size figure. With the election just 65 days away, there is a puzzle: How did a leader who was so formidable become so vulnerable?
In small ways, the answer is an accumulation of miscalculations and missed opportunities that have marred the president's political operation this year, in the view of some Republicans inside that operation and others beyond it. In a large way, however, Bush's predicament is less a reversal of his 2002 success than a natural progression of it -- the consequence of two confrontations he sought that autumn.
To the dismay of Democrats, who suspected he was manipulating national security for political advantage, he invited the electorate two years ago to judge him over the then-looming confrontation with Iraq. To the delight of Democrats, it is precisely such judgments that polls say are shadowing his reelection campaign.
By the same token, his decision to confront Democrats directly and immerse himself in partisan electioneering ensured that he would face reelection with little of the rally-behind-the-leader sentiment that flowed to him after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
To the contrary, Bush's decisions and political style have virtually eliminated the political center -- sending all but a small percentage of Americans into fevered pro- and anti- camps -- and dictated a general election strategy organized around exciting core supporters and increasing turnout. This approach upends conventional reelection strategy, which holds that a president should mostly finish his base-tending the year before voting, and spend the general election softening his rhetoric and showering blandishments on independent voters in the ideological middle.
Matthew Dowd, the Bush-Cheney campaign's senior strategist, said the conventional strategy is obsolete in an election dominated by national security: "The same thing that appeals to our partisans appeals to those folks in the middle, which is: What are you going to do about terror?"
Drawing a contrast with President Bill Clinton, Dowd added that both groups admire a president willing to take controversial actions to meet problems, rather than expending political capital on small-but-popular initiatives: "This is a president who decided to play big ball instead of small ball."
There are indications that, in the homestretch, Bush is planning to return to the milder brand of "compassionate conservatism" on which he ran in 2000. This week's GOP convention will feature such speakers as California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, who hold clear appeal to moderates, even though they have views on abortion and other social topics that are anathema to the party's conservative base. Democratic strategists say they are surprised that Bush is making this pivot so late, and only this week planning to lay out more details of a proposed second-term agenda.
Without question, it is real-world facts -- events in Iraq, the economy at home -- that are shaping Bush's reelection prospects more than any decision about strategy, in the view of campaign operatives with the president and the Democratic nominee, Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.).
Even so, a variety of critical Democrats and anxious Republicans outside Bush's campaign believe that the long and mostly downward arc of Bush's political strength over the past year is also the result of some specific misjudgments. Two stand out as most important:
• The enactment of a prescription drug benefit under Medicare in December. The expectation was that by delivering on this promise, which is the most expensive expansion of government social benefits in 40 years, Bush would take away an issue that historically had belonged to Democrats. As it happened, by passing a bill with mostly GOP support Bush did not reap much political gain. Polls show voters still strongly trust Democrats and Kerry more than Bush to protect senior citizens' health care, and many are wary of a benefit that is more complicated and slower to arrive than they wanted.
• The missed opportunity of the State of the Union address in January. Bush spoke to a large national television audience, but polls showed little movement upward in his support. Critics said that in content and tone, much of his rhetoric seemed aimed at existing supporters of his Iraq and tax-cut policies rather than presenting new arguments to doubters. He foreshadowed his support for a constitutional amendment to block gay marriage, which polls say is the most important issue for social conservatives, at the risk of alienating more tolerant independents who think the issue should be decided by states.
These large events were reinforced by several smaller ones, including what even some Bush political aides acknowledge were middling performances in a high-profile "Meet the Press" interview on NBC last winter and a news conference in the spring in which he professed himself stumped when asked whether he could think of any mistakes he had made.
In its own way, that answer was of a piece with the values Bush has followed at every major juncture of his presidency. It is a brand of politics that believes the assertion of power can create the reality of power -- and that it is preferable to act boldly and make other politicians accommodate Bush's agenda rather than try to accommodate their doubts. Bush did not offer coalition government after winning the contested 2000 election with a minority of the vote, nor did he offer to split the difference when Democrats complained that his tax cuts were too large. Instead, he corralled Republicans and a handful of Democrats and enacted the tax cuts into law.
A top official from a former Republican White House said Bush's governing operation created critical problems for his political arm by deciding to "divide and conquer rather than unite and win." This official, who refused to be identified because he works with Bush's inner circle, said that largely because of Vice President Cheney's influence, the White House adopted a confrontational style with Capitol Hill and with the Democratic Party that is endangering Bush's chance of reelection. "There's nobody over there saying 'No,' " the official said. "It's all the same Kool-Aid. Instead of the art of governing, it's been, 'Are you for me or against me?' "
Steven Schier, a Carleton College political scientist, has edited a book on Bush's political style called "High Risk and Big Ambition." In pursuit of large goals, Schier believes, Bush and his political team are willing to take "audacious risks" with voters in the middle so long as the GOP base is secure; 2002 showed the rewards of this style, while 2004 has so far highlighted the perils.
"When you take risks, if your premises are wrong, you pay a price," said Schier, who noted that Bush might well be coasting to victory had he been proved right that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or that tax cuts would have an unambiguous stimulative effect on the economy. As it is, Schier said, Bush has spent the year stroking his partisan base and pursuing an electoral strategy that amounts to "reaching the top of a low ceiling."
The Clinton Comparison
In 2000, Bush campaigned expressly inviting a comparison of his leadership style and Clinton's. "They have not led; we will," he declared at his first nominating convention. What has been striking about the past two years is the extent to which Bush has been a mirror opposite of Clinton.
The comparison worked to his advantage in the fall of 2002. Clinton's first midterm elections resulted in a massive repudiation of his party and majority control that Republicans have yet to surrender. The GOP gains after two years of Bush contradicted long history dictating that a new president's party loses seats in midterm elections.
Clinton's humiliation forced him to transform his strategy for reelection. He adapted a governing style in which he cast himself as unconcerned with partisan politics and relentlessly embraced policy positions that had been extensively polled and proved popular with large majorities. After the State of the Union address in 1996, when Clinton angered liberals in his party but captured the center with his declaration that "the era of big government is over," he never trailed in the race for reelection. By August, after Republican Robert J. Dole's convention but before his own -- exactly the point where Bush is now -- Clinton was leading by 10 points in the polls. Bush started the month a couple of points behind Kerry but has nudged slightly ahead in several recent polls.
In contrast to Clinton's "near-death experience," Bush's experience apparently has emboldened him to believe that he can win by playing down independents and "making Republicans come out of the woodwork," said Bruce Reed, a former Clinton administration official. The Clinton comparison is revealing of Bush's election strategy in other ways. Clinton's brand of campaigning involved regular policy pronouncements and proposals, sometimes several a week. Some, such as cell phones for neighborhood watch groups, were criticized as piddling, but collectively they presented a vision of a smaller-but-still-activist government that proved popular with voters.
The president is focused on large questions of national security and the changing economy, and has no interest in such minutiae, even if popular, said Ken Mehlman, Bush's campaign manager.
But critics say Bush has not filled out his policy agenda for a second term in ways big or small. White House communications director Dan Bartlett said the president made a decision to save many details about his vision for his acceptance speech.
Mark Penn, a Clinton pollster, believes the shortcomings of Bush's political strategy on both domestic policy and Iraq were on vivid display in the State of the Union address. While no rhetorical formulation could offset bad news, such as the Abu Ghraib prison scandal or mounting U.S. casualties in Iraq, the political costs of these would have been lessened if Bush had presented "more of a flow of information and an explanation to state the case," Penn said. Bush has later made such acknowledgments, but his initial posture of refusing to admit error or surprise apparently caused many people to stop listening to him, Penn said.
Keeping Up Appearances
There were few indications that Bush hit panic buttons last January. This was the same month that one of the White House's 2003 assumptions about the campaign -- the president would be running against the antiwar Howard Dean -- was overturned by Kerry's comeback success in Iowa and New Hampshire. Even then, the assumption was that Bush's then-formidable financial lead could be used to fund advertising that would leave Kerry irrecoverably behind in polls by the time of his convention. This did not happen, although Bush aides say they are pleased at polls showing that ads depicting Kerry as weak-willed and a flip-flopper have influenced public opinion.
The public posture of unyielding optimism about Bush's prospects and insistence that his strategy has worked creates a dissonance. Top Bush operatives such as Mehlman say they have been surprised that Kerry has not offered more policy substance to date, and other Bush aides are more blunt in bad-mouthing the Democrat as a weak candidate. In the next breath, they say the campaign is happy with the president's posture -- even though he is running even, with job approval ratings under 50 percent in most polls.
Surely, though, it would have come as a rude surprise if Bush strategists had been told a year ago that two months before the election the president would be running even with a man they regard as a clumsy opponent. In fact, the numbers illuminate a steady decline. Bush's job approval in a Washington Post-ABC News poll this month was 47 percent, 11 points lower than a year ago. Even his core asset -- the public's confidence in how he is handling terrorism -- has dropped more than 20 points from the spring of 2003 to this summer, and stands in the mid-50s.
Some White House officials acknowledge they have not had a major success since the capture of Saddam Hussein in December, which provided a fleeting bump in polls. Some of these officials have begun what is the rare process of second-guessing themselves. For instance, some of Bush's senior aides believe they would be better off if they had preserved Medicare prescription drugs to use as a campaign issue.
But Dowd said no strategy was going to prevent the election from being a narrowly fought and highly polarized contest. "The dominant parties occupy 90 to 92 percent of the landscape. There are very few people that swing in the middle anymore," he said. "We're playing within the 45- or 47-yard lines, so nobody's going to break away in this thing." Bartlett predicted that Bush's aggressive posture will pay dividends this fall, as even people who disagree with him on particulars appreciate that "there's no ambiguity where he stands." Paraphrasing a hypothetical voter, Bartlett said, "Do I agree with everything Bush is doing? No. But on the big things, I feel pretty good about him, or reassured about him. If things go wrong again, I feel good about him being there."
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Ex-head of BBC says Tony Blair lied
August 29, 2004
United Press International
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20040829-091457-2157r.htm
LONDON, England, Aug. 29 (UPI) -- The former chief of the BBC has accused Britain's Prime Minister Tony Blair of being incompetent or lying to Parliament about the war in Iraq, the BBC said.
Just former BBC Director General Greg Dyke is set to publish his memoirs he told the Sunday Mail that Blair attempted to bully the BBC.
Dyke resigned in January after the Hutton report found the BBC had been wrong to claim the government "sexed up" its dossier on Iraq's weapons and said Iraq could unleash weapons of mass destruction in 45 minutes.
Dyke said the prime minister "unleashed the dogs" on the BBC after it was heavily criticized by the Hutton report.
"He (Blair)was either incompetent and took Britain to war on a misunderstanding or he lied when he told the House of Commons he didn't know what the 45-minute claim meant," Dyke wrote in "Inside Story," serialized in The Observer and the Mail.
Added Dyke: "We were all duped. What is really frightening is that Blair still doesn't believe or understand that what he did was fundamentally wrong."
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Dyke: Blair's world of 'lies and bullying'
Sunday August 29, 2004
The Observer
Kamal Ahmed, political editor
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,6903,1293242,00.html
Greg Dyke, former director-general of the BBC, today lays bare the astonishing inside story of the war waged by the Prime Minister and Downing Street against the BBC over its coverage of the Iraq war and the controversial issue of weapons of mass destruction.
In an explosive autobiography which returns the corrosive issue of Iraq to the heart of political debate, Dyke reveals that Tony Blair wrote an unprecedented letter to him and Gavyn Davies, the former BBC chairman, trying to force the corporation to change the tone of its coverage.
The disclosures, which will reignite the row between the BBC and the government, will again raise the question of trust which has dogged the Prime Minister since the WMD row first surfaced. It is unheard of for a serving Prime Minister to write to the head of Britain's public service broadcaster. Dyke, who says the move was intimidatory, claims Blair later regretted sending the letter, but was persuaded to by Campbell.
Dyke says Campbell had become 'obsessed' with trying to 'beat' the BBC, was out of control, vindictive and eventually had to be removed by the Prime Minister.
The book, Inside Story, also claims that Blair broke a promise to Davies that he would not demand the resignations of either himself or Dyke following publication of the Hutton Report.
The Hutton inquiry was set up after the death of David Kelly, the government scientist linked to claims on the Today programme that Downing Street had 'sexed up' intelligence to make a stronger case for war.
Both Davies and Dyke left the BBC within 36 hours of the report's appearance, after Campbell accused the corporation of lying in an officially sanctioned statement.
The book reveals that the BBC was baffled when Hutton said the government was not guilty of the 'sexing up' claims. Dyke's book quotes a comment by Philip Gould, one of Blair's closest allies and advisers, by way of explanation, alleging that he told a Labour peer: 'Don't worry, we appointed the right judge.'
Dyke says a number of governors should resign after capitulating to political pressure. He accuses Blair of allowing Number 10 to produce 'mountains of untruth' in two dossiers published by the government to justify going to war. He said Downing Street started using techniques similar to those of Nixon's White House to smear those seen as being against the interests of the government.
'The charge against Blair is damning,' Dyke says. 'He was either incompetent and took Britain to war on a misunderstanding, or he lied when he told the House of Commons that he didn't know what the 45-minute claim meant.
'We were all duped. History will not be on Blair's side, it will show that the whole saga is a great political scandal.'
The book also reveals fresh doubts at the very top of the intelligence services about claims that Saddam Hussein was an international threat.
Dyke says John Scarlett, former head of the Joint Intelligence Committee who was promoted by Blair to head of MI6, had professed private doubts to a BBC journalist about the case for war. In particular, he was concerned by claims that Saddam could launch a chemical or biological weapons attack within 45 minutes of an order to do so.
'At the BBC, we knew he [Scarlett] was uncomfortable with the public case being made for the war because that is what he had told one journalist on a bench in the grounds of Ditchley Park, the exclusive Oxfordshire house used as a centre for high level discussions on international affairs. Scarlett told the journalist he was particularly worried about how the dossier had been interpreted in the press.'
Dyke says he was forced out after the governors failed to back him following Hutton. He argues that the six governors who voted for him to go, including the former chairman of the JIC, Dame Pauline Neville-Jones, should resign because they 'bowed to political pressure' and damaged the BBC's standing.
He also reveals that when the BBC did finally apologise after Dyke had quit, they first checked the statement with Number 10.
'I had no idea I would be fired by a board of governors behaving like frightened rabbits caught in car headlights,' Dyke says. 'The new BBC chairman, Michael Grade, needs better, more knowledgeable, governors to support him. There is no greater betrayal of BBC principles than to fold under political pressure, particularly from the government of the day.'
Blair's letter, revealed for the first time, to Davies and Dyke was sent on 19 March, 2003, a week before the war in Iraq started.
'It seems to me there has been a real breakdown of the separation of news and comment,' the Prime Minister wrote. 'I believe, and I am not alone in believing, that you have not got the balance right between support and dissent; between news and comment; between the voices of the Iraqi regime and the voices of Iraqi dissidents; or between the diplomatic support we have, and diplomatic opposition.'
Dyke says he sent back a robust response.
'My view was straightforward: if the government was going to try to bully the BBC, then I was going to fight back,' Dyke says in the book.
After Kelly's death, the government further tried to turn the screw, with one Cabinet minister briefing journalists that 'the problem with the BBC was too much money and Greg Dyke'. The minister also spoke of 'revenge'.
Dyke wrote to Blair saying the attack was a 'blatant threat to the funding and editorial independence of the BBC from a member of your Cabinet'.
He initially thought that he could sit out the post-Hutton storm because of a private pledge the Prime Minister had made to Davies.
'I knew Blair had told Gavyn in a private telephone conversation that, whatever happened, Number 10 would not be calling on either Gavyn or me to go,' Dyke says. 'When we watched Blair in the Commons [following the Hutton publication] Gavyn realised the Prime Minister had gone back on his word.'
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Dyke: Blair tried to gag BBC war reports
sundayherald
29 August 2004
By Steven Vass, Media Correspondent
http://www.sundayherald.com/44442
TONY Blair took the unprecedented step of writing a letter to the BBC to try to force it to soften its coverage of the war in Iraq, according to Greg Dyke, the former director-general of the corporation.
The row about the government's reasons for going to war will re- surface as a result of the publication - in today's Observer - of extracts from Dyke's new autobiography, Inside Story.
Dyke claims that the Prime Minister forced Alastair Campbell, his director of communications who resigned a year ago today, to quit because Campbell had become "out of control" and "obsessed" with trying to "beat" the BBC. Dyke believes that Campbell persuaded Blair to write the letter and that Blair later regretted it.
Dyke says Blair also went back on an agreement not to call for resignations at the BBC, and that the six still-serving members of the board of governors should resign for capitulating to the findings of the Hutton Report.
He writes: "The charge against Blair was damning. He was either incompetent and took Britain to war on a misunderstanding, or he lied when he told the House of Commons that he didn't know what the 45 minute claim meant.
"We were all duped. History will not be on Blair's side, it will show that the whole saga is a great political scandal."
He says that following the death of government weapons expert Dr David Kelly, another Cabinet minister briefed journalists that "the problem with the BBC was too much money and Greg Dyke", and also referred to "revenge".
The revelations follow Andrew Gilligan's defiant speech to senior television executives at the Edinburgh International Television Festival yesterday. The former defence correspondent for Radio 4's Today programme, who lost his job over his infamous 6.07am report about the government's intelligence dossier on the military threat from Iraq, said: "Everything that David Kelly told us was right. The dossier was sexed up. The element of the 45 minute claim was the clearest example of that," he said.
He added that there was a heavier weight of blame to be attached to the Hutton Report than to him, saying it had been "ridiculed" and that it was a "landmark in incompetence". He also spoke about the "over-reaction" of the governors of the BBC. "By sacking Greg Dyke , the governors turned the issue into a disaster," he said.
He also accused the BBC of turning investigative journalism away from the government following the Hutton inquiry .
He singled out programmes like Panorama's exposé of racist police officers as examples of ground-breaking journalism, but said: "I can't help thinking that they are much softer targets than ministers and company bosses ."
Peter Horrocks, head of current affairs at the BBC and a member of the audience, stood up to dispute Gilligan's accusations, pointing to John Sweeney investigations and John Ware's investigation into MI6 in the run-up to the Butler report. "We don't want to take ourselves into a crisis over this," he said.
Gilligan replied he didn't want to give the impression the BBC was in crisis but said there was a trend for anything that causes trouble to be reported by the BBC's current affairs department rather than news.
Like John Humphrys the night before, Gilligan was also highly critical of What The Media Are Doing To Our Politics, the new book by journalist John Lloyd, which argues that the media's cynicism about the government's activities has poisoned the electorate's trust in politics. "The reason the government is distrusted is because it doesn't tell the truth. Even now, New Labour has real achievements to boast about, but it's just not believed ...
"Did (Alistair) Campbell impose the values of the government on the press or did he impose the values of the press on the government?"
But he ended on a positive note, welcoming recent new appointments to the board of governors such as ex-ITN chief Richard Tait .
"The dossier was a tactical triumph (for the government) but a strategic defeat. Not only will New Labour never be able to get away with another war, it will never be able to get away with another war against the BBC."
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By refusing to accept second place, Reagan ended (and won) Cold War
washtimes
August 29, 2004
http://www.washtimes.com/books/20040828-103522-8070r.htm
REAGAN AND GORBACHEV:
HOW THE COLD WAR ENDED
By Jack F. Matlock Jr.
Random House, $27.95, 363 pages, illus.
REVIEWED BY ARNOLD BEICHMAN
This is the story of a global miracle and how it happened. It's been told before by other historians, but not with the same insights and almost burdensome inside information as are contained in Jack F. Matlock Jr.'s new book, "Reagan and Gorbachev: How the Cold War Ended."
Mr. Matlock, U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union (1987-1991), was President Ronald Reagan's adviser as Russia moved from its inhuman totalitarian system to the beginnings of a genuine thaw. Historians of the Cold War will find this book indispensable.
Mr. Matlock tells the story in so pedestrian a fashion that there are times you want to stop reading. But then, perhaps when you get right down to the nitty-gritty technical details of miracles - say, the parting of the Red Sea or how Balaam's ass got talking or the loaves and fishes - such information might become over-detailed.
It is a fascinating memoir, and as I read it I kept thinking about the two men who made the miracle possible.
The miracle? A Cold War that ended cold, without missiles and megadeaths.
The miracle workers? Mikhail Gorbachev, a man who as late as 1986 said in an interview with the French communist daily, L'Humanite, "Stalinism is a concept thought up by the enemies of communism to discredit socialism as a whole." (Somebody should ask Mr. Gorbachev whether he still believes that particular piece of tripe.)
Three years later the Berlin Wall came down and with it the whole kit and caboodle called "socialism." For a little while longer, Mr. Gorbachev continued to believe that the bloody-minded V.I. Lenin had been a great leader.
President Reagan, says Mr. Matlock, had no such problem about changing his mind or his ideas about communism. He came to the White House animated by one idea: The Soviet Union was an "evil empire." Or as he put it succinctly, "We win, they lose."
Mr. Matlock minimizes Reagan's anti-communism and anti-Sovietism, which is a mistake. In fact he blames Reagan's speech writers for pushing their - not his - anti-Soviet agenda. He forgets that it was Gov. Reagan who insisted at the 1976 Republican convention on passage of a resolution in favor of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, to counteract President Ford's refusal (thanks to then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger) to receive the Russian dissident novelist.
What becomes clear from Mr. Matlock's account is that Reagan's anti-communism changed dramatically with the arrival on the scene of Mr. Gorbachev.
There was no way of knowing that Mr. Gorbachev would become the great reformer. After all, he was the protege of KGB chief and later Soviet General Secretary Yuri V. Andropov, the hard liner of hard liners.
But Reagan knew something, and acted on what turned out to be a sagacious hunch.
What Reagan did in his first term was to obliterate the Kissinger detente policy: trade agreements, phony summit meetings, loss of U.S. strategic nuclear superiority, casting a blind eye on Soviet violations of arms control agreements and legitimizing as a permanent Soviet sphere of influence Central and Eastern Europe.
In toto, what Kissingerism or Nixonism meant was graciously accepting second place in the world of nations. In fact, in a half-hour TV broadcast on March 31, 1976, Reagan quoted Mr. Kissinger as telling Adm. Elmo Zumwalt, "The day of the United States is past and today is the day of the Soviet Union. My job as Secretary of State is to negotiate the most acceptable second-best position available."
Thirteen years later, when Reagan left the White House in January 1989, Mr. Matlock writes, "the Cold War had ended in principle." And with it, two years later, the Soviet Union ended in fact.
Reagan was fortunate in having at his side the masterful Secretary of State George Shultz, whom Mr. Matlock describes as "one of the most effective statesmen of the twentieth century."
No man is better equipped than Mr. Matlock, who speaks fluent Russian, to tell the story of the Soviet implosion. In 1981 he had been charge d'affaires at the U.S. embassy in Moscow, then was ambassador to Czechoslovakia, and then a member of the National Security Council until his ambassadorial assignment to Moscow in 1987.
In a piquant touch, the research assistant for this memoir was Nina Khrushcheva, great-granddaughter of Nikita Khrushchev, the sociopathic ruler of Russia from 1957 to 1964.
"Reagan and Gorbachev" has its flaws. One of them is Mr. Matlock's view, which borders on the metaphysical, of how the Cold War ended. As he puts it, "as for winners, everyone including the Soviet Union won."
Why is it that, when you ask who won World War I, World War II or the war in Vietnam, the answers are easily forthcoming (the Allies beat the Kaiser and Adolf Hitler, the United States lost to North Vietnam), but when it comes to who triumphed in the Cold War, a great smog immediately blankets the question?
The response, if you're Mr. Matlock, is simple and utterly inaccurate. Everybody did not win the Cold War. This is the ahistorical George Kennan position.
In 1969, Mr. Kennan wrote: "The retraction of Soviet power from its present bloated and unhealthy limits is essential to the stability of world relationships." Twenty-seven years later, there was no Soviet power; its "bloated and unhealthy limits" had been retracted. There wasn't even a Soviet Union.
So didn't the democracies win the Cold War? Didn't the once Soviet-satellized countries of Central Europe and the Baltic "win" the Cold War? When the Berlin Wall came down on Nov. 9, 1989, without bloodshed, wasn't that a victory? Shh, mustn't gloat in front of the children.
The problem is that Mr. Matlock, like Mr. Kennan, doesn't tell you how he defines victory. It is playing with words to say everybody won the Cold War.
Clearly Mr. Matlock is a Reagan admirer. He tells us that Reagan "had no secret strategy but described every element of his policy to the public," that "he saw both the arms race and geopolitical competition as symptoms of an ideological struggle, not its causes.
" . . . His greatest asset was his character. He dealt with others, whether friends, adversaries, or subordinates, openly and without guile."
A slow read but worth the investment.
Arnold Beichman, a Hoover Institution research fellow, is a columnist for The Washington Times. An updated version of his biography "Herman Wouk, the Novelist as Social Historian" will be published next month.
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Reform Party Reaffirms Nader Is Nominee
Some Question Alliance as Marriage of Convenience, Group's Political Viability
By Jonathan Finer
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, August 29, 2004; Page A05
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A42629-2004Aug28?language=printer
At a hastily arranged convention in an Irving, Tex., hotel, Ralph Nader yesterday accepted the Reform Party's nomination for president, and the ballot lines in seven states, including Florida and Michigan, that come with it.
The event is something of a formality. Nader was nominated by national chairman Shawn O'Hara in a telephone conference call in May and is only being reaffirmed to satisfy a Florida election law that requires nominees to be selected in person.
"This is just to prevent any more court litigation with our brothers and sisters in the Democratic Party," O'Hara said, alluding to legal squabbles in several states where Democrats fear Nader will siphon votes from their nominee, Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.).
To many longtime Nader backers, the alliance with a party that has struggled since the withdrawal from public life of its founder, Texas billionaire H. Ross Perot, is an unlikely, and some say unfortunate, marriage of convenience.
In its heyday, the Reform Party had ballot lines in every state except New York, according to O'Hara. But while Perot won more than 8 million votes as its nominee in 1996, membership is now about 1 million, he said.
The party nearly dissolved after splitting into two factions during the 2000 campaign and nominating separate candidates: conservative commentator Patrick J. Buchanan and physicist John Hagelin.
A court recently ordered the party to repay the Federal Election Commission $333,558 owed from the 2000 election. According to an Aug. 11 report filed with the FEC by its then treasurer William Chapman Sr. -- who asked the regulators to terminate the party's national status -- the Reform Party had $18.18 in its coffers.
"It shows how desperate Nader is, to have to join up with these people. He basically has nothing in common with them, aside from an anti-corporate leaning and a desire to rehabilitate his image," said Cal Jilson, a political science professor at Southern Methodist University in Texas who has written extensively on third parties. "And when a party nominates Buchanan one election and Nader the next, it shows there's no there there."
Nader spokesman Kevin B. Zeese sees it differently. "It's actually surprising how much Ralph and the Reform Party agree on," he said, citing electoral reform, ending corporate welfare, and opposition to the Iraq war as examples.
Zeese acknowledges disagreements on some topics, such as immigration and health care. "But remember, they're endorsing us." he said. "We're not endorsing them."
Throughout the 2004 campaign, Nader -- who ran on the Green Party ticket in 1996 and 2000 but was denied that party's endorsement this year -- has drawn criticism for seeking or accepting help from those of all political stripes.
Republicans, who think Nader's presence in the race helps President Bush, have gathered signatures for his petitions to get on the ballot in states such as Michigan, where officials refused to recognize his Reform Party endorsement. Nader is suing to reverse that decision.
He won the backing of the Independent Party of Delaware. He is said to be wooing the Natural Law Party in California, where he previously sought the nomination of Peace and Freedom Party, which instead chose activist Leonard Peltier, who is serving a life sentence for murder. In West Virginia, Nader's overtures were turned down by the progressive Mountain Party.
But in the Reform Party and its leader, Nader found a willing partner.
O'Hara, who recently moved the party's headquarters to his hometown of Hattiesburg, Miss., said in an interview that he courted Nader to top the ticket.
A wealthy perennial candidate, O'Hara has run unsuccessfully for various offices as a Democrat, Republican, Reform Party member and Independent. He once ran for governor against his father. During a 2002 campaign, O'Hara argued for the dissolution of the FBI, the CIA and the U.S. Department of Education to the Hattiesburg American newspaper. He also assisted with the legal defense of Sam Bowers, a former Ku Klux Klan leader convicted in 1998 of ordering the murder a civil rights worker in the 1960s.
In an interview in which he stressed that he was speaking for himself and not his party, O'Hara, who is running for Congress this year, said he favors a constitutional amendment banning abortion, and that "anyone who violates it should get the death penalty."
"The party is basically now a vehicle for people on the fringe like O'Hara, and I guess, Nader, to pursue their personal ambitions," said L. Sandy Maisel, a professor at Maine's Colby College who studies third parties.
Zeese decline to comment on O'Hara, except to say: "Look at [Democratic National Committee chairman] Terry McAuliffe and his corporate ties. I am sure he has more skeletons."
O'Hara said the party will focus on Florida, which has a Sept. 1 deadline for filing papers on Nader's behalf, and where Nader received more than 97,000 votes in the 2000 race. The Ballot Project Inc., a group of attorneys working to keep Nader off the ballot in numerous states, is considering asking the FEC to rule that the Reform Party is no longer a national party and should not be able to place Nader on the Nov. 2 ballot.
But according to O'Hara, the party is on the rebound and is circulating petitions that will allow it to gain ballot lines in Rhode Island and four other states he would not name.
"Keep in mind, 80 out of 100 people did not vote for a Democrat or a Republican in the [primaries], so that is who we are appealing to," O'Hara said. He added that the first batch of signs listing Nader and running mate Peter Miguel Camejo above the Reform Party name were to be distributed to Florida last week.
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'NY Times' Releases Survey of 9/11 Families
editorandpublisher
By E & P Staff
August 29, 2004
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000620813
NEW YORK With the Republican National Convention about to open in New York City as a kind of tribute to the city's losses in the 9/11 terrorist attacks, The New York Times on Sunday released its survey of 339 family members of victims that day.
It showed that more blame former President Clinton for what happened that day than they do President Bush, but a majority feel the Bush administration did not do enough before 9/11 to act on intelligence warnings.
Most approve the U.S. attack on Afghanistan but three out of five feel the invasion of Iraq was not worth the loss of American lives. Equal numbers in this sample described themselves as Republicans or Democrats.
But the process of taking the poll proved as revealing as the results: it took much longer to complete (up to an hour in some cases) than the usual New York Times/CBS News Poll, as many respondents cried or expressed raw emotion in other ways. One respondent, the paper reported, "was so upset by a questions about Mr. Bush that she began screaming."
More than three-quarters of the sample objected to use of images from ground zero in political commercials, which the Bush campaign has done. But more than half said President Bush should visit ground zero when he is in New York this week.
-------- OTHER
-------- genetics
The ethics of meddling with nature
washtimes
August 29, 2004
http://www.washtimes.com/books/20040828-103524-8611r.htm
PROMETHEAN AMBITIONS: ALCHEMY AND THE QUEST TO PERFECT NATURE
William R. Newman
University of Chicago Press, $30, 333 pages
REVIEWED BY ERIC WARGO
It is a nearly archetypal anxiety of the past century: Our unprecedented power to destroy and to create has, just in this last historical lap, outrun our wisdom to exercise it. It is the theme of any science-fiction novel you can name: Will our creations rise up against us? Will God (or Nature, or some combination) punish our hubris?
These anxieties seem to define us as modern because the technologies they center on - cloning, nuclear weapons, artificial intelligence, bioengineering - seem so utterly unprecedented.
But in a new book, "Pro-methean Ambitions: Alchemy and the Quest to Perfect Nature," William R. Newman shows that debating the ethical limits of human meddling in nature - even over creating artificial life in the laboratory - has a remarkably long history, going back well before the scientific revolution.
Mr. Newman, a professor of history and philosophy of science at Indiana University, is one of a few scholars who have taken medieval and Renaissance alchemy seriously as a laboratory discipline.
The prevailing view, advanced most forcefully in the last century by Carl Jung, has been that alchemy was mainly a spiritual or psychological enterprise - a form of Gnostic mysticism in which occurrences in test tubes were read like Rohrshach tests, and transmuting lead into gold was mainly a metaphor for perfecting the soul.
In previous books, including "Alchemy Tried in the Fire" (with Lawrence M. Principe), Mr. Newman has seriously challenged such a view by showing that some practitioners, such as the influential 17th-century American alchemist George Starkey, followed recognizably modern experimental protocols, even though they used deliberately obfuscatory symbolism when describing their work. Starkey's friend Robert Boyle - often regarded as the father of modern experimental science - carried on an experimental mindset directly inherited, via Starkey, from the alchemical tradition.
Transmutation was understood as a real physical undertaking, not simply a metaphor. As such, it raised real ethical issues. These issues are the subject of Mr. Newman's latest book.
Medieval alchemy was understood as an art, so Mr. Newman begins by placing alchemical debates over nature and artifice in the context of ancient arguments over substance and appearance that go back to the Greeks.
From Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century to Robert Boyle and Francis Bacon in the 17th, much ink was spilled (by alchemists and critics alike) on questions like whether alchemically-created gold differed from natural gold and if so, how - in substance? In appearance? In name?
Many of the arguments Mr. Newman paraphrases have a scholastic "how many angels can dance on the head of a pin" sound that will be wearying to non-historians. But lurking just under the surface of these debates are much more timeless and pertinent anxieties.
This is particularly apparent when it comes to the vexing issue of artificial life. It wasn't just a theoretical issue; the means already existed (alchemists and philosophers believed) to make life in the laboratory.
The medieval Jewish cabalists, for instance, believed that artificial servants - golems - could be created with clay and animated with words. Making these soulless and moronic beings was a perilous undertaking, since they would run amok if not deactivated after a certain length of time.
An even more fascinating alchemical obsession of the 16th and 17th centuries - and the source of much ethical anxiety - was the creation of homunculi, miniature humans that, like cloned fetal embryos today, possessed valuable therapeutic properties.
Homunculus ethics, on the one hand bizarre, were weirdly prescient. Mr. Newman cites one text falsely attributed to Thomas Aquinas in which the author outlines a procedure for heating bottled semen in dung to create a mini-man whose blood is "useful against many infirmities."
It would be okay to harvest the blood, the author says, since being produced artificially, the being would lack a rational soul. Here as throughout the book, Mr. Newman pithily translates the issues at stake into modern terms: "How much simpler this issue for pseudo-Thomas than it is for the President's Council on Bioethics: the absence of a rational soul imparted to the fetus by the Creator allowed the homunculus to be classified as subhuman and hence fit for research purposes."
Yet opinions varied. Conservative theological critics countered, for instance, that creating a being without a soul would diabolically tempt God to provide it with one, an abominable undertaking.
Then as now, the ethics of test-tube life were bound up with issues of reproductive politics. Some alchemical writers saw homunculi as a desirable way to circumvent sexual reproduction and create highly spiritualized (indeed, largely transparent) beings purified of the "gross materiality" of the female sex.
(Mr. Newman points out the ironic resemblance here to one of the dreams of recent in vitro techniques, the fertilization of an egg by another egg, obviating the need for, in this case, a male genetic contribution.)
And this again raised serious counter-arguments, such as the theological quibble that, having been created asexually, homunculi were not subject to original sin - thus creating them was, as one Jesuit critic put it, "foolish, impious, erroneous and blasphemous": How could sinful Man create a being that did not need Christ's redemption?
Occupying a strange middle ground in the homunculus debate was the most fascinating character in Mr. Newman's book, the great 16th-century alchemist and physician Theophrastus Paracelsus.
Rejecting the medieval dogma that ill health was caused by imbalances of the four bodily humors, Paracelsus sought the cause of disease instead in toxins, climate, diet and other influences - a surprisingly modern view. Yet the brilliant physician also devoted much ink to the problem of homunculi, which he saw as both the summa of the alchemical art and also a real and present biohazard.
His obsessive fear that homunculi could be produced accidentally by virtually any form of nonreproductive sexuality (such was the power of the male seed if unchecked by the womb's inhibitory matrix) verged on an idee fixe. (Even chastity - the retention of seed - was dangerous; as a policy of public health, Paracelsus seriously recommended to parents that their male children should be either married or castrated.)
On the one hand, Mr. Newman observes that "The medievals had a surprisingly open attitude on issues that are now mired in dogma and reflexive apologetics." Yet squeamishness of various kinds - religious, sexual, technological - clearly permeate the debates in this book, just as they permeate modern debates over everything from stem cells to nuclear power.
Squeamishness was not just a monopoly of alchemy's critics. Take Paracelsus: Probably a lifelong virgin and very likely also a hermaphrodite, the freethinking and irreligious physician's views on organic processes were powerfully informed by his own pathological (even by the conservative standards of his day) squeamishness over sex.
The pursuit of knowledge can never be disentangled from personal and cultural obsessions. Which is why, in the end, Mr. Newman's welcome (and well-researched) approach to alchemy as a laboratory discipline-cum-ethical quagmire carries us back ironically to a view not unlike Jung's - that we are dealing, really, with mentalities projected onto matter.
Matter is morals, and science (like alchemy) is bound to be an ethical problem that people take very personally. Wherever we stand, whatever our particular squeamishness, we are bound to invoke God, Nature, or some idiosyncratic mixture of the two, in our own defense. To do so has, indeed, a long history.
Eric Wargo is an associate editor at the Biblical Archaeology Society in Washington.
-------- ACTIVISTS
Marchers Denounce Bush as They Pass G.O.P. Convention Hall
August 29, 2004
By CHRISTINE HAUSER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/29/politics/campaign/29CND-PORT.html?pagewanted=all&position=
On bicycles, on foot, and some with their children in tow, hundreds of thousands of people moved through areas of Manhattan today in rallies or mass demonstrations, carrying messages against war and the Bush administration.
In the largest demonstration ever at a political convention, people swarmed through the midtown area of Manhattan in a march organized by United for Peace and Justice, passing by Madison Square Garden, where this week's Republican National Convention starts on Monday. At the height of the march, it took more than an hour to move one block.
Groups of bicyclists were detained by police officers on scooters in other parts of the city.
The police cordoned off an area along Seventh Avenue near the Garden when a papier-mâché likeness of a green dragon went up in flames. The fire was quickly extinguished. A protester was arrested on arson charges and a police officer suffered third-degree burns on his hand while making the arrest, the police said.
Another officer was hospitalized after being hit in the head with a thrown object, the police said.
By 4:30 p.m., at least 134 arrests had been made, including more than 50 on charges of disorderly conduct for blocking traffic near 37th Street and Seventh Avenue on Manhattan's West Side, the police said.
Witnesses said a group of cyclists was arrested at Park Avenue South between 27th and 26th Streets. The police handcuffed the cyclists, photographed them and searched their bags, which they then placed in clear plastic sacks. Those who were detained called out that they had been riding lawfully when pulled over.
Much of the activity was focused on the Garden, where President Bush will accept his party's nomination this week. But even as the demonstrators were marching, Republican delegates were enjoying other aspects of the city, including theaters and restaurants.
As delegates lined up on West 44th Street, waiting to be admitted to the Majestic Theater for a matinee performance of "Phantom of the Opera," a couple of dozen picketers chanted "Get out of New York!"
Some delegates responded, "Four more years!"
The protesters retorted, "Four more months!"
When a drummer and a man in an elephant costume - "Elephants Against Republicans" - filed by, Flora Rohrs, a delegate from Colorado, burst into song. "This is my country," she sang, with bits of "God Bless America" thrown in.
"What is going on here is we are going to get George Bush re-elected," she said, adding that the day's demonstrations did not faze her.
Outside Madison Square Garden, about 100 people from a group called Young Koreans United stood banging drums for about 20 minutes chanting that it is time for Bush to go.
Imbo Sim, 40, said he was from Los Angeles and that most of the group were from out of town. "We're against Bush's war policy," he said. "We're against any escalation of tension with North Korea."
A group of older women calling themselves the Raging Grannies from Rochester, N.Y., sang to the tune of the "Battle Hymn of the Republic":
"No more lies from Dick and Georgie, we deplore their wartime orgy."
On 41st Street and Sixth Avenue, six other bicyclists were arrested for disorderly conduct, obstructing traffic and parading without a permit.
One man, Kevin O'Connell, a 37-year-old graphic designer, was among those arrested. He said there were "all these small scooters, about 12 of them, with officers in civilian clothes."
"They blocked off the road and caught us," he said.
Mr. O'Connell said he had stepped onto the sidewalk from the street to try to make sure that people were getting through and "was knocked off his bike by officers" and sprayed with tear gas.
Authorities braced for protests by hundreds of thousands of people, including the largest rally, that planned by United for Peace and Justice, which had expected about 250,000 people to take part.
The huge demonstration wound its way north through steamy streets just around noon, when temperatures climbed to about 88 degrees Fahrenheit, starting in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. The route took them past Madison Square Garden before turning south again to finish in Union Square.
Among the marchers were war veterans, parents with their children, and the elderly, as well as familiar faces, like the Rev. Jesse Jackson and the filmmaker Michael Moore. Many marchers commuted into the city.
"The march is going great," said Faith Strongheart, a 31-year-old film production coordinator, who drove in from her home in New Jersey to attend the rally.
As she spoke, she struggled to be heard over the chants of a raucous crowd. "There are tons of people, the energy is really high," she said. "There are people with homemade signs. The main message is to get Bush out of office."
She said the heat was beating down on the marchers but "people are very peaceful, everybody is singing, the cops are being very cooperative."
Uniformed police patrols were thick on the ground in the midtown area and other parts of Manhattan and along the planned protest routes near Madison Square Garden. Officers strode through the tunnels of New York City's elaborate subway network, watchful of passers-by.
Even before the convention started, as of Saturday night more than 300 people had been arrested on charges related to the event, according to the police. A large group of bicyclists on Friday were among those held. The police said 264 individuals were arrested on charges of obstructing governmental administration, unlawful assembly and disorderly conduct at various locations throughout Manhattan.
Thousands of protesters gathered today in Union Square Park on the edge of the city's Greenwich Village neighborhood, holding up placards opposing the policies of President Bush.
Paintings showed scenes depicting Mr. Bush in a war crimes setting. One old woman in a wheelchair held up a placard saying, "I'm 98 and I'm outraged."
One organizer of the protest shouted through a megaphone to the crowd that the police were "closing down" a table with pamphlets and booklets espousing the anti-Bush views.
"Save a Tree - Plant a Bush Back in Texas," read one placard.
"Bush - You're Fired!" read another, using a motto that has infused popular culture borrowed from the reality television show "The Apprentice," set in New York City.
Streets around the convention center were sealed off. After the march, thousands of demonstrators gathered in Central Park, despite court decisions last week that denied some groups, including United for Peace and Justice, permission to hold rallies.
Earlier in the day, police vehicles and officers on patrol circulated among the joggers, bicyclists and dog-walkers. Helicopters thudded overhead in the Upper West Side neighborhood. But by late afternoon, thousands of protesters, many still carrying placards, had converged on the Great Lawn. Some sat on the ground, their signs at their sides, others milled around as the police watched and answered questions for those who needed directions.
Mari Elena Granger, 57, a self-employed New Yorker, carried a sign that said, "Bush lies. Who dies. Bring the troops home now."
Asked whether most of the people in the park had come from the march organized by United for Peace and Justice, she said: "I am assuming most of them are, particularly because they told us we couldn't go. It was a very poor excuse."
The police have been training on mock demonstrations for the convention, which starts on Monday and continues through Sept. 2.
On Saturday, a small circle of demonstrators used Central Park's Great Lawn for a protest, lying in the grass covered by plastic garbage bags.
"Come join us!!" they shouted to people strolling around the oval of grass. Bemused couples with babies lying on picnic blankets looked on but did not budge. One man, throwing a Frisbee with a friend nearby, shouted, "Shut up!"
"If they get out of control we're going to shut it down," a park security guard said, standing in the shade nearby with her arms folded.
Randal C. Archibold, Carla Baranauckas, Natalie Layzell, Jennifer Medina, Colin Moynihan and Marc Santora contributed reporting for this article.
--------
Protesters Flood New York, Cheney Praises Bush
August 29, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/politics/politics-campaign.html
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Hundreds of thousands of protesters flooded the streets of New York to condemn President Bush on the eve of the Republican convention on Sunday, but Vice President Dick Cheney praised Bush's ``calm'' leadership after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Beating drums and shouting ``no more Bush,'' a largely peaceful mile-long column of protesters marched past a heavily fortified Madison Square Garden to raise their voices against the war in Iraq and other Bush policies.
Republicans, buoyed by new polls showing Bush gaining ground or slightly leading Democratic Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts in their race for the White House, open their four-day convention on Monday.
``All of us are gathering here this week for one reason and one reason only, and that is to make certain that George W. Bush is president for the next four years,'' Cheney told an Ellis Island rally on his arrival in New York.
Cheney moved quickly to invoke Bush's leadership after Sept. 11 -- certain to be a recurring theme at the convention, which will be held less than four miles from the gaping hole where the World Trade Center once stood.
``In the weeks following the terrorist attacks on America, people in every part of the country, regardless of party, took great comfort and pride in the conduct and the character of our president,'' Cheney said.
In the key swing state of West Virginia, Bush portrayed himself as a friend of the U.S. steel and mining industries, chastising Kerry as a flip-flopper who once described coal as a dirty source of energy.
``He's out there mining for votes. Be careful of somebody whose position shifts in the wind,'' Bush said during the latest stop in his week-long tour of key states ahead of his arrival in New York on Wednesday.
A wide range of anti-Bush protest groups, many opposing the war in Iraq, participated in the march through central Manhattan, which police said led to more than 100 arrests. More than 400 people have been arrested in protests since Thursday.
The demonstrators, carrying banners and signs in a carnival atmosphere, stretched for more than a mile down New York streets and avenues and were watched closely by police in riot gear and on horseback.
One group carried 1,000 coffins as a tribute to American soldiers dead in Iraq. A small group of masked anarchists set fire to a float one block from the convention site and hurled bottles at police in riot gear. Police rushed them and made 11 arrests.
PRAISE FOR BUSH
Cheney received a much warmer reception on his arrival at Ellis Island. He and Republican New York Gov. George Pataki both praised Bush's leadership after the Sept. 11 attacks in New York and Washington.
Republicans hope the convention will revive images of Bush's visit to the rubble of the collapsed World Trade Center to cheer on firefighters, and will remind voters of what Americans saw in Bush immediately after the attacks.
``They saw a man calm in a crisis, comfortable with responsibility and determined to do everything necessary to protect our people,'' Cheney told the Ellis Island crowd.
Bush's turn in the campaign spotlight this week gives him a stage to tout his first-term record and lay out ideas for another four years while drawing sharp differences with Kerry.
Bush and Republicans also will highlight the party's more moderate face during the convention, featuring a series of middle-of-the-road speakers to help appeal to swing voters.
Former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, Arizona Sen. John McCain and California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger will have prime-time speaking roles, while most of the party's more conservative figures will be shunted off center stage.
New York Democratic Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton blasted the Republican plans, calling it a ``bait and switch'' convention.
``They are going to talk about things that they are not really committed to. They are going to have leaders who don't have any influence in Washington,'' she said on CNN's ``Late Edition.''
McCain dismissed the notion that the speaking line-up was designed to hide the party's conservative nature, saying media stars like Schwarzenegger and Giuliani would help keep viewers tuned in.
``I think it's also a strong effort to keep people from punching the channel changer,'' McCain said on CBS's ``Face the Nation'' television program. ``I hope we are trying to send a message of inclusion and tolerance in our party.''
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Protesters Gird to Send A Message
Groups' Objectives Differ, But GOP Target Is the Same
By Michelle Garcia and Michael Powell
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, August 29, 2004; Page A29
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A42656-2004Aug28.html
NEW YORK, Aug. 28 -- Just before the Republican National Convention, thousands of abortion rights activists marched over the Brooklyn Bridge into downtown Manhattan to decry what they termed a genuine terrorist threat -- efforts by the Bush administration to curb women's reproductive rights.
The march comes amid of flurry of protests and rallies, symbolic and otherwise, as the Republicans prepare to open their national convention Monday in this overwhelmingly Democratic city. In Central Park, Quakers and the families of soldiers killed in the Iraq war laid out 972 combat boots to symbolize those who have lost their lives. On the Long Island beaches, antiwar activists flew an airplane trailed by a large banner reading "Give Bush a Pink Slip."
Nita Praditpan, left, and Laura Moore, both of Manhattan, were among thousands of abortion rights activists protesting President Bush's policies in an event marked by high security and high spirits. (Melina Mara -- The Washington Post)
And at Ground Zero, another group opposed to the policies of President Bush sounded 2,749 bells -- one for each victim of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
FBI agents and New York City police, meanwhile, arrested two men on charges of conspiracy to plant bombs in a Midtown Manhattan subway station. Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly noted that neither man is believed to have connections to terrorist organizations, and that they had not obtained explosives.
The men allegedly drew a rough sketch of the Herald Square subway station at 34th Street in Manhattan, and scouted other potential targets from the Verrazano Narrows Bridge to a prison and three police stations, Kelly said. One of the men, Shahawar Matin Siraj, 21, lives in Queens, N.Y., and is a Pakistani national. The other man, Shames El Shafay, lives in Staten Island and is a U.S. citizen. They are being held without bail.
"It's important to stress that to the best of our knowledge they had no connection to international terrorism," Kelly said at a news conference. "But it's clear they had an intention to cause damage and kill people."
On the protest front, large swarms of bicyclists had slowed and in some cases blocked traffic Friday evening in the East Village and near Madison Square Garden, the convention site. Police arrested 264 bikers. As of Saturday evening, 20 to 40 of these protesters still were being held, legal advisers for the activists said.
There was little trouble elsewhere, however. At the Brooklyn Bridge on Saturday, marchers waving placards and pushing baby strollers -- and the drag-queen Church Ladies for Choice -- streamed across for more than hour before they poured into City Hall Park in Lower Manhattan. One 9-year-old held a sign saying, "More trees, less Bushes."
This march had an air of celebration, as a federal court judge struck down as unconstitutional last week the administration's ban on late-term abortions, because the law did not contain an exception for the pregnant woman's health.
"This decision was a reminder to people that this is the first administration to sign a law banning abortion," said Joan Malin, executive director of Planned Parenthood of New York City, which organized the demonstration.
For many veterans of the abortion rights movement, the march was part of a four decade-long struggle for health rights and access to abortion services. But many of the younger women spoke in the vocabulary of this age of terrorism.
"The administration is cutting health care for women and the right to choose," said Radikelly Kupowski, 24, one of the Radical Cheerleaders. "That's terrorism for women."
Amid the crowd, Charles "Chick" Straut appeared to have lost his way. In his baby blue button-up shirt and reversed cleric's collar, Straut read the newspaper quietly on a park bench as he waited to cross the East River. A retired Methodist pastor, he is a three-decade veteran of the abortion rights movement. "I grew up in a Republican atmosphere and I took it for granted that abortion was an awful, sinful thing," he said. "But when I began to meditate on it, it wasn't so simple."
Security was heavy at this parade, as it was across the city on this hazy summer day. Police officers on foot and motorcycles followed the marchers, while police helicopters circled overhead. But the mood was as often buoyant, perhaps captured best by Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz (D), an effervescent man. He stood on the bridge and cheered the marchers as they walked to Manhattan.
"You're leaving the city of Brooklyn," he yelled. "Have a good rally and come home soon."
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Protesters Are Anti-G.O.P., but Democrats Don't Claim Them
August 29, 2004
By DIANE CARDWELL
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/29/politics/campaign/29groups.html?pagewanted=all&position=
For weeks now, Republican Party leaders have signaled that they plan to blame Democrats for any mayhem stemming from protests during the convention in Manhattan, with the G.O.P.'s chairman, Ed Gillespie, saying there is a thin line between labor, environmental and antiwar protesters and the Democratic Party hierarchy.
Many groups planning demonstrations do have a close affinity to the Democratic Party. But as protest organizers scrambled through their last week of preparations, two major themes emerged: the leadership of the protest effort is deeply fractured, and the many groups flooding New York's streets are poorly coordinated and under no central control.
Members of the largest antiwar coalition, for instance, could not agree on how to settle arrangements for its demonstration, set for today, and many other groups are practically tripping over one another with competing news conferences, attention-grabbing events and overlapping political messages.
On Wednesday, for example, as the War Resisters League was downtown announcing plans to march from ground zero this week for a "die-in" at Madison Square Garden, Al Franken, the comedian and radio host, was in Midtown, amusing reporters with his "shout-out" project.
At the same time, a protest billboard counting the dollars spent on the Iraq war lighted up in Times Square, sandwiched between a Sean John clothing advertisement and a Baby Phat billboard showing Kimora Lee Simmons wearing nothing but sneakers and bling.
Even though most protests are aimed squarely at the Bush administration, there is little evidence that Democratic Party officials are at the helm. Indeed, Democratic leaders have been worrying that angry images of demonstrators shouting, clashing with the police or damaging property will be used to tar their party, as historians say occurred after the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, when violent antiwar protests were seen as hurting the party's cause. As a result, party officials say, a focus of the spin operation they set up last week about 10 blocks from the convention site at Madison Square Garden will be to counter Republican efforts to link them to protest mishaps or violence.
"We have no connection to any of the protesters," the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Terry McAuliffe, said on Thursday in announcing the party's war room. "I have implored everyone to make sure that the Republicans have a peaceful convention."
But the Republicans see it differently, even warning delegates that Democratic protesters will try to make it hard for them to get around the city. "Many of those organizing the protests were involved in the Democratic National Convention and are strong John Kerry allies," said Ray Sullivan, a former press aide to George W. Bush who is working with the communications team for the convention. "We expect their message to be very similar to the message coming out of Boston."
Mr. Sullivan said he would not speculate on the political ramifications of potential disorder, but he added, "The people behind many of the protests and many of these groups are seasoned Democratic operatives and allies and should be able to put on their events in peaceful and safe ways."
Nevertheless, while few people say they expect a repeat of the mayhem of 1968, the events of the past week suggest that there will be disruptive demonstrations. Already, the protesters, some naked, some on bikes, have been snarling traffic - and signs, banners and fliers are cropping up throughout the city. On Friday night, in the first major clash between demonstrators and the police, more than 250 people were arrested for biking through the city in an anti-Bush protest. And today, law enforcement officials are girding for protesters expected to descend on Central Park, many of them in defiance of bans on political rallies on the Great Lawn.
But Democrats say that the people who are likely to cause trouble are not the party faithful.
"I think the public knows that the people who get really agitated and at times violent are kind of out of the mainstream and aren't really operating in the context of a political debate," said John D. Podesta, who was chief of staff to President Bill Clinton and is president of the Center for American Progress, a research institute. "Since the party can't really control these protests and these people, I think the only thing you can do is disassociate yourself from the tactics and try to keep the public focused on the big picture," he added.
The protest landscape, ranging from established groups like Planned Parenthood and the A.F.L.-C.I.O. to anarchists bent on undoing the country's corporate structure, is disparate and fragmented. And some groups have found themselves in the uneasy position of trying to balance a desire for inclusiveness and lack of hierarchy with the need to assert enough control to avoid chaos. Law enforcement officials, while emphasizing that the vast majority of protesters are peaceful, say that organizers have no way of controlling how many or which people show up at their events and what their motives may be.
Some groups have tailored their methods to minimize the chances for a political boomerang. Mr. Franken's "shout-out,'' in which he is encouraging people to throw open their windows and engage in a loud spurt of collective anti-Bush venting as President Bush takes the stage on Thursday, is one example. "It won't tax the public safety structure," he said. "We think that this provides a way for people who really want to do something to do it in a way that can't be used by the Republicans to say, 'Look at these unruly Democrats.' "
United for Peace and Justice, whose long-anticipated march is scheduled to begin at noon today, has been working furiously to make sure protesters deliver a strong antiwar message that cannot be distorted. Part of the message, said Leslie Cagan, national coordinator for United for Peace and Justice, is not simply that so many people are opposed to the war in Iraq but that they come from all walks of life. As a result, the demonstrators will march behind the coalition's leaders in thematic groups, beginning with a combination of veterans, military families and relatives of victims of the Sept. 11 attacks.
"We are doing everything we can to be clear about what our plans are and to set a tone," Ms. Cagan said. "The notion that just because we are speaking out it will lead to conflict is an assumption that doesn't have to be made. But also the notion that should there be a conflict, that a party would use that to their own political advantage, is inappropriate."
But some protesters interested in making their own statements, whether antigovernment, anticorporate, antipoverty or pro-civil liberties, are unconcerned with whether they will undermine the Democrats.
"If we don't get out there and protest the way we want to and as forcefully as we can, then we lose our rights and it doesn't matter who's president," said Eric Laursen, who is organizing a day of civil disobedience on Tuesday with a group called the A31 Action Coalition.
Referring to how protesters could be portrayed in the news media, he said: "You don't even have to be doing anything violent. All you have to be doing is looking like a bunch of angry people behind metal barricades and people think, 'Well, the cops have to deal with that.' If you follow it out to its logical conclusion, the only thing you can do is stay home."
Of course, it is possible that whatever happens in the streets will not make a tremendous difference in what happens in voting booths in November.
"I don't think there will be a lot of movement on the basis of protests," said Kieran Mahoney, a Republican political consultant. Unless something particularly unusual happens, he added, "it seems like the people who are voting for Bush love him and the people who are voting for Kerry really hate him, and there's not a lot of people who hate George Bush who are going to suddenly not hate him based on the protesters."
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MORE THAN 500,000 SAY NO TO THE BUSH AGENDA AT NYC MARCH
UNITED FOR PEACE AND JUSTICE | www.unitedforpeace.org
Contact: Bill Dobbs, United for Peace and Justice, 212.868.5545
http://www.unitedforpeace.org/article.php?id=2576
For immediate release
August 29, New York, NY -- In the largest protest ever held during a political convention, more than 500,000 people from all over the United States marched past Madison Square Garden, site of the Republican National Convention, to express their opposition to the Bush agenda and the war against Iraq. "This march brought together people from every sector of society and every possible background, because we all understood that we had to shine a spotlight on the issues that the Republicans won't bring to the stage at their convention - the ongoing chaos and violence in Iraq, the unprecedented roll-back of environmental protections, the assault on a woman's right to choose and so many other issues that Americans deeply care about," said Leslie Cagan, national coordinator of United for Peace and Justice, the national anti-war coalition that organized the march.
Film maker Michael Moore, Rev. Jesse Jackson, actors Rosie Perez, Marissa Tomei, and Danny Glover, musician Steve Earle, Congressman Charles Rangel and playwright Eve Ensler headed up the march along with Iraq war veterans, military families, September 11th families, and religious and community leaders. So many people participated that it took nearly six hours until marchers finished at Union Square.
After the march ended, thousands of people went to Central Park's Great Lawn, where Republican New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg had denied a permit to hold a rally. The atmosphere at the park was festive and peaceful. Despite a huge police presence during the march, there were few conflicts between the police and marchers. Later in the afternoon, however, about a hundred people were arrested during a separate protest of Republican delegates in Times Square.
The Iraq war and occupation was a main theme of the chants and signs that were held by marchers. Hundreds of marchers carried coffins draped with American flags to represent the nearly 1,000 U.S. soldiers who have been killed since the war began in March 2003.
Military families, some of whom lost sons and daughters in the war, marched holding up pictures of their loved ones as they called for an immediate end to the occupation.
Fifty other cities and towns in the U.S. also held rallies to protest the Bush agenda during the Republican National Convention -- from San Diego, CA to Chicago, IL to Orlando, FL.
United for Peace and Justice is a non-partisan coalition with more than 800 groups under its umbrella. Since its founding in October 2002, UFPJ has spurred hundreds of protests and rallies around the country, including the two largest demonstrations in the U.S. against the Iraq war.
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One Irishman in his boat spreads anti-war message
The Observer
Mary Russell
August 29, 2004
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1293208,00.html
On 25 June, a small 12ft boat slipped up the Shannon estuary and within the hour attracted the attention of two helicopters, two assault craft and a police riverboat.
The occupants - two men and a woman - were not engaged in drug or people smuggling, or even in a spot of illegal fishing. 'We held up our sign so that the river police could read it clearly,' said former Irish army officer Ed Horgan.
What it said was 'Bush Go Home', and given that the President of the United States was at that moment flying in to land at Shannon airport it was perhaps inevitable that the three should be escorted under armed guard to Ennis Court House, where they were charged with breaching public order.
Horgan is something of a thorn in the flesh of the Irish government. After 22 years in the army, where he served as Commandant (Major) in charge of the First Tank Squadron, and having served with the UN in the Middle East and Cyprus, he has most recently been actively engaged in opposing the present government's stance on Iraq.
In April 2003 he brought his case to the high court in Dublin, challenging the government's decision to allow Shannon airport to be used for the movement of US troops and munitions and for the refuelling of US aircraft going to war.
He claims this was in contravention of international law and, in particular, incompatible with Ireland's historic role as a neutral country. Although not enshrined in the constitution, neutrality has long been government policy, first declared by De Valera in 1939 prior to the Second World War and reaffirmed many times over.
However, since the invasion of Iraq, Horgan maintains, this neutrality, cherished by many, is being eroded and continues to be.
About 150,000 US troops have passed through Shannon airport, transported in US military aircraft as well as in chartered civilian planes.
The high court dismissed his case, although he was awarded 50 per cent costs as the judge felt he had raised an issue of national importance.
Since then, he has engaged in more individual action, including returning his cherished service medals and, most recently, using a small boat in a manner which the Irish authorities clearly felt was a threat to President Bush. The charge brought against him was that he was breaching public order by being in a public place within an exclusion zone.
'How you can have one within a public place I don't know,' he says, 'and where it was exactly in the water I don't think they knew either.'
Horgan draws his strength from the fact that he sees what is happening in the world from his perspective as a military man, as an international peacekeeper and from an academic point of view: he is currently writing his doctorate on reform of the UN. He is passionate about the issue of war and the role of the individual in aiding and abetting it, directly or indirectly. 'We provided everything the US troops needed at Shannon, down to the sandwiches,' he said. 'By doing so, we have participated, to date, in the killing of 13,250 Iraqi civilians. Because of this we are now potential targets since, under international law, Iraqis have the right to defend themselves.'
To some, the idea of Ireland's neutrality is a pleasing but unrealistic pipe dream. They believe that, instead, Ireland must cease its posturing and play a military role both within Nato and the EU.
Horgan disagrees. Though not a pacifist - he describes himself as a peace activist - he believes Ireland can never be anything more than the tail end of a major army. He thinks the country can make a huge contribution to global peacekeeping, but its credibility with the global community is now being eroded.
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Mayhem fears as protesters target Bush
29 August 2004
independent.co.uk
By Rupert Cornwell in Washington
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=556265
There may be mayhem on the New York streets outside, but the Republican Convention inside the fortress of Madison Square Garden this week will exude tolerance and sweet reason, as the party makes its pitch for the moderate voters who may decide November's presidential election.
Last night police were completing security measures for what will surely be the most heavily protected political gathering in US history - and for which a massive demonstration today will provide a possibly violent prologue. Up to 250,000 anti-war and anti-Bush protesters are expected.
For Mr Bush the convention will be the platform to set out his plans for a second term during his prime-time speech on Thursday evening, when he formally accepts re-nomination. As in 2000, he will position himself as leader of a party appealing to centrists as well as his conservative base.
The final convention policy platform ignores conservative demands on issues such as stem-cell research and immigration. "Conservatives were badly outflanked," said Richard Lessner, director of the American Conservative Union. "A lot of grass-root Republicans will be very unhappy."
Barely a word will be heard from the party's hard men on Capitol Hill, such as the arch-conservative Texan Tom De Lay, majority leader in the House, or Senator Rick Santorum, a relentless foe of abortion and sexual "deviancy".
Convention-goers will be treated to a procession of moderates - essential if the party is to reach out to the independents and centrists who will probably decide the outcome in November. Opening night tomorrow features Senator John McCain of Arizona, arguably the most popular politician in the land. Other speakers include Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger of California and former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani - both opposed to a ban on abortion and supporters of gay rights. The goal, as in 2000, is to present the party as a "big tent" in which moderates can comfortably find a home. The problem now, of course, is that the President is a known quantity, and moderation may be a harder sell.
A string of polls last week gave the President a two- or three-point lead over his Democratic opponent. Though the margin is a dead-heat in statistical terms, Mr Bush seems to have erased the slight advantage gained by John Kerry after his own convention in Boston.
Almost certainly, the turnaround reflects the impact of the campaign ads by a group of Mr Kerry's fellow Vietnam veterans, claiming he lied over parts of his war record. The claims have been largely disproved and even Mr Bush maintains he does not believe them. But they have dominated the campaign and forced Mr Kerry on to the defensive, denting his image of trustworthiness.
Republican strategists believe any demonstrations this week will work to their advantage, raising fears among undecided voters that the Democrats are extremists - just as anti-Vietnam violence at the Democratic convention in 1968 helped Richard Nixon, the Republican candidate, to assemble his "silent majority" of voters.
The Republicans chose New York for the convention, and picked a date as close to 11 September as possible, in a shameless bid to exploit the approaching third anniversary of the twin towers attacks. Mr Bush's appearance among the rescuers, with a bullhorn in his hand, is regarded as the finest hour of his presidency.
But hostility to him personally in this Democratic city, and to the war in Iraq, has forced him to scrap plans for a visit to Ground Zero. He may spend just a few hours in New York on Thursday before heading straight back to the campaign trail.
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Protesters Are Anti-G.O.P., but Democrats Don't Claim Them
NYTimes
By DIANE CARDWELL
August 29, 2004
For weeks now, Republican Party leaders have signaled that they plan to blame Democrats for any mayhem stemming from protests during the convention in Manhattan, with the G.O.P.'s chairman, Ed Gillespie, saying there is a thin line between labor, environmental and antiwar protesters and the Democratic Party hierarchy.
Many groups planning demonstrations do have a close affinity to the Democratic Party. But as protest organizers scrambled through their last week of preparations, two major themes emerged: the leadership of the protest effort is deeply fractured, and the many groups flooding New York's streets are poorly coordinated and under no central control.
Members of the largest antiwar coalition, for instance, could not agree on how to settle arrangements for its demonstration, set for today, and many other groups are practically tripping over one another with competing news conferences, attention-grabbing events and overlapping political messages.
On Wednesday, for example, as the War Resisters League was downtown announcing plans to march from ground zero this week for a "die-in" at Madison Square Garden, Al Franken, the comedian and radio host, was in Midtown, amusing reporters with his "shout-out" project.
At the same time, a protest billboard counting the dollars spent on the Iraq war lighted up in Times Square, sandwiched between a Sean John clothing advertisement and a Baby Phat billboard showing Kimora Lee Simmons wearing nothing but sneakers and bling.
Even though most protests are aimed squarely at the Bush administration, there is little evidence that Democratic Party officials are at the helm. Indeed, Democratic leaders have been worrying that angry images of demonstrators shouting, clashing with the police or damaging property will be used to tar their party, as historians say occurred after the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, when violent antiwar protests were seen as hurting the party's cause. As a result, party officials say, a focus of the spin operation they set up last week about 10 blocks from the convention site at Madison Square Garden will be to counter Republican efforts to link them to protest mishaps or violence.
"We have no connection to any of the protesters," the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Terry McAuliffe, said on Thursday in announcing the party's war room. "I have implored everyone to make sure that the Republicans have a peaceful convention."
But the Republicans see it differently, even warning delegates that Democratic protesters will try to make it hard for them to get around the city. "Many of those organizing the protests were involved in the Democratic National Convention and are strong John Kerry allies," said Ray Sullivan, a former press aide to George W. Bush who is working with the communications team for the convention. "We expect their message to be very similar to the message coming out of Boston."
Mr. Sullivan said he would not speculate on the political ramifications of potential disorder, but he added, "The people behind many of the protests and many of these groups are seasoned Democratic operatives and allies and should be able to put on their events in peaceful and safe ways."
Nevertheless, while few people say they expect a repeat of the mayhem of 1968, the events of the past week suggest that there will be disruptive demonstrations. Already, the protesters, some naked, some on bikes, have been snarling traffic - and signs, banners and fliers are cropping up throughout the city. On Friday night, in the first major clash between demonstrators and the police, more than 250 people were arrested for biking through the city in an anti-Bush protest. And today, law enforcement officials are girding for protesters expected to descend on Central Park, many of them in defiance of bans on political rallies on the Great Lawn.
But Democrats say that the people who are likely to cause trouble are not the party faithful.
"I think the public knows that the people who get really agitated and at times violent are kind of out of the mainstream and aren't really operating in the context of a political debate," said John D. Podesta, who was chief of staff to President Bill Clinton and is president of the Center for American Progress, a research institute. "Since the party can't really control these protests and these people, I think the only thing you can do is disassociate yourself from the tactics and try to keep the public focused on the big picture," he added.
The protest landscape, ranging from established groups like Planned Parenthood and the A.F.L.-C.I.O. to anarchists bent on undoing the country's corporate structure, is disparate and fragmented. And some groups have found themselves in the uneasy position of trying to balance a desire for inclusiveness and lack of hierarchy with the need to assert enough control to avoid chaos. Law enforcement officials, while emphasizing that the vast majority of protesters are peaceful, say that organizers have no way of controlling how many or which people show up at their events and what their motives may be. Some groups have tailored their methods to minimize the chances for a political boomerang. Mr. Franken's "shout-out,'' in which he is encouraging people to throw open their windows and engage in a loud spurt of collective anti-Bush venting as President Bush takes the stage on Thursday, is one example. "It won't tax the public safety structure," he said. "We think that this provides a way for people who really want to do something to do it in a way that can't be used by the Republicans to say, 'Look at these unruly Democrats.' "
United for Peace and Justice, whose long-anticipated march is scheduled to begin at noon today, has been working furiously to make sure protesters deliver a strong antiwar message that cannot be distorted. Part of the message, said Leslie Cagan, national coordinator for United for Peace and Justice, is not simply that so many people are opposed to the war in Iraq but that they come from all walks of life. As a result, the demonstrators will march behind the coalition's leaders in thematic groups, beginning with a combination of veterans, military families and relatives of victims of the Sept. 11 attacks.
"We are doing everything we can to be clear about what our plans are and to set a tone," Ms. Cagan said. "The notion that just because we are speaking out it will lead to conflict is an assumption that doesn't have to be made. But also the notion that should there be a conflict, that a party would use that to their own political advantage, is inappropriate."
But some protesters interested in making their own statements, whether antigovernment, anticorporate, antipoverty or pro-civil liberties, are unconcerned with whether they will undermine the Democrats.
"If we don't get out there and protest the way we want to and as forcefully as we can, then we lose our rights and it doesn't matter who's president," said Eric Laursen, who is organizing a day of civil disobedience on Tuesday with a group called the A31 Action Coalition.
Referring to how protesters could be portrayed in the news media, he said: "You don't even have to be doing anything violent. All you have to be doing is looking like a bunch of angry people behind metal barricades and people think, 'Well, the cops have to deal with that.' If you follow it out to its logical conclusion, the only thing you can do is stay home."
Of course, it is possible that whatever happens in the streets will not make a tremendous difference in what happens in voting booths in November.
"I don't think there will be a lot of movement on the basis of protests," said Kieran Mahoney, a Republican political consultant. Unless something particularly unusual happens, he added, "it seems like the people who are voting for Bush love him and the people who are voting for Kerry really hate him, and there's not a lot of people who hate George Bush who are going to suddenly not hate him based on the protesters."
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Angry mobs protest Schroeder's reforms
August 29, 2004
By Tony Paterson
LONDON SUNDAY TELEGRAPH
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20040828-110856-6905r.htm
BERLIN - When Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder came rolling into the east German town of Wittenberge in his black Mercedes limousine to open a glistening new $90 million rail station, the locals were in no mood to celebrate.
An angry mob greeted the German leader with raised fists, drowning out his speech in a cacophony of whistles and catcalls. The chancellor just escaped being hit by a rotten egg hurled in his direction. His official delegation was not so lucky as it made a swift exit from Wittenberge, the cars coming under a hail of stones that found their target.
He had gone to the town, wracked by high unemployment, to sell his Social Democratic Party's "Agenda 2010" program of economic reforms. The protesters, mostly middle-aged men and women, brandished placards reading "No Future in East Germany," and "You Practice Legalized Poverty."
It was the first time in his six years in office that Mr. Schroeder had suffered what one political commentator described as "West Bank-style treatment" at the hands of his increasingly disgruntled electorate, and his ordeal did not end there.
Later the same day, Mr. Schroeder was subjected to another hostile reception in Leipzig, where demonstrators again drowned out his speech with whistles.
"The political culture in this country is being destroyed," he protested in exasperation, and in vain. "We cannot have this in Germany."
On Friday night another egg was thrown at Mr. Schroeder as he attended a music festival in the east German town of Finsterwalde. The egg missed the chancellor and police arrested a 17-year-old boy in connection with the incident.
The chancellor has good reason to feel alarmed. Earlier this year, he embarked on a drive to reform Germany's sclerotic economy with long overdue cuts to welfare benefits. Public anger has since spiraled out of control.
Every week, thousands of ordinary Germans gather in towns and cities to protest against a key element of the reforms that will slash benefits for the long-term unemployed. Last week, the number of people attending these so-called "Monday demonstrations" topped the 100,000 mark. Heartened, the organizers vowed to carry on marshalling support until the government scrapped the program.
Germany's opposition conservative Christian Democrats oppose the reforms. Hermann-Josef Arentz, the party's social affairs committee chairman, described them as a scandal.
"It is not difficult to understand why people are taking to the streets," he said. "Even for those who are desperate to work, the reforms do not offer the faintest chance of a job."
Mr. Schroeder might have expected criticism from the opposition. Tomorrow, he will face a challenge from a previous ally.
Oskar Lafontaine, his former finance minister, is to signal his return to frontline politics as a would-be champion of Germany's downtrodden masses when he gingers up supporters at a key anti-reform rally in Leipzig.
Mr. Lafontaine, also known as "Red Oskar" for his left-wing views, was forced to resign as finance minister and Social Democrat leader in 1999 following serious disagreements with Mr. Schroeder over policy.
The backlash could hardly have come at a worse time. Mr. Schroeder's government already rates as the most unpopular Social Democrat-led administration since World War II. An opinion poll last week gave his party a mere 26 percent of the vote, compared with 42 percent for the opposition conservatives.
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